Somatic Strategies to Address the Interplay Between Shock & Developmental Trauma
Includes 5 client demonstration-based training sessions with Peter Levine, PhD and Dr. Diane Poole Heller
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Your purchase includes:
- Video Recordings
- Audio Downloads
- Full Transcripts
- Bonus Resources
Course Description
Explore how to tune into physical signals and nonverbal cues to get to the root of trauma and reconnect clients with their resilience, vitality, and life.
Watch a Preview of the Training
Get a first-hand look at the approach, teaching style, and format you can expect in our on-demand learning sessions.
What’s included in the training?
Five On-Demand 90-Minute Demonstration-Based Sessions + Q&A, featuring client demo debriefs by Peter A. Levine, PhD and Dr. Diane Poole Heller.
Each session includes core teaching, real client demos (with thorough explanations of techniques by Dr. Levine), practice exercises, corrective techniques and additional resources you can apply to your own therapeutic sessions.
- Session 1: Understanding Basic Developmental Stages, Connecting Unmet Needs and Repairing Misattunements
- Session 2: Titration and Pendulation to Avoid Re-Traumatization
- Session 3: Body Reading to Identify Shock and/or Developmental Trauma
- Session 4: Reading the Living Body Types: Embodied Energetic Approaches
- Session 5: Untangling Shock Trauma and Developmental Trauma
Includes practical exercises that reinforce concepts and help you integrate somatic skills and techniques with other modalities more easily.
Client Demos that help new and experienced practitioners become more proficient at applying somatic skills and techniques into therapeutic sessions with clients.
Private Course Portal with Lifetime Access to Course Materials including video recordings, audio, transcripts, demos, and slide handouts and additional resources for each session.
BONUS #1: Five Video Training Sessions on Character Structure with Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Includes over 4.5 hours of additional instruction, video/audio, transcripts, and downloadable handouts, where you learn about the five main structures.
- PLUS, includes a detailed guide—Mastery Interventions for Character Structure Needs—with adaptations, practices, interventions, and therapeutic applications for each Character Structure, so you can be more attuned to work more deeply and effectively as you guide clients in overcoming trauma.
BONUS #2: Expert Spotlight Training—‘Fundamental Differences Between Developmental and Show Trauma with Innovative Interventions’ featuring Peter A. Levine, PhD and Dr. Diane Poole Heller.
In this 90-minute recording of an expert spotlight session with Dr. Levine, you’ll explore the intricacies, interplay, and clinical distinctions between shock and developmental trauma, so you can identify the source of your clients’ distress and relieve suffering to open the door to growth and resilience.
Dr. Levine highlights some key tools and body-based interventions you can use to help clients find relief and support healing. You’ll also learn several specific strategies to help you understand exactly what the body is saying.
BONUS #3: Understanding Ayurvedic Doshas with Dr. Diane Poole Heller.
In this video lesson, Dr. Diane Poole Heller discusses the ways the principles of Ayurvedic Doshas can support body reading and enhance understanding of physical expressions of developmental limitations or psychological issues.
She also covers specific routines, behaviors and nutrition used to bring the doshas into balance to restore the mind-body connection.
Why take this course?
It’s not uncommon for developmental and shock trauma to resurface––consciously or unconsciously––in painful and sometimes subtle ways, making it even more difficult to cope.
When this happens, a client won’t come to you and say that the stress of the current situation has activated a trauma wound from childhood––because they often can’t identify or verbalize the root cause of their suffering.
But they might come to you with a host of symptoms, emotions and behavior patterns…and say they’ve been feeling numb, or angry, or they’ve been behaving recklessly.
As therapists, how do we proceed when we need crucial information our clients can’t provide?
Needless to say, this can pose a problem since therapy relies on spoken communication. And too often, trauma therapy does just that—depending almost entirely on a client’s ability to recall and retell the painful events causing their suffering.
This is when your client is relying on you to recognize what they need to heal. Here’s the good news: words may sometimes fail us, but the body is always talking. So we must learn how to listen.
