Once a month. 1st, 2nd, or 4th Friday of the month, depending upon preferences of group members, from 2:15-3:45 pm.
Ellicott City, MD

The group will use the book, “The Body Keeps The Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma”, by Bessell van der Kolk, MD as the text for the examination of trauma from a neuroscience perspective. Other sources will be added to enhance understanding of specific aspects of trauma and treatment. Goals will include:

  • Understanding various forms of trauma, and how they may change the wiring of the brain and affect the body.
  • Learning about brain and body based therapies, their mechanisms, and efficacy.
  • Understanding how traditional psychotherapy compares with brain and body based therapies.

At the conclusion of the Fall semester, Group Members will be able to:

  1. Describe what happens neurologically within the brain when someone is experiencing or re-experiencing trauma.
  2. Describe the various types of childhood attachment.
  3. List the long-term effects of incest trauma. Include differences of mood, cognition, memory and relationships.
  4. Describe whether long-term effects differ for survivors of other forms of trauma (e.g., medical trauma, war, acts of terrorism, natural disaster, serious injury).
  5. Describe the Adverse Childhood Experiences research, including which experiences were included in the original study.

At the conclusion of the Spring semester, Group Members will be able to:

  1. Define four consequences of traumatic memory: amnesia, dissociation, reenactment, and flashbacks.
  2. List forms of traditional psychotherapy as well as alternative methods (e.g., yoga that is always suggested at counseling idaho falls for relieving any kind of stress, breath work) that may contribute to healing the brain’s limbic system in a traumatized person in order to help control hyper- and hypo-arousal.
  3. Describe several potential psychological consequences, for a transgender person, of gender trauma: the incongruency between ones physical, natal body and ones psychologically experienced, mentalized body.
  4. Describe one hypothesis regarding how an individual’s appraisal of threat leads to physiological reactions that can ultimately lead to cardiovascular disease.
  5. Describe the various brain-wave states and how neurofeedback can affect them.