Basic BASE™ Training

Bodywork and Somatic Education™ (BASE™) is clinical, body-oriented approach to help clients overcome the emotional, relational and and physical effects of trauma. BASE™ provides psychotherapists and somatic practitioners with a versatile toolkit to use with individuals, couples, and families dealing with symptoms of trauma. The training is designed to: a) clear relational attunement b) help psychotherapists develop clinically and ethically appropriate hands-on touch skills, and c) to help bodyworkers and movement educators refine and expand their hands-on skills with a paradigm that focuses on expanding a client’s capacity without triggering cathartic overwhelm.

The body’s holding of psychological trauma and its importance as the vehicle for healing are now broadly recognized in academic, clinical and research settings. Physical and relational dysregulation, including persistent high arousal and dissociation, go hand in hand with developmental wounding, illness and shock trauma. When our interoceptive (internal state of the body) systems are signaling discomfort, pain or distress, we are in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that fuels dysregulation. This persistent state of high arousal causes both intrapersonal and interpersonal difficulties, such as feeling detached from the self and the world, relationship and work issues, learning problems, chronic pain, headaches, gastrointestinal problems, sleep issues, anxiety, PTSD and other challenges.

BASE™ brings two aspects of somatic work together:

1. Somatic education: learning from the inside through the kinesthetic sense of self.

2. Skilled touch: how to use ethically appropriate touch to facilitate and enable increased regulation in body tissues, organs and structures.

BASE™ teaches the use of non-touch somatic awareness strategies as an important tool for clinical attunement, assessing trauma and working with a client’s internal state. The training is designed to support psychotherapists interested in adding touch work to their practices to become skilled in somatic therapy. Students learn movement and somatically-oriented interventions, as well as assessing how and when it is appropriate to use touch to support clients. BASE™ students develop a highly refined attunement to clients’ internal, non-verbal states, enabling them to track health and dysregulation by observing a) what is happening physiologically (i.e. anxiety, shutdown/dissociation, etc), b) how it is manifesting (i.e. constriction, etc) and c) where the dysregulation is located in the body. Participants will learn how to help clients release internal freeze/shutdown states and facilitate expansion, capacity and ease. The approach gives clients new ‘interoceptive’ experiences that provides critical, regulating information to the brain, enabling them to experience greater resilience and choice—the opposite of a trauma response. In turn, this improves relational or interpersonal dynamics.

This workshop offers 24 CE hours.

There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.