A hallmark of owning a Private Psychotherapy Practice is isolation. Regardless of how many years we've been doing this work as Therapists, or even how well we're doing professionally, it can be tough to navigate the legal, ethical or personal questions that arise in each of us. When we connect with our clients about their concerns and questions, sometimes we're left feeling drained and uncertain about things we hear. We might also be unclear how to proceed with difficult therapy challenges. This is when a group consultation meeting can provide guidance and clarity.

I've been involved with a monthly Therapist consultation group for about eight years and it has consistently been a great source of clarity, knowledge, connection and validation for my clinical work. I began the group by inviting a few colleagues and posting an online invitation. Each participant came with their own clinical experiences, concerns and expectations for the group. Some Therapists that responded were a natural fit, others weren't.

As one might imagine with the varying personalities of Therapists and our differing clinical orientations, assembling a new work group met with some small challenges.

This article explores the role of grieving in treating childhood trauma and Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Insight, as crucially important as it is, is never enough in recovery. No amount of intention or epiphany can bypass one's need to learn to lovingly care for himself when he is suffering from the emotional flashbacks of C-PTSD. Emotional flashbacks are regressions that take the survivor back to the excruciating states of fear, humiliation, abandonment, helplessness and hopelessness that he nearly drowned in during childhood. Grieving is an irreplaceable tool for metabolizing and resolving the overwhelming feelings that arise during emotional flashbacks.

Grieving aids the survivor immeasurably to work through the innumerable death-like experiences of being lost and trapped in emotional flashbacks. Grieving also supports recovery from the many painful, death-like losses caused by childhood traumatization. Recoverees need to grieve the death of safety and belonging in their own childhoods -- the death of their early attachment needs. They need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of their frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from their parents.

As the grieving process therapeutically evolves, survivors typically uncover a great deal of unresolved grief about the deadening absence of the nurturance they needed to develop and thrive. Children will only flourish if four types of needs are consistently met.

There are many types of traumas that effect children and adolescents, and there is a great deal of variation in what different people find upsetting. What is a trauma for one might not upset another person at all. Traumas can range from the dramatic (such as witnessing violent death, or being sexually assaulted) to the subtle (experiencing an incident of emotional abuse, or being bullied) and everything in between. I find it is important not to judge whether or not a child "should" be upset by an experience. If a memory is disturbing him or her, trauma treatment may help.

Children who are suffering from disturbing memories or a full diagnosis of PTSD may exhibit different symptoms than adults. These symptoms may be confusing to the parents or caregiver.

In healing psychological traumas, we must work down through the layers of defense mechanisms the person has built up, healing each as we go, until we can address and heal the original wound(s). This article offers a map of the typical layers of defenses, beginning with the older and simpler defenses at the bottom and building up to the defenses visible at the surface. The map looks like this:

4. trauma + self-negation --> self-defeating behavior
3. trauma + numbing habit --> addiction
2. big or repeated hurts --> defense is ego syntonic --> trauma
1. an isolated hurt --> defense is ego dystonic --> phobia

The article then unpacks each of the layers and discusses how to dissolve it using energy psychology (EFT) techniques. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is an incredibly effective new therapeutic approach that directly heals the energy body (where all negative feelings and beliefs are actually created and held) rather than going the long way around through the mind and emotions, as current psychology does. EFT allows you to locate the energy pattern that is causing an unhealthy negative feeling or thought and then quickly and painlessly dissolve it.

Steven Kessler , LMFT has been a licensed psychotherapist for over 20 years and is the Director of the EFT Therapy Center. He has studied many different healing modalities, including Character Structure, the Enneagram, NLP, energy work, and Thought Field Therapy, the precursor of EFT. He is now credentialed as an EFT Expert practitioner.

Read more about Steven Kessler here.

East Bay CAMFT is convening a Single Payer Task Force for members and other interested mental health care providers. You and interested colleagues are invited to attend the first meeting, on Saturday, June 11 from noon to 2 pm in Albany.

Shaping Our Future

Hello and best wishes to everyone. We have been working hard on the Board, and we will soon hold the first General Membership meeting in two years. It's on Saturday, June 18, from 9am to 1pm, in Moraga. Please mark the date, and come by! I am also happy to announce that CAMFT's new Executive Director, Jill Epstein, will attend this meeting as well. The format is going to be very interactive - we want to have a general discussion with our members about the issues that concerns you, and we want to find ways to improve chapter operations for our members.

I especially want to invite therapists whose membership has recently lapsed, to come to this meeting. We want to hear from you, and we want you back! We will have simplified sign-up forms or renewal forms available.

Sadly, Drew Hutchinson resigned as our treasurer, and I want to take this opportunity to thank him for his work in overseeing the finances, and helping us to formulate a meaningful vision statement. His voice on the Board will be missed.

This means that we are looking for a new treasurer, and if you want to get involved in this chapter and have some experience managing money and creating budgets, please send me an email!

Serving as President of East Bay CAMFT has been an interesting journey so far, and a little more time-consuming than I originally anticipated. I am grateful for all our volunteers, without them the chapter would simply not exist. We are still in need of more Board members or volunteers who can help us do more outreach to members, and to create updated content for our website. As always, I am open to all kinds of member feedback, so feel free to contact me directly at the email address below

I hope to see many of you on June 18!

