This class examines how stored trauma dysregulates the autonomic nervous system, shaping survival responses, health outcomes, and psychological diagnoses.

• Identify the six main trauma survival strategies.

• Utilize a non-pathologizing lens in conceptualizing adaptive, proactive responses to potential stress.

• Understand the relationship between traumatic stress and health outcomes and potential DSM diagnoses.

• Utilize the Window of Tolerance in conceptualizing nervous system regulation.

This class explores how autonomic nervous system states shape perception and behavior, offering insights into regulation, dissociation, and integrative healing.

• Identify the three main branches of the autonomic nervous system.

• Identify the three blended autonomic nervous system states.

• Identify common autonomic nervous system loops.

• Understand how the state of your nervous system drives your story about the world.

• Combine Structural Dissociation of the Personality Theory with Parts Work and Trauma Responses.

This class examines the neurobiological necessity of co-regulation, its role in the social engagement system, and the impact of trauma on relational safety and survival strategies.

• Describe the role of the polyvagal theory in shaping attachment and regulation.

• Identify cranial nerves involved in the social engagement system.

• Differentiate between co-regulation and self-regulation in caregiving contexts.

• Explain how early attachment experiences influence adult regulation capacities.

• Recognize the importance of contextualizing behaviours as survival strategies.

We unpack the intersection of somatics, trauma, power, and social justice.

• Define neuroception

• Identify the distinction between fawning, appeasement, freeze, and dorsal vagal shutdown.

• Identify the dynamics of domination and subordination that are inherent in all forms of traumas.

• Recognize the impacts of historical, systemic, structural, institutional trauma on the present day.

• Recognize the imperative of engaging in therapy from an approach that recognizes the longitudinal, structural impact of ideologies and systems of oppression upon clients.

This class explores the distinction between safety and felt safeness, exploring orienting, fidgeting, and intellectual defenses as adaptive strategies for nervous system regulation.

• Differentiate between orienting, find, and fidget, and fidgeting responses of the nervous system as indicators of autonomic nervous system arousal.

• Evaluate how Zoom and virtual environments impact relational safety, and explore virtual techniques to establish relationality.

• Apply ocular release and orienting practices to foster safety, reinstate safety, and to reset the vagus nerve.

• Explain the Find response as a pleasurable evolutionary adaptive drive that goes haywire due to stress-distress-trauma.

• Releasing anxiousness through the fidgeting responses

This class explores dissociativeness and dorsal vagal dissociation, offering breath and somatic techniques to support self-regulation, co-regulation, and reconnect with vitality.

• Breathing techniques for regulation, contextualizing breathwork for trauma, mouth-breathing vs nose-breathing.

• Resource the truncated attachment cry response.

• Re-frame dissociation as a protective, not a defective, response.

• Demonstrate multiple techniques for how to help someone who is experiencing an increase in low-grade dorsal vagal energy.

• Demonstrate how to help someone to come out of a dorsal vagal response.

• Regulating resources for dorsal energy

This class explores the sensory patterns that exist at the confluence of trauma and neurodivergence, provides nuance in our healing approach through phase-oriented healing, and offers somatic techniques for tension release.

• Define sensory seeking and sensory avoidance in relation to trauma responses and neurodivergence, with recognition of the intersection between neurodivergence, sensory processing difficulties, and trauma.

• Distinguish between resourcing vs re-processing traumatic memories.

• Utilize phase-oriented trauma treatment as a framework for identifying how to use which interventions to use, how to use them, and when to use them.

• Demonstrate techniques to release tension in the jaw, neck, shoulders, and diaphragm.

In this class, we will cover various somatic techniques to compassionately resource the sympathetic life force energies of flight, fight and freeze.

• Understand frozen terror through a somatic lens.

• Apply body-based techniques to resource the energies of frozenness.

• Apply body-based techniques to resource the energies of fight.

• Apply body-based techniques to resource the energies of flight.

In this class, we explore the interactive dynamics of alcoholic, dysfunctional, and under-resourced families which results in the formation of unmet developmental needs and adaptive survival strategies.

• Explore the interactive dynamics of alcoholic, dysfunctional, and under-resourced families that can result in the formation of unmet developmental needs.

• Identify the impact of unmet / under-met / inconsistently met dependency needs upon character formation, self-organization, and the adoption of adaptive survival strategies.

• Identify common family systems within which developmental needs are more likely to be unmet / under-met / inconsistently met.

• Apply psychoeducation on trauma adaptation to support a strengths-based clinical practice.

• Apply interventions: complete the stress response cycle, the practice of self-compassion, seeking healthy connection and co-regulation.

Many of us needed to be silent in order to survive. Many of us learned that there was no one there. This class explores the sequalae of disrupted early attachment experiences of withholding the voice upon the neuromuscular patterns and character structures.

• Demonstrate self-holding practices for regulation and containment.

• Analyze the impact of caregiver behaviour upon the child’s development of attachment strategies, with focus on the truncated attachment cry.

• Understand the history of somatic psychotherapy.

• Demonstrate an understanding of how one’s attachment history reflects in the neuromuscular skeletal patterns of the body and informs the development of character structures.

• Evaluate oral armouring and oral collapse as protective defences that inform the development of character structures, which emphasis on resourcing and regulating strategies.

• Engage in an experiential to practice the basics of soliciting implicit body wisdom.

In order to maintain a connection with the caregivers in our early lives, many of us had to learn to inhibit or have fearful expressions to certain developmental actions of attachment - pushing, reaching, grasping, pulling, and having. These actions of attachment form the basis for embodied asking, receiving, giving, and letting go that underscores our worthiness in our relationships.

• Engage with non-verbal mirroring and attunement exercises.

• Identify implicit body memories and their relevance in somatic psychotherapy through experiential application of the developmental actions of attachment (yield, push, reach, grasp, pull, yield).

• Develop an understanding of over-coupled and under-coupled somatosensory memories, as it pertains to trauma, in order to develop a trauma-informed somatic practice.

• Engage experientially with the Oral Collapse and Oral Armoring character structures.

• Interventions for resourcing the developmental actions of attachment that accompany the Oral Collapse and Oral Armoring character structures.

• Engage with somatic practices and somatic elicitations around receiving support.

In order to survive neglectful and/or threatening early childhood environments, many children needed to adapt by creating a nourishment barrier.

• Describe the action-sensitivity cycle, common difficulties experienced by our clients, and its barriers (insight, response, nourishment, completion).

• Identify how early relational and systemic under-resourcing shapes the formation of the nourishment barrier.

• Apply strategies to cultivate the expansion of integrative capacity through a foundational relationship with physiological needs.

• Techniques for re-shaping clients’ autonomic nervous systems towards safety through co-regulation.