Co-Creating the Conditions for Safety: 
A playshop for the EMDR curious therapist
(available on demand here for $29)

I am a queer fat femme who practices at the intersections of oppression, grief, trauma and liberation. My EMDR and trauma healing practice is deeply woven within liberatory practice culture and I come from a lineage of queers, witches and healers dedicated to justice and liberation for all people with a lived experience of oppression.

One of my early teachers, the wise Bonnie Badenoch, first taught me that we are constantly searching for the conditions of safety and when we find them, healing simply happens. Years later another of Bonnie’s students, Jules Taylor Shore, taught me a different version of this birthright wisdom: when compassion is present, the brain can’t help but heal. This workshop will introduce how EMDR approaches the work of trauma metabolism, creating the relational conditions for trauma healing.  

Offered to folx who have been considering becoming trained in EMDR, this 90 minute playshop will give a brief introduction to the model of EMDR, reinforcing the magic of how healing happens and drawing from the rooted wisdom of relational neuroscience and polyvagal theory so you’ll recognize the pathways of healing. I’ll answer questions about the model, give a little behind the scenes tour of EMDR training, and teach a fun intervention from the EMDR world that you can immediately use with your clients to help in trauma recovery. 

Location: Virtual on Demand (pre-recorded)**
Cost/Energy Exchange: $29

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The Somatic Intelligence of Dissociation
(co-creating the conditions for safety in trauma therapy) 

An in person offering on Coast Salish Land (so-called Seattle)
10am-5pm
7/20/24

Dissociation is a very wise, very human and very ancient trauma pathway. When we first learn to dissociate, it is a brilliant idea that effectively helps us avoid feeling what is literally intolerable. What we know, from the wisdom of our own bodies and from those of our clients, is that dissociation–once learned–is a pathway we travel again and again, diverted there by cues of danger that are often (though not always) more about our inner experience than our outer one. 

Wise dissociation is a reliable protector in therapy and is a part of someone’s survivorship that will reliably show up in the therapy room.  Our job as trauma therapists is to co-create the conditions of safety so that we can help our clients reach for the felt safety their wise nervous systems need to be able to metabolize what has so-far-been-unmetabolizable. This is the body of work we achieve in trauma therapy. 

In trauma therapy we help clients reach for the healing that is their birthright. We do this by knowing that healing is possible, by deeply attuning to our clients and their lived experience, by compassionately holding hope, by lovingly contradicting the burdens our clients carry, and by helping them remember how to listen to the deep wisdom of their body. Our birthright access to healing follows a resilient, meandering, familiar-but-ancient pathway we were born knowing how to reach for, in relationship. Despite living in a wounded culture that asks us to forget what is possible and who we truly are, we can unlearn the lies we have learned about ourselves, about our dignity and worth, and about what is truly possible–replacing these lies with something that is whole and true. 

Part magic, part neuroscience, this offering teaches liberation-aligned  trauma therapists how to reliably and repeatedly co-create the relational conditions for healing with clients whose wise nervous systems bring them adaptively away from the moment and whose intuitive capacity for connection can bring them back again.  Drawing from the rooted wisdom of relational neuroscience, the brilliance of queerness, the vibrancy of liberation-rooted therapy, the effectiveness of trauma specific therapies and the ancient knowingness of folk medicine, this offering will help participants trust their own somatic knowing of how to travel the bridge between the compassionate present (regulation) and the traumatic past (dissociation) while creating the relational conditions for transformative healing. This, afterall, is where the magic happens. 

This workshop draws on the body intelligence of ego state/parts work and includes a hands-on practicum, teaching tangible skills that will increase effective practice and create more safety working with client’s dissociative systems.

What if you remembered that you are enough? That the temple of your body, heart, soul could feel the call of magic as you respond with a resounding YES. What if you sat in a forest of other bodies, praying to the elements of life.  Feeling them, knowing them, loving them and being changed in that knowing.

What if we did this together? What if we could trust the spark of absolute knowing that our magic is real.

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