Trainings Offered

Ego State Workshop

In her accessible and practical style, Robin Shapiro will teach you how to use ego state therapy to work with a variety of clients and their issues. This can be either a 2 or a 3 day workshop. During the workshop you will learn to distinguish healthy, flexible states from dissociative ones, and to map your own states, from physically-based vagal states to age and role-related states. You’ll learn methods to use embodied ego-state interventions to clear trauma, work with couples, attachment issues, sexual issues with sex-abuse survivors, over-active immune systems and chronic pain, shame, personality disorders, suicidal clients, and dissociative identity disorder. You will learn to track your own states, and you’ll practice many of the interventions. If you do EMDR, you’ll learn when it’s more useful to use EMDR, when to use ego state work, and when and how to use them both. The 3-day format includes ample time for practice, for questions, and for clinical demonstrations. And despite the seriousness of the subject, expect to enjoy the process.

Suicide Assessment and Treatment

Suicide Assessment & Treatment is a six-hour workshop for master and doctorate level mental health professionals, ARNP’s, and physicians who may treat suicidal patients. Participants will gain skills in recognizing, understanding, assessing, managing, and treating patients who have suicidal ideation or intent. They will become conversant with the legal and ethical issues surrounding treatment of suicide. They will gain skills in working with survivors of suicidal family members and effects of client suicide on providers. They will gain these skills through lecture, videos, discussion, and experiential learning. The outcomes will include more clients with less suicidal ideation and fewer attempts, from clinicians who are competent in bringing this to be.

How to Get Your Clients and Yourself Through the New Political Reality, including Climate Change, the new Racism, Grief, and Overwhelm

This 2 to 4 hour workshop includes how to assess for past and present political or cultural trauma; treatment planning and treatment for that trauma; dealing with ongoing threats; empowering actions, in the face of overwhelm, and how therapists can address and move through their own issues. There is a lot of audience participation, as the group discusses what is most distressing, and how they cope. There are many case examples, including a grandmother grieving that her grandchildren will live in a degraded physical environment, victims of the new anti-black and anti-Semitic violence, and many people feeling helpless in the current political environment.

The EMDR “Mixed-Bag” Training

This twelve hour class includes a full-day on EMDR in treatment of depression, including biology, a report of van der Kolk’s famous study, and appropriate treatment of trauma-based, attachment-based depression, and mood disorders with EMDR’s standard protocol. The second day includes four ninety-minute segments: The Two-Hand Interweave (previously seen in EMDRIA’s Toronto conference), EMDR with Anxiety, Attachment Focused EMDR (2013 EMDRIA conference) and EMDR with Couples and with Trauma-Related Sexual Issues.

Healing Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Author and dynamic presenter Robin Shapiro will guide clinicians to assess and treat the impact of client sexual abuse histories including dissociation, to establish a sense of present time safety, to free clients from flashbacks, emotions, old sensations, and outdated senses of self- so they can live in the present, with new potential for healthy sexuality.

Key Features:

1. Describing the prevalence, types, and effects of sexual abuse
2. Talking to clients about abuse
3. Assessment of sexual abuse
4. Establishing therapy goals
5. Establishing the sense of a safe present
6. Choosing trauma interventions
7. Starting trauma therapy with appropriate preparation
8. Working through all the visual, visceral, and emotional targets
9. Helping clients achieve healthy, adult, consensual sexual lives

One out of four American girls and one out of six boys experience some form of sexual abuse, that can range from a one-time fondling to years of being sexually trafficked. The more the abuse, the more likely the client will have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other forms of dissociation. This workshop explains the prevalence and effects of sexual abuse on children and the adults that they become. Participants will be able to assess clients’ abuse histories and the effects, including dissociation, that it had. They will be able to talk effectively with different kinds of clients about their abuse histories and assess client therapy needs that are consistent with EMDR therapy and Ego State therapy. Participants will learn strategies to help clients establish a sense of safety in present time, to find freedom from flashbacks, distressing emotions, old sensations, and outdated senses of self in order to live, completely, in the present. Participants will know how to help their clients understand healthy sexuality, teach them how to talk about sex, and navigate a current, happy consensual relationship with a good partner.