Speaking

Speaking  &  Teaching

What if you could increase your impact with your clients just by
adding “body up” skills to your current evidence-based practice?

Beth Dennison’s speaking and teaching style:
​ 
Beth’s presentations include carefully crafted, safe,
experiential exercises to develop therapists’ capacity to
track clients’ “body up“ responses and respond to them 
in collaboration with the client.
“Body Up” means we attend to threat responses and   
emotional regulation by tracking specific body indicators.
These relationship skills are key to therapists’ success 
in helping clients with trauma, and all clients.

Beth Dennison stays current with the cutting edge of research on interpersonal       
neurobiology and presents it in simple, relevant terms. Her highly effective visuals facilitate comprehension and memory. Her suggestions and exercises jump start the process of integrating body up skills into your clinical practice.

Beth has been teaching and working with people at their  emotional edges for 40 years. She is a skilled presenter, an experienced body worker and a compassionate, resourceful therapist and consultant. She draws on all three roles to educate, heal, and support people who have lived through trauma, and their networks. 
Beth is a Marriage and Family Therapist, certified in Peter Levine’s trauma work, Somatic Experiencing® and in Jin Shin Do®  Body Mind Acupressure®.  Emotional regulation and the therapeutic alliance are central in her work. Currently she is training in Stan Tatkin’s Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT). She reads neuroscience, puts the information to work in her practice, and develops visual maps, books and worksheets to anchor and teach what works.


What people who have worked with Beth have to say:
“Even though there has been talk of trauma in the professional fields and the   literature for the last few years, I believe the educational piece, in helping people understand “how” the trauma works in them, body, heart and spirit, has been missing and you seem to do this so well, in ways that are so clear and teachable.” (C.S.) This is what Beth offers the field. 
“The books are fabulous! You did such a great job in creating visuals for these complex topics.” (D.H.)
“You have so beautifully integrated a vast amount of information into a very   accessible form.” (C.S.)
“Thanks for the attunement work. Even though I thought I was good at building   rapport,  the exercises brought my skills and awareness to a whole new level.” (M. H.)
Selected Speaking Topics:
Essential, Cutting-edge, Body-Oriented skills for helping clients heal trauma:  
   •  Body up attunement and tracking skills for building sturdy therapeutic relationships  
   •  Solo and interactive regulation skills for working with depression and anxiety
   •  Embodiment strategies for helping clients access safety, boundaries and agency
   •  Framework skills and invitational language, for structuring a therapeutic contract
       that invites access to deep nonverbal layers

The Research
“Decades of research indicate that the   
provision of therapy is an interpersonal
process in which a main curative
component is the nature of the therapeutic
relationship.” (Lambert & Barley, 2001) 

Affective neuroscience indicates that our strongest  emotions typically arise out ofsurvival based threat responses. The research shows that body oriented modalities are best equipped to access and shift this deep level of reactivity. Research also shows that the most efficient strategy for reregulating a dysregulated nervous system is interactive regulation, rather than solo regulation.  
Study findings note the relationship between PTSD and somatic symptoms and indicate that reducing dissociation is a key factor in trauma recovery. The emphasis on accessing and accepting somato-emotional experience suggests that body-oriented therapy is particularly well suited to women with PTSD and chronic pain.

About Beth Dennison’s Focus:
Recovering from PTSD involves working with old, non-verbal, survival -oriented parts of the brain. Beth cultivates skills that are effective in building sturdy, therapeutic relationships where people can access and change patterns deep in the unconscious threat response circuitry of the nervous system. “Trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event” (Peter Levine, 1995).
The “top down” framework skills cultivate safe, sturdy therapeutic relationships by building in collaboration and feedback, by explicitly sharpening our clarity of intention, about roles, power, boundaries and goals and by finding language to accurately describe body up experience. The “bottom up” skills increase our capacity for emotional regulation, help us identify what we need, and develop agency and self-confidence by aligning top down awareness with body up intelligence.
These therapeutic relationship skills that help people heal from trauma are also what we need to thrive as individuals and as a culture in changing and challenging times.  These skills help us build community, maintain emotional regulation, make good decisions, handle stress, loss and grief, recover from setbacks, parent our teenagers and take responsible, inclusive leadership.

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