Сòòò½ÊÓƵ

• Affect reconsolidation as a universal mechanism
• When to implement affect reconsolidation
• Creating the optimal conditions in therapy
• Risks and Limitations

• Key brain regions for emotions
• Impact of specific emotions on the brain cortex
• Emotion as a central problem in psychopathology
• Strategic use of emotion in therapy

• Building safety and trust with your patients
• Addressing internal and external relationships to emotion
• Achieving the optimal level of arousal
• Changing the relationship between memory and emotion
• Seeing emotions as a useful tool in therapy

• Emotional Awareness/Mindfulness
• Validation of emotions
• Self-Compassion & Empathy
• Utilizing emotion

• Mindfulness for recognizing emotions and where they come from
• Emotional validation techniques
• Techniques for optimal arousal of emotions
• Gestalt techniques for increasing emotion
• Somatic techniques for up and down-regulation
• Cognitive-based techniques to stop reinforcement of negative feelings

• Anger — boundaries and consequences, forgiveness
• Sadness — unresolved grief, primary/ secondary emotions
• Fear — managing fear responses, controlling behavior
• Desire — regulating reward systems, increasing self-control
• Disgust — self-acceptance
• Jealousy/Envy — comparisons to others, self-judgement

• Creating curiosity about our emotional responses
• Differentiating between past and present emotions
• Work with secondary emotions first
• Affect Reconsolidation for primary traumatic feelings

Laying the Foundation for Neuroscience in Psychotherapy

• Key reasons to integrate neuroscience into your psychotherapy practice
• The 5 E’s:
  • Empathy: Reduce stigmas and bias
  • Engagement: Capture clients' attention
  • Expectations: Power of expectations in the healing process
  • Education: Illuminate limiting factors
  • Experimentations: Basis for new strategies
• Valuing the human above the technology
• Responsibility of the field not just the individual practitioner
• Standards for early career and advanced practitioners
• Key benchmarks for ethical practice
• Uses of neuroscience: Theory enhancement, direct brain interventions, metaphor-based applications, and psychoeducation

Integrate Neuroscience into Your Clinical Practice

• 10 Axioms of integration
• Brain and nervous system basics
• Neuroscience and factors common across all theories of treatment
• Limitations of the research and potential risks

Practical Applications of Neuroscience:

Validate and extend popular theories in practice

Third-Wave Cognitive Behavioral Theory

• Neuroscience-informed-CBT
• Expand the understanding of neuroplasticity and homeostasis
• Left- and right-mode processing
• Nervous system retraining

Psychodynamic Theory

• Address trauma and relational wounds
• Neuroscience-informed ways to reduce harmful vs. healing recall
• Grow through the impact of early relationships
• Importance of the unconscious: Attention and implicit awareness

Humanistic-existential Theory

• Neurobiology of therapeutic relationship – therapist or technician
• Neurobiology of empathy in building authentic connections
• Interpersonal physiology and co-regulation

Constructivist/Postmodern Theory

• Phenomenological practices supported by neuroscience
• Hawthorne effect: Manage awareness of strengths and challenges
• Pygmalion effect: Unlock the power of expectation
• Neurobiology of developing personal narratives
• Solution-focused relationships and problem-management strategies

Inheritance Model of Wellbeing

• A novel neuroscience-integrated model
• 8 dimension-specific techniques and interventions

Address Mental Health Disorders Through a Neuroscience Lens:

Advanced integration and applications

• Case vignette: Adult with anxiety, mood, and trauma
• Anxiety disorders
  • Teach the prefrontal cortex to respect the messages from the anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala
• Mood disorders
  • Neuroscience-based models of depression
  • Monoamine, glutamate, and neuroplasticity theories
• Stress Trauma
  • Trauma as a continuum and working on specific brain regions
  • Treat the HPA, SAM, and DMN
  • Train systems to work in concert rather than in opposition
• Substance abuse disorders
  • Heal the mesolimcocortical dopamine system, reward, and stress circuits
  • Listen to what serves and release what doesn’t

