Level II Training – Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

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Three of the Center’s therapists have worked hard this year (Deborah Pettitt, Kent Bertrand and Danen Downs) and are poised to complete Level II training (Treatment of Developmental Injury) from the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. This training consists of 126 contact hours divided into 7 multi-day modules, for a total of 21 days. Modules are typically spaced 4-8 weeks apart; trainings typically complete within 9-12 months. If you would like to read more concerning Sensorimotor Psychotherapy at the Center please click on the link.

The level II training is primarily concerned with the interaction between trauma, attachment, and developmental issues. The end purpose of the training is to teach how to provide effective treatment to the client. In this training, research from the attachment and neuroscience fields provides the theoretical foundation for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy interventions and practices that address the effects of less than optimal and/or traumatic early attachment.

In the training, participants learn how to track and name developmental and attachment patterns, help clients make meaning from the bottom up, connect to early memories and unresolved grief and loss, and transform painful emotions held by early memories.

Some of the topics covered in the 9 months of training include:

  • Trauma, Traumatic Attachment and Development

The history of attachment; developmental and traumatic wounds

  • Body Reading for Attachment History

Track how body structure, posture, and movement reflects and sustains early childhood experience; interventions to alter the history of early attachment

  • Changing Procedural Learning

Identify and work with the emotional, cognitive, and physical action patterns that reflect early attachment history

  • Translating the Body’s Language

Understand how meaning is encoded in the body, and work to change meanings conditions from early attachment interactions

  • Therapeutic Techniques for Developmental Themes

Learn body-oriented interventions that address learned habits and early attachment patterns

  • Somatic Resources for Developmental Injury

Capitalize on the body’s resources for transforming painful unresolved attachment patterns

  • Action Systems and Action Tendencies

Learn how motivational systems are disrupted by trauma and attachment failure, and discriminate negative action tendencies from adaptive ones related to these systems

  • Befriending Adaptive Strategies

Explore how adaptive strategies form in childhood, how they affect us as adults, and how the can be a useful avenue toward healing.

  • The “Child” State of Consciousness

The connection between early memories and the child part that holds the pain reflected in limiting beliefs

  • Integration of Treatment Techniques for Developmental Injury and Trauma

How to work with clients who present with both attachment-related issues and unresolved trauma

Again the Center is excited for the commitment and training received by Deborah, Kent and Danen.  Thanks for continuing to pursue excellence in all you do.

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