Breaking Trauma Bonds: 20 Clinical Interventions and Somatic Exercises to End Toxic Cycles & Rebuild Self-Trust

The Trauma Bonded Client

• What are we missing with this population?
• Do more effective work with trauma-bonded clients
• Explore Dr. Copley’s research and trauma-informed approaches
• at is needed to do better work with trauma bonded individuals?
• INTERVENTIONS: “Not My Best Moment” visualization exercise and “Self-Forgiveness” practice

Preparation, Grounding, Resourcing, and Titrating

• Trauma-informed considerations before beginning therapy
• What is titrating and how to do it?
• Applied Relational Neuroscience and Positive Psychology
• Teaching clients “The Art of Discernment”
• INTERVENIONS: Polyvagal-inspired “Meet Your Nervous System” and “What Grounds Me?” exercise, Havening Techniques for safety, Parts Mapping for “Creating Inner Guardians” and client’s “Gathering Place” Activities, Intro to Bilateral Stimulation

Attachment Traumas, Family-of-Origin Issues & Reparenting

• How the 5 major attachment traumas are linked to worthiness
• Know how attachment traumas play out as current reactions and behaviors
• Examine and undo the impact of family-of-origin roles and attachment wounds
• Reparent the inner child and its wounds
• INTERVENTIONS: “Meeting Your Wounded Inner Child” Parts Work activity and worksheet, “Little Me Reconnection” photograph exercise, and Establishing Unmet Needs, “Dialoguing with Inner Guardians” as a Reparenting writing exercise

Assessing Toxicity in Relationships

• Identifying Protectors, Blocks, and Resistance, and a new mindsight on how to perceive them
• Sensitively overcome client resistance and prepare them for healthy self-disclosures
• Explore the continuum of trauma bonding, red flags and narcissism
• Paradigm shift away from “victim-perpetrator” mindset
• Signs of abuse
• Know the 7 stages of trauma bonding
• INTERVENTIONS: “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” resistance activity, Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples and “The Dance”, “Mapping Out the Toxic Hook” and Somatic Therapy, The Psychology of Ritual “Chord Cutting”, Somatic Experiencing Exercise, “Creating Your Self-Trust Mantra”, clinical movie analysis

Healing the Trauma in the Relationship Bond

• Your role as a guide to corrective emotional experiences
• Gottman’s research on Stages of Repair
• Help clients identify their unmet needs and “toxic hook” cycle
• Explore new narratives with writing exercises from Narrative Exposure Therapy
• How to get clients speaking to their “Embodied Self”
• Apply Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability & Ester Perel’s research on intimacy and connection
• Therapeutic questionnaire for clients’ self-exploration
• INTERVENTIONS: Qi Gong Activity for Healing Energy, Tapping-in (installing) a new narrative (“Even though I feel… I know I am…”), Narrative Exposure Therapy using storytelling and letter-writing,“Know Thyself, Trust Thyself” Exercise and how to speak on behalf of parts, “Getting to Know You,.. Again” re-connection questionnaire

Nurturing Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG)

• The key to authentic connections after trauma bonding
• How PTG looks after toxic relationships
• Incorporate the “hero’s journey” into healing
• The 5 key experiences in PTG
• Create interpersonal transformation and growth after therapy ends
• INTERVENTIONS: “Benefit Finding” exercise for Individuals and Couples, “Playlist for Parts” coming to aid an unmet need, Two-Chair Technique from Healed Self to Trauma Wounds, Trauma Transformation Timeline Exercise, and Re-authoring the story 

Foreseeable Limitations and Risks

• When treatment doesn’t work
• The role of personality disorders in treatment
• Address and identify misunderstandings
• Emergence of new symptoms and triggers
• Unmet expectations, drama and disappointment
• Contraindications and Cultural Considerations:
• Newness and evidence for the presented content