With somatic tools and strategies, you can tune in to the physical signals hiding in plain sight, revealing what your client needs to release lingering trauma and open up to fulfillment, wholeness, and connection.
What you’ll learn?
In this self-paced, on-demand training, you’ll learn how to…
Ready to put this into practice?
Watch on demand, at your own pace, with lifetime access.
Here’s what’s in the training curriculum…
Session 1
Understanding Basic Developmental Stages, Connecting Unmet Needs and Repairing Misattunements
ANGUS is a man with a long trauma history beginning in infancy, including his own near-drowning, foster care, getting hit by a car at age 2, the death of 20+ friends from drugs and alcohol, and intergenerational trauma.
This has resulted in abandonment, dissociation, addiction, limited boundaries, multiple overdoses. He has never had long-term partner intimacy. He is in recovery now.
Angus will work somatically towards more presence using visualization and sound. Dr. Levine will offer generational trauma exercises.
- Explore the plight of the wounded inner child and how unmet developmental needs may intrude on the adult self.
- Discover how to help the client build an intrapsychic alliance between the inner child and their adult self, as well as with the facilitating therapist.
- Distinguish between chronic and toxic stress as it relates to deficits in adult development.
Session 2
Titration and Pendulation to Avoid Re-Traumatization
LU is a shy, very creative 11 year old, but she feels she is weird.
She lives with her mother, Julie. Her father is an addict; Lu loves him but cannot have a healthy relationship with him.
He has supervised visits, following the dissolution of the parents’ abusive and argumentative marriage. His mother, Lu’s grandmother, can be overbearing. She is very close to her two older maternal half-siblings.
Dr. Levine will guide Lu in Smovey movement with the Haaa sound, and work on boundaries with Voo/jaw and drawing.
- Observe Dr. Levine touch into the edges of trauma and insert positive contradictory experiences to be embodied.
- Learn manageable steps to “pace and dose” the integration of high arousal and shutdown while metabolizing the traumatic symptoms.
- Understand the importance of working with one energy level at a time to help the client’s somatic experience to unfold and to build resilience without collapse.
Session 3
Body Reading to Identify Shock and/or Developmental Trauma
ALYSON has chronic pain and trouble with intimate relationships. At the core, she feels, “not good enough.” Her story begins with birth trauma and her parents’ divorce when she was 3, and is compounded by severe bullying, serious car accidents, a face-first fall off a chair lift, and multiple surgeries.
As she got older, the pain became inescapable; she relied on pills to get through law school. Then, she lost father. She has been inconsolable with grief. Somatic Experiencing® has helped her pain subside and resolved her reliance on pills.
Dr. Levine will be working with imagery to tap into the bracing/anxiety loop and Alyson’s chronic pain.
- Uncover the reasons shock and developmental trauma are often intertwined.
- Understand why developmental trauma makes individuals more susceptible to shock trauma.
- Learn somatic clues and effective interventions to help clients gently ‘unmingle’ their traumas.
Session 4
Reading the Living Body Types: Embodied Energetic Approaches
JULIE has trouble asking for what she needs from others. She either gives everything or she isolates/freezes. Julie’s father and uncles were brutally murdered by the Mexican mafia when she was an infant, and Julie raised herself and her siblings while her mother worked to provide. Later in life she had 3 children and two marriages. Her last marriage was an abusive relationship with an addict. Her youngest daughter (from that relationship) is Lu from Module 2.
Julie will work with the tragedy that fell upon her ancestors through trans-generational trauma exercises. Dr. Levine will also help her connect to her child self and her unmet needs from her mother who had to always work.
- Discussion of body somatotypes – endomorph, ectomorph and mesomorph.
- How to explore a clients’ roots in development as confirmation of character structure.
- Detect developmental trauma in the basic somatotypes to inform therapeutic interventions and meet energetic needs.
Session 5
Untangling Shock Trauma and Developmental Trauma
MONIQUE endured childhood neglect and abuse, giving rise to an eating disorder.
