Course Description

Clients’ trauma-related fragmentation presents challenges for the EMDR therapist when dissociative responses complicate or disrupt trauma processing. The processing may appear to be going smoothly but, despite the apparent success, doesn’t result in resolution and completion for the client. Or the client may become flooded and de-stabilized. Traumatized clients have one body and one mind but can also have many parts holding different trauma responses to the same event. In this workshop—led by Janina Fisher, Ph.D.—participants will be introduced to a protocol for working with fragmented or dissociatively disordered clients that can enable effective processing of the trauma and facilitate self-compassion.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify four clinical signs of self-alienation.
2. Participants will be able to identify distressing emotions as communications from young wounded parts.
3. Participants will be able to assess the contribution of each child part in surviving the trauma.
4. Participants will be able to apply techniques that foster ‘earned secure attachment’ as the outcome of attachment bonding between adult and child self.

Presenter(s)

Janina Fisher, Ph.D.

Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is the Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and a former instructor, Harvard Medical School. An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015), author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017) and the forthcoming book, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (in press). She is best known for her work on integrating newer body-centered interventions into traditional psychotherapy approaches. More information can be found on her website: www.janinafisher.com.