The foundation of Diane Poole Heller’s teachings rests on her firm belief that we are hardwired to heal. Our bodies and our brains are storing memories of early experiences, creating patterns that deeply affect our relationships and our behaviors in adult life.
Her holistic approach, largely based on Somatic and Relational healing techniques, helps us discover the source of those patterns and to apply the right understanding to unwind them, thus releasing new energy to live fully and freely in the moment.
For over 30 years, Diane’s teachings and practice have been based on Dr. Peter Levine’s decades of research and hands-on development of Somatic Experiencing®, as well as her own personal research. Her work is supported by contributions sourced from the most recent theories on attachment by Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby, Louise Kaplan, Heinz Kohut, Mary Main, Dan Siegel, Marion Solomon, Daniel Stern, Donald W. Winnicott, Jeff Young; as well as couples work theory by Ellyn Bader, John Gottman, Stan Tatkin, and countless others.
Through the Certification Training on Attachment, you will gain confidence to work more intimately with your clients and create an environment for healing to occur. Once you have this map, you will also find it much more fun and easy to work with your clients, too!
Specific techniques and approaches we will work with over the 18 – 24 months will include:
- Presence: Learn to be with clients in increasingly difficult levels of arousal and gain a capacity for consistent awareness and presence when confronted with high activation states. The nervous system is highly trainable!
- Resonance and Attuned Relationship: To establish an empathetic relational field, to communicate in an attuned manner, and hold the container toward stabilizing coherence and continuity in the client. This means joining versus merging.
- Self-Regulation and Interactive-Regulation: You will learn how to teach the client self-regulation through their felt sense in practical ways, while building their capacity – as well as your own – to regulate interactively in healthy relationships.
- Tracking: To recognize high activation patterns, including dissociative, flooding and frozen states, and to learn the practical strategies to work with those states efficiently through the physiology – tracking emotionally, cognitively, and “essentially.”
- Counter-Transference: To recognize when therapists are reacting to the over-activation from the clients’ issues, as a form of “arousal-induced” counter-transference. it’s immensely valuable to be aware of these styles and their implications.
- Working with Arousal: To understand how to induce symptoms with or without memory or content. For example: working the edge of arousal by alternating back and forth to a “resourced” or calmer area of the body.
- Reduce Symptoms and Release Fear: To excavate fear and terror out of symptoms or Attachment patterns that are bound with survival energy, and to redirect that energy toward the original threat, facilitating a release out of the body (versus a charge being held in the body in a symptom or behavior). We also work to untangle the Attachment system from the threat response.
- Innate Healing Wisdom: To evoke the client’s own innate healing wisdom, or core intactness (i.e., in the form of intrinsic movement and organic meaning/emotional shifts) and help them learn Secure Attachment experience and functioning. This restores clients’ trust in themselves and their body in a very empowering way, as they feel they are doing the healing – rather than overattributing the healing effects to the therapist or teacher.
- Body Time: To work on the slower sense of time held in the body versus the much faster cognitive time; to use appropriate language to engage the survival brain and nervous system in order to disengage the amygdala from stuck-ness in the threat response, thus allowing a physiological shift toward pleasure, relaxation, safety—enhancing well-being and Secure Attachment.
- Neuroplasticity and Efficiency: To reduce unnecessary suffering by providing enough support while working with the maximum amount of arousal; this will avoid system disorganization or disintegration, while also helping the client stay aware and connected to uncomfortable states long enough to deepen awareness, to integrate them and to support positive neuroplasticity.
