Finding Leverage in Therapy
Learn how to make allusive presentations workable. 2 CE Credit hours
Finding Leverage in Therapy
Have you ever worked with a client and you feel like you can’t get any traction? Where it feels like you are working harder than the client? Where it is hard to tell why they are there? Or that you can’t effectively establish a focus for the session? This recorded webinar will dive into how we can find leverage to help make such allusive presentations workable.
Topics include:
Leverage in therapy refers to the therapist using awareness of the tension in a client’s presentation and story to define the work.
Close somatic tracking on the therapist’s part helps to stay engaged in the process.
What it looks and feels like when we have traction, and not, in sessions.
How to regain traction when we’ve lost it.
Working with “ambivalence.”
The value of defining what is most important to our clients, as part of creating leverage.
Assessing the dynamics of how people disconnect in the face of struggles can guide the therapist to “hold the heat” in those moments.
Clear collaborative agreements between the therapist and client make the therapy workable and easier.
Somatic tracking of clients keeps the therapy more process-focused, which reveals moments of nervous system activation.
Ways to use EMDR and subtle uses of bilateral stimulation to find leverage openings.
How to access the client’s sense of truth, as the ultimate leverage in therapy.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify “traction” in therapy, when none is showing
- Assess how to use our natural drives and the tension they create to help your client self-confront well
- Utilize “the leverage” inherent in avoidance, deflection, projection, placating and denial
- Identify “ambivalence” to make it explicit and workable
- Use EMDR and subtle uses of bilateral stimulation to find the leverage openings, and expand them collaboratively
- Identify the somatic manifestations of rigidity, disconnections and over-rides
- Utilize the client’s sense of truth as “ultimate leverage” in therapy
2 CE Credit hours are provided for Psychologists, LMFT’s, LCSW’s, LPC’s, LMHC’s. Click here for more CE details.
The content of this training is appropriate for beginning and advanced level therapists. Certificates of completion are given after viewing all the videos, passing the quiz and finishing the evaluation form.
Your Instructor
Craig Penner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, in private practice in Santa Barbara since 1982. He brings a process-oriented approach to therapy, with a strong somatic (body/nervous system) focus, and integrates EMDR and other uses of “bilateral stimulation,” to help the therapy be as efficient and effective as possible.
He has always believed that we have a natural drive to completion and resolution. This has inspired his commitment to develop “Natural Processing,” which is an integration of ways to utilize our own awareness to facilitate that drive. He has been training therapists in this approach across the US and Canada since 2014 and had led consultations and other trainings for over 25 years.
Craig is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and a Somatic Experiencing Touch Therapy Practitioner. He has been a Facilitator with the EMDR Institute since 1995, and is an Approved Consultant and Therapist with the EMDR International Association. Craig offers live and online consultation for individuals and groups, group practicum sessions, and Natural Processing Trainings on integrating EMDR with somatic psychotherapy.