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On-Site Workshops and Training Seminars Offered for Health Professionals
Mental health agencies and organizations seeking speaking services are
invited to combine the lectures described below to become half-day,
full-day, or multiple-day teaching workshops that meet the unique training
requirements of their professional population.
Click here for description
NEW - Opening New Frontiers in the Treatment of Eating Disorders:
The Role of the Neuroplastic Brain and Somatic Education in Healing Eating Disorders
The prefrontal cortex is the neurological center for eating
disorders, obsessions, addictive disorders, and alterations of body image… a
discovery that expands the breadth of possibilities for treating and healing
eating disorders. Originating in genetic
clusters, clinical eating disorders fragment the core self, distorting one’s
capacity to accurately perceive and experience sensation and to regulate
behavior and the self. Eating disorder
practitioners need to address and heal the brain, along with the patient.
Twenty-first century brain research and neuro-imaging technology has shown that the development of the Self is an embodied process, grounded in kinesthetic experience. Somatic education practices utilize movement and sensation in conjunction with guided self-awareness, to access, integrate and heal the brain and the Self. Through movement with attention, such non-invasive, body-based interventions facilitate connections between sensory receptors embedded in the moving body (the ‘body brain’ promotes learning from the bottom up,) and those embedded in the cranial brain (the ‘mind brain’ promotes learning from the top down.)
The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education©, when used in
combination with traditional forms of eating disorder treatment, enhances
accurate self-awareness, coherence and reintegration of brain, self and body
image…all qualities that lie at the very heart of eating disorder recovery.
By stimulating mind, brain and body connections through gentle, pleasurable patterns of movement, the Feldenkrais Method globally upgrades the quality of nervous system function and fills in the gaps in one's self image.
The Method teaches its students to learn how to learn,
empowering self-determination, self-regulation and self-esteem.
Facilitating the creation of new neuronal pathways,
its practice adds sustainability to healing changes.
This half-day or whole day educational workshop for mental health professionals
is experiential and didactic. As a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, as
well as an eating disorder specialist for the past 4 decades, I will facilitate
a group Awareness through Movement© lesson for workshop participants, enhancing
their experiential understanding and appreciation of the neuroplastic brain and
how it heals, and of the relevance to eating disorder recovery of
kinesthetically-based somatic education.
Learning Objectives:
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Participants will better understand how the neuroplastic brain changes and
heals.
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Participants will understand the power of the brain/body connection in healing
the brain and eating disordered patient.
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Participants will experience and understand the power of the Feldenkrais Method
of Somatic Education© to reorganize the central nervous system, reintegrate the
sense of Self, and sustain healing changes.
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Practitioners will learn to use themselves in facilitating the patient’s healing
by communicating with the brain in ways that supersede and augment traditional,
cognitive based talk therapy.
Eating Disorders: A Treatment Apart
ED are clearly of the most misunderstood, under-diagnosed, medically and
psychologically mishandled disorders; they are also the most lethal of all
the mental illnesses. Though there are few specialties that challenge the
mental health professional as deeply as the treatment of eating disorders,
even the most highly trained and competent psychotherapists lack exposure to
formal professional education and training in this field. The good news
about treating eating disorders is that most generalist practitioners have
acquired the skills they need to manage the complexities of these disorders.
What they lack is guidance about how to use themselves to apply these skills
to meet the unique demands of these disorders and their victims… when, why,
and how.
This workshop, geared to psychotherapists who seek a better understanding of
what sets eating disorder treatment apart from generalist practice, is
highly appropriate for novice eating disorder practitioners, but also
capable of deepening the level of understanding and expertise of those with
experience in the specialty. The workshop provides a practicable
introduction to eating disorder care, laying the foundation for
practitioners to develop the confidence, personal self-awareness, and
wherewithal to become action-based self-starters within a demanding
treatment process, even while helping their patients to do the same. It
offers an overview of the rigorous professional and personal challenges
facing clinicians within this treatment field, of the diverse and unique
clinical, physical, emotional, and social issues that need to be addressed,
and a framework for mitigating these challenges through treatment tools and
strategies, as well as a quality, therapeutic connection and facile use of
the clinician's self to facilitate healing.
Workshop Objectives: Participants will
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Recognize unique
challenges presented by eating disorders which set their victims, their
diagnosis, treatment and recovery apart.
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Learn to mitigate
treatment challenges through an integrative and versatile use of the
therapist's self within the patient/therapist relationship.
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Learn to recognize
and utilize significant human resources in the family, the team, and in
multi-leveled milieu care.
