Trauma-Based Anxiety: Restoring Safety and Connection
A 3-part on-demand training that helps you understand the roots of anxiety in past trauma and learn body-based tools to restore calm, safety, and connection.
$127 | Save 50%!
Course Description
Understand the roots of anxiety, calm your body, and restore a lasting sense of safety and connection.
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Get a first-hand look at the approach, teaching style, and format you can expect in our on-demand learning sessions.
When trauma goes unresolved, anxiety often arises—the signal of a nervous system locked in patterns of protection and fear. In this three-part training, Dr. Diane Poole Heller reveals how to uncover the traumatic roots of anxiety, and work with encapsulated parts of the self to restore wholeness and connection. Through live demonstrations, case studies, and practical guidance, you’ll learn how to transform anxious activation into integration and empowerment.
What’s included in the training?
Here is everything you get for just $63!
Three 2-hour training sessions led by Dr. Diane Poole Heller, expert attachment and trauma specialist.
In this three-part series, Diane helps you trace anxiety back to its origins in trauma and guides you through the steps to transform fear into safety and integration.
- Session 1: Trauma Stops Time: Releasing Encapsulated Anxiety
Anxiety can have many origins—biological, relational, or situational—but often its deepest roots lie in trauma. In this session, Dr. Diane Poole Heller explores how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our sense of time, leaving parts of the self “frozen” in moments of danger and fueling anxiety that resurfaces long after the event has passed.
You’ll see how these encapsulated parts continue to anticipate threat, and how somatic awareness and gentle pacing can bring them back into the flow of life. Through live demonstrations and clinical case studies, Diane illustrates how to support your clients’ encapsulated states, dissolve dissociative barriers, and restore a felt sense of safety and calm.
- Session 2: From Helplessness to Empowerment: Transforming Defensive Responses in Anxiety
This class explores how unresolved defensive responses can perpetuate anxiety and how transforming passive experiences of helplessness into active experiences of empowerment can create profound healing. We’ll examine how somatic approaches can help clients complete interrupted defensive orienting responses and reclaim agency in situations where they previously felt powerless.
Through in-depth clinical case studies, you’ll see how even severe presentations of agoraphobia and social anxiety can transform when clients are guided to renegotiate traumatic experiences from a position of empowerment.
- Session 3: Decoding the Body's Language: Unraveling Phobias and Mysterious Anxiety Patterns
Seemingly unrelated phobias and anxiety reactions often hold hidden clues to unprocessed trauma. In this session, Dr. Diane Poole Heller guides participants in developing a “Sherlock Holmes” approach to clinical investigation—tracking the body’s narrative and symbolic communications to uncover the true origins of anxiety.
Through detailed clinical demonstrations, you’ll see how puzzling fears—like dogs barking, blue jeans, or being under trees—can be decoded to reveal their link to forgotten or misinterpreted traumatic events. Diane also explores how to help clients distinguish between accurate memories and protective misattributions, while honoring the adaptive role these interpretations once played.
This session illuminates how curiosity, compassion, and attunement allow the body’s hidden stories to resolve, transforming anxiety into integration and understanding.
Includes live recorded Q&A sessions with Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Hear Diane respond to participant questions from the original live training—offering rich clinical insights and practical guidance drawn from decades of work in trauma and attachment healing. Whether you’re a therapist, coach, or healing arts practitioner, you’ll gain access to the same depth, clarity, and experiential learning that made the live sessions so transformative.
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: Attachment & Anxiety Reference Guide from Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Explore how anxiety manifests within each attachment style, what tends to trigger it, along with practical, compassionate approaches for regulation. This quick-reference companion helps you connect theory to real-world clinical work and personal insight.
BONUS #2: Anxiety Patterns Questionnaire from Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Adapted from the GAD-7 and expanded with somatic and trauma-related indicators, this reflective questionnaire offers a structured way to observe how anxiety shows up across thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. Use it to track progress, curiously explore, and support meaningful discussion in therapy or self-study.
Why take this course?
Understand anxiety as a trauma response and gain tools to restore balance, empowerment, and connection.
When threat or overwhelm isn’t resolved, the nervous system can stay stuck in protective states—hypervigilance, freeze, or collapse—long after the danger has passed. These unfinished responses become the foundation for chronic anxiety, panic, and phobic reactions that seem to appear “out of nowhere.”
Traditional approaches focus on calming thoughts or managing symptoms, but they rarely address why anxiety takes hold in the first place.
This course offers a deeper path that traces anxiety back to its roots in unresolved trauma and early attachment disruptions.
Through powerful demonstrations, live client sessions, and in-depth discussion, you’ll see how safety, sequencing, and compassionate attunement help encapsulated parts of the self reintegrate. You’ll gain somatic and attachment-based tools to complete defensive responses, transform helplessness into empowerment, and restore natural regulation.
Whether you experience anxiety personally or work with clients who do, this training will give you a new framework—and practical skills—to help anxiety finally find its resolution, rather than just relief.
What you’ll learn?
Gain practical tools to calm anxiety, restore safety, and support lasting nervous system regulation.
- How anxiety often signals unresolved trauma—parts of the self still “frozen in time” and anticipating danger.
- Somatic and attachment-based methods for identifying and working with these encapsulated child states.
- Ways to complete unfinished defensive responses and restore a felt sense of empowerment and safety.
- How to apply Polyvagal principles and orienting responses to calm overactivated threat systems.
- Clinical strategies for transforming helplessness, avoidance, and hypervigilance into grounded presence and choice.
- Techniques for decoding phobias and “mysterious” anxiety patterns to uncover their true traumatic roots.
- Approaches for helping clients reframe misattributed or confusing symptoms while honoring their protective intent.
