Level 2: SP for Developmental Injury
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Developmental Injury addresses the interaction between traumatic, attachment, and developmental issues and how to provide effective treatment given their inevitable intertwining. In this training, research from the attachment and neuroscience fields provides the theoretical foundation for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy℠ interventions and practices that address the effects of suboptimal and/or traumatic early attachment.
Experiences in early childhood leave a legacy of conscious and nonverbal learning reflected in relational habits, affect tolerance and expression, meaning making and cognitive schemas that limit development, patterns of body structure, and the ability to connect deeply to one’s own emotions. In the training, participants will learn to track and name developmental and attachment patterns, help clients make meaning from the bottom up, manage consciousness, assess resources for relationship and full participation in life, connect to early memories and unresolved grief and loss, and transform painful emotions held by young child states.
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.
Trauma, Traumatic Attachment and Development
The legacy of attachment; developmental and traumatic wounds, somatic treatment approaches for secure, ambivalent, avoidant and disorganized/disoriented attachment patterns
Physical Development and Attachment History
Track how body structure, posture, gesture and movement can reflect and sustain early childhood experience; learn interventions to alter the legacy of early attachment
Changing Procedural Learning
Identify and work with the emotional, cognitive, and physical action patterns that reflect early attachment history
Translating Implicit Language
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 early attachment patterns
Verbal and Physical Experiments
Apply embedded relational mindfulness™ to introduce verbal and somatic experiments that address the legacy of attachment
Somatic Resources for Developmental Injury
Capitalize on the body’s resources for transforming painful unresolved attachment patterns
Re-working Limiting Beliefs and their Somatic Components
Identify manifestations of cognitive schemas in the body, connect meaning making to early attachment interactions, and learn interventions to transform limiting beliefs
Action Systems and Action Tendencies
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
Befriending Adaptive Strategies
Explore how adaptive strategies form in childhood, how they affect us as adults, and how the can be a useful avenue toward healing.
Therapeutic Enactments
Use a bottom-up approach to understanding and negotiating therapeutic enactments
The “Child” State of Consciousness
The connection between early memories and the child part that holds the pain reflected in limiting beliefs and procedural learning
Integration of Treatment Techniques for Developmental Injury and Trauma
How to work with clients who present with both attachment-related issues and unresolved trauma
View Continuing Education/Continuing Professional Development Documents
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.