When Clients Recover Memories, How do we help them Heal? LIVE ONLINE WORKSHOP - Dr Catherine Hynes

Early Bird Saves $100 until October 1st, 2026

This is a live event and will not be recorded.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. All therapeutic orientations are welcome.

Who is this Workshop For? Mental health practitioners who work with trauma and complex trauma, and want to upskill in assisting clients who recover memories in their recovery journey to heal. The focus is on adult therapy clients.

Is there any Practicum? No.

What Will I Learn? Participants will acquire skills to:

   1. Formulate recovered memories from a neurobiological and psychological perspective

   2. Describe how recovered memories emerge spontaneously during therapy

    3. Work ethically with challenges presented during the emergence of recovered memories

    4. Structure memory work for resolving recovered memories

General Summary

Research on recovered memories shows that both amnesia and spontaneous recovery of memories are common in complex trauma treatment, especially where abuses of power have occurred (Brand et al, 2016; Freyd, 1996; ISSTD, 2011; Ross et al, 2022; van der Hart & Nijenhuis, 1999). Nonetheless, working with recovered memories remains controversial today (eg Brewin, 2021; McNally, 2023; Ross, 2023). The controversy creates challenges for clinicians, including: fear of working with recovered memories, unreflective belief in clients’ memories, and unreflective suspicion of clients’ memories, all of which can be obstacles to the recoveries of complex trauma survivors.

This workshop draws on research on the prevalence of recovered memories, and neurobiological and psychological models of memory to teach participants how to formulate and work with memories that are recovered by clients during their recovery. Catherine draws from experience in her clinical work, including observations of how recovered memories emerge during therapy for complex trauma, and makes recommendations for addressing the memories therapeutically, by combining trauma therapy, parts work, and best practice recommendations for working with recovered memory. This workshop aims to:

1) build clinicians’ confidence in understanding and responding to memory recovery during therapy

2) provide a foundation for healing recovered memories within therapy

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.