Sounds True presents
Trauma &
the Embodied Brain
A Heart Based Training in Relational
Neuroscience for Healing Trauma
with
Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT
Welcome to Trauma and the Embodied Brain
Dear friends,
I'm writing to let you know about my new online course entitled Trauma and the Embodied Brain: A Heart-Based Training in Relational Neuroscience for Healing Trauma. I would love to share these ten weeks with you.
We are learning that trauma is much less about the event and much more about who is truly with us before, during, and after the overwhelming experience. With this in mind, we will be exploring the conditions that open a truly healing space for the integration of embedded traumas.
Our primary focus will be on deepening our capacity for nonjudgmental presence, the foundation of safety, as we learn about and experience how our embodied brains develop in health, trauma, and healing. We know that trauma embeds in the body—in our muscles, heart and belly brains, and so much more. As we practice listening to sensation, the language of our bodies, we can deepen our receptive presence with ourselves and the people who come seeking relief from suffering.
The culture in which we seek to support restoration for survivors who come to us, foster our children's unfolding, and partner with each other for a more humane world is indeed challenging at this moment in our history. As we cultivate the conditions for offering relational safety, we may each become not only a more receptive therapist, but also a therapeutic presence in our daily walk in the world.
This can sound like a monumental task—and while that is true in some ways, the discoveries of relational neuroscience can provide a firm foundation for developing our innate capacity to be deeply present to one another. We will be building on the wisdom of Stephen Porges about our autonomic nervous system, drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work on the relationship between the two hemispheres of our brains, looking to interpersonal neurobiology for a new definition of trauma, and exploring the work of scientists who tell us how the quality of implicit traumatic memories can change.
And we will be working with our own inner world throughout so that this will be a healing as well as learning experience. All of us who offer sanctuary for those who have been wounded need and deserve this kind of support.
I look forward to sharing this nourishing experience with you.
With a warm heart,
Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT
P.S. Offered through Sounds True, this course comes with a one-year guarantee so you can try it risk-free. You can also apply for up to 10 Continuing Education credits upon completion.
An Overview of the Training Program
Here is everything that you will receive in the training:
- An eight-week online video training program with six-plus hours of teaching
- Two prerecorded question-and-answer sessions
- Transcripts of ALL video teachings and calls
- Downloadable videos for lifetime access
- Ten Continuing Education credits will be available for purchase
Trauma and the Embodied Brain:
A Heart-Based Training in Relational Neuroscience for Healing Trauma
Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT
Eight Weekly Training Modules Plus Two Prerecorded Sessions
This professional training taught by Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT, offers the latest research and neuroscientifically grounded treatment approaches in the area of trauma. Bonnie is author of the acclaimed Being a Brain-Wise Therapist: A Practical Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology.
Bonnie will provide the theory and clinical tools you need to work more effectively with clients suffering from trauma, and will look at both theoretical and experiential-based learning approaches. In the course, we will be exploring:
- Building a foundation in the field of relational neuroscience
- Working with trauma from the perspective of interpersonal neurobiology
- Deepening our awareness of the roots of trauma
- Developmental psychotherapy and the embodied brain
- Explicit and implicit memory
- The nature of what it means to heal trauma and the journey it requires
Bonnie will emphasize the role of emotion, feeling, the heart, and relationship in healing from trauma, and how the therapy relationship itself can provide a second chance at secure attachment.
What's Inside Your Curriculum
Session #1: Introduction to Relational Neuroscience
In this session we'll start with the big picture of how relational neuroscience is being used in the therapy room.
Topics we will explore include:
- An overview of the pioneers—scientists and theoreticians—and humility about where we are and what we know
- How to settle our inner world into perspectives that allow us to cultivate a healing space for our people to inhabit
- How to feel our way into the core principles of interpersonal neurobiology—what does it mean to be a human being?
- Understanding the positivity bias and how to trust the ”inherent treatment plan“ inside each person
- Reshaping our perceptions in the direction of nonjudgmental presence, receptivity, and responsiveness
Session #2: Considering Trauma from the Perspective of Interpersonal Neurobiology
In this session we'll look at how to connect awareness, emotions, and trauma with neurobiology.
Topics we will explore include:
- Why trauma is a relational experience and arises more from our sense of being alone with pain and fear than from the event itself
- What does ”alone“ mean? Are others in a condition to be able to be with us? How is our nervous system able to receive them?
- What happens when experiences are unheld/unintegrated
- Are there positive (integrative) and negative (disintegrative) emotions—or are all emotions truth-tellers and entry points for further integration?
- How to think of these ”en-wombed“ implicit experiences as doorways to healing
- The current struggle with cultural trauma—Iain McGilchrist's perspective including algorithms, protocols, and loss of connection
- How can we collaborate with our brain's natural pattern of R-L-R integration?
Session #3: Deepening Our Awareness of the Roots of Trauma
In this session we'll look at the roots of trauma, how individuals adapt, and the consequences.
Topics we will explore include:
- A review of the relational nature of trauma and pathways by which traumas are held awaiting the necessary support to integrate
- The different types of trauma and their effects—visible, invisible; cumulative, sudden
- Differences based on the developmental stage when trauma happens (historical trauma and epigenetics)
- How to create the required support for radical inclusiveness
- Introduction to the neural streams that are touched in development, trauma, and healing
Session #4: Our Embodied Brain in Development, Trauma, and Healing, Part 1
In this session we'll look at different aspects of working with clients.
