#ASD- AV2 Mas

Mas reports often feeling withdrawn and notices that she pushes contact away. She knows that is a strategy for self–protection, but we try something new to increase her options so that we are not taking anything away but rather expanding options.

Teaching Points:

1. Using attachment specific corrective experiences to contact original healthy attachment system; i.e. “Finding Kind Eyes and designing the client’s own “Welcome to the World” exercise.
2. Helping clients with Avoidant Attachment to safely resurrect the impulse and capacity to connect with others, allowing clients to regain social engagement.
3. Helping clients increase their capacity for greater life force and to contain stronger energy while being embodied and in contact with one’s self.

Giving time for stabilization and reorganization after major internal shifts occur

ASD # AV1 Amar

A’s concern is the lack of intimate relationships in her life. She feels alien and “walled off” from others when she has needs or requests. She explains that her parents had tried to have her aborted. It was a large family. Her Mother did not like children and both parents were very busy and preoccupied. She describes an emotionally dead, vacant family life. The felt sense of the family deadness shocks her. After the session “The SPARKLE is back!”

Teaching Points:

1.     Using corrective experience and antidote resources to recall the core intactness of the original attachment system

2.     Integrating ego state by accessing the activation related to the frightened 10 yr old and bringing her into the present.

3.     Accessing and stabilizing the group relational field as a safe resource to help break A’s projection of the past.

4.     Helping the impulse for contact with one’s self and others to emerge and broaden to allow fuller social engagement and connection.

                        Reclaiming radiance and playfulness of her authentic self

                                    Experience of safety and relational continuity

                                    Ego state work and integration

ASD #AM 1 Nir

Ambivalent/Disorganized Attachment Style

Teaching points

ASD #AM 1 Nir

Ambivalent/Disorganized Attachment Style

With Victim-perpetrator Dynamic with Occasional Violence

BACKGROUND: N’s mother was violent at times and loving at times. Fortunately N has a very safe partner in the present. She experiences a quick spike of activation  and over coupling when we access her mother. We focus on safety with her partner and their dog, S, relaxing in bed.

Teaching points

1. Defining attachment style as disorganized due to violence and evidence of dissociative coping method.
2. Separating good mother from difficult mother to work the over-activation. Lifting the over-activation of the PNS–dorsal vagal brake to release bound energy.
3. Evoking and completing thwarted defensive responses of fight (groans, roars) and flight responses (running away through the forest).
4. Returning to empowerment and “pronking” exhilaration with the feeling that “I have successfully escaped.”
5. Discharging bound, high activation to alleviate symptoms and reduce dissociation and increase aliveness and freedom
6. Repairing boundaries and de-constriction by having one’s voice
7. Integrating the child self ego state into the adult self.

ASD #AM3 – Bir

German and English

B has a very critical stepfather who constantly derides her in her attempts to play the piano even though she plays very well, she visits a favorite piano store and the manager truly cherishes her music and encourages her – a real life corrective experience we use in the session to discharge arousal activated by her critical stepfather. Post session: She is free of the effects of criticism and is now very excited to play music with greater resiliency, life force and feeling.

Teaching Points:

1. Introduction of the piano store ally and his appreciation of Birgit’s musical talent as a corrective experience and felt sense resource.
2. Reconnection to the group support and restoration of social engagement.
3. Discharge of high arousal and working with ANS temperature shifts to reclaim feeling from dissociation and movement from frozen immobility in her hands
4. Re-establishing increased range of motion in orienting responses of the head, neck and shoulders out of avoidant feeling of shame and humiliation toward reconnection with the real support in the group.
5. Distancing the threat of the stepfather to resurrect her sense of safety and restore embodiment, especially in her hands as his image gets smaller.
6. Learning that there is enough love to go around and that, ideally, there should be no need to compete as a corrective experience to ambivalent attachment issues.
7. Accessing compassion and spiritual maturity as well as ego state integration

ASD #AM6  Siri

S wants to explore pattern of infant failure to thrive in abandonment. S: “Checking out that you’re here in order to know that I’m here”.  S must be careful not to lose self in spiritual awareness.

1. Installing  personal boundary in order to be able to feel boundarylessness.
2. Ventral prefrontal contact, both core attachment systems working together.
3. Identifying what secure attachment feels like.
4. differentiation. 
5. Supporting core intactness surfacing. 
6. Creating sense of becoming substantial without isolation 

ASD #AV3 SM

Avoidant and Disorganized Attachment Style with Victim Perpetrator Dynamics.

SM was severely beaten by his Father as a child. At age 9 had the distinct feeling of his life being threatened by physical abuse. SM’s reaction is deep physical constriction and disconnection. He has been unable to relax or discharge bound energy.

