Trauma can force us to develop strategies to help us survive what we experienced.

These actions of survival and truncated actions of survival get stuck inside the nervous system and, as we now know, the body keeps the score. Our biography becomes our biology. And then our biology informs our current and future biography. The strategies that kept us alive can keep us from fully living.

By learning to recognize and safely resource the tension patterns of these survival responses, we can manage anxiety and overthinking, emotional flooding, and overwhelm. New choices become available for the neuro-muscular system, which can allow us to cultivate self-awareness around past behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

In this presentation, you will learn how the cascade of tension and immobilization can be addressed to facilitate enhanced treatment outcomes, including capacity for bottom-up self-regulation, expanded window of tolerance, and interoceptive awareness.

Objectives:

• Neuroception of danger & life threat: Animal survival responses in the face of trauma
• The autonomic impact of trauma on physical and mental health
• The link between traumatic stress and nervous system dysregulation, including addictive processes
• Window of capacity as a model for mapping the autonomic nervous system
• Learn three bottom-up somatic techniques to resource the nervous system to facilitate enhanced treatment outcomes
• Deconstructing neuroception of safety io include the trauma of class, race, sex and other -isms through critiquing the fawn, appeasement and dorsal shutdown responses

Student discount and sliding scale discount available. Please contact us at chicagominds@gmail.com for details.

Workshop participants who opt to receive CE certification, please select the CEU option. This workshop fulfills requirement for 1.5 CE credits. CE sponsorship is approved by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR), credits are applicable to LCSW and transferrable to LCPC in Illinois. If you have a different licensure or are licensed outside of Illinois, please check with your licensure body before purchasing.

Please note that we require your live attendance in order to issue CE certificates. If you are unable to attend live, please let us know at least 24 hours before the event.

About the Speaker

Linda Thai, LMSW, ERYT-200, CLYL

Linda is a mental health clinician, storyteller, and educator who has had her own lived experiences of individual, collective, historical and cultural traumatization…and healing. She uses her background in trauma therapy, somatic therapies and yoga to guide others through steps that help you to recognize and safely release tension through resourcing the body. She believes in empowering others through education and skills, thereby igniting potential and fueling your innate desire to learn, to grow, to heal.

Linda is an adjunct faculty member in the Social Work Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and specializes in trauma-informed care and compassion fatigue resilience skills; Mental health clinician at ND Systems, specializing in somatic therapies and trauma therapy. She assists internationally renowned psychiatrist and trauma expert, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, with his private small group psychotherapy workshops aimed at healing attachment trauma. In her work at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, she is responsible for training clinicians in all departments, including psychology, nursing and medicine. She has a Master of Social Work with an emphasis on the neurobiology of attachment and trauma.