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Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ Certificate Program

Current pathologizing models for treating trauma and addiction miss the point. The brain disease model leaves out the wisdom of the body.

Course Price: $1,050

Course length: 27 hours

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About the course

Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Certificate Program™

NOTE: If you took the initial PVI course Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model with Jan Winhall, please contact us for a discount on this course.

HARNESSING EMBODIED WISDOM

There's no denying that there's a powerful movement in the trauma field towards helping clients to connect with embodied wisdom.

Many trainings emphasize the importance of this connection but do not actually provide the specifics on how to help your clients feel into their bodies.

In order to assist our clients, we need to engage in our own felt sense experiencing. My training offers you a safe and powerful way to explore your own felt sense experience and to bring this process to your clients.

Whether you are a therapist, coach, or bodyworker, my Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ is a generic framework that can support any modality.

It will help you to help your clients harness the wisdom of their body as a powerful healing tool.

WHAT IS THE FELT SENSE POLYVAGAL MODEL™?

The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ helps people transition from being stressed, overwhelmed, or addicted…to becoming more regulated, grounded, and calm in their bodies.

The model integrates Porges’ Polyvagal theory, and Gendlin’s Felt Sense Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy process, enabling us to appreciate trauma/addictive behaviors as adaptive responses to maladaptive environments. It shifts the current pathologizing paradigm to a strength based approach and provides a generic framework that can support any therapeutic modality. Therapists, coaches, bodyworkers are all welcomed here.

THE RISE OF ADDICTIONS AND OTHER TRAUMA RESPONSES: A NEW APPROACH NEEDED

Addictions and other trauma responses are increasing day by day. We desperately need a fresh approach that treats the trauma of addiction where it lives: in the body.

The fields of trauma and addiction have developed separately, and yet when we treat one, we are very often working with the other. The state of addiction is traumatic in and of itself and so, it’s important to work with both! In this workshop we will explore the intersection of trauma and addiction and how to address both with an embodied approach.

PARTNERSHIPS AND A GROWING COMMUNITY OF LIKE-MINDED THERAPISTS

Participants of this course will gain focusing partnerships and become part of a growing supportive community of like-minded therapists who understand the importance of a polyvagal lens in working with clients.

This new certificate course will include 120 minute live zoom classes, once a month. The first 75 minutes of the class will be spent with elaboration of the pre recorded material that students receive each month. This will include examining research in the area of polyvagal theory, experiential therapy, and trauma-informed practice.

In the final 45 minutes of the class you will break into small supportive groups where assistants help you to learn the embodied practices of mindfulness and focusing, so that you will be able to facilitate these processes with your clients in a therapeutic context.

Participants of this course will be assigned into focusing partnerships. For one hour of every month you will meet with your focusing partner to practice in your own time.
In order to create a safe enough container, participants are expected to engage in a private, quiet setting, with their cameras “on”, as we will be working experientially.

Over the six months duration of this course we will have time to really integrate all the material, get to know each other and form relationships that can endure over a lifetime.

APPLYING THE FELT SENSE POLYVAGAL MODEL™

Participants will be guided in the use of tools for applying the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ to treat trauma and addiction.

The Felt Sense Polyvagal Dialogue is a tool that integrates Imago therapy with the model. This provides a methodology for working with couples and families that engages them in an embodied approach.

The course also includes a description of the theoretical framework, and an introduction to The Embodied Assessment and Treatment Tool™ (EATT) with in-depth training on how to use it. This tool reflects the experiential nature of a body based psychotherapy.

Instruction will be given on how to apply the model through live demonstrations, experiential exercises in how to teach mindfulness and focusing, and presentations of case examples.

WHAT YOU GET IN THIS COURSE:

-  6 x 120 minute live monthly zoom classes

-  9 hours of on-demand lectures by Jan Winhall

-  Recorded conversations between Jan Winhall and Stephen Porges

-  Focusing partnership and a supportive community of like-minded therapists

 

Upon passing a final course quiz, participants will receive:

-  Focusing Proficiency from the International Focusing Institute

-  Certificate of Completion: Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Certificate Program, from the Polyvagal Institute (Level 2)

-  24 APA Approved CE’s

-  Opportunity to continue further on your journey in our supportive community from here to Levels 3 and 4 coming soon!

 

DATES

The live zoom sessions will be held on Saturdays from
12:00pm - 2:00pm ET on the following dates:

  • November 5, 2022
  • December 3, 2022
  • January 7, 2023
  • February 4, 2023
  • March 4, 2023
  • April 1, 2023

 

REQUIRED READING

Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, by Jan Winhall, Routledge, 2021. Purchase now 20% off purchase using this code: FLR40

International Body Psychotherapy Journal Vol. 21, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2022: Revolutionizing Addiction Treatment with The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ by Jan Winhall and Stephen W. Porges.
 

ADDITIONAL INFO

website: www.janwinhall.com

email: [email protected]

 

Students will have access to the course for 240 days from the date of purchase.

Instructor Information:

Jan Winhall M.S.W. R.S.W FOT

Jan Winhall, M.S.W. F.O.T. is an author, teacher and psychotherapist. She is an adjunct lecturer and practicum supervisor in the Department of Social Work, University of Toronto. Jan is director of Focusing on Borden, a psychotherapy and training center. She has built a community of people who teach and practice Focusing as a way of life. Jan presents internationally on trauma and addiction.

Her book, Treating Addiction with The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model: A Bottom Up Approach is the result of rethinking the Felt Sense Experience Model that she wrote about in Emerging Practice in Focusing- Oriented Psychotherapy, 2014.

"In Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Jan Winhall introduces a new strategy to treat addiction that brilliantly integrates Gendlin’s classic concept of a felt sense with Polyvagal Theory. The author shares her intellectual journey in which unique insights transform two disparate perspectives into obvious complements leading to a powerful treatment model." ―Stephen W. Porges, PhD, scientist, author, creator of Polyvagal Theory.

"In this insightful volume Jan Winhall brings together the essence of groundbreaking modern therapeutic practices with her own decades of hard-won clinical experience to fashion a new, deeply humane and promising model of addiction treatment, illustrated by poignant clinical vignettes." ― Gabor Maté, MD, is the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

"Reframing addiction and its treatment through the lens of Experiential Psychotherapy, Polyvagal Theory, Interpersonal Neurobiology and Imago Relationship Therapy, Jan Winhall has produced a brilliant synthesis and expansion of addiction theory and treatment that should be read by all therapists, not just addiction specialists." ―Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, authors of Doing Imago Relationship Therapy in the Space Between

Stephen W. Porges, PhD

Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. is Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium in the Kinsey Institute. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He served as president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences and is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award. He is the originator of the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavioral, mental, and health problems related to traumatic experiences. He is also the creator of a music-based intervention, the Safe and Sound Protocol ™, which is used by therapists to improve language processing, state regulation, and spontaneous social engagement.

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