Title: Releasing & Transforming Shame: Cultivating Healthy Attachment in Clients with Mood, Trauma, and Relational Difficulties Course Description: Debilitating and complex, shame is among the most destructive of human emotions. Depression, violence, anxiety — it emerges in a variety of ways that are profoundly damaging to your clients’ lives and the lives of those around them. Working with clients experiencing unhealthy shame presents you with a formidable therapeutic challenge. How do you effectively manage something that hides in the shadows…that by its very nature is so excruciating that it pushes people toward avoidance? How do you heal something that lurks behind masks of anger and defensiveness? How do you break through to suffering individuals who’ve spent a lifetime viewing themselves as wrong, unlovable, and unworthy of getting better? Stop letting shame derail the therapeutic process and transform how you work with shame-driven clients! Attend this seminar and help your clients end avoidance, **** their shame, and rewrite their story of dysfunctional self-worth and condemnation into one of compassionate acceptance. Objectives: Enhance client attunement with clinical strategies that replicate conditions for healthy attachment. Characterize how shame complicates the treatment of trauma and specify how shame can be worked with somatically in traumatized clients. Evaluate how shame can be addressed in your addiction trauma?treatment plans with self-forgiveness interventions that can help facilitate recovery. Communicate how anxiety generated by feelings of shame can be managed with breathing techniques taught in-session. Establish how depressed clients can manage shame generated negative emotions with imagery-based compassion exercises. Analyze how mindfulness can reduce judgemental thoughts and reactivity with shame-prone clients. Bio: Debra Premashakti Alvis, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and private practitioner with over twenty-five years of clinical experience in supporting clients’ recovery from shame, trauma, anxiety, depression, and relational concerns. A seasoned international presenter and consultant, Dr. Alvis is also a therapeutic yoga educator and a lecturer at the University of Georgia where she developed and led the Mind/Body Program. The program included a clinician training program integrating contemplative approaches into psychotherapy. A thirty-year personal contemplative practice, research experience, and a deep understanding of mindfulness and yoga further enrich her presentations. She draws upon this unique background to provide effective, easily applicable skills designed for immediate integration into clinicians’ practices. Continuing Education Credit: Application has been made and pending approval by LPCA-GA for 5 core continuing education hours Application has been made and pending approval by GSCSW for 5 continuing education hours Application has been made and approved by GPA for 5 continuing education hours Refund Policy: Requests must be in writing. Refunds will be given on requests postmarked or faxed no later than 7 business days prior to the seminar. No refunds will be issued for «late arrivals» and «no shows». Address: October Road, Inc, Erin Evans, Administrative Assistant/Seminar Coordinator, 119 Tunnel Road Suite B, Asheville, NC. 28805-1800. Fax: (828) 350-1300. Requests may also be emailed to eevans@pyramidhc.com.