— Sounds True Presents —
Trauma Skills Summit.
August 17–26 2020
— Sounds True Presents —
Trauma Skills Summit.
August 17–26 2020
We are so happy you’re here. Access each day’s presentations using the left navigation.
— Sounds True Presents —
Trauma Skills Summit.
August 17–26 2020
Enjoy access to the most popular presentations from the Trauma Skills Summit for a limited time.
— Sounds True Presents —
Trauma Skills Summit.
August 17–26 2020
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Day 6
Day 6 will be available Saturday, August 22, 2020.
Internal Family Systems Therapy with Trauma Survivors
Richard Schwartz, PhD
Creator of Internal Family Systems therapy
Very often, people who have experienced trauma hold the belief that they have been so damaged that they will never heal and that their very essence is tarnished. With Internal Family Systems therapy, we are able to experience our core essence as untouched by trauma and realize that we don’t have to meditate for years to find liberation from suffering. This session explores how Internal Family Systems therapy and working with our “parts” can support trauma recovery by helping us feel empowered and released from shame.
Session Highlights:
- Why different parts of yourself might not be what they seem
- The importance of turning toward our parts with compassionate curiosity rather than trying to get rid of them
- How symptoms such as dissociation, suicide, rage, resistance, and hypervigilance can be honored and shifted
- Connecting with your undamaged self to release and transform your vulnerable qualities
Richard Schwartz, PhD
Dr. Richard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief, and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationships that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and thereby separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities such as curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. He called that inner essence the “Self” and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s. IFS is now evidence-based, and has become a widely used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a nonpathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and, more recently, corporations and classrooms. In 2013, Dr. Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Parenting after Trauma
Susan Stiffelman, MFT
Author of Parenting Without Power Struggles
Parenting can be a path of profound growth and transformation. When we raise children, we may find ourselves behaving in ways that feel out of sync with our conscious parenting intentions and values. By exploring the impact of trauma on our childhood, feelings of intense frustration, rage, overwhelm, or withdrawal can become catalysts for deep healing, allowing us to move toward greater responsiveness to and attunement with our children.
Session Highlights:
- How parents can forge loving attachment with their children, even if they did not experience it growing up
- Guidance for moving through the residue of early childhood stress, neglect, or abuse as we raise children of our own
- Creating a narrative that empowers parents to find healing and resilience
Susan Stiffelman, MFT
Susan Stiffelman is a marriage and family therapist, a credentialed teacher, and a licensed psychotherapist. She is the author of Parenting Without Power Struggles and Parenting with Presence (An Eckhart Tolle Edition). For over 40 years, Stiffelman has worked with families to create greater harmony and deeper connection between parents and children. She facilitates a Parenting Without Power Struggles membership program, a wide array of classes and events on topics ranging from chores and homework to sensitive children and screen time. She also cohosts the Co-Parenting with a Narcissist monthly support group. For many years, Stiffelman was the weekly advice columnist for AOL, HuffPost, and grandparents.com, and she continues to reach parents through her online programs, newsletter, virtual events, and Parenting Without Power Struggles podcast.
Breaking the Cycle of Inherited Family Trauma
Mark Wolynn
Director of the Family Constellation Institute
The unresolved traumas of parents and grandparents can surface in the unexplained symptoms of children and grandchildren. By tending to this trauma, we have the potential to break cycles of inherited family trauma for ourselves and for future generations. In this session, Mark Wolynn shares ways we can decode our own personal language of trauma—what he calls the Core Language Approach®—and presents tools to help us break the cycle of generational suffering.
Session Highlights:
- Exploring the ways trauma can be passed from a parent to a child
- Learning about scientific research behind inherited family trauma
- Understanding the signs of inherited trauma—including how we express verbal and nonverbal trauma language
- Integrating Our Fragmented Selves—a practice for healing
Mark Wolynn
Mark Wolynn is the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco and a leading expert in the field of inherited family trauma. A sought-after lecturer, he teaches at hospitals, clinics, conferences, universities, and teaching centers around the world, including the University of Pittsburgh, the UPMC Western Psychiatric Institute, Kripalu, Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, 1440 Multiversity, John F. Kennedy University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. Wolynn specializes in working with depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, fears, panic disorders, self-injury, chronic pain, and persistent symptoms and conditions. His book It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle is the winner of the 2016 Nautilus Book Award in psychology. His articles have appeared in Psychology Today, mindbodygreen, mariashriver.com, Elephant Journal, and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. Learn more at markwolynn.com.
Inspired by today’s presentations?
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This is the one I’ve been waiting for absolutely love Richard Schwartz perspective this is the way I work and I’ve gained some really fabulous insight and tools, insight and new awareness. Thank you.
Same here! So much war trauma in my family! On both sides. I have always known this on some level. As soon as I heard the stories from my grandmother, who raised me.
Becoming a grandmother myself almost two years ago, has been the biggest trigger in my entire life of 56 years.
I heal my trauma with internal family system therapy!
Tjat was groundbreaking. Thank you Mark, espacially for the practice.
It’ s being such a great time watching all these wonderfull presentations!
I’ m a Psychiatrist and EMDR / Brainspotting Therapist.
Thank you so much!
Thank you Mark… extremely informative and inspiring. I’m truly fascinated by epigenetics and body reaction.
I understand we can gain insights from mice, but it disgusts me that we intentionally traumatize living, sentient beings – for the sake of research. We need to stop destroying animal lives for only the chance of maybe improving human lives.
Yes, listening to the inflicted harm on mice was practically intolerable. The means do not justify the ends. In an enlightened society there will be no killing or harming of animals. One day….
Responding to Andrew and Laurel:
I almost stopped watching after listening to his dispassionate recounting of the mice experiments. To let them drown? Was it not enough to see that they were making no effort to save themselves and then rescue them?
My Facebook cover photo is a picture of a pig with this quote:
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” —Paul Farmer
How arrogant is the human race.
After that, I did find the talk very informative and I will be purchasing his book. I will, though, continue to fight, with every fiber of my being, animal cruelty, including in labs.
I agree ☝🏼
Gabor Maté puts it thus:
“What I am saying is, there’s an emotional block. It’s not an existential block, we don’t need a stitch more research on what causes addiction. We don’t need one more bit of research on what causes violence, rape, psychopathic behavior, mental illness. We don’t need a stitch more research. I now that sounds like a radical statement in a society which is so research oriented and where whole intellectual industries, knowledge factories are based on having to gather more money for research to justify more jobs, to justify more papers, but I’m telling you, if we simply applied what we already know, if we simply do the lessons of what’s already been clearly shown, we would have a totally different world. So, even that need for more research is a factor of denial.”
Thank you for pointing this out. Animal cruelty is my biggest trigger and without your warning I would have watched it and been triggered while home alone in the middle of the night!
I’m with you. I abhor animal cruelty and can not understand the disconnect in “compassionate & intelligent” people thinking it is okay. I think I will skip this talk, to avoid being triggered. Ugh!!!