Welcome!
For the last 30 years, I've been on a mission to help survivors of trauma. My approach takes the intensity out of trauma treatment and helps even the most resistant clients.
Treatment advances have helped many clients, but a large number of trauma survivors are reluctant to dive into the emotions and memories of the event that traumatized them. They get stuck trying to protect themselves from more pain, and their therapists don't have other modalities to help them.
Therapists feel helpless and ineffective, and clients feel more shame and hopelessness. TIST changes all that.
In TIST, we focus on helping clients feel more connected, accepting, and self-compassionate.ย
TIST is designed for very complex, difficult-to-treat clients; the ones therapists often feel overwhelmed by, and refer to other therapists.
My method focuses on treating the effects of traumatic events, as opposed to treating the event itself, and on managing unsafe and addictive impulses as trauma-driven rather than manipulative and attention-seeking. We show clients how to use mindful observation to develop a relationship with their feelings, their impulses, and their traumatized parts.
TIST makes therapy much less threatening to the client.ย
TIST is informed by concepts and techniques from sensory motor psychotherapy, IFS, and clinical hypnotherapy. The process is more gentle and requires less of clients, and the response has been extremely positive.
The TIST approach makes emotions less frightening and more tolerable.
In this training, you will learn exactly how trauma drives survival responses that re-create the felt sense that these are still desperate times requiring desperate measures, leading to impulsive attempts to fight or flee. TIST provides an easier and more effective way of working with any clients who still suffer from these and other effects of trauma. Best of all, TIST also prevents burn-out by decreasing the stress on YOU to "save the day."
I am truly inspired by how hard therapists work and how much they put themselves on the line to help their clients. If you want to learn how to treat the clients at the highest risk, the clients most demanding to take on, or those you may have felt ill-equipped to handle, join me in learning this unique and effective method.
Warmly,
Janina Fisher and
Academy of Therapy Wisdom
P.S. I recently graduated my first TIST-certified cohort. If you are interested in becoming certified in the TIST model, this course is the first step. Certified TIST practitioners are some of the best equipped in the field to help people that others have given up on or who have given up on themselves. Certification allows you to be listed on a public referral directory available to clients looking for therapists who are trained in this approach.
You can do justice to the traumatic past while stabilizing the trauma survivor's ability to live a normal life here and now.
-Janina Fisher, Ph.D.
Surviving trauma, especially when young, requires that we disown the abused, humiliated child and try to be a child who is too 'good' to be abused. The effects of disowning and rejecting ourselves to survive have lifelong consequences, resulting in personality or dissociative disorders, unsafe behavior, and tumultuous relationships, including the therapeutic one. In this module, we will look at a trauma model that addresses this important issue and how to help clients understand themselves with compassion rather than shame and self-judgment.
In this module, we will explore:
Overcoming internal fragmentation and self-alienation require the ability to focus mindfully rather than 'going with' the flood of emotions and impulses survivors experience daily. Step-by-step instructions will help the therapist guide clients from impulsive actions and reactions to mindful awareness and increase their ability to be "with" themselves. Learning to relate to their intense distress as a communication from young traumatized parts changes their relationship to the strong emotions and tendencies to act out.
In this module, we will discuss:
Research demonstrates the strong relationship between a history of trauma and the development of unsafe behavior, addictions, and eating disorders. This module focuses on how to help clients learn to relate to unsafe impulses as trauma responses driven by protector parts. Trauma-related cues in daily life stimulate fear and shame, driving fight and flight parts to desperate measures that bring short-term relief but recreate the unsafe environment of childhood. Understanding their intentions as protective often calms the system and allows clients to build the resources and skills they need to manage emotional overwhelm.
In this module, we will discuss:
Physical, emotional, and/or sexual trauma in childhood has a profound effect on attachment development, causing what researchers call 'disorganized attachment.' The child (and later adult) respond to the threatening environment with a heightened yearning for closeness and fear of abandonment alternating with fears of closeness and heightened mistrust. Separation anxiety alternates with pushing others away or fleeing from them. The intensity of these opposing drives is confusing and frightening for the client and often strains the therapeutic relationship. In this module, we will address how to deal with traumatic attachment as it complicates the treatment.