Following a hit-and-run that left her in a coma and required many surgeries, she experienced abandonment, intimate betrayal, and job loss.
Monique has developed PTSD and is unable to work. She is currently living on disability, with her dog as her sole companion.
Dr. Levine will work with her shock trauma and her early developmental neglect/abuse through Bellicon play.
- Develop an awareness of the subtleties of shock and developmental traumas.
- Learn about the similar yet different interventions needed in treatment.
- Discover how working with corrective experiences for developmental trauma can support the treatment of shock trauma and vice versa.
Start with the first session today.
Watch on demand, at your own pace, with lifetime access.
Meet the Experts
Meet the Expert
Peter A. Levine, PhD
I have worked to develop a safe, gentle, and effective way for people to heal from trauma. It works by understanding that trauma is something that happens initially to our bodies and instincts.
Peter A. Levine PhD is the developer of Somatic Experiencing®, a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma, which he has developed over the past 50 years. He is the Founder of the Somatic Experiencing® Trauma Institute and the Ergos Institute of Somatic Education™, and his work has been taught to over 50,000 therapists in over 45 countries.
Dr. Levine served as a stress consultant for NASA and on the American Psychological Association task force for responding to large-scale disasters. He holds doctorates in Biophysics and Psychology and is the author of several bestselling books on trauma, including Waking the Tiger and An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey.
Dr. Diane Poole Heller
We don’t always work on remembering—what we’re doing, is workin with the memory as it presents itself in the now.
Diane Poole Heller PhD is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and teaching expert in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution. She created the Dynamic Attachment Repatterning Experience™ (DARe), an approach that gives therapists and individuals practical skills for healing attachment and trauma wounds.
Her work helps adults with childhood attachment injuries develop Secure Attachment Skills (SAS) that lead to more connected and fulfilling relationships. Her expertise in trauma healing has supported survivors, helpers, and families affected by events such as 9/11, Columbine, and other school shootings.
She has authored several books, including The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships and The Attachment Workbook.
Learn directly from these experts.
Learn directly from this expert.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers to common questions about course access, the training format, continuing education, and purchasing. If you need more information before enrolling, our support team is always happy to help you choose the right training.
Do I need to be a therapist to benefit from this training?
While most people who take this course are both new and experienced practitioners we do sometimes have non-therapists who join us.
Due to the sensitive nature of the material, however, we highly encourage non-therapists who choose to take this course to have therapeutic support in place should the material become activating. Note, the material in this course is not meant as a substitute for therapy.
How long can I access the course materials if I purchase this training today?
You’ll have lifetime access to ALL training materials, including videos, transcripts, worksheets, demos, resources and bonuses too. You may also download, print or save materials at any time to your professional reference library for personal use.
In the interest of privacy, client demo videos are not downloadable.
Are the class sessions live or recorded?
All sessions were recorded live, including the Q&A segments. This reissued training features recordings of all five 90-minute sessions, along with client demonstrations, audio recordings, written transcripts, complementary resources, and exclusive course bonuses.
All of the training is on-demand, so you can learn at your own pace, or revisit sessions more than once.
Will taking this course qualify me as SE Trained?
This is a demonstration-based course suitable for both introductory students and those already trained in Somatic Experiencing® (SE).
Throughout the sessions, various common techniques are demonstrated and applied to different situations and cases. Please note that taking this program will not qualify you as ‘SE Trained,’ as it does not replace the 8-module training through Somatic Experiencing®.
However, it will ensure that you are ‘SE Informed.’
Are CE credits available for this course?
Continuing Education (CE) credits are not available for this training at this time.
Is there a refund policy?
We’re confident this program will be a valuable investment in your education, personal growth and clinical practice.
Because this is a re-issue of a previous training and course materials are downloadable, all sales are final.
If you have further questions, do not hesitate to reach out to our Customer Support Team for help.
I’m having trouble completing the purchase. How can I get support?
If you have additional questions or need technical support, please contact our friendly Customer Support Team for help.
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