Global Perspectives

By Hadi Bahlawan Marcher  and Lene Wisbom A man enters a party with many new faces; to join in, to connect with these unfamiliar faces,...

My journey involves a deep and prolonged exploration of the Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011). In my quest to understand when intimacy, emotional expression, and connected communication are possible, I delved deeply into Porges’ research with the vagus nerve and its role in the evolution of the nervous system. His insights provided a road map for me and my clients to a fuller emotional life as we connected with our interoceptive awareness of emotions that motivate our behavior, their influence on our relationships, and the conscious choices we have.

Babies and children can often be our greatest teachers in life. They remind us of our deep human connection to each other and to the world. An Integrative Approach to Treating Babies and Children, edited by John Wilks, persuades us to listen to everyone’s own “baby history.” In other words, Wilks has us look into the history of our birth in order to have a greater understanding of its effects on our adult life. Wilks suggests in the introduction that, “One of the major themes in this book is that it is much more important for us to create the right space in ourselves and in our clinic setting to work with babies rather than what we ‘do’ to a baby” (16).

Stephen Porges, Bessel van der Kolk, Ian Macnaughton and Joseph LeDoux discuss the biological nature of trauma (defined as a life threat in the face of helplessness) and the position that if trauma is stored in the body and in the limbic system what are effective treatment approaches?

Introduction. This new edited collection will explore the practise of counselling and psychotherapy by self-identified survivors of sexual violence/abuse: #MeToo for psychotherapy and counselling. It will show: • That sexual violence/abuse is widespread rather than rare - so widespread, in fact, that all contributors to this book about it have experienced sexual violence/abuse; • That victims/survivors are more than victims/survivors - including that we can be counsellors and psychotherapists; • That pathologising and objectifying victims/survivors - something which often happens in ‘mental health’ settings – can be challenged…. We’re aiming to make a rich and nuanced contribution to #MeToo, a significant political intervention for psychotherapists and counsellors, qualified and in-training. We are interested in exploring a wide variety of potential contributions to the book… Structure and content. An initial chapter will offer an introduction to social, cultural and political understandings of sexual violence for counsellors and psychotherapists. After some notes about the ethical underpinnings of our project, the main body of the collection (with space here for approximately 12 main contributions) will be original (previously-unpublished) chapters about working as a therapist and being a survivor (or however you prefer to term yourself) in a variety of counselling and psychotherapy modalities. There will be at least one chapter concerned with supervision; and there will be exploration of activism beyond the therapy room.

From an object-subject relationship point of view, we should never underestimate how challenging it might be for a body-mind system that has been betrayed by humans to trust humans again—to trust the object ‘human’ and to authentically experience that this subject is safe.

It appears that online therapy services are flourishing despite potential concerns with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), state licensing laws and...

In her latest publication, Rewiring the Addictive Brain, Dr. Laurel Parnell convincingly responds: combine EMDR to reprocess and clean things up and use resource tapping—a combination of positive imagery that activates positive resources internally and bilateral stimulation that serves to link this information together. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a powerful therapy for handling trauma (small and big).

Who am I? Why was I born? What am I meant to do? How will I do it? Your soul knows the answers to these questions and you can open to its whispers and wisdom. Come explore your soul’s essence, your heart call, and the next steps along your sacred journey to Self. The research-based science of Positive Psychology, in concert with intuitive awareness and spiritual guidance, offers tools to help you discover your unique destiny.

How many of us have been studying trauma resolution for many years?I started healing prenatal and perinatal trauma 20 years ago when a client remembered her birth on my table during a Biodynamic craniosacral therapy session. At first, I was curious about her experience and wanted to help. But, when I started tracking feelings of anxiety in myself while working with her, I committed to learning more about prenatal and perinatal experiences. It turns out we had similar birth experiences as babies. I asked myself, How could her experience affect me in present time? That question opened the way for my energy to flow into the work that has become my passion.