Write to Jurgen Braungardt at braungardt@gmail.com.

It has been a privilege to have served as the 2010 President of the East Bay Chapter of CAMFT. I have had the opportunity to meet many great individuals who are part of our professional community. I have been most impressed by the individual members who have contributed to the operation of our chapter in the past year. I would like to thank and acknowledge their volunteer work in the past year and ongoing commitment to their colleagues.   read more

CAMFT is embarking on an exciting effort to rebrand and re-launch TherapistFinder.com as CounselingCalifornia.com. CAMFT believes that the rebrand to CounselingCalifornia.com will reap long-term benefits for member visibility, including building consumer awareness of the tool, and making it easier for consumers to find licensed California therapists on the web.

In order to make this switch as easy as possible for existing users, enclosed is a list of frequently asked questions and a user checklist. CounselingCalifornia.com will have a bit different look and feel than that of TherapistFinder.com, but will feature all existing profiles, functions and information about therapy in general. CAMFT will also send regular updates to members about the transition to CounselingCalifornia.com.

CounselingCalifornia.com will go live the week of January 3. If you are not currently using TherapistFinder.com you can create your CounselingCalifornia.com profile at http://www.camft.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Join_CounselingCalifornia&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7864.

Please e-mail CAMFT staff at marketing@camft.org with any questions.   read more

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the East Bay Chapter of CAMFT, I would like to thank those who took the time to participate in our recent member services survey. The Member services survey was conducted between July 15, 2010 and August 15, 2010. Following are some highlights from the survey results.

We appreciate the invaluable feedback from those who responded to the survey. The results will provide a framework for future member services improvements.

Sincerely,

Guillermo Alvarez, MFT

EB-CAMFT President   read more

In order to thrive and grow into our potentials, we all have basic needs that must be met consistently. The most basic needs are for food, safety and shelter. Other important needs are for loving attention, a sense of belonging, stimulation through learning and play, structure and boundaries, age appropriate responsibilities, respect, freedom to express oneself, to be heard, and creative outlets.

As children if we do not have these needs met, or they are met erratically or inconsistently, we develop defenses and strategies to compensate. These strategies may help us cope and survive when we are young, but as we get older, these defenses, behaviors, perceptions and ways of being with ourselves and our world often become liabilities. Many common issues that clients want to work on in hypnotherapy are linked to these childhood patterns that limit.

This article highlights the prodigious role that emotional neglect plays in childhood trauma, and how it alone can create Complex PTSD. It begins by extensively examining the processes of denial and minimization that blunt our awareness about childhood trauma. Denial is first explored in relationship to abuse, especially verbal and emotional abuse, which then sets the stage for a more complete explication of the trauma of emotional neglect.

Denial about the deleterious effects of childhood abandonment seriously delimits our ability to recover. Continuous emotional neglect turns the child's psyche into a quagmire of emptiness, fear and shame - a quagmire that she will, as an adult, frequently flashback into until she understands and works through the wretchedness of her childhood. Without such understanding, her crucial, unmet needs for safe and comforting, human connection will continue to cause her an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.

Process, I've observed, is what one colleague called "a molasses-like movement of ideas or action within a hierarchical system." In my role as group therapist, I am constantly on alert for moments of multi-layered communication and I have noticed an interesting array of resistances to process orientation. These are explored in detail.

Although a content focus is safer and easier, I implicitly advocate for a style of group facilitation that challenges order, hierarchy, even safety, and in so doing enter that ambiguous space wherein client/patient and therapist responsibility is negotiated.   read more

When confronting issues of substance use, professional opinions as to what constitutes use, abuse, or dependency, as well as notions of prevention, often compete with the ideas of individuals and families, and those of the culture at large.

Recently, a client who proclaimed himself an addict looking to abstain from drugs, asserted: "I wanna quit drugs, I just wanna' drink from now on." The misconception that drugs exclude alcohol is an example of a distorted--but all too pervasive--belief. Similarly, clients often believe that the consequences of drug use are confined to the period of intoxication, and do not extend beyond that time.

As therapists working with such clients, we must confront these distorted belief systems before we can clarify treatment goals. In this article, I will discuss some important ideas pertaining to substance use, and present interventions that are substantive and practical.   read more

As Sexual Addiction becomes more frequently recognized as a diagnostic label, sex addicts are more easily identified and referred for treatment. Addiction being a family disease, the more sex addicts referred for treatment, the more it becomes apparent that there is an entirely new group of co-addicts that urgently require attention.

The partners and spouses of sex addicts, while sharing many similarities with partners/spouses of alcoholics, gamblers, et al., have many unique characteristics that significantly impact treatment failure or success.   read more

Now, as a Marriage and Family Therapist, I have the privilege of sitting with clients every day who share with me the intimate details of their lives.   read more

One of the most difficult features of Complex PTSD is extreme susceptibility to painful emotional flashbacks. Flashbacks are painful layers of reactions ¨C physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional - to the reemerging danger and despair of childhood abandonment. This article maps out these layered, defensive reactions and offers a treatment strategy for managing the depression that underlies them. Here is a model of the layering of an emotional flashback.   read more