• Positives: We know more about anxiety-based disorders than any other disorders
• Science gives explanations, evidence, authority, destigmatizes difficulties
• Concerns: It can be difficult to explain, answer questions
• Clients may feel a lack of responsibility
• Oversimplification is inevitable

• Don’t neglect the therapeutic relationship!
• Address the challenges of anxious clients
• Remember that strategies are effortful
• Guide the process using the client’s goals
• Maintain motivation

• Define Neuroplasticity in everyday language
• Therapy is about creating a new self
• ”Rewiring” as an accessible concept for change
• Re-consolidation: the modification of emotional memories

• Amygdala – bottom-up triggering of emotion, physicality of anxiety
• Cortex – top-down emotion generation based on cognition
• Explain the two pathways to clients
• How anxiety is initiated in each pathway and how pathways influence each other

• Use illustrations to create a concrete understanding
• Fight/flight/freeze responses
• The “language of the amygdala”
• Anxiety and the cortex
• Help clients recognize the two pathways to anxiety

• Sleep and the amygdala
• The influence of exercise
• Breathing techniques to reduce activation
• Relaxation, meditation, and yoga to modify responses
• Exposure opportunities for the amygdala to learn
• Combatting avoidance
• When anxiety indicates that the amygdala can learn new responses
• Push through anxiety to change the amygdala

• ”Survival of the busiest” principle – strengthen or weaken specific circuitry
• The healthy (adaptive) use of worry in the cortex
• ”You can’t erase: You must replace.”
• Recognize and modify the impact of uncertainty
• Training correct uses of distraction
• Left hemisphere techniques – cognitive defusion, coping thoughts, fighting anticipation
• Right hemisphere techniques – imagery, music
• Mindfulness and anxiety resistance

• Medication’s effects on the rewiring process
• The myth of the chemical imbalance
• The danger of sedating the brain with benzodiazepines
• Promoting neuroplasticity with SSRIs, SNRIs
• The effectiveness of CBT and meds

• Anxiety is a component of many diagnoses (depression, substance abuse, etc.)
• Amygdala- and cortex-based techniques help in other disorders
• Targeting brain-based symptoms rather than disorders
• Worry, obsessions, and rumination response to similar cortex-based techniques
• Panic, phobic responses, and compulsions response to amygdala-based techniques

• Empirical versus clinical and anecdotal evidence
• Clinical considerations for specific clients and settings
• The efficacy of particular interventions may vary

Understand the Key Brain Regions and Chemicals Involved

• The prefrontal cortex, limbic system, striatum
• Neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, etc.
• How it all fits together

Key Principles From Proven Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions

• Behavioral Activation Therapy (BAT)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

Utilize the Benefits of Exercise

• Benefits on serotonin and dopamine systems, as well as stress reductions
• Intensity and frequency of exercise required
• How simply being outdoors can help

Minding the Amygdala: Mindful Awareness of Emotions

• Labeling feelings to reduce amygdala activity
• Making the most of ACT to reduce stress

Set Goals, Make Decisions, and Top-Down Regulation of Brain Activity

• The impact of goal-setting on lower-level processing
• Choice, decisions, and happiness
• The importance of intention and voluntary choices
• Simple strategies for applying BAT

Low-Tech Biofeedback

• The mind-body connection, meditation, and MBCT
• Understanding heart-rate variability
• The power of breathing
• How postural changes, muscle tension, and facial expressions can affect mood

How the Brain Encodes Habits and How to Change Them

• The distinction between impulses and routines
• Cognitive and emotional habits
• The relationship between habits and stress
• Cognitive-behavioral approaches to changing habits

Social Solutions

• The impact of social support on the brain’s stress response
• The power of physical touch
• Why social interactions are rewarding
• How social support can improve the efficacy of medication

The Power of Gratitude

• The impact of gratitude on key neural circuits
• Operationalize gratitude to implement it in daily life

Make the Most of Sleep

• How sleep affects mood
• Key changes in sleep hygiene that improve sleep quality

The Limitations of Neuroscientific Research

• fMRI imaging
• Things to consider regarding animal studies
• Simple explanations for complicated processes