Working with Dissociation: an Introductory Workshop - Dr Catherine Hynes

This training is for mental health practitioners who work with trauma and complex trauma, and wish to extend their skill set to be able to assess and offer treatment to people whose trauma is complicated by dissociation and internal conflict.

Dissociation and dissociative disorders are common clinical phenomena, but unfortunately, they are often misunderstood, under-diagnosed and frequently remain untreated in clinical practice. This introductory workshop provides an overview of research on dissociative disorders, assessment and treatment considerations for mental health clinicians who are looking to begin to develop expertise in the treatment of trauma and dissociation in adults.   This workshop is intended as professional development for mental health practitioners who offer therapeutic interventions for people with trauma. It assumes knowledge of clinical skills, working with complex clinical presentations, and therapy for trauma.

Detailed Content Summary

Part 1: The Context of Therapy

• Working within Area of Expertise
• Therapist Self Care
• Grounding and Containment
• Establishing Boundaries

Part 2: Research on Dissociative Disorders

• Definition and Prevalence
• Causes of Dissociative Disorders
• Models and Explanations of Dissociation
  
• Controversies and Evidence Against the Controversies

Part 3: Assessment Considerations and Treatment Beginnings

• History Taking
• Reported
• Observed
• Formal Measures
• Formulating Dissociation
• Managing Dissociation in Session

Part 4: Treatment

• Mapping a Dissociative System
• Case example

Part 5: Managing Risks and Concluding Remarks

• Possible road blocks to therapy
• Directions for Future Learning

About the Trainer

Catherine has a passion for helping people to achieve wellbeing by harnessing the brain’s healing potential. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Brisbane, who works with adults who have experienced adversity and trauma, often in childhood and throughout development. She is the director of Wellbeing Wisdom, a business devoted to training psychologists to provide high level interventions in trauma and dissociation while practicing thoughtful self care, and to sharing wisdom from the therapy room with the general public.

Catherine offers training and consultation across Australia and internationally on the treatment of trauma and dissociation. She graduated from the University of Toronto, Canada, where she studied philosophy and neuroscience. She completed a Masters Degree at Dartmouth College, USA in Biological and Brain Sciences, where she completed her thesis on the functional neuro-imaging of social cognition. She obtained a PhD from the University of Queensland, in clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology, where her thesis developed neuropsychological assessments for social and emotional difficulties following traumatic brain injury. She is a an EMDR consultant with the EMDR Association of Australia, and a member of the Australian Association of Psychologists, and the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

Catherine’s current therapeutic work is founded on her lifelong interests in the philosophy of consciousness and the neurobiology of social cognition. She works integratively, and draws on therapies whose mechanisms are consistent with brain science. She uses EMDR therapy, embodied mindfulness therapies, Parts Work Therapies, Coherence Therapy, Compassion Focussed Therapy, Schema Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in her treatments.

She develops her clinical case conceptualisations from a social neurobiology perspective, and avidly follows developments in neuroscience to guide her therapeutic and educational projects.