Novel Approaches to Fear, Grief, Shame and Guilt

Novel Approaches to Fear, Grief, Shame and Guilt

This course will introduce you to the Fear, Grief, Shame and Guilt emotional brain systems. These brain systems can be called the Secondaries because they are processed within the secondary-level [basal nuclei and cerebellum] of the central nervous system. They often play a significant role in the lives and symptoms of our patients. Why is that? What can we do about it? Each of these brain systems are nonconscious and so we and our patients are usually unaware of their impact in their emotional lives.

This presentation will also help you look at the emotions of fear, grief or shame from several different perspectives to enable you to be more effective in helping your patients manage and move beyond these emotions. We will look at how these secondary emotional brain systems modulate the experiences of primary-level brain systems such as Care, Connection and Safe. Most of our emotional developmental learning was processed by these emotional systems when we were very young. For this reason and others, they play a disproportionate role in our nonconscious emotional lives. 

Changing the nonconscious processing of emotions with our patients is often challenging. This course will introduce you to some novel ways to address these challenges. I will demonstrate several practical approaches to initiate those changes within a single session. At the same time, it will help you trust your therapeutic process even when you cannot hear or observe the progress you are making. We will explore a variety of treatment strategies, interventions and techniques to help you on your way.

This course will emphasize the following:

1. Neurobiological principles of the Secondaries can help you be more precise and secure in yourself as a therapist. Understanding the neurobiology of the Secondary brain systems makes them more approachable and invites your curiosity.
2. Having clear treatment strategies when working with the Secondaries will smooth your therapy with emotions that are often turbulent.
3. Practical interventions with Secondaries will enable you to be proactive with these emotions. These interventions can release the constraints of emotions such as fear and shame.
4. You each have your own techniques to deal with fear, shame, grief such as compassion, empathy, and curiosity. This course can add some new treatment techniques to your repertoire.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to explain how Secondaries modulate our present moment emotional experiences.
2. Participants will be able to describe how Secondaries contain most of our nonconscious emotional learning.
3. Participants will be able to describe three ways how we can change the emotional learning within the Secondaries.

Course Format & Details
The content of the course will include a mix of: a live clinical demonstration; PowerPoint presentations by the presenter, Albert Sheldon M.D.; new illustrations; video-recording of a session; and questions, practice and discussions.

Basic Principles of CIMBS

Therapeutic Process of CIMBS is called: NeuroPhysioPsychoTherapy.  Neuro- refers to our active interventions to maximize neuroplasticity for long term learning and specific interventions to activate multiple neurotransmitters to facilitate the therapeutic process.  Physio- refers to our observations of psychophysiological phenomena to adjust our therapeutic process and redirect our interventions in response to psychophysiological shifts.  Psycho- refers to our careful attention to 6 different psychological Brain Systems and to our therapeutic process that explicitly meets the psychological needs of the patient.

Therapeutic Elements: CIMBS incorporates all of the change elements that are a part of the following evidence based therapies:  CBT [desensitization, cognitive restructuring, behavioral change], mindfulness based CBT, affect activation and cognitive restructuring of EDT [Experiential Dynamic Therapy and STDP] therapies [we were co-investigators in prospective evidence based EDT psychotherapy study],  and we use the interruption and rebalancing of EMDR.  In addition we utilize Empirically supported relationship elements since therapy relationships make substantial and consistent contributions to outcome results.

Therapeutic Outcomes:  Our goal is to enable our patients/clients to become the author of their own lives, capable of making the best of any situation, continuously learning and growing to the full extent of the neuroplasticity of their brains and fulfilling their lives.

Workshop Leader

Albert Sheldon M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington, Seattle and has conducted research and taught psychotherapy for 20 years. He has trained in many psychotherapeutic modalities including CBT, EMDR, hypnosis, group therapy, systems oriented therapy, psychodynamic, and in short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Dr Sheldon received a three year Bush Medical Fellowship to pursue research in psychotherapy.