Boundary repair begins on the left as his body experiences a very strong discharge. His body begins to fill with renewed life force. The process is to reintroduce threat to stimulate active responses for self-protection. We uncouple the collapse/immobility response of fear and mobilize defensive orienting responses. He regains more life force. We give SM time to adjust to having more energy flowing through his body and to develop the capacity to contain it.

Teaching points:

1. Using the 360 Degree Boundary exercise to identify ruptures and begin repair on his left side; working with right–left body split.
2. Facilitating strong discharge through vibration and shaking in SM’s legs to release deep constriction without flooding.
3. Filling the body with life force and helping SM “tolerate” positive energy.
4. Introducing the threat, giving distance as resource, reinstating self protective responses to regain empowerment
5. Uncoupling collapse immobility (the freeze response) from fear and regaining defensive movement and mobility, restoring life force.

ASD #AV4 KM

Client feels dry, mechanical, not human. K. is afraid to make eye contact and craves it at the same time.

Teaching Points:

1. Feel arms and legs and any impulse to move -Peripheral NS weak signal to CNS – potentiates freeze response
2. Body reintegrating on its own
3. Marking regulation
4. Lack of mirroring can cause a person to doubt their existence
5. Moving from fragmentation toward integration – there can be bursts of arousal as pieces re-connection – (there was energy in the original rupture and that charge holds the pieces apart)
6. Waves of warmth that can discharge or initiate movement
7. Movement from disconnection to connection toward mobility
8. There can be a lot of activation in the eyes – as open your eyes find kind eyes in the room.
9. Titrating back to ventral vagal

ASD #DS1 Cora

Disorganized Attachment

Sensitive Child in Chaotic Household

Cora grew up in a chaotic household with a father who was violent and mother who was suicidal. Her stepfather was also emotionally abusive. I ask her to think of a person in her past that was a more stable presence in her life and she chose a teacher named Joan. When she thinks of Joan her face becomes alive.  She reports that she feels lighter and warmer. She beings to discharge with energy moving down and out through her arms.  She becomes a bit afraid of the energy releasing and we go back to the resource of her teacher Joan. More sensations of discharge are aroused. We comment on how this is a good thing. She feels such relief in the resource she wants to cry. She feels her teacher understood her and accepted her sensitivity. As she resources the relationship with the teacher, her back starts to relax, her breathing deepens and she is able to orient.   She feels she wants to leave her family and go with the teacher. She would like the teacher to come speak out to her family about their behaviour and tell them how they should treat her.  She wants the truth seen and heard.  Helping Cora find her voice “This needs to stop!”  “This is not good enough” “You need to recognize the children’s needs.” As her arousal around her family begins to rise, we shift focus back to her “protector” teacher. She feels the final phases of the discharge go in her hands. She finds herself feeling safe and secure in the relational field of the treatment space.  Colors are brighter.

Teaching Points:

1. Installation of a competent Protector to reinforce safety and stability in the client’s body.
2. Restoring grounding and the capacity to gradually discharge high arousal.
3. Expanding the body’s felt sense of safety in physical sensations of tingling, awareness, muscles relaxing and the body settling and “dropping down.”
4. Using interactive regulation to support and enhance her self-regulatory mechanism.

ASD #DS2 Pavi

Pavi experienced a childhood with physical and emotional abuse. Consequently she is fearful of being with other people, filled with self-hatred and inability to trust others. During the session, she notices one friend she can trust in the group as a resource. When Pavi feels the presence of this safe person, along with the sense of safety that Presence creates in her body, Pavi’s hyper-vigilant activation decreases and calms.

 Understandably, we discover highly mobilized energy in her arms that initially becomes tingly aliveness. Pavi is able to self-soothe and self-regulate. Soon more activation shows up in constricted shoulder muscles. We look for evoking and completing self-protective movements through distancing the original threat. We reverse the immobilization by freezing the threat instead of allowing her body to become paralyzed. She experiences tremendous relief and feels her own body is her greatest resource.

Pavi experiences her history of abuse falling off her back and shoulders. She continues to work on the activation triggered by an upcoming visit with her Mother for the holidays. We work to repair weak boundaries behind her back that were related to that troublesome relationship.

Most significantly, Pavi emerges from living in the chronically stuck threat response long after the original threats from an abusive childhood have passed. Pavi realizes she has a completely different experience of the world as she feels safer and reclaims her sense of empowerment and resilience.

Teaching Points:

1. Emphasizing the appropriateness of Pavi’s protective energy brought in the felt sense, reinforced by installing the Competent Protector.

1. Reducing hyper-vigilance and enhancement of a sense of safety with someone present in the room as a relational resource engenders trust as an antidote to the recurring deep betrayal from an abusive childhood.

1. Giving the client distance from the threat and reversing immobilization support safety and relief. This also gives space for self-protective movements and defenses to arise and complete.

Repairing the boundary rupture from previous intrusions results is her feeling her history fall off her back. Once relieved of threat response, she enjoys a completely different experience of the world.