🌻 Overcome Trauma Responses Week 5 ~ Treating Relational Trauma

10/26/22 (Wed)

Treating Relational Trauma ~ Link

[Infographic] How Trauma Can Affect Adult Relationships ~ Link

Here’s a look at the agenda: 

  • An Important Issue That Must Be Addressed BEFORE You Can Build Your Client’s Relationship Skills
  • How to Help Clients Speak For, Not From, Their Wounded Inner Part
  • Two Distinct Types of Relational Trauma (and Specific Approaches for Working with Each)
  • How to Effectively Work with Male Clients Who Have Suffered Sexual Abuse
  • Why Clients Re-Enact Past Relationships (and How to Help Them Stop the Cycle)

Study Guide: https://www.nicabm.com/sample/trauma20-studyguide/?del=10.23.22StudyGuidetoFree

Notes: (10/26/22)

  • 1. How Trauma Can Affect Relationships:
  • A. What happens when trauma shuts down our social engagement system?:
  • Inability to stay in the present moment. Getting triggered.
  • We can start to miss or misinterpret interpersonal cues.
  • B. What are the two types of trauma that can impact clients’ relationships?:
  • a. Intrusive / Violating
  • b. Negligence / Abandonment
  • C. What are the 5 domains of human experience Real assesses as he asks about nurturing in childhood?
  • a. physical
  • b. sexual
  • c. intellectual
  • d. spiritual
  • e. emotional
  • D. What are the 3 questions Terry Real asks to move a client into trauma work?
  • a. The Process:
  • i. Bring your client into their functional adult part.
  • ii. Extract the adaptive child part.
  • iii. Identify the age of the child.
  • b. The 3 Questions:
  • i. Who did you do this with?
  • ii. Who did it to you?
  • iii. Who did you do it to and no one stopped you?
  • Love them, Teach them, and Limit them (i.e. your child and adaptive parts).
  • E. Draw lines to connect the concepts:
  • a. Wounded Child (birth ~ 4 to 6 years old): Pre-verbal / Limbic System.
  • b. Adaptive Child: Adaptation to Abuse / Runs the Relationships.
  • c. Functional Adult: Pre-frontal Cortex / Within Window of Tolerance.
  • 2. The Role of the Therapeutic Relationship:
  • A. According to Stephen Porges, what can a therapist do to get a client’s social engagement system back online?
  • The therapist has to recognize the power of their presence.
  • Help to activate the client’s internal self-observation.
  • “Rupture & Repair” ~ let the client express when they feel hurt by the therapist.
  • Empower the client to say their feelings towards the therapist. e.g. I feel hurt when you said that ……
  • 3. Working With Couples:
  • A. Please describe a “parts” approach to working with trauma’s impact on intimate relationships.
  • Implicit memory can drive trauma responses and disrupt relationships.
  • Help clients become mindful of their past and how it’s triggering their present situation.
  • Help clients to start speaking for their part, not from their part.
  • e.g. I have a part who feels that you are not listening to me.
  • Help clients notice and then separate from their parts.
  • Help clients learn to listen from a place of compassion.
  • B. Please describe how to use a somatic approach to change the body-to-body communication between couples.
  • 4. Reenactment Behaviors
  • A. Ruth Lanius described how she helped reframe her client’s reenactment behaviors as strength. How might you do this with a client?
  • Let’s see how your reenactment has helped you to survive in the past? e.g. childhood sexual abuse survivors start becoming promiscuous in adulthood.
  • It protected you to survive. This part can do anything. It’s a great strength to have this part. It helped you to survive.
  • How can we now use its great strength in a more productive way in the present time?
  • B. How does Fisher help clients develop more awareness of stuck patterns?
  • Help clients realize that their body is choosing past bad patterns.
  • “Traumatic attachment”.
  • 5. Defensive Adaptations to Trauma:
  • A. How might you help a client work through the following stress responses when it’s causing a problem in their relationships?
  • a. Freeze:
  • Educate both parties about “The Freeze Response” ~ Psychoeducation.
  • Educate both parties on how to help the person that freezes to get out of the response. Let both parties collaborate together.
  • b. Dissociation:
  • Help the dissociation client become more present. Teach the other partner on how they can help to ground the dissociating partner by becoming aware of their 5 senses.
  • Encourage the partner to help ground the partner that is dissociating.
  • c. Collapse / Submit:
  • Bring in psychoeducation for both parties.
  • Ask a few direct, practical questions. e.g. Ask how both parties will feel once the dynamic changes within the relationship from therapy, e.g. one patient will no longer please/appease, etc.
  • Help both parties mentally prepare for the shift in dynamics of their relationship.
  • d. Please / Appease:
  • If we can’t express our true feelings, then the relationship can not be a genuine one.
  • Please / Appease leads to power imbalances within a relationship.
  • Let clients know why it was natural for them to develop the please / appease survival response when they were younger.
  • Work with the isolation that shame can induce within your clients.