Session 1 — Working with Minimization & Critical Self Judgement: Awareness & Exploration
Dr. Levine works with a middle-aged woman whose history includes early neglect, war zone exposure, multiple major car accidents and surgeries, severe postpartum anxiety, autoimmune disease, and PTSD. Learn how to discuss complex trauma responses including shut-down, define perceptual skills for presence and rhythm, analyze the Window of Tolerance with body-based tools, identify self-compassion as an antidote to critical judgment, and apply micro-movements to expand the shame/collapse response.
Session 2 — Working with Emotional Trauma & the Inner Child: Recognizing Expansion & Contraction & Even More Expansion
Dr. Levine works with a Type A middle-aged man with psoriatic arthritis, muscle spasms, head injuries, and chronic stress from a failed business merger and caretaking his bipolar mother. Learn to track autonomic nervous system shifts, work with the inner child to heal developmental needs, define the functional nature of symptoms through psycho-education, and demonstrate work with chronic pain and syndromal clients through imagination, sound, movement, and diaphragms.
Session 3 — Utilizing Somatic Tools to Increase Flow: Developmental Trauma, Chronic Pain, and COVID-19
Dr. Levine works with a woman who experienced extensive childhood and young adult abuse including attempted strangulation, suffers from fibromyalgia and arthritis, and was hospitalized and coded with COVID-19. Learn how complex trauma combined with severe illness can advance chronic pain, how early abuse and neglect hinder physical healing, how syndrome and chronic pain symptoms manifest in the body, somatic techniques for soothing and self-regulation, and methods to manage triggered, reactive trauma to avoid long-term bodily damage.
Session 4 — Medical Trauma & Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: Support Through Regulation & Embodiment
Dr. Levine explores a young woman's medical trauma from a Munchausen by Proxy upbringing, including invasive over-medication, multiple painful surgeries, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, anesthesia resistance, sexual abuse, and harassment. Learn how ongoing trauma leads to chronic ailments, how early attachment wounds create boundary difficulties, the principles of Somatic Experiencing® Bodywork, the functional mind-body pathways of the Polyvagal system, and how to adjust autonomic vegetative states through regulation and embodiment.
Bonus Content (4 hours):
- Unpacking Hope with Dr. Levine, Dr. Sará King, and Dr. Scott Lyons
- Evolution of Somatic Trauma Therapy with Dr. Levine
- Healing Intergenerational & Attachment Trauma with Dr. Levine
