Introducing An All-New Online Training
With Janina Fisher, PhD
Inside and Outside Threat
Mind-Body Approaches
to Fear and Danger
A Special 5-Session Online Training Program
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
I look forward to seeing you in the course!
Warmest regards,
Janina Fisher
"Janina Fisher is a true master clinician and teacher - the go-to consultant to deal with complex clinical issues and treatment challenges."
- Bessel van der Kolk MD
Who is this for?
This unique online training course is designed to meet the changing needs of therapists and clients during a traumatic time in history. By providing a way of understanding the inside and outside threats we all face and offering ways of using the mind and body as supports, you will be better equipped to help yourself, your nearest and dearest, and your clients.
And it will offer a mind-body approach to
Use body awareness to achieve optimal levels of anxiety, not too much or too little. Too much anxiety is disempowering. Too little makes us careless.
Increase resilience in the face of danger. We all need emotional resilience to tolerate the uncertainty and threat, and we all need physical resilience to increase our immune responses.
Address the effects of feeling isolated or trapped. Loneliness is not only emotionally painful but also increases
our sense of stress.
Increase our ability to tolerate the emotional toll. The greater our capacity for emotional and physical discomfort, the less overwhelmed we will feel, whatever our circumstances.
Support our immune systems. The more active and robust our immune systems, the greater our protection against COVID or its effects. Supporting the immune system is good self-care.
Teacher: 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."
- Janina Fisher
Our courses are
At the Intersection of Psychotherapy, spirituality, and social change
WE BELIEVE LEARNING SHOULD CHALLENGE YOU AND CHANGE YOU.
What's included?
1) 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.
2) 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.
PLUS You'll Receive these Special Training Bonuses
1) Trauma-Informed Training Webinar: Supporting Your Immune System
2) Trauma and the Body: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma by Janina Fisher
Here's What we'll Learn together in the
Inside and Outside Threat: Mind-Body Approaches to Fear and Threat Curriculum
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
What People Are Saying ABOUT THIS COURSE
"Janina is a highly skilled teacher, imparting significant understanding of a great deal of digestible information. One can only imagine she is also a masterful therapist."
- E B
"This is a wonderful course taught by a clear and emphatic teacher who conveyed the info with ease and in a way that kept the students interested and engaged"
- Heather K
"Having done many trauma webinars and workshops with Janina over the years, I found it great to refresh information for working with clients who have experienced trauma in their lives which is impacting on their daily functioning."
- Helen Giles
"Janina's delivery - a wonderfully embodied modelling of the rich benefits in slowing down, and working more mindfully and purposefully as a result. Also lovely to have liberal wonderful references from other clinicians, beautifully chosen and always apposite to the point Janina was making."
- Janet Dewhurst
"I am moved by Janina's ability to present complex material in a clear and practical way. The handouts were excellent, and I appreciated receiving them well before each session. I appreciate her depth of knowledge, experience, and skills, as well as her warmth, generosity and presence. I love how she models how to work with clients with non-judgment and deep compassion. I feel her presence when I work with my clients. Thank you, Janina!"
- Maureen Drage
"The most beneficial part of the program has been experiencing the "person" of Janina who continuously modeled theory and practice through her extraordinary voice, tone, pace, mood, acceptance, curiosity, skills, and empathy. This training has been a lived experience of learning to use theory and practice with the inside and outside threats of the coronavirus. Her acceptance of our questions and collaborative exploration of our case was inspiring."
- Jane Webber
Inside and Outside Threat:
Mind-Body Approaches
to Fear and Danger
Program Summary
1) A 5-Module Training with Janina Fisher [7+ Hours of Teachings]
2) Transcripts and Complete video downloads of all sessions for lifetime access
Plus these special bonuses:
1) Trauma and the Body: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma by Janina Fisher
2) Trauma-Informed Training Webinar: Supporting Your Immune System
100% Risk-Free Money-Back Guarantee
We wouldn't accept your enrollment without taking every bit of risk out of the decision. Please join and get started on your new future. At any time during your first 14 days of access, if you don't feel more confident, enlightened, and/or ready to take on difficult client cases … contact our support team at support@therapywisdom.comto request a refund, no questions asked.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Inside and Outside Threat:
Mind-Body Approaches
to Fear and Danger
Program Summary
1) A 5-Module Training with Janina Fisher [7+ Hours of Teachings]
2) Transcripts and Complete video downloads of all sessions for lifetime access
Plus these special bonuses:
1) Trauma and the Body: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma by Janina Fisher
2) Trauma-Informed Training Webinar: Supporting Your Immune System
"I have absolutely loved the course. Each session has been unique but also connected. It has been such a delight to hear Janina's voice of welcome and then her wonderful words of wisdom. She is so genuine and generous with her experience and her answers to questions so thorough and beneficial. I have truly loved doing the course and have learnt so much about myself and know it'll help me with my client work. Thank you so much"
- Barbara Miller
"The course was extremely insightful and provided me with valuable tools to analyze my own anxiety during this time and points that I can share with friends and family to help them navigate through this period of uncertainty. I especially enjoyed the grounding tools that you discussed such as finding a calm place within the body and straightening the spine when one feels anxious. Additionally, I really appreciate the recognition and integration of systemic racism and how apparent it is to this time and the emphasis of the additional layers of threat that have now been added to individuals who have experienced this on a regular basis in their life. Your examples have all been very relatable and your way of explaining large concepts in a simplified manner is so appreciated!"
- Seher Bajwa
"Thank you so very much for all you are doing during this tough time in our nation, and in our world. I have learned many helpful tools and am already using them with my clients who are telling me that they are experiencing relief.
- Linda
"Thank you very much Therapy Wisdom team and Dr. Janina Fisher for this great course.
I have reached my goal for this course (which I even did not expect), I feel more empowered in the coronavirus situation, less afraid of getting sick as I have some understanding and tools what is going on with my nervous system. I feel very happy about it. Great course. Great webinar leading."
- Kristina Wodal