Janina Fisher
Dear Friend
In a climate of fear and social isolation, we are all faced with the imminent threat of the COVID virus compounded with an intensified fearful awareness of everpresent racial trauma, something the white community is just becoming aware.
At the same time, this novel virus is also a deadly ‘inside threat’ once we are infected or the experience of those of color from police brutality.
Under social distancing restrictions, many feel alone in a dangerous world deprived of the person-to-person contact that calms the nervous system, and many feel trapped inside with no way of protecting their personal space or sense of boundary.
It is also a time in history when we all need a robust immune system to resist the virus or to diminish its severe effects if we catch it, yet fear suppresses immune functioning, increasing our risk.
With isolation, anxiety, and loneliness higher than we’ve seen in a long time, we need ways to reduce the fear and suffering we experience on a daily basis. That’s where the body comes in.
As therapists, we can teach our clients to use the resources of their minds and body to combat the sense of threat.
Here is what we’ll be covering together in the program sessions:
- Session 1: Inside and Outside Threats: How our Bodies Respond to Danger
- Session 2: Befriending a Body Under Inside Threat
- Session 3: Using Fear as a Resource to Combat Outside Threat
- Session 4: A Mind-Body Approach to Tolerating Stress and Distress
- Session 5: Restoring a Sense of Agency
A 5-Module Training with Janina Fisher
Join Janina Fisher on five 90-Minute recordings that include core teaching and question & answer sessions from the audience.
Transcripts and Complete video downloads of all sessions for lifetime access
Each training is available in video and audio formats so you are able to download and own all the content.
Trauma-Informed Training Webinar: Supporting Your Immune System
Trauma and the Body: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma by Janina Fisher
Inside and Outside Threats: How our Bodies Respond to Danger
The mind and body are organized to prioritize safety above all other human needs, but they respond differently to inside versus outside threats. Understanding how the body perceives and adapts to danger is critical for helping clients manage the sense of danger they experience in the era of COVID. In a world that is threatening, fear must become adaptive rather than disabling.
In this module, you will learn:
- How the brain and body respond to threat
- To differentiate between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ threats
- How you can help clients to regulate fear rather than just tolerate it
- Mindfulness-based and somatic interventions for managing anxiety
Befriending a Body Under Inside Threat
When individuals feel threatened by internal dangers, such as cancer, heart disease, or COVID-19, they often become alienated from their bodies, fearing the body or losing confidence in it. As therapists, we can help clients transform their relationship to threat by helping them befriend the body and speak its language. This will also help the client feel safer.
In this module, you will learn:
- How to understand the effects of an ‘inside’ danger
- How to re-frame disease and disability as ‘inside’ threats
- To increase curiosity and interest in fear as a body state
- Ways to help clients become aware of their body’s resources
- How to change their relationship to the body
Using Fear as a Resource to Combat Outside Threat
Our biology intended that fear be a resource, a line of defense against danger. But often clients interpret their somatic responses to threat as a warning to ‘watch out.’ Even when not in actual danger, they can become so focused on anticipating environmental threats that the fear becomes overwhelming. Fear does not feel empowering to most human beings-but helping clients make conscious choices about the risks they face increases their sense of mastery.
In this module, you will learn:
- How to help clients understand fear as a resource
- Ways to facilitate curiosity and interest in fear responses
- How to increase client self-awareness of anticipatory fears
- Interventions that help clients experience fear as empowering rather than disabling
A Mind-Body Approach to Tolerating Stress and Distress
In these stressful times, many clients feel the sense of impending COVID and/or societal threat shared by all human beings. In addition, they also experience heightened emotional distress: anxiety, isolation, loneliness, grief, hopelessness. Unable to feel relaxed or find pleasure and often tormented by their early trauma and neglect, many clients are not equipped with ways to feel better in a more stressful world. Helping clients change their relationship to both early and current stress and distress takes the ‘help’ of both the mind and the body.
In this module, you will learn:
- Ways to help clients differentiate their responses to current losses of safety from feeling memories of earlier threats
- How to change their relationship to distress and pain rather than enduring it
- Somatic interventions that decrease the intensity of distress
- How to increase their ability to feel positive emotions without fear
Restoring a Sense of Agency
It is easy at this time in history for any individual to feel trapped, confined, and at the mercy of institutions and governments. Whether in response to COVID restrictions or in response to the racial and socioeconomic inequities that create danger for communities of color, more of our clients will feel helpless, hopeless, or angry. These feelings rob them of a sense of agency and increase their vulnerability to depression and fight/flight responses. To restore the sense of agency in these troubled times, clients need us to help them increase their resilience and support their immune systems so they are better protected from the inside and the outside.
In this module, you will learn:
- How to help clients understand their defensive responses as bodily instincts
- Ways to differentiate symptoms and instinctive impulses
- Interventions that increase the somatic sense of competence and mastery
- Interventions that support a robust immune system
Meet Your presenter
Janina Fisher, PhD
Janina Fisher, PhD is the Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and a former instructor, Harvard Medical School. An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015), author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017) and the forthcoming book, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (in press). She is best known for her work on integrating newer body-centered interventions into traditional psychotherapy approaches.
“In the context of life threat, survival is a necessity. Being able to consciously witness the experience, preserve a sense of time, place, and identity, and clearly encode a memory of what happened frame-by-frame is an unnecessary luxury when human beings are in immediate danger. Faced with potential threat, the brain and body instinctively mobilize the emergency stress response, preparing the individual to take action: fleeing, fighting, ducking, and hiding.”
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