Background: While the overwhelming bias in western psychotherapy has been taught as a “top-down” primarily left-brain model of conscious cognition (verbal insights, interpretations, etc.) neuroscience is increasingly inspiring us as clinicians to add more “bottom-up” approaches to our work (affective, experiential, & embodied) that can access early, even pre-verbal material.
Outline:
a. Neurobiology of affect regulation
b. Infants as right brain beings
c. The importance of managing affect in mental health
d. Complication of “limbic dominance”
e. Implicit relational schema underlying all dysregulated affect & psychiatric symptoms
f. Attachment styles as implicit schema
g. Non-decisional changes
h. Tools for working “bottom-up”
While the overwhelming bias in western psychotherapy has been taught as a “top-down” primarily left-brain model of conscious cognition (verbal insights, interpretations, etc.) neuroscience is increasingly inspiring us as clinicians to add more “bottom-up” approaches to our work (affective, experiential, & embodied) that can access early, even pre-verbal material.
Francine Lapides has been a licensed MFT since 1974, was a supervising therapist through the 1970’s, and been in private practice in San Jose and Santa Cruz, CA since 1980. She trained extensively with Daniel Siegel, is a 10-year member of Allan Schore's Berkeley study-group, and has been influenced by relational principles developed at The Stone Center, Wellesley College. She's a founding member of the Santa Cruz Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, teaches at workshops and conferences across the US, and a repeat presenter at the Cape Cod Institute and NY City Affect Regulation Conference. For more, contact Francine at FrancineLapides@aol.com
