The Boulder Psychotherapy Institute Presents a Special Guest Workshop:
TRAUMA SOLUTIONS
EXPLORING THE INTERPLAY OF SHOCK TRAUMA & CHARACTER STRUCTURE
With Laurence Heller, Ph.D., date to be announced
1140 Lehigh Street, Boulder, CO 80305
10-5:30 with lunch break
Cost: $360.00 for all three days ($20 an hour)
The Workshop: In this workshop, we will explore five basic character types as they relate to trauma work. Each type forms as the result of developmental difficulties and is reflected in the body by a particular pattern of tension or character armoring as well as by predictable patterns of coping and behavior.
As therapists we have all had the experience that certain trauma clients respond more quickly to our therapeutic work than others. Some clients are not easily resourced. Other clients seem to just stay stuck, regardless of our efforts. Every person who experiences trauma obviously already has a personality structure and a developmental history that forms the personal context for any traumatic event. Understanding that personal context and knowing how to work with it has been the missing piece for many trauma therapists. For example, a client who already has an underlying structure formed around contact/existence issues will respond to a traumatic event with more withdrawal, isolation, and intellectualizing than a person who is not already struggling with this developmental dilemma.
In this workshop we will explore the reverberating loop that develops between underlying character structure and shock trauma. Therapists will be provided a new understanding and a new set of tools to help their clients work through the complexity of this loop.
The Workshop Leader: Laurence Heller, Ph.D., has been a body-centered psychotherapist for over 25 years. He is a faculty member of the Foundation for Human Enrichment and teaches seminars regularly in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland. He was the President and Director of Training for the Gestalt Institute of Denver where he taught Gestalt and character structure for over 13 years. He specializes in the interplay of trauma and character structure and is currently writing a book on those subjects. He is the co-author with Diane Poole Heller of Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery. The Boulder Psychotherapy Institute welcomes Larry as the teacher who originally taught Gestalt and other approaches to so many of us in the 1970’s.
For more information, call us at 303-494-3052, e-mail us at BPI.training (at) boulderpsych.com
