The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., over the past 30 years as he learned to set aside his trained assumptions and truly listen to his clients. It is a highly efficient and effective way of guiding clients to a state of inner clarity and compassion, the Self, from which they know how to heal themselves. From the Self, clients are able to calm and transform their troubling inner voices, the critical and anxious chatter, the compulsive distractions, their feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and overwhelm. These parts of the psyche are surprisingly responsive and resilient when addressed with respect and patience. They readily forsake their inner battles, and take on valuable inner roles once they are accepted and witnessed.

This application of family systems principles and techniques to inner systems is now widely used internationally in the treatment of trauma and severe diagnoses, as well as in non-clinical applications such as business consulting and meditation practice.

The healing and reorienting of their “inner families” in an environment of genuine acceptance, translates into concrete behavioral change, plus improved ability to relate well to people. IFS is a gentle, yet powerful, healing delivery system that releases the therapist from the need to be clever because it trusts and empowers the clients’ Self.

This presentation will introduce the basic principles and techniques of IFS, and how they can be applied in the treatment of trauma.

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living powerfully shaping experiences of safety and influencing the capacity for connection. Polyvagal Theory, through the organizing principles of hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation, has revolutionized our understanding of how this system works. We now know that trauma interrupts the development of autonomic regulation and shapes the system away from connection into patterns of protection. For many clients, states of fight, flight, and collapse are frequent, intense, and prolonged while the state of safety and connection is elusive. Their autonomic nervous systems now respond in characteristic post-traumatic patterns of hyperarousal, hypervigilance, disconnection, and numbing.

A Polyvagal approach uses an updated map of the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviors and beliefs so clinicians can reliably lead their clients out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety that is necessary for successful treatment. Polyvagal Theory gives clinicians a guide to help clients safely tune into their autonomic states, reshape their nervous systems, and rewrite the trauma stories that are carried in their autonomic pathways.

Trauma is an internal straitjacket created when a devastating moment is frozen in time. It stifles the unfolding of being, strangling our attempts to move forward with our lives. It disconnects us from our selves, others, nature and spirit. When people are overwhelmed by threat, we are frozen in fear. It is as if our instinctive survival energies are “all dressed up with no place to go.”

Somatic Experiencing offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatised? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually “immune” to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.

Although humans possess regulatory mechanisms identical to those in animals, the function of these systems is often overridden by the rational mind. This restraint leads to the formation of a constellation of symptoms, including physical pain, emotional reactivity, cognitive dysfunction, depression and dissociation. Through the focal awareness of bodily sensation individuals are able to access the disconnected physiological action patterns, allowing the highly aroused survival energies to be safely and gradually re-regulated.

In this short introduction, Giselle will offer experiential exercises and some simple tools that can be used immediately in times of distress.