Developmental Trauma Course Early Developmental Stages

Resolve the difficult issues your clients are struggling with from traumas in the early developmental stages

$299 (33% off)

Regular price is $450
16 hours, with 6 Demonstrations
On-demand, online course
English only

NOTE: This course has been renamed, it was previously called “Trauma, Development, and Attachment.”

7 Easy-to-Implement (but Essential) Developmental Trauma Strategies for Adults and Children

I have 7 easy-to-implement (but essential) strategies for resolving developmental traumas that you can implement ASAP.

We are going to break down the three early stages of development, the specific traumas possible in each, and how to resolve your client’s corresponding presenting difficulties effectively. 6 clinical demonstrations are included.

How this Developmental Trauma Course Will Improve Your Outcomes with Adults and Children and Help Your Clients Overcome Difficult Issues

In the three early stages of its development, a child is learning and imprinting foundational experiences that determine its adult capabilities for relating to oneself and to others.

Developmental, shock, and complex traumas that adults experienced as a child in these critical stages of early development can become the basis of attachment and relationship difficulties throughout one’s life. For example,

In the existence stage (conception to 3 months after birth) the child needs support to experience existential safety and unconditional self-worth — otherwise, the person is likely to suffer from existential terror and shame throughout their life.
In the need stage (birth to 2 years) the child requires support to sense and express its basic needs — otherwise, the individual can remain despairing or distrustful about their needs getting met all life long.
In the autonomy stage (8 months to 2 ½ years) the child depends on support from others to develop its ability to stay with its emotions and other impulses — otherwise, the child (and then the adult) will have difficulty holding onto their experiences as well as their sense of self.

Please click here for a complete list of all possible issues from each stage of development

Diagnostic Aid

In this comprehensive developmental trauma course with 6 demonstrations, I will guide you through how to identify and work with each difficulty in each stage precisely and effectively through the practice of embodying emotions from Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™). We will use a diagnostic aid, you can download a sample here: Diagnostic Aid for Developmental Trauma from the Early Stages of Development

You Will Learn How To…

Identify and work with developmental, shock, and complex traumas in the first three stages of childhood development
Identify and work with the specific developmental difficulty and the corresponding developmental stage in the client’s presenting symptom
Improve your work with different attachment styles from understanding how different developmental traumas can affect attachment styles
Improve your work with your clients by learning defensive character structures caused by developmental traumas in different stages of development
Work with complex traumas characterized by high levels of intense emotions accompanied by high levels of stress and dysregulation
Help your clients work through extremely difficult emotional experiences and improve their cognition and behavior
Improve your ability to regulate your client emotionally through embodied emotional attunement
Apply the practice of embodying emotions to your work with relationship and attachment issues

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Included With Your Course

16 hours of on-demand video
6 clinical demonstration sessions
Comprehensive Checklists to use in your practice
Access on Computer and Mobile
Full Lifetime Access

Who can Benefit from this Developmental Trauma Course

All mental health professionals engaged in treating relationship and attachment difficulties caused by developmental and shock traumas stand to gain much from this course. This includes graduates and students of Somatic Experiencing^® (SE™).

If you are an Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) graduate or trainee, you will gain advanced knowledge and develop specific skills for applying your ISP expertise to the specific areas of trauma, development, and attachment.

How Your Client’s Presenting Issues relate to the Early Stages of Development

In this developmental trauma course, I will describe and demonstrate how to work with adult relationship difficulties differentiated in terms of attachment styles and various developmental tasks in the early stages of development.

We’ll introduce clinical strategies of interpersonal resonance and emotional embodiment from Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), a modality based partly on emerging paradigms of embodied cognition and emotion in cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

A. Do your clients suffer from the following?

If they do, they might have experienced developmental trauma or shock traumas in the existence stage of development (conception to three months after birth)

Not belonging
Not being present
Unlovable or unwanted
Unworthy of love or belonging
Not feeling power or the right to exist
Existential terror: Of being annihilated
Fear of fragmentation of body or psyche
Existential rage: I feel like destroying the world
Existential shame: I am defective by nature
Difficulty making contact
Fear of abandonment: The world will disappear suddenly

B. Do your clients suffer from the following?

If they do, they might have experienced developmental trauma or shock traumas in the need or oral stage of development (from birth to two years)

Cannot sense one’s needs
Cannot express one’s needs
Waits for others to sense and fulfill one’s needs
Cannot tolerate needs not being met quickly
Cannot tolerate needs not being met perfectly
In despair about needs being met
Distrustful that one’s needs would be met exactly
Not flexible about how one’s needs should be met
Not able to give or receive nurturing through body contact
Not able to exchange love through eye contact
Not able to sense and communicate connectedness through eye contact

C. Do your clients suffer from the following?

If they do, they might have experienced developmental trauma or shock traumas in the autonomy stage of development (eight months to two and a half years)

