Workshop Description
Learn how to work creatively, and effectively with clients who struggle with extreme emotional dysregulation such as those with Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, eating, and mood disorders. Combining the successful treatment model of DBT with somatic awareness and expressive arts, participants will learn how to successfully teach and use mindfulness as prevention to help highly reactive clients find emotional balance.
Many traditional creative and somatic therapy modalities are not directive enough to contain and focus highly emotionally dysregulated clients and effect constructive changes in their lives. And the more structured therapies, such as CBT, favor the cognitive to the exclusion of the sensory and somatic where resources and aliveness can be experienced. Somatic, creative, and cognitive approaches no longer have to be at odds. Combined, they create a powerful treatment approach allowing clients to experience change in their mind, body, and relationships.
This workshop presents innovative ways of working creatively and effectively with highly challenging clients including those exhibiting the intense reactivity and emotional instability seen in addictions, BPD, PTSD, as well as Mood and Eating Disorders. Drawing on DBT, mindfulness, Hakomi, and the latest neurological research, we present hands-on, relational ways of engaging both the sensory and rational parts of the brain to balance the emotional (limbic) systems.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, developed by Marcia Linehan, is a treatment model proven highly effective with clients suffering from BPD, addictions, eating disorders, and mood disorders. It is a directive, skills based approach teaching clients life skills in emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. The foundation of these skills is an active relationship with mindfulness. DBT presumes that there are important life skills that must be taught and consciously practiced in order to find balance in emotions and relationships. Some people naturally learn these skills in their development and others do not. DBT seeks to actively build the Self for those without the internal resources to do so on their own.
Participants will learn how to teach these life skills in somatic and creative ways. They will be able to help their clients create new experiences of success in emotion regulation and self-awareness. The use of mindfulness in somatic experiencing and creative exploration activates new neural pathways in the brain, bypassing the thought looping and rumination found in emotional dysregulation and suffering. Experiencing mastery in skill building and emotion regulation, reinforces the neural structure of more adaptive, balanced, and alive ways of being in the world. New expressions of self, emotions, and relationship are explored without re-traumatization or dissociation, thereby creating new pathways in mind, body and soul. Clients learn these life-enhancing skills by experiencing them in their body and playing with them in creative exploration.
Our goal is to give participants concrete and specific tools for staying balanced, embodied and resourceful while working effectively with a challenging clientele. We also want them to become acquainted with a way of working with a highly challenging group of clients, which is structured and contained enough to be effective, yet creative and expressive enough to allow for an authentic, engaged experience of self in the therapeutic setting. This workshop will be intensive, energizing, and presupposes clinical education and experience.
