BONNIE BADENOCH – Trauma and the Embodied Brain

Dear friends,

I’m writing to let you know about my new online course entitled Trauma and the Embodied Brain: A Heart-Based Training in Relational Neuroscience for Healing Trauma. I would love to share these ten weeks with you.

We are learning that trauma is much less about the event and much more about who is truly with us before, during, and after the overwhelming experience. With this in mind, we will be exploring the conditions that open a truly healing space for the integration of embedded traumas.

Our primary focus will be on deepening our capacity for nonjudgmental presence, the foundation of safety, as we learn about and experience how our embodied brains develop in health, trauma, and healing. We know that trauma embeds in the body—in our muscles, heart and belly brains, and so much more. As we practice listening to sensation, the language of our bodies, we can deepen our receptive presence with ourselves and the people who come seeking relief from suffering.

The culture in which we seek to support restoration for survivors who come to us, foster our children’s unfolding, and partner with each other for a more humane world is indeed challenging at this moment in our history. As we cultivate the conditions for offering relational safety, we may each become not only a more receptive therapist, but also a therapeutic presence in our daily walk in the world.

This can sound like a monumental task—and while that is true in some ways, the discoveries of relational neuroscience can provide a firm foundation for developing our innate capacity to be deeply present to one another. We will be building on the wisdom of Stephen Porges about our autonomic nervous system, drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work on the relationship between the two hemispheres of our brains, looking to interpersonal neurobiology for a new definition of trauma, and exploring the work of scientists who tell us how the quality of implicit traumatic memories can change.

And we will be working with our own inner world throughout so that this will be a healing as well as learning experience. All of us who offer sanctuary for those who have been wounded need and deserve this kind of support.

I look forward to sharing this nourishing experience with you.

With a warm heart,

Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT

P.S. Offered through Sounds True, this course comes with a one-year guarantee so you can try it risk-free. You can also apply for up to 10 Continuing Education credits upon completion.