Unique Aspects of Eating Disorder
Diagnosis
As the point of entry into the ED, the lives of patients and families, and
the treatment and recovery processes, diagnostic assessment is the first and
most critical intervention; if not executed deftly and effectively, it could
potentially become the last opportunity for patient and family to avail
themselves of professional care. The cause and effects of integrative eating
disorders are biological, neurological, physiological, nutritional,
emotional, psychological and interpersonal; all need to be assessed and
addressed. By falling "between the cracks" of the specialized knowledge of
physicians, psychotherapists and nutritionists, ED all too frequently remain
under-diagnosed, misdiagnosed and as a result, mistreated. Clinicians need
to prepare themselves to meet the challenges of managing the unique aspects
of this diagnostic process.
As the pivotal entry to the start of treatment, the initial diagnostic
session sets the stage for the clinician's treatment alliance with patient
and family, the patient's engagement in care, and augmenting an action-based
treatment plan. Assessing this most lethal of all mental health disorders
might well be considered a form of crisis intervention, in which keen
attention must be paid to the patient's physiological risk and medical
concerns, as well as to the appropriateness of level of care. The complete
diagnosis for an ED typically takes place over time, to allow for the
observation of the patient's ego functioning, and capacity to accept,
initiate, and tolerate preliminary behavioral changes in response to
rudimentary treatment tasks. Determining Axis diagnoses and possible
co-occurring conditions requires therapy "mileage" as well, along with the
collaborative input of the multi-disciplinary team, including parents and
families.
In light of an ever-changing emotional landscape over time, every treatment
session in some sense becomes "diagnostic" in clarifying the current status
of disease, as well as recovery progress. The ED clinician's assessment
includes not only the extent of the patient's pathology, but his/her
potential to heal, the degree and direction of previous and current
progress, the breadth and depth of the patient's strengths, weaknesses and
needs, and available human support resources. The most critical diagnostic
assessment of all concerns the patient's capacity to make healthy
attachments, as it is through the trusting therapeutic connection that the
patient discovers self-trust and self-regulation, the foundation of healing.
Nuts and Bolts of Treatment Management
Though CBT has been proven to be the "best practice" for bulimia nervosa,
over 90% of ED therapists report failure to conduct their ED practice
according to CBT's manualized requirements. It has become clinically
apparent and recently proven through evidence-based brain research and
neuropsychological technology that the most effective ED solutions stem from
an integrative group of skill sets including family systems theory and
practice, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and relationship-based mindfulness in
practice, in conjunction with and enhancing cognitive-behavioral treatment.
In fact, the quality therapeutic relationship has come to be known as the
most critical healing "intervention." This workshop presents an integration
of treatment approaches and techniques that are capable of cracking the
complex maze of intra- and inter-personal dysfunction that characterizes
these disorders, of managing a uniquely resistant patient population and a
typically stagnating change/recovery process. Learn effective treatment
tools, mindful strategies and nuts-and-bolts practice techniques that are
strength-based, outcome driven, action-focused, and intentional in meeting
patients' care requirements.
Treatment challenges for ED professionals are profound, both professionally
and personally. Professionally, the ED clinician, functioning as part of a
multi-disciplinary team, is faced with managing a disease that wrecks havoc
on the patient's internal resources and emotional resiliency so necessary to
accomplishing the tasks of recovery, and leaving victims bereft of the very
means to muster them. Personally, ED challenge practitioners with emotional
tasks and issues which ironically parallel those of their patients, such as
tolerating the same sense of the "free fall" in facing the fuzzy
approximations and unpredictability that they embolden their patients to
confront within the healing process. Maintaining a healing connection with
the ED patient requires the professional's clear, honest, and healthy
connection with his or her own self first.
Useful to novice and experienced practitioners alike, the workshop offers
strategies and tips that have proved particularly effective and relevant to
the practice of ED, such as providing motivational enhancement, applying
Prochaska and DeClemente's "stages of change" model to resistance
management, joining with the patient, meeting resistance with reflection,
reframing recovery outcomes, establishing interim goals, assigning
action-based "small step" behavioral tasks, etc. This course will address
issues of treatment management, along with the significance of a versatile,
empathic, and connected therapeutic relationship that sets this treatment
specialty apart.
The Clinician's Unique Use of Self in Eating Disorder Treatment
The most lethal of all the mental health disorders, eating disorders are
among the most highly misunderstood, under-diagnosed, and medically and
psychologically mishandled of all the mental illnesses. This workshop
highlights the unique professional challenges of treating these complex,
integrative disorders that become deeply embedded within family systems.
Compounding professional challenges, practitioners treating eating disorders
typically find themselves confronting deep personal challenges as well, in
needing to tolerate the ambiguities, unpredictability and frustrations of a
treatment process that are not unlike those they embolden and entreat their
patients to face and conquer in life, and throughout the recovery process.