In this module, we will discuss:
The next challenge in the treatment is the development of internal collaboration between parts driven by conflicting survival responses. Self-destructive behavior is usually addressed behaviorally, but high relapse rates confirm the need to also treat the trauma and traumatized parts. Learning how to help clients change their relationship to unsafe thoughts and impulsive actions is a first step. Next, treatment requires an ability for internal dialogue and negotiation that results in increasing empathy for the parts and a willingness to deal with them creatively and compassionately. Safety becomes common ground where all parts can be welcomed.
In this module, we will discuss:
In this last module, we will focus on helping clients 'repair' rather than remember the past in order to resolve the legacy of trauma borne by each part. As bonds of kindness and compassion are built internally, the parts' intense reactivity diminishes, allowing clients to welcome home disowned parts and offer them a safe, loving internal environment. Rather than emphasizing 'integration,' this model focuses on internal collaboration and closeness and on the establishment of internal acceptance, forgiveness, and safety. The client's ability to attach to each rejected, disowned part with warmth and loving-kindness becomes the healing antidote to the trauma.
In this module, we will discuss:
"It's clarified and organized much of what I've known, giving me greater confidence in my work."
- Anonymous
"Wow, where to even begin! This course has helped on all levels - navigating my own reactions (from my own parts) to client presentations and interactions; understanding the complex layers of fragmented and traumatized clients' internal landscapes; learning about more complex presentations involving clients' parts; more clearly understanding how to apply TIST in sessions (especially how to facilitate un-blending and internal parts work toward repair of ruptures and healing legacies of traumatic environments)."
- Jonathan L.
"Personally it made sense to me and clarified reasons for our own behaviour, how I behave with clients sometimes as well. It has also given me a road map to navigate with clients who have deeper issues. I feel more comfortable using the road maps shared to better help my clients evolve, release and grow."
- M.A.H.
We are confident you will really enjoy and benefit from this online training. However, if you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase, please contact our support team at support@therapywisdom.comwithin 7 days of your purchase and we will give you a full refund, no questions asked.
I love the de-pathologizing of trauma symptoms through Janina's IFS-influenced approach. Being very spiritually myself, I have found myself at odds with the diagnostic/ medically influenced view of human behavior as pathological, bad or wrong. IFS and Janina's approach is such a breath of fresh air. In my younger days I was terrified of working with certain diagnosis, ie, BPD. Using this approach is so affirming and gentle, true and real that I now find working with this population easier and so much more effective.ย
- Cyndi W
I am so happy. I will be a better therapist from having sat at Janina's feet.
- Susan Ann Stauffer
I am in love with Janina's model. It is body-based, collaborative, and anti-oppressive. It has helped me develop more compassion for my clients' parts, my own parts, and family members' parts too.
- Natashia M.
I thought that the course was excellent. Janina was so kind and compassionate and just lovely in her beingness and her presentations. She is clear and so loving in the way she approaches her clients and her students. I learned so much about how to use words and presence to connect more deeply with clients and how to be welcoming and non judgemental, yet effective and connected....slowly but surely working with the legacy of trauma in us all.
- Danielle Long
"It will take you to new places and enable you to reach for your clients and find them when they cannot find themselves. Enjoy!"
- Sue Johnson, PhD, professor, researcher, and
author of Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships
"The role of cumulative trauma in the fragmentation of self-experience, the strategies for identifying, together with the client, the non-integrated parts of the personality during the clinical exchanges, and the integrating power of the psychotherapy dialogue have rarely been dealt with in such a convincing and original way as in the pages of this fascinating book."
- Giovanni Liotti, MD,
APC School of Psychotherapy, Rome, Italy
"Janina Fisher's unique blending of IFS 'parts' with sensorimotor and mindfulness-based therapy is a terrific enhancement to psychodynamic work. Although grounded in structural dissociation theory and trauma treatment, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors offers insights that will enrich the knowledge-base of therapists treating higher-functioning as well as deeply traumatized individuals. I recommend this remarkable book to all psychotherapists, especially psychodynamic ones, who will discover an extraordinary opportunity to expand their clinical horizons."
- Kenneth A. Frank, PhD, Psychotherapy Integration Training Program,
National Institute for Psychotherapies