The Neurobiology of Attachment
 |
with Dan Siegel, MD ;
|
 |
with Dan Siegel, MD; Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD; Allan Schore, PhD; Bessel van der Kolk, MD; and Ruth Buczynski, PhD
Sign up for a Gold Subscription
This is a learning community for practitioners. We can’t wait to hear what you’re going to use with your clients
But please do NOT:
- seek advice for personal problems
- ask for referrals
- post links or advertise a product
- post about technical problems
Thank you for your sharing! I’ve worn many hats over the years working in schools: Early Childhood Consultant, EC Coordinator, Parent and staff educator, EC Special Education teacher and an anatomy/medical terminology teacher. I hope to share some of your information for parent and staff education. My appreciation for the opportunity to listen and learn up to date information from your professionals pertaining to the psychological elements of brain development.
This was a great session, with a lot of practical orientations. I find specially useful to know about the types of attachment and their implications, also the alternatives to connect using midnfulness as a vehicle to get in touch with the body sensations that are always wise guides to open new understandings and to deep our perspective on the resources we have. Thank you very much
Sending thanks to the content experts, the producers, editors and marketing staff who created this highly consumable, accessible trauma series…I am a professional patient navigator and health coach working with chronically ill and traumatized caregivers who deal with brain-based disorders, auto-immune diseases and a variety of fatal conditions. We who experience collateral trauma ourselves, as practitioners, can benefit enormously from what you are teaching through this course. Five stars!
I’m a retired associate professor and LCSW and i’ve just read Dr. VanDer Kolk book . This was very helpful to me in better understanding The Brain Keeps The Score and some family members who are Viet Nam vets suffering with PTSD. It also is helping me with reflecting back on my own life and the realization of how very fortunate my life has been, growing up knowing I have always belonged and knowing I was loved. Thank you.
Really interesting – thank you!
The part I found most linked with my developing practice is the concept that we invoke types of relationships and reactions from others – I observe this frequently in the population of children I work with and have focussed on supporting the teaching staff (I work as a mental health occupational therapist in a school) to recognise what could be happening and develop their own sensory and emotional regulation skills and to be able to support the children through co-regulation . I work with some children individually but there is not the funding to work with all so supporting staff an effective use of time etc
I love the comments about patient unique experiences … ie. kindness allowing overexposure, smiling being associated with a personality flip towards abuse or anger later. So complicated how nice isn’t enough, but so true.
Important to note that fathers (and others) can and do affect the developing fetus in a number of ways. For example, 1)A father can mistreat the pregnant mother, thus raising her cortisol levels, among other things. 2)A father can create a loud, chaotic environment, whether overtly abusive or not, that can both directly and indirectly affect the developing fetus. Thus, the mother’s dysregulated emotional states and reactions are not the only influences on the developing fetus. Thank you.
I agree with the others, this is wonderful! Some points are good reminders and others are new ways of thinking about the work. Thank you all! I will definately consider the gold package, if there is some way I can ask a couple of questions first.
I would really LOVE to see a client version of these presentations. I believe several of my clients would benefit greatly from getting all these ideas so well presented. I could then reinforce/discuss/help apply instead of using sessions to explain it all, which I do now. It wouldn’t require very much change of content, just replacing the comments meant for therapists with comments to clients, but I realize the editing might be a bigger job.
As I live in another country, where English is not the primary language, I think it would help spread this fabulous learing opportunity to therapists around the world if there was texting (subtitles), even if they are in English. Sometimes it’s easier to understand what is being said that way.
Happy to hear that main stream psychotherapy is finaly catching up with the teaching I got in the 1980s: give everybody a choice, “Would you like a cup of tea?”; acknowledge and explore as able the pre and perinatal experience of the person; do the family genome so the person can reflect on the gifts and hazzards they inherited; assure them you will walk with them to the extent they want you to; focus on what is working more than on what is not working; encourage them to identify resources they have found along the way, stuffed animals can be a big help; acknowledge that the “solution”, the wisdom, the healing is within the person; self-monitor for the tendancy to “help” people rather than empower the person to help themselves as they are able; the butterfly is in the cocoon, don’t rip it open, it will emerge in its own time.
This segment is particularly helpful for me because I may well have had some placental exposure to excess cortisol and I had a right sided head injury with a loss of consciousness greater than 1/2hr. After a lot of minimization by the medical community over decades a functional MRI shows that my Rt ventricles don’t visualize (they’re compressed enough there is no CSF to make clear spot that would be seen with the imaging). Postulation- scar tissue or inflammation. Difficulty processing information has always been a problem for me. Personal relationships have been and are difficult like not remembering to avoid invalidating remarks with my wife who is especially sensitive to them. I hope the remaining segments will be as helpful.
