Neuroscience-Informed Strategies for Therapists

Laying the Foundation for Neuroscience in Psychotherapy

• Key reasons to integrate neuroscience into your psychotherapy practice
• The 5 E’s:
  • Empathy: Reduce stigmas and bias
  • Engagement: Capture clients attention
  • Expectations: Power of expectations in the healing process
  • Education: Illuminate limiting factors
  • Experimentations: Basis for new strategies
• Valuing the human above the technology
• Responsibility of the field not just the individual practitioner
• Standards for early career and advanced practitioners
• Key benchmarks for ethical practice
• Uses of neuroscience: Theory enhancement, direct brain interventions, metaphor-based applications, and psychoeducation

Integrate Neuroscience into your Clinical Practice

• 10 Axioms of integration
• Brain and nervous system basics
• Neuroscience and factors common across all theories of treatment
• Limitations of the research and potential risks

Practical Applications of Neuroscience:

Validate and extend popular theories in practice

Third-Wave Cognitive Behavioral Theory

• Neuroscience-informed-CBT
• Expand the understanding of neuroplasticity and homeostasis
• Left- and right-mode processing
• Nervous system retraining

Psychodynamic Theory

• Address trauma and relational wounds
• Neuroscience informed ways to reduce harmful vs. healing recall
• Grow through the impact of early relationships
• Importance of the unconscious: Attention and implicit awareness

Humanistic-existential Theory

• Neurobiology of therapeutic relationship – therapist or technician
• Neurobiology of empathy in building authentic connections
• Interpersonal physiology and co-regulation

Constructivist/Postmodern Theory

• Phenomenological practices supported by neuroscience
• Hawthorne effect: Manage awareness of strengths and challenges
• Pygmalion effect: Unlock the power of expectation
• Neurobiology of developing personal narratives
• Solution-focused relationships and problem-management strategies

Inheritance Model of Wellbeing

• A novel neuroscience-integrated model
• 8 dimension-specific techniques and interventions

Address Mental Health Disorders Through a Neuroscience Lens:

Advanced integration and applications

• Case vignette: Adult with anxiety, mood, and trauma
• Anxiety disorders
  • Teach the prefrontal cortex to respect the messages from the anterior cingulate-cortex and amygdala
• Mood disorders
  • Neuroscience-based models of depression
  • Monoamine, glutamate, and neuroplasticity theories
• Stress trauma
  • Trauma as a continuum and working on specific brain regions
  • Treat the HPA, SAM, and DMN
  • Train systems to work in concert rather than opposition
• Substance abuse disorders
  • Heal the mesolimcocortical dopamine system, reward and stress circuits
  • Listen to what serves and releasing what doesn’t