Creating safety for connectivity: Using EFT to Work Interpersonally in the Healing of Trauma:
Trauma mystifies clinicians and couples alike. In our field, a great deal has been written on trauma. Very little of it, however, teaches us how to work interpersonally to resolve trauma although the echoes of trauma change the dance of intimacy and the typical course of treatment in couple therapy. The key to healing trauma is comfort and protection from a loved one but, with no template for safe connection, reaching to a loved one is fraught with dangers for the trauma survivor, partner, and, at times, for the clinician. From a foundation of adult attachment and EFT, this two-day training will be a deep dive into our beloved EFT approach and the adaptions needed to work with and heal trauma.
The HOW of working Intrapsychically:
Emotional dysregulation, known as the hallmark of trauma, scrambles communication, blocks intimacy, and amplifies distress. Working with, privileging and sharing fears often feels like being on a roller coaster in the dark but it’s exactly what is needed to restore connection with self and partner.
In this training, the importance of the clinician’s ability to monitor and respond to clients’ moment-to-moment experiences, especially in extreme states of numbing, will be highlighted. You will come away with the knowledge of how to work intrapsychicallypiece-by-piece with each partner in order to create healing between them. Learn how to support the trauma survivor in cultivating the courage to reach for comfort and protection (tension between fears and longings) and how to prepare partners to be responsive (an amazing privilege but also an extraordinary pressure for the partner of a trauma survivor).Learn how to stay in the process when clients become activated emotionally, a common outcome of trauma, and when, we, the clinicians, get triggered.
Through teaching, video presentation, and experiential learning, you’ll see how to use voice, reflection, and deepening interventions to prepare partners to share vulnerabilities with each other in order to break the familiar yet dreaded feeling of emotional isolation, often a result of trauma.
You will come away from this training with knowing how to:
• Create the safety necessary to work intrapsychically with trauma survivor and partner.
• Work with elements of emotion in order to access clients’ fears experientially.
• Reprocess, between partners, aspects of trauma and its impacts in order to antidote the potency of trauma.
This training is appropriate for those EFT clinicians wanting to know more about working with all types of trauma, including childhood abuse, sexual trauma and abuse, and combat trauma. Completion the Externship in EFT is the pre-requisite.
This training will be led by Kathryn Rheem, Ed.D., LMFT, who has published four chapters and two articles on the adaptations of EFT with trauma survivor couples. For more information on Kathryn, click here.