I loved hearing about the importance of animals for some clients struggling with attachment issues. My primary clients are horses. But, of course, those horses have owners, and often unravelling the trauma between the humans and the animals is a practice unto itself. I’ve worked as a professional trainer for over forty years, starting with a couple of very young horses when I was a teenager. One of the horses was started in a very harsh, traumatizing manner, leaving her untrustworthy with triggered responses that would show up when I least expected them. The other one, a yearling colt out of a well-adjusted, peaceful mare and handled with kindness from birth, was incredibly easy to train. He loved people, and they loved him back. He taught many children how to ride and show until the day he passed away at age 26.
After decades of working as a professional, many of the horses brought to me for training were from backgrounds of abuse or other traumatizing situations, such as off-the-track thoroughbreds. Understanding these horses and turning them back into safe, manageable mounts became my specialty. Understanding the “people problems” that lead to the abuse of these horses has been more difficult. I turned to practicing meditation and mindfulness techniques, hence my interest in NICABM and other teachers.
In 2015, my book, The Compassionate Equestrian (Gordon/Schoen DVM, pub. Trafalgar Square Books/Horse and Rider Books), became the 25 Principles of Compassionate Equitation now used by several Equine Facilitated Learning and Wellness programs around the world. It is striking how the crossover between animal behaviourist theory and practice is becoming ever more correlated with the latest in neurobiology and healing trauma in humans. Ultimately, what we understand about the ever-aroused equine brain can be applied to understanding trauma in humans and vice versa.
I’m looking forward to the balance of the sessions in this series.
Hello, thank you for making this available for free. I am not a practitioner, I am actually just an unemployed, 60 year old that is trying to figure out how to fix my own developmental trauma because I want to be able to figure out where in my body I feel the trauma’s I received because I somehow disconnected from feeling those things and all of the different modes of healing I have learned involves pinpointing those feelings in my body and none of them have given me a way to do it. Anyway, I have learned and tried to use eft, neurodynamic breathwork, reiki, and a few other things but I don’t have health insurance or an income so it has been an uphill battle I haven’t figured out yet. I will continue watching and hoping for a clue.
One of of the other methods for establishing relationship with a client who is not ready to use words is to simulate the level of control (comfort) with art materials (resistive to fluid) and either “parallel-play” or cooperative play giving the client as much choice directiveness as is comfortable.
Thank you , this has been incredibly helpful.
I got so many significant insights. Around providing safety. So refreshing !
Thee we neurobiology helped, also up regulating and down regulating
Thank you. I found this session very helpful.
I think kindness and compassion can be expressed in a range of different ways depending on the client’s window of tolerance. Maybe sometimes a quieter form of kindness and compassion can work eg in a quiet, comfortable, safe professional setting with an outlook onto ‘nature’(bird sounds, greenery, trees) – (I’m fortunate to work in a semi-rural/ city fringe area) – and express/model curiosity, receptivity, creating a safe, ‘different’ space for the client to speak, to cry, to be angry, to laugh, to be heard, to translate memories, somatic or emotional experiences into language to frame and re-frame their own connections -can often provide a new, very different experience for them. A bit like the example given today where the toddler who has grazed their knee doesn’t cry and scream until they are picked up and held, until their experience of pain can be adequately heard, held and contained and can feel nurtured through the experience to the point of having a different somatic, emotional and cognitive experience that can then be held in their own memory. I think this experience is foundational and formative in the attachment process – in primary attachments and also in the therapeutic context. Thank you again, you have stimulated and challenged me to think afresh and conceptualise my own experience as a therapist
I am a parent and in desperate search to heal my own teenage daughter who was traumatized by me since I was pregnant. I was under enourmoous stress due to betrayal by a family member. But then when my daughter was born my mothering was that of my mother even though I had told myself never to be like her. I was completely self unaware. She was very colicky baby, I didn’t know how to soothe her, and my nervious system was getting triggered constantly by her uncontrolled cries. And I was not mentally attached to my baby because of my own defenses. I was afraid to get hurt and wounded if I ever lost her. Now the more I listen to more I realize how impotent I am to help my daughter to heal from me. My own feeling of guilt, insure how to do what to say, no support and understanding… I have gone through several therapists over the years but nobody really helped us. All was done was do some assessments for ADHD, and other disorders and she was labeled as Mood Disregulation disorder and offered drugs which I refused. Thats why I have lost my faith in the entire system of pshocology and psychologists and therapists, etc. The best ones who have gotten to the root of the problem to the multigenerational trauma, to the childhood trauma of caregivers, to the attachment issues, etc.. those therapists are not available because they are busy educating everybody, writing books, giving talks in conferences like this one. I do learn and search and am not stopping at the challenge, however I am so depressed for not getting anywhere. I know I am my daughter’s best bet, but I am not equpped to re-wire because of my own insecure attachment patterns, triggers, insecurities. I am right now listening to “Myth of Normal” by Gabot Mate, have listened to Dr Neufeld’s “Hold on to your kids”, Oprah’s “What happened to you”, and many more. I have taken over 8+ online courses from Neufeld Institute on Making sense of attention problems, alpha children, making sense of adolescence, teachability factor, 5-steps to maturity, making sense of attachment, etc. My daughter has a disorganized attachment I think, she wants me but pushes me away, seeks my love but in unloving ways, is not thriving, no vitality, attached to her iphone.. it just breaks my heart knowing I am the reason. I am heartbroken knowing the legacy I am leaving her with. My explosion of self-awareness is both a blessing and a curse. I feel lonely as my friends, family do not have capacity to support and we are mostly isolated, there is no attachment village. If you know any therapist who is available to work with us, lives in Boston area, or willing to do remotely, or any other book or conference on healing from traume that might be helpful I am willing to try. Your conference is helpful as it added a few more pieces into my giant puzzle that I am trying to solve. THANK YOU! Sincerely, K. T.
