Finding Connection: Therapist Attunement and Self-Regulation When Clients Shut Down or Dissociate

Presents, through dramatized therapy sessions, traumatized youth who are profoundly emotionally shut down or dissociative and how therapists can remain attuned to clients while managing their own affect. When children shut down or dissociate they may seem unreachable or impossible to engage; yet through therapy those traumatized children can learn to understand and recover from their post-traumatic reactions. Experienced trauma therapists discuss their reactions to these critical moments of disconnection and impasse in trauma therapy, the questions and dilemmas this raises for them, and ways they have found to engage with detached or dissociated clients while handling their secondary traumatic stress reactions.