Peter Levine PhD on Trauma: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

CPD

Handouts

Objectives

1. Articulate the four major developmental stages that increase vulnerability to trauma and how to recognize them in your clients.
2. Determine the naturalistic mechanics of trauma and survival responses of flight, fight, freeze and collapse as it relates to clinical treatment.
3. Discover the evolutionary underpinnings of trauma and the Polyvagal theory and their clinical implications.
4. Demonstrate the importance of “Bottom-up” processing versus “Top Down” processing to improve treatment outcomes.
5. Summarize the process of how overwhelming stress leads to somatic and emotional syndromes in clients.
6. Incorporate Dr. Levine’s simple containment tools in order to more effectively engage your client in trauma therapy.

Outline

Child Development: The Signs of Trauma in Each Developmental Period:

• Pre-Natal
  • Hormonal interactions between mother and child
  • Birth Stress
• Year One
  • Safety, affection and containment
  • Proprioceptive development
  • The Dopamine System
  • The space to explore one’s effect on the world
  • The formation of a self that is different from Mom and Dad
  • Testing boundaries
• Age 3-5
  • The Biology and balance of shame
  • The importance of shame in society
  • The signs of overshaming
  • The signs of undershaming
    • The initial forays into sexuality
      • The importance of flirting
      • How these sames stages replay themselves out in later life

The Naturalistic Mechanisms of Trauma

• Understanding our primary survival tactics and how they play out in the body: Flight, fight, freeze and collapse
• 500 million years of evolution: Our Polyvagal underpinnings
  • How the Dorsal Vagal System is related to shutdown and collapse
  • Fight or flight: Sympathetic/adrenal System mobilization, Returning to our Mammalian birthright: The Ventral vagal system and social engagement
• How we get “stuck”
  • Tonic immobility – The fallback to freeze
  • Freeze couples with Fear
    • Dissociation
    • Bracing and terror
    • Euphoric dissociation
  • Collapse
• Somatic and emotional – syndromes and complexes
  • Emotional – anxiety, depression
  • Somatic – chronic pain, fibromyalgia
  • Autonomic – migraines, irritable bowel

Resolving Traumatic Reactions

• The importance of “Bottom-Up” processing
  • The Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain
  • In an Unspoken Voice
• Somatic Experiencing©
• Renegotiation vs. Reliving
  • Restoration of self-regulation
  • Trauma isn’t about the event, but the body’s inability to process and integrate the nervous system charge
  • The importance of developing a felt sense
• The nine basic stages of trauma treatment
  • Containment of strong sensation and emotion
  • Pendulation – The dual opposites of sensation
  • Titration – going gradually
  • Completion
    • Renegotiation of active for passive responses
  • Simple exercises that you can use in your practice

Spirituality and Trauma

• Trauma as one of the 4 avenues to enlightment
  • Lessons from the Kundalini
  • A feeling of “okayness”, wholeness and trust in the world
    • And other side effects of effective trauma treatment
  • The importance of maintaining balance in one’s life