In addition, fully one third of female ED practitioners have dealt with
their own personal experience of recovery from an eating disorder. Having
dealt personally with an ED or not, all practitioners find themselves in
continuous need of facing and dealing with uniquely poignant transference
and counter-transference issues in managing these cases. Though formally
untrained in this specialization, be they novices or veterans, most
therapists already have the skills and capacities they need to treat ED.
What they require is guidance and direction about which to use… when…why,
and …how, in applying them to meet the unique requirements of this
specialty. This workshop proposes to offer just that.
In mastering highly diverse treatment skills and resources, the knowledge of
modalities and interventions, the pacing of treatment demands, the use of
self within the multi-disciplinary treatment team and within the healing
connection of the quality therapeutic relationship, ED practitioners
integrate the art and the science of ED practice. In so doing, the acronym
V.I.A.B.L.E. (versatile, integrative, and action-oriented, with an
outcome-bias, loving nature, and educational bent) best describes the
practitioner's effective qualities, intention, and foci. This workshop is
packed with interesting case examples to lend understanding and relevance to
nuts and bolts techniques.
Learning objectives: Practitioners will learn to
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Recognize the unique
qualities that set eating disorder practice and practitioners apart.
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Discover the unique
personal challenges required of treating professionals in the face of
the unique demands of these patients, developing an awareness of one's
own self and counter-transference.
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Learn effective
treatment tools, strategies and nuts-and-bolts practice techniques to
use in the face of resistance, and in moving a stalled healing process
forward.
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Understand the
findings of brain research which have proved the quality of the
therapeutic relationship to be the most important healing intervention.
The Role of the Mindful Therapeutic Relationship in Healing the Eating
Disordered Patient
A look ahead into the twenty-first century reveals the increasing potential
for neuroscience, with its evidence-based revelations about brain
plasticity, to impact and define the future of eating disorder treatment.
Particularly significant in the treatment of disorders that disrupt the
patient's relationships with self and others, new brain research has shown
that the quality of the therapeutic relationship and the therapist's use of
self can become the single most significant intervention in achieving
successful eating disorder healing outcomes, even within the context of
manualized (CBT) practice. Brain scans before and after psychotherapy show
that the more successful the treatment interventions, the greater the brain
changes.
Paralleling the findings of Allan Schore, quality treatment relationships
based on mindfulness in practice hold the potential to create
therapist/patient "right-brain to right-brain" connections or the 'meeting
of the minds,' capable of enhancing the growth and development of new
neuronal pathways that produce feelings of well-being and the return of
self-regulation. It is within and through the empathic, mindful therapeutic
connection between patient and therapist that the eating disordered patient
becomes capable of enduring and sustaining positive changes that lead to the
re-integration of the self; it is through the mindful connection and the
trust that it inspires in the patient's self and the treatment process that
the therapist successfully navigates the rigors of the interpersonal
challenges that are the benchmark of eating disorder practice. This workshop
describes the impact of the quality treatment relationship and the
practitioner's versatile use of self in eating disorder treatment and offers
specific strategies, techniques and approaches to enhance healing through
the poignancy of the interpersonal dynamic between therapist and patient.
Learning objectives:
1. Participants will understand how the unity of the body (brain to brain)
and mind connections contribute to eating disorder healing, both
intra-personally and interpersonally.
2. Participants will understand the role of the neuro-plastic brain in
creating, integrating, and ultimately sustaining a complete and sustainable
eating disorder recovery.
3. The therapist will learn specific tried-and-true interactional techniques
based on the therapist's versatile use of self that will foster and sustain
the patient's personal growth in eating disorder recovery.
Empowering parents to Become Eating
Disorder
Recovery Advocates Through Healing Connections
By partnering with parents, professionals create healing alliances that
enhance and support the recoveries of eating disordered children. This
workshop will discuss the professional’s role in mentoring parents of eating
disordered children to become a proactive and integrative part of a
multi-disciplinary treatment effort, healing and supporting their child
through a timely and lasting recovery.
The most timely and sustained recovery outcomes occur when parents and
families are encouraged to optimize healing connections with self, spouse,
their recovering child, and the child's treatment team. This workshop will
provide strategies for professionals to use to access and integrate the
power of parents, assisting parents to access their own potential to mentor
the healing process as advocates for child and treatment team. Educating and
empowering parents enhances and streamlines the work of health
professionals, cutting the recovery time and the cost of treatment services
to eating disordered children. Click here to learn more about
the role of parents in a child’s eating disorder recovery.
Learning Objectives: Professionals learn to provide parents the empowering
assistance they require in their efforts to:
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