Attachment, Affect Regulation, and Psychological Development in a Traumatic Environment
- Secure is not the norm – the predicament of attaching to unavailable or abusive caretakers
- Affect dysregulation and the impact of hypo- and hyper-arousal
- Brain-based navigation of developmental stressors and challenges
Strengths-Based Assessment and Treatment of Self-Destructive Behaviors
- Advantages to de-pathologizing acts of self-harm
- Understand trauma-reenactment syndrome and the meta-communication of self-harm
- Tips for helping clients share information about self-destructive behaviors
- Explore triggers and how to navigate them with journaling and escape clauses
- Self-compassion, re-framing, de-coding, and other interventions for negative cognitions
- Install safety, enhance containment, and access somatic resources to stabilize affective dysregulation
- Breathwork to decrease anxiety
- Introduce choices and re-grounding to address dissociation
Additional Clinical and Other Considerations
- Working with endorphins produced by self-harm
- Tools to address shame and decrease emotional vulnerability
- Why standard safety contracts don’t work and what to do instead
- Reducing power struggles in treatment
- Limitations of the research and potential risks