Difficulty in holding onto their experiences, especially when others differ
Difficulty in sensing a stable sense of self
Difficulty in sensing oneself autonomous and separate from others with respect to experiences
Difficulty in differentiating one’s experiences from those of others
Difficulty in accessing and staying with their emotions and other impulses
Difficulty in sensing that they are inter-dependent with others in their lives
Difficulty in sensing that they impact others or others impact them
Difficulty in sensing the need for and asking for help
Difficulty in giving or receiving support for experiences, especially emotions
Overwhelmed by too many impulses or experiences or commitments
Difficulty in making commitments and staying with them
Difficulty staying with one story or activity in life and therapy
Suffer from intolerable boredom or emptiness at rest

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About Raja Selvam, PhD

Raja Selvam, PhD, is the author of The Practice of Embodying Emotions and developer of Integral Somatic Psychology™, a new paradigm in body psychotherapy based on state-of-the-art research in neuroscience, affect theory, cognitive psychology, and emotion. He has helped over 1,500 therapists in 20 countries graduate from his ISP Professional Training.

His articles on trauma, embodiment, and spirituality have appeared in several journals.

Raja is also Senior Faculty at Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing^® Trauma Institute and works as a licensed clinical psychologist with a PhD in Psychology.

References

Peer Refereed Journal Articles

Aviezer, H. Trope, Y., & Todorov, A. (2012). Body cues, not facial expressions, discriminate between intensive positive and negative emotions. Science, 338(6111), 1225-1229.

Cassidy, J., Jones, J. D., & Shaver, P. R. (2013). Contributions of attachment theory and research: A framework for future research, translation, and policy. Developmental Psychopathology, 25(4 0 2) 1415-1434. doi: 10.1017/S0954579413000692

Cortizo, R. (2021). Prenatal broken bonds: Trauma, dissociation and the calming womb model. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 22(1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2021.1834300

Critchley, H. D., & Nagai, Y. (2012). How emotions are shaped by bodily states. Emotion Review, 4(2), 163–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911430132

Daglar, G., & Nur, N. (2018). Level of mother-baby bonding and influencing factors during pregnancy and postpartum period. Psychiatria Danubina, 30(4), 433–440. https://doi.org/10.24869/psyd.2018.433

Damasio, A. & Carvalho, G. (2103). The evolution of feelings: Evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Nature Reviews in Neuroscience, 14 (2), 143-152.

Gross, J., & Barrett, L. F. (2011). Emotion generation and emotion regulation: One or two depends on your point of view. Emotion Review, 3(1), 8-16.

Laird, J., & Lacasse, K. (2014). Bodily influences on emotional feelings: Accumulating evidence and extensions of William James’ theory of emotions. Emotion Review, 6, 24-37.

Nelson, C. A. III, Zeanah, C. H., Fox, N. A. (2019). How early experience shapes human development: The case of psychosocial deprivation. Neural Plasticity. doi: 10.1155/2019/1676285

Price, T. F., Peterson, C. K., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2012). The emotive neuroscience of embodiment. Motivation and Emotion, 36, 27-37.

Tammilehto, J., Punämaki, R., Flykt, M., Vänskä, M., Heikkilä, L. M., Lipsanen, J., Poikkeus, P., Tiitinen, A., & Lindblom, J. (2021). Developmental stage-specific effects of parenting on adolescents’ emotion regulation: A longitudinal study from infancy to late adolescence. Frontiers in Psychology, Section on Developmental Psychology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.582770

Books

Barrett, L. F. (2018). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Boston: Mariner Books.

Berk, L. E. (2017). Development through the life span. Pearson: London, UK.

Colombetti, G. (2014). The feeling body: Affective science meets the enactive mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Craig, A. D. (2015). How do you feel? An interoceptive moment with your neurobiological self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Evertz, K., Janus, L. , & Linder, R. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of pre and perinatal psychology: Integrating research and practice. New York, NY: Springer Publishing.

Hufendiek, R. (2016). Embodied emotions: A naturalistic approach to a normative phenomenon. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Janus, L. J., Turner, J. RG, Turner, T. GN, Gouni, O., Verny, T. R., Janov, A., Odent, M., Rakovic, D., Levin, E., & Brekhman, G. (2018). Prenatal psychology 100 Years: A journey in decoding how our prenatal experience shapes who we become! The International Journal of Prenatal and Life Sciences: Athens, Greece.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment therapy in practice: Emotionally Focused
Therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. New York and London: The Guilford Press.

Ruppert, F. (2014). Pregnancy, birth, and the first years of life. Green Ballon Publishing: Steyning, UK.

Integral Somatic Psychology is neither a regulatory nor licensing organization and therefore not sanctioned to certify, license, or otherwise bestow the legal authorization to practice as a mental health professional.