A heartfelt, emotive course on the neurobiology of shame, its overlap with trauma, and how to work effectively with it in the therapy room. With both left-brain neuroscience and right-brain personal narrative, this course uniquely looks at how shame manifests first and foremost in our bodies, and how to work with shame without exacerbating it. Join me on the journey from crippling shame to living with the courage to be imperfect.

Trauma is a supremely physical phenomenon, manifesting not just in our emotions and mental states, but also in our bodies. Trauma results in significant emotional distress and fear-based dysregulation, but also in long-term bodily inflammation and sleep disturbances, which in turn inhibits the processing of traumatic memory. And so it makes sense that our bodies also need to be involved in recovering from trauma: this course shows you how.

Our default response to self-harm and suicidality is to think in terms of ‘risk’. But what if that approach in itself actually increases the risk? What if, instead, we thought in terms of reducing distress, and what if by doing that it in fact also reduced the risk? This course looks at how to develop a collaborative – and kinder – approach to working with people in intense pain, and explains the fundamental but enlightening neuroscience behind both self-harm and suicide.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the term we give to a set of responses to trauma which are the natural outcome for a childhood of unremitting unsafety, and which result in a fragmented sense of self and disorganised attachment in adulthood. Join me as I explain how to work with compassion and empathy with people who have suffered the most extreme forms of early life trauma, and expound a treatment roadmap including the principles and pitfalls of this complex work.

In this course I look at the evolution of attachment theory and what this means for working therapeutically with people who have experienced relational trauma, and how its impacts can be reversed through the development of a secure base and ‘earned secure attachment’ through psychotherapy. Aimed principally at professionals, this course is in fact relevant to anyone who has been a child, a parent, or indeed a human being … because attachment theory, quite simply, is relevant to everybody.

Trauma doesn’t just affect the mind and the emotions. It profoundly affects the brain and the body too. Often ‘the body remembers’ what the mind cannot, manifesting not just in long-term psychological difficulties but in physical ones too. Trauma is not something ‘all in the mind’, or something that we can just think or talk ourselves out of. On this course I look at how there is no real split between ‘body’ and ‘mind’ – and certainly not when it comes to trauma.