Module 1 - Healing Upstream: Repairing Generational Wounds with Integrity with Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Led by internationally recognized expert Dr. Diane Poole Heller, this module explores the crucial topic of healing intergenerational trauma and repairing deep generational wounds. It introduces an experiential approach designed to differentiate an individual's personal journey from inherited familial patterns, restoring appropriate generational boundaries and breaking ancestral cycles of trauma.
Key Concepts Covered
- Imaginal Resourcing: Using an experiential, imaginal realm to visualize competent adult support for a parent's core wounds or unmet childhood needs.
- Resolving Parentification: Releasing the client from the psychological burden of parental role reversal and structural family boundary confusion.
- Lineage Attachment Repair: Utilizing compassionate somatic and psychological methods to restore a ripple effect of secure attachment throughout the family system.
Learning Objectives & Format
Through targeted experiential exercises and theoretical framing, participants will learn how to address inherited trauma structures. This module equips practitioners with a compassionate, clinical framework to help clients release ancestral burdens, leading to profound personal healing and fostering a greater somatic capacity for joy, love, and relational safety.
Module 2 - Introduction to IFS & Legacy Burdens with Dr. Richard Schwartz
This module offers a comprehensive introduction to the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, which proposes that the human mind is naturally multiple rather than a unitary entity. The psyche is comprised of various valuable, innate "parts" that can be forced into extreme, defensive, and often destructive roles due to trauma and early attachment injuries. This session outlines the structural architecture of the inner system and the somatic pathway toward systemic harmony.
Key Concepts Covered
- The Parts Continuum: Understanding how trauma alters the natural state of internal parts, categorizing them into three distinct groups:Exiles: Vulnerable parts that carry and hold deep pain, terror, and shame from past trauma.Managers: Proactive protective parts that strive to tightly control environments and behaviors to prevent the exiles from being hurt again.Firefighters: Reactive protective parts that respond impulsively and aggressively to douse intense, overwhelming emotional flare-ups.
- The Core Self: Identifying the Self as an undamaged, innate essence present within every individual. This core state possesses qualities of calm, confidence, clarity, and compassion, naturally emerging when protective parts open up space.
- Unburdening Legacies: Distinguishing between personal traumatic burdens and "legacy burdens"—the systemic trauma, biases, and beliefs passed down across generations through family ancestry or cultural lineages.
Learning Objectives & Format
Through structural analysis and clinical framing, participants will learn how to guide clients in accessing Self-energy. This module equips practitioners with the therapeutic tools necessary to help clients safely relate to, negotiate with, and ultimately unburden their protective and wounded parts—enabling them to transform back into their naturally valuable, supportive roles within the internal family system.
Module 3 - Somatic Experiencing Transgenerational Trauma Demonstration with Dr. Peter Levine
In this module, Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, demonstrates a clinical session focused on transgenerational trauma. He illustrates how complex patterns of energy, trauma, and experience are transmitted across generations, extending far beyond an individual's own direct life history. The session shifts away from reliving traumatic content, focusing instead on creative and somatic tracking to safely engage with ancestral lineages.
Key Concepts Covered
- Transgenerational Transmission: Understanding how historical, collective, and family patterns of trauma physically manifest in an individual's current somatic presentation.
- Non-Cathartic Processing: Utilizing creative tools like drawing and body awareness to sense and engage with ancestral energetic fields without re-traumatizing the client.
- Ancestral Inheritance as Resource: Reframing ancestral lineages not only as a source of inherited pain or burden, but as a repository of gifts, wisdom, and life force accessible through somatic curiosity.
- Macro-Scale Trauma Transmission: Exploring how language, limited or missing family histories, and place-based or collective structural traumas affect generational healing.
Learning Objectives & Format
Through an interactive case demonstration and clinical breakdown, participants will witness the real-time application of transgenerational somatic processing. This module equips practitioners with the tools to map inherited trauma footprints, navigate gaps in family lineages, and help clients safely boundary ancestral burdens while integrating inherited resilience.
