Level 2: SP for Developmental & Relational Injury
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) engages the body’s innate wisdom for healing and growth. Since developmental and relational injury profoundly affect not only the body but also emotions and beliefs, the SP Level 2 trauma training for Developmental and Relational Injury integrates bottom-up and top-down processing to address somatic, emotional, and cognitive adaptations for various relational challenges — from early childhood adversity and attachment disruption to oppression, sociocultural, and transgenerational factors.
Adverse experiences in early childhood leave a lasting impact on conscious and nonverbal learning, influencing relational habits, affect tolerance and expression, meaning-making, cognitive schemas that limit development, body structure patterns, and the ability to connect deeply with one’s own emotions. As a result, symptoms such as depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, somatic complaints, addiction, and other symptoms can emerge, all rooted in these early adverse relational experiences.
The SP Level 2 training equips students with the foundational principles, maps, and techniques necessary to identify and articulate developmental and relational patterns, assist clients in deriving meaning from implicit memory, evaluate resources for relationships and full participation in life, and address memories and unresolved grief and loss to transform painful emotions..
By the end of the training, students will be able to conceptualize developmental and relational injuries within a contextualized lens – considering personal, familial, cultural, collective, and transgenerational layers – and approach these injuries through three primary avenues: adaptive strategies, parts of the self, and the therapeutic relationship.
SP for the Treatment of Developmental Injury consists of approximately 126 contact hours divided into 7, or 10 multi-day modules, for a total of 21 days. Modules are typically spaced 4-8 weeks apart; trainings typically complete within 9-12 months.
Consultation Hours
Students are required to complete 4 hours of individual or group consultation with an SPI Approved Consultant.
Trauma, Traumatic Attachment, and Development
Review the legacy of attachment; identify developmental and traumatic wounds and apply somatic treatment approaches for attachment patterns.
Physical Development and Relational History
Track how body structure, posture, gesture and movement can reflect and sustain relational wounds; learn interventions to heal them.
Procedural Learning
Identify and work with the emotional, cognitive, and physical action patterns that develop from attachment and relational wounds.
Translating Implicit Language and Memory
Understand how meaning is encoded non-verbally as well as verbally, and work with posture, expression and movement to change meaning conditioned by early attachment interactions
Therapeutic Techniques for Developmental Themes
Learn body-oriented interventions that address procedurally learned habits and the legacy of early attachment and later relationships.
Verbal and Physical Experiments
Apply embedded relational mindfulness to introduce verbal and somatic experiments that address relational issues.
Somatic Resources for Developmental Injury
Capitalize on the body’s resources for transforming painful unresolved relational patterns.
Re-working Limiting Beliefs and their Somatic Components
Identify manifestations of cognitive schemas in the body, connect meaning making to relational interactions, and learn interventions to transform limiting beliefs
Action Systems
Learn how motivational, or action, systems are disrupted by trauma and attachment failure, and discriminate maladaptive action tendencies from adaptive ones related to these systems
Adaptive Strategies
Explore how adaptive strategies form in response to personal, sociocultural and transgenerational influences and lead to physical, emotional, and thinking patterns.
Therapeutic Enactments
Develop a bottom-up approach to understanding and negotiating therapeutic enactments.
The “Child” State of Consciousness
Describe the connection between early memories and child parts that holds the pain reflected in limiting beliefs and procedural learning.
Integration of Treatment Techniques for Developmental Injury and Trauma
Demonstrate how to work with clients who present with both attachment-related issues and unresolved trauma
Action Cycle
Describe the four steps of the action cycle: insight, response, nourishment, and completion.
Current Issues
Identify patterns of themes and adaptive strategies that underpin current issues.
Three Avenues
Explain how the Three Avenues for processing – adaptive strategies, the child state, and the therapeutic relationship – exist within and are shaped by historical and contemporary contexts.
Candidates must fulfill each of the following criteria to be considered for enrollment:
- Successful completion of either Level I course: SP for the Treatment of Trauma or SP for Trauma Themes
- Recommendation from trainers of the Level I course completed.
- Completion of Training Application & Questionnaire found within the course listing.
“For me, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is the best training I could have taken to prepare me for understanding how to work with a range of traumas—from acute trauma to developmental trauma. Both levels of 1 and 2 truly equipped me with skills as a therapist to not shy away from attachment-related trauma that I wasn’t confident in working with until I took the SPI training.”
– Joshua Smith (SPI Level II Graduate)
“I found my own SPI L2 invaluable both for my clients and for healing some of my own attachment-related wounds. As a clinician it gave me tools to read the body for a rapid assessment of the beliefs that were limiting my clients. It also gave me somatic interventions to circumvent procedural behaviors that were keeping my clients from the lives they wanted to lead. In addition to organizing the latest and most relevant research, the training added a framework and a therapeutic stance that felt “right” to me. I wish I had discovered it sooner, and feel privileged to bring this training to others.”
– Lana Epstein, MEd, LICSW, (SPI Faculty)
Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy adds a much needed dimension to the clinician’s approach to early attachment failures…This is a vital addition to our psychodynamic foundations that I believe every psychotherapist should know and I have found it extremely helpful in my own work.