Distance Learning - Trauma-Informed Dance Movement Therapy Featuring Guest Speaker: Ilene Serlin Ph.D, BC-DMT
Full-Day Training *Online $260+HST
Applies to certification – All certification levels
Trauma-Informed Dance Movement Therapy Featuring Guest Speaker: Ilene Serlin Ph.D, BC-DMT
The rising tide of suffering, displacement and natural disasters calls for expanded available human services. Creative and mind/body approaches to working with trauma and PTSD can complement available services with cost-effective and humane methods. This workshop will focus on understanding how working with the body through expressive movement can promote resilience and help heal from trauma, using examples from the United States, Israel, Jordan,Turkey and China.
The experience of trauma is contained in the body and has been described as speechless terror (Van der Kolk, 1987). Therefore, nonverbal and symbolic approaches are needed to address this speechless terror in the body. Trauma is also a crisis of mortality, meaning and identity; therefore, there is a need for existential perspectives to work with these crises of meaning.
Trauma is also about stuckness and numbness, an inability to play; therefore, there is a need for creative, imaginal, movement and emotional approaches to help stuck places begin to flow again. Trauma is also about fragmentation; therefore, there is a need for approaches that build connection, integration, and transitions.
The movement arts can provide creative ways to bring relief and to ease some of the human suffering associated with trauma. The ability to shape raw affect into symbolic meaning builds safety and regulates emotions. The act of creativity builds on courage, risk taking, confidence, and strength, and it gives the participant a sense of mastery. The therapeutic use of imagery, whether visual, auditory or kinesthetic, can help one communicate this experience. The arts
provide nonverbal and symbolic ways to express trauma, helping to re-integrate broken parts of the self, the psyche, and the community, and evoke images of wholeness.
This workshop will introduce participants to the theory, application and practices of KinAesthetic Imagining, a form of dance movement therapy, to promote resilience and work with trauma. For a group, participants will learn the physical embodiments of: Safe space, grounding, centering, creating boundaries, moving into space and connecting with others.
Participants will learn techniques and contraindications for reducing anxiety, building strength, increasing bodily awareness and expressiveness, and building supportive relationships in the group. These approaches build on current approaches to treating trauma by adding tools that bring the body, symbolic movement, movement through space and the creative process into the healing process.
We will explore both theory and practice to apply this work as clinicians, to reduce compassion fatigue, build resilience and posttraumatic growth, and increase self-care.
*Please note that online registrations include an additional fee to cover associated fees for using these products. You can make an transfer through online banking at no extra cost.