TREATING COMPLEX DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA: FROM DISSOCIATION TO INTEGRATION, PART 1
This three day workshop will provide specific and practical skills to create safety, reduce and resolve symptoms, and stabilize patients who have trauma-related dissociation and complex trauma disorders. We will first examine how to understand and plan complex treatments in a sequenced, rational and tailored manner that supports increasing integration. Treatment organization and planning is based on a thorough assessment of what the patient needs from therapy, what his or her resources are, and what prognostic factors are present. We will look at treatment planning for patients who have an excellent prognosis, a moderate prognosis, and a limited or guarded prognosis. Factors that support a good prognosis will be described in depth. Next, we will focus on specific and practical skills to deal with dissociation both from a perspective of improving functioning in daily life and cultivating the patient’s ability to tolerate and work with his or her own inner experience. Specific skills include reflective functions; techniques to improve daily life functioning; overcoming the phobia of inner experience; self and relational regulation; capacity to have positive affects; management of dissociation and triggers; containment of traumatic memory and distressed dissociative parts; grounding; and mindfulness. Trauma-related phobias will be addressed and their treatment will be described as a central part of treatment. We will focus on initial and sequenced approaches to working with dissociative parts in an integrative and systemic way. Attachment and dependency issues in early therapy will also be discussed. Practice of skills will be emphasized in small groups or dyads, and participants are encouraged to be prepared to role play a patient.