Topics we will explore include:
- What is the nature of trauma and particularly of our adaptivity?
- Understanding magical territory as we begin to have a felt sense of some of the neural streams that feed our unfolding experience
- Why it is important for us to become embodied ourselves in order to practice nonjudgmental presence
- Working with rupture and repair, and techniques for modeling radical inclusiveness
- Reflective practices for the skin, muscles, belly brain, and heart brain
- Neural streams that are touched in development, trauma, and healing
Session #5: Our Embodied Brain in Development, Trauma, and Healing, Part 2
In this session we'll go deeper into aspects of working with clients.
Topics we will explore include:
- A review of neural streams
- Understanding the autonomic nervous system (Porges)—polyvagal theory, neuroception, eyes, ears, and face
- How to use responsiveness rather than motivation and a reflective practice for beginning to identify signs of movement from ventral to sympathetic, ventral or sympathetic to dorsal
- Understanding the brain stem and core fight/flight nuclei, sensitivity to rhythm, and a reflective practice for sensing rhythms of attachment and difference/similarity between parents
- Panksepp's social emotional circuitry in the midbrain and a reflective practice with the seeking system
- Gathering in RH limbic circuitry as foundational perception of the world and a reflective practice to sense difference between explicit and implicit memory
Session #6: Implicit Memory Change
In this session we'll look at the power of implicit memory and how to work with it as a therapist.
Topics we will explore include:
- An overview of the streams of neural information and the development of implicit memory
- The blessing of implicit memory being touched and awakened
- How changes in language may lead to changes in response
- Developing warm implicit memory as an oasis with a reflective practice
- How to cultivate gratefulness for its arising when it carries pain and fear (a lifelong process)
- How implicit memory changes including a look at reparative, restorative, and disconfirming experiences
- The role of implicit, explicit, and autobiographical memory in development, trauma, and healing
Session #7: Pathways of Healing
In this session we'll look at how we can repair and create pathways of healing with our clients.
Topics we will explore include:
- How to work with stillness, presence, and nonjudgmental acceptance of where we are—33 percent with rupture and repair
- How to lead and follow when responding to clients
- The underground process of attachment repair, including using presence, contact, reflection, responsiveness, and delight
- What to do when therapy ”fails“
- How to create a sacred space of connection and a closing moment of reflection on “holding suffering”
Session #8 A Sacred Space Opens
In this session we'll look at how we can repair and create pathways of healing with our clients.
Topics we will explore include:
- Introduction to connection in all its forms as sacred and looking at co-suffering
- A review where we’ve been these last eight weeks—core principles and practices
- Why we don't know what healing will look like with our people
- How to be truly present and trust the “inherent treatment plan” that our people bring with them, settling into deepest respect for individuality
- Closing with gratefulness for this time together, shifting to a time for integration, and a closing reading from Martín Prechtel
This is a powerful course that will give you tools and skills to work on for years to come.
PLUS RECEIVE THIS SPECIAL BONUS:
As part of this eight-week training with Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT, you will also receive:
An Article Series: The Introduction to Neurobiology:
- Relationship Is Everything
- Interview with Iain McGilchrist
- Cradling
- A Body of Knowledge
- Roots of Meaning
- The Embodied Therapist
- Consilience Default Network
- Spiritual Coherence and Continuity
- Spirituality Section Winter
- Embodiment
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT, is a marriage and family therapist, author, consultant, and group facilitator. She is a student of interpersonal neurobiology who is particularly devoted to supporting the clinician's ongoing personal healing process. She is the author of Being a Brain‐Wise Therapist and The Brain‐Savvy Therapist's Workbook. Her 25 years of working with people healing from trauma and attachment wounds has fostered in her such respect for those who are willing to touch their suffering in the service of being more kind and compassionate human beings.
Trauma and the Embodied Brain
Training Overview Summary
- An eight-week online video training program with six-plus hours of teaching
- Two prerecorded question-and-answer sessions
- Transcripts of ALL video teachings and calls
- Downloadable videos for lifetime access
- Ten Continuing Education credits will be available for purchase
Plus, receive the following presenter bonus:
- An Article Series: The Introduction to Neurobiology
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I access the presenter bonus files?
To access the bonuses you will need to:
- 1. Log in to your Sounds True account.
- 2. Click on “my library” (located in the navigation bar at the top right of the page).
- 3. Click on “Online Courses” (located on the left side of the page).
- 4. Find Trauma and the Embodied Brain.
- 5. Click on “download.”
Can I download the course to a computer or mobile device?
You can download the course onto your computer. At this time, courses are also available in your Sounds True App and can stream on your mobile device, but can not be downloaded. However, you can download the sessions on your computer and then sync to your device, where they will be available in iTunes.
Are CE credits included in the purchase price of the course?
No. CE credits are available for purchase separately. You can purchase CE credits here.
We unconditionally guarantee your satisfaction with all Sounds True products for one year when purchased via our website. However, if you are not 100% satisfied with Trauma and the Embodied Brain for any reason, simply return it with receipt for a full refund.
