Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing with Janina Fisher, Ph.D.

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Speaker

Janina Fisher, PhD Related seminars and products

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Janina Fisher, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and former instructor at The Trauma Center, a research and treatment center founded by Bessel van der Kolk. Known as an expert on the treatment of trauma, Dr. Fisher has also been treating individuals, couples, and families since 1980.

She is past president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation, an EMDR International Association Credit Provider, Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, and a former Instructor, at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fisher lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to the integration of the neurobiological research and newer trauma treatment paradigms into traditional therapeutic modalities.

She is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015) and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation (2017) and the forthcoming book, Working with the Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma (in press).

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Janina Fisher is an international expert and consultant on Trauma and Dissociation. She is a consultant for Khiron House Clinics and the Massachusetts Department of MH Restraint and Seclusion Initiative. Dr. Fisher receives royalties as a published author. She receives a speaking honorarium, recording royalties and book royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. Dr. Fisher has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Janina Fisher is on the advisory board for the Trauma Research Foundation. She is a patron of the Bowlby Center.

Target Audience

Objectives

1. Discriminate the clinical implications of physiological and cognitive contributors to shame.
2. Determine cognitive-behavioural, ego state, and psychoeducational interventions to address shame in clinical practice.

Outline

• The role of shame in traumatic experience
• Shame as an animal defence survival response
• Effects of shame on autonomic arousal

• Shame and the attachment system
• Rupture and repair in attachment formation

• Feelings of disgust, degradation, and humiliation are interpreted as “who I am”
• Cognition and the body
• Internal working models predict the future and determine our actions

• The role of procedural learning and memory
• Physiological effects of mindful dual awareness
• Using mindfulness-based techniques to inhibit self-judgment

• Re-contextualizing shame as a younger self or part
• Bringing our adult capacity to our childhood vulnerability
• Healing shame through compassionate acceptance

• Social engagement and the ventral vagal system (Porges)
• The incompatibility of shame and social engagement
• The therapist’s own social engagement system as a healing agent

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