PESI UK Announces Timely Trauma and Attachment Conference
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Blog Editor
Understanding the interrelationship between trauma and attachment has never been more important than in this time of global stress. In April, PESI UK will be gathering together world leading attachment specialists and trauma experts as part of a special two-day conference. Join Dr Pat Ogden, Dr Stephen Porges, Professor Jeremy Holmes and other key voices for the latest insights and innovations in working with trauma and attachment.
We’re all in the same storm – but not in the same boat. For many, this has emerged as the defining adage of the pandemic. From economic background to ethnicity, it has become painfully clear that the coronavirus crisis is not impacting all of us equally.
As therapists, we will understand that our clients’ attachment and trauma histories can also be powerful influences on how they are experiencing the pandemic. How we respond to and recover from trauma often depends on our early attachments. And when our early attachment experiences have themselves been traumatic, the boat may feel more precarious still.
How can we help clients with trauma and attachment wounds to steer their boats through this storm – and other periods of public or more personal stress?
Next month, some of the world’s leading attachment specialists and trauma experts will be offering cutting-edge, cross-modality takes on this urgent question.
Taking place from April 15-16, PESI UK’s Trauma and Attachment Conference will combine attachment-informed perspectives on trauma, and trauma-informed perspectives on attachment.
It will be a chance to strengthen your theoretical knowledge, pick up practical tips, draw inspiration from powerful case examples, get up to speed with the latest neuroscientific research… and above all, to enrich and deepen your own individual approach to working with trauma and attachment issues.
Dr Pat Ogden, the creator of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, will explain how to draw on the body to help dissociative clients with conflicting attachment patterns.
Dr Stephen Porges, the developer of Polvagal Theory, will consider the relationship between stress and adversity, and social connectedness.
And Professor Jeremy Holmes, renowned expert in the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and attachment, will explore trauma as a ‘piercing of the protective boundary’, drawing therapeutic implications from the latest neurobiological insights.
What are the lasting interpersonal effects of living in a chronic threat response? Dr Diane Pool Heller, leading expert in adult attachment theory, will be sharing creative and practical ways to assess and address unresolved power dynamics and disorganised attachment.
Are you aware of the way in which attachments between black people and people of colour may be impacted by the legacy of racial trauma and injustice? Group analyst and forensic psychotherapist Dr Anne Aiyebusi will bring a generational perspective, and invite us to consider ‘how we move on from this?’
We will also be delving in to five dimensions of consciousness with PTSD specialist Dr Ruth Lanius. The trauma expert and Professor of Psychiatry will be sharing mind-brain-body techniques to help integrate and restore our clients’ sense of self in the wake of psychological trauma and childhood attachment disruptions.
Each day will conclude with a lively panel discussion, allowing us to integrate what we have learned and quiz the experts further – and there is also a package of bonus material, including contributions from Michael Soth and Janina Fisher.
By drawing on the breadth and depth of insight afforded us by attachment and trauma perspectives, we can help some of our most psychologically vulnerable clients to sail on through this storm to calmer seas, whatever boat they find themselves in.
The PESI UK Trauma and Attachment Conference will take place from April 16-17. Visit this page for the full line-up and details of how to register.