Events and Seminars
| Event | : | Working with Fragmented and Chaotic States |
|---|---|---|
| Venue | : | Online |
| Date | : | 27/06/2025 |
| Duration | : | 2 - 5:30pm BST / 9am - 12:30pm EDT |
| Extra Info | : | Working with Fragmented and Chaotic States: Adjunctive Techniques for Psychotherapists With Ruthie Smith, Phil Mollon & Alice Jacobs Waterfall (Facilitator) Clients prone to fragmentation and chaotic states can be extremely challenging to work with. Those who suffered early or developmental trauma and ruptures in relationships may struggle with damaged and scrambled communications. As therapists we work with various chaotic presentations including projection, fragmented ego states, disconnection, dissociation and at the more extreme end, alters, fugue states, depersonalisation, and the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and reality. Trauma also distorts time and memory, and clients may struggle with ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ what has happened to them. Further challenges arise if clients have a pattern of disorganised attachment which may lock the work in unhelpful dynamics, such as unconscious retaliatory defences, the ‘drama triangle’, coercion and punitive control. It is precisely in such situations that energy psychotherapy techniques offer an invaluable adjunct. We move beyond the tools of transference and counter transference, working instead to help the client release the traumatic stress/ PTSD via their bodies, minds and subtle energy systems. These methods, self-applied by the client, are woven within the therapeutic dialogue and they contain, regulate, and alleviate the client’s distress so they can experience a sense of safety, calm and balance. Using these simple methods strengthens the fragmented ego, reaches beneath the deeper defensive layers, and helps to integrate parts, so that clients learn to regulate their extreme moods and in so doing, develop a more coherent narrative of self. By releasing the blocked energy of traumatised states, the client is able to ‘reverse’ their self-sabotaging behaviour, so that more mutual, reciprocal forms of relationship can emerge. Energy psychotherapy reveals complexities and subtleties of factors maintaining psychopathology that cannot easily be accessed and identified within conventional listening and talking psychotherapies. Moreover, a psychoanalytic psychotherapy that is congruent with modern understandings of how trauma smashes the container-contained function, causing an explosion of psychic ‘beta elements’, will benefit from the incorporation of adjunctive trauma-focused modalities. |
| Organised By | : | Tavistock Relationships |
| Web Link | : | https://trtogether.com/events/fragmented-chaotic-states |