- Step-by-step guidance for creating corrective experiences that integrate fragmented memories and release chronic anxiety.
Here’s what’s in the training curriculum…
Session 1
Trauma Stops Time: Releasing Encapsulated Anxiety
This class explores how trauma disrupts our temporal experience, leaving parts of ourselves “frozen in time” and generating anxiety that may emerge unexpectedly, even years after the original event. Diane examines how traumatic experiences create dissociative barriers that leave these fears unresolved and stuck at the time of the trauma—blocking the path to healing.
You’ll hear compelling clinical case studies showing how to identify and work with these “encapsulated child” parts that remain hypervigilant against threats that have long passed. Through these real client cases, and live demonstration, you’ll learn practical interventions that help clients complete their processing of traumatic events, allowing these fragmented parts to finally experience resolution and release from the grip of anxiety.
What You’ll Learn:
- How trauma creates a disruption in temporal processing, leaving parts of ourselves "frozen" at the moment of overwhelm
- Why anxiety symptoms may appear "out of the blue" months or years after traumatic events
- Clinical strategies for recognizing when present anxiety connects to unresolved past trauma
- Effective techniques for guiding clients through time-based trauma resolution
- How to help clients transform statements like "I'll never stop feeling this way" into a recognition that even intense anxiety has a beginning, middle, and end
- Methods for gently dissolving dissociative barriers and reintegrating fragmented aspects of self
Session 2
From Helplessness to Empowerment: Transforming Defensive Responses in Anxiety
This class explores how unresolved defensive responses can perpetuate anxiety and how transforming passive experiences of helplessness into active experiences of empowerment can create profound healing. We’ll examine how somatic approaches can help clients complete interrupted defensive orienting responses and reclaim agency in situations where they previously felt powerless.
Through in-depth clinical case studies, you’ll witness how even severe presentations like agoraphobia and social anxiety can transform when clients are guided to renegotiate traumatic experiences from a position of empowerment. You’ll learn practical, body-centered interventions that help clients distance perceived threats and reprocess traumatic scenarios with a sense of mastery and empowerment.
What You’ll Learn:
- How incomplete defensive responses remain activated in the nervous system, fueling ongoing anxiety
- Techniques for identifying and completing interrupted orienting responses using Somatic Experiencing principles
- Methods for transforming passive traumatic experiences into active expressions of choice and agency
- Clinical approaches to help clients distance perceived threats and repattern their relationship to triggering situations
- Strategies for guiding clients to reimagine traumatic scenarios while maintaining a sense of control and mastery
- How to recognize and work with "healing metaphors" that can serve as powerful vehicles for transformation
Session 3
Decoding the Body’s Language: Unraveling Phobias and Mysterious Anxiety Patterns
This class explores how seemingly disconnected phobic reactions and anxiety symptoms often contain hidden clues to unprocessed traumatic experiences. We’ll develop a “Sherlock Holmes” approach to clinical investigation—following the body’s narrative and symbolic communications to uncover the true origins of anxiety.
Through detailed clinical demonstration, you’ll witness how apparently unrelated phobic reactions (like fear of dogs barking, wet leaves, or being under trees) can be decoded to reveal their connection to forgotten or misinterpreted traumatic events. You’ll learn how to help clients distinguish between accurate traumatic memories and false attributions that may have been created to make sense of confusing symptoms, while respecting the protective function these interpretations have served.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to approach mysterious anxiety symptoms with therapeutic curiosity rather than pathologizing them
- Techniques for tracking somatic clues that point to the true origins of phobic reactions
- Methods for helping clients safely revisit and reframe traumatic memories without retraumatization
- Clinical approaches to untangling false attributions or misinterpretations of traumatic events
- Strategies for transforming perceived threats into resources for healing
- How to restore relationships damaged by misattributed trauma or false memories
Meet Your Instructor
Anxiety softens when we remember that it’s not the enemy, but a signal from parts of us still waiting to feel safe. Healing begins when we meet those parts with understanding, not judgment.
Dr. Diane Poole Heller is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and teaching expert in the field of adult attachment theory and trauma resolution.
Her signature approach—DARe (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience)—provides therapists and individuals with relevant skills and practical exercises that facilitate healing from attachment and trauma wounds.
Her work with adult attachment has forged a path for adults with childhood attachment injuries to develop Secure Attachment Skills (SAS) that lead to more connected and fulfilling adult relationships.
She has authored several books, including the widely acclaimed The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships. Her expertise in trauma healing has supported survivors, helpers, and families affected by events such as 9/11, Columbine, and other school shootings.
Through various training programs, books, lectures and her own work as a clinical therapist, Dr. Heller has helped a countless number of people in their healing journey towards experiencing greater intimacy, wholeness and more fulfilling relationships.
She believes that when we heal ourselves first, we heal our families, our communities and the world as a whole.
Do I need to be a therapist to benefit from this training?
No! While Diane’s original classes were delivered to an audience of therapists and healing practitioners, we think the content is too valuable not to share! Whether you or someone you love are struggling with symptoms of anxiety, this course will provide a vital new perspective on approaching anxious patterns with precision and compassion.
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.
Are CE credits available for this course?
Continuing Education (CE) credits are not available for this training at this time.
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.
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 previous of previous training (at a special promotional price) 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.
Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Get immediate access…
- 3 Recorded, On-Demand Training Sessions
- Includes recorded live Q&A: Dr. Diane Poole Heller answers questions on working with anxiety, and embodied healing.
- Private Course Portal with Lifetime Access to Video Recordings, Audio, Transcripts, and Resources
- PLUS Downloadable Course Bonuses!
Save 50%
$63
$127 original price
Limited promotional pricing. All sales final.