Friday Lunchtime Program: Body, Brain and Love: Affect Regulation and Somatic Attachment, Karen Rachels, LMFT

Have you noticed clients being emotionally overwhelmed in session yet not known how to calm them? Have you been aware of clients not being quite present and not known how to bring them back? Have you found yourself being overwhelmed, withdrawn or shut down with a client? This presentation seeks to provide a basic understanding of nervous system regulation and connect it with the fundamentals of attachment, as it plays out in the therapeutic dyad.  The speaker will emphasize the connection between regulation and attachment and address how our own attachment tendencies show up in our work and how to manage them.

Karen Rachels, LMFT, workshop leader and author of Body, Brain, Love: A Therapist’s Workbook for Affect Regulation and Somatic Attachment will highlight all of the above through the following:  A brief didactic portion, experiential exercises and demos to reinforce learning regarding our own attachment tendencies as therapists, and a demonstration of Somatic Attachment Therapy. The somatic attachment approach uses present-moment experience to work with attachment core beliefs in a visceral, somatic manner, facilitating clients' achievement of a secure attachment and aiding the therapist to work from a secure place with clients.

Karen Rachels believes that right-brain learning facilitates long-term integration of left-brain didactic material and has therefore planned this lecture to extensively include demonstrations and practice activities. She has been a therapist for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the recently published Body, Brain, Love: A Therapist’s Workbook for Affect Regulation and Somatic Attachment (available through www.karenrachels.com, click on “For Therapists”). She facilitates Somatic Attachment Therapy consultation and practice groups, and she teaches related workshops and classes. In addition, she is a Certified Hakomi Therapist, a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy practitioner and EMDR practitioner, and has completed the externship for Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website (above) and watch YouTube videos she created and uploaded under Karen Rachels, MFT.