Karine,
I have chilled to the resemblance of our stories. I have an almost exact story except that I have 3 teenagers. My kid’s are thriving for the most part because of the other parent who was their secure attachment figure while I was unable to be that person to them. When I stopped blaming everyone else for my problems and began taking responsibility for my behaviors I found mediation. I have a deep meditation practice that has actually saved my life. I have also started working with someone only a couple of months ago that has been a game changer for me. Kristina Renée Kuzmich Bengala is in San Diego CA and works via zoom. But honestly it is a deep practice in mediation that has guided me to Kristina. It’s hard work, no doubt! But I am finding forgiveness and compassion which is allowing me to heal. So much of what they share here is KEY! Listening to our bodies, but we have to learn how to do that and it takes time and a lot of patience. Much Love to you and your daughter.
I found this session insightful and it also validated some technique I seem to do intuitively around right to right brain communication and up-regulating. I enjoyed the whole session and found many helpful ideas to translate into my practice. I really like the practical suggestions: Pat Ogden’s suggestions on how to use physicality and offer choice throughout, so encouraging and supporting self-agency. I found the clear descriptions of different attachment styles and how they might play out in a person’s life or in the therapy room helpful and also the suggestions around providing psych ed in order to slow the process down and ask the client to take some charge of that. I am hoping to use all of these things in my practice this week.
In today’s session, I found it especially important to highlight a person’s need for control and choice in their day and life. I also appreciate the message about the dangers of restraints, as my advocacy work for The Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint is what brings me to these sessions. The traumatic impact of seclusions and restraints are undeniable. The information contained in these sessions are a part of the roadmap to doing better. Thank you!
Thank you for another great, informative presentation. It was really helpful to be reminded that being warm and empathic can be triggering for some patients/clients as it may revive the perpetrator/abuser for them who was warm and friendly but so abusive.
Thank you. Just this morning I was speaking on not being a dictator and allowing the person’s own innate intelligence provide & allow for their healing experience, as Pat Ogden said this afternoon. I’m happy that we’re in sync.
Mina Matania (Mindspace Mina) Counsellor, London UK
I’m very grateful for today’s insights. A handful of clients kept popping into my head and I thought about what I could have done better! As somone considered highly empathic in both my personal and professional lives, the consideration of empathy and kindness in working with trauma clients was extremely helpful. From a personal perspective, having had strong and secure attachments from both parents, it was interesting to learn how trauma can cause ruptures in adulthood. Thank You!
I think this is great. I especially like the variety of presenters, their personal professional examples, the pacing, opportunity for different times, suggestion for writing in journal and Ron’s suggestion of psycho-education. Having worked in child welfare and residential programs it is useful to consider the prenatal issues, trauma of relinquishment, and awareness of the trauma potential or reality of physical holds. I have taken a number of these courses through the years and its good to be back.
Thanks Ruth and all the presenters of NICABM.
I am Lucy Kung’u from Kenya. Thank you very much for the session, it was informative and very well presented. I have been dealing with a client who has gone through complicated grief and trauma, currently displaying PTSD since moving out of her country. Having to make choices, use of mindfulness, an emphasis on positive coping mechanisms, psycho-educating on how the trauma impacts the body and using the first part of the session to build and uplift the client will be very helpful in my sessions with this client. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to learn.