Presence Psychotherapy is a powerful trauma therapy that incorporates spirituality, parts inquiry, the nervous system, and relational attunement to facilitate healing. Rooted in evidence-based practice, this model helps clients easily orient to and sustain awareness of Four Dimensions of Presence:
- Compassionate Presence
- Spacious Presence
- Grounded Presence
- Transcendent Presence
In this model, published in the APA's Journal of Integrative Psychotherapy, clients easily experience the essence of who they are beyond their trauma, experience both embodiment and oneness, and sense compassion and support in and around them. Presence Psychotherapy utilizes presence awareness to help clients access and process the layers and nuances of trauma held in multiple memory networks in the body.
This intensive 5-day training led by Presence Psychotherapy developer Michelle Lepak, LCSW, includes didactic presentations, live demonstrations, and experiential practice to help participants gain tools and knowledge to:
- Identify the qualities and therapeutic aspects of the Four Dimensions of Presence
- Recognize and utilize clients' personal connections to spirituality in trauma treatment to heal trauma
- Explain how presence awareness can help heal attachment wounds, provide regulation during trauma processing, and reprocess negative beliefs and emotions resulting from trauma
- Practice the skill of listening for and facilitating client's presence awareness through client's narrative
- Describe how to help clients regulate effect between sessions utilizing Four Dimensions of Presence techniques
- Define implicit, explicit, procedural, semantic, emotional, and sensory trauma memory
- Facilitate transcendent presence awareness to processing trauma without creating spiritual bypass
For a full list of what you will learn, please see presencepsychotherapy.org/training.
This training will describe how Presence Psychotherapy can easily integrate other therapeutic models. The training also explains Presence Psychotherapy's expanded concept of Compassionate Presence and demonstrates how to include aspects of clients' spirituality, such as nature, animals, spiritual beings, and totems in trauma work.
Because the learning of this model is largely experiential, participants work with their own experience of presence and parts of the mind in highly supported breakout sessions. This training is for beginning, intermediate, and advanced licensed mental health professionals.
