Beyond Trauma: Helping Your Clients Cultivate Inner Presence

An On-Demand Course with Ann Weiser Cornell

I’m Ready to Sign Up How This Will Help You

Do your clients get triggered into emotional states out of proportion to current issues?

Are there areas of emotional fragility and “resistance” that are difficult to help your clients get past?

Do you long for your clients to become strong, adult partners in their own recovery?

Most client issues have trauma at the core.

Early life trauma – usually attachment trauma of some kind – is at the core of most of the issues our clients are struggling with. An essential component of trauma healing is cultivating the strong self, Self-in-Presence — in other words, the ability to be present with different parts and their needs.

You can help your clients become the healing environment for their trauma.

When the client is in the state of emotional overwhelm, therapy goals can be hard to achieve. Effective therapy usually involves facilitating the client’s development of a strong self. This course offers specific, empowering language that enables clients to move into a stronger sense of self even in the first session.

This work can be done within any psychotherapy modality and can combine with any other trauma healing method.

Help Your Clients Heal

“The ‘problems’ inside you are only those parts of the process that have been stopped, and the aim of Focusing is to unstop them and get the process moving again.” -Gene Gendlin

About the Beyond Trauma Course

Many core life issues stem from early experiences of trauma.

The presenting issue may be a current relationship, or low self-esteem, or conflicts with authority figures… and yet we know that before too long something about childhood will come up.

Because the past casts a long shadow over the present.

It’s very moving when your client trusts you enough to tell some of those early stories. Yet simply recounting the incidents and reliving the emotions only goes so far. It’s as if the adult sitting in the therapy room somehow “is” the vulnerable, overwhelmed child. What we need to do is invite the client to be his/her strong adult self, and to be with the inner traumatized child.

In a sense, the trauma is still happening now.

The IRF view of trauma is that it is “stopped process.” An aspect of self (“part”) has been left behind, frozen, in the field of the trauma. Other parts patrol the borders of the frozen area, ready to send sleepiness or distraction, convinced that contact with the pain of the trauma would be too much for the person. Being caught up in distressed emotional states does not strengthen the person’s core self.

Your client doesn’t have to be at the mercy of past events.

The clinician can offer interventions that support the client in shifting into an inner healing relationship with even the most intense emotional states. This can happen even when the tendency otherwise would be to control the emotions, distract from them, or repress them

Healing from trauma is possible within a supportive inner relationship.

The clinician informed by IRF supports and encourages the client to build his/her ability to be Self-in-Presence with parts that are stuck at younger life stages. This enables attachment needs to be filled in by the client’s own secure, compassionate inner relationship with his or her distressed emotional states. It also gives clients the self-worth-enhancing experience of being able to regulate their own affect.

Skills You’ll Gain

You’ll learn how to:

  • Use language that supports the client in being in relationship with his or her emotional states instead of being flooded by them
  • Give your clients “homework” in the form of simple, practical emotional regulation practices to use during the week
  • Strengthen your own calm presence with your clients even when you are tired or stressed

And you’ll also learn:

  • Why it isn’t necessary for your client to recover specific memories in order to heal from past trauma – and what is needed instead
  • A definition of trauma that is sensible, hopeful, and process-oriented, based on Eugene Gendlin’s idea that “the organism can fill in what was missing”
  • How you can help your client grow in her/his ability to acknowledge, be with, and keep company with emotional states

Three weekly themes – Each introduces one or two new skills you can use to help your clients move beyond trauma.

Number 1

Cultivating Self-in-Presence for Your Clients – and Yourself

Learn how to support your clients in becoming an “inner healing environment” for their own traumatized younger selves… and learn ways to enhance your own healing presence.

Emotional Fragility and Low Self-Esteem – How We Help

Explore the challenges and difficulties of working with clients whose emotional states are easily triggered, and discover specific ways to help such clients experience a stronger sense of self.

Healing Trauma by Cultivating Self-in-Presence

Practice a process for healing trauma through cultivating the client’s healing relationship with the “younger self” who has remained frozen in the trauma state… until now.

About Your Teacher

Ann Weiser Cornell, PhD, is the co-developer (with Barbara McGavin) of Inner Relationship Focusing. Ann learned Focusing in 1972 from its developer, Eugene Gendlin, and was his close friend and colleague to the end of his life.

Ann is the author of several definitive books on Focusing, including Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change, The Power of Focusing, and The Radical Acceptance of Everything. She has taught Inner Relationship Focusing around the world since 1980, and is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Today she is internationally recognized as one of the leading innovators and theoreticians of Focusing.

When our clients are present and willing to turn toward the hurt places inside (and also to turn toward the Protectors who are nervous about this process), something new can happen. They learn to supply the presence and empathy that was missing when the trauma occurred. The change is not instant… but over time, powerful change can happen.


― Ann Weiser Cornell

Do You Want to Help Clients Cultivate a Strong Inner Self?

Help them become an ‘inner environment’ for change…

Beyond Trauma Course

Beyond Trauma: Helping Your Clients Cultivate Inner Presence On-Demand Course

$147.00

Three-Week On-Demand Video Course
Unlimited, lifetime access
Taught by Ann Weiser Cornell

Note: This is an interactive video course. Video was recorded during an actual live course and has been edited. Sound quality may vary.

This course meets the qualifications for 4 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. Focusing Resources, CAMFT Approved CE Provider #62524.

Focusing Resources is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Focusing Resources maintains responsibility for this course and its content.

There is a $25 administrative fee for CE Credits. Records of Completion are awarded at the end of the course upon completion of all requirements and the course evaluation. (If you don’t want CE Credits but would like a Record of Completion, the $25 fee does still apply.)

Eligibility for CE Credits requires 100% completion of the course and all assignments.

How This Course Works

Learn Wherever You Like

This course is accessible by computer, tablet, or smart phone. If you can connect to the internet, you can connect to this course!

Be Supported In Your Process!

You won’t be going it alone! You’ll have access to a forum to chat with other students, plus access to Ann for parts where you might feel stuck.

Available at Your Convenience!

You can move through this course as quickly or slowly as you like. You’ll also have lifetime access to the material, so you can revisit it anytime

Interactive Materials

This course includes a beautiful PDF workbook to help you integrate your learning. There will also be checkpoints during the course to check-in on your progress.

What People Are Saying About Beyond Trauma

Something just clicked into place...

“Ann applied the Focusing method to trauma states in a very clear way. She explained the appearance and symptoms of trauma on one hand and the use of Self-in-Presence on the other. This made a circle of understanding seem to close for me as if something just clicked into place. As a result of the Beyond Trauma course, I now have more knowledge and a sense of security around how to use Focusing in my practice with trauma clients.”
Michaela Jerusalem

Helps clients be emotionally and psychologically wiser 

“Inner Relationship Focusing just clicks with me; it allows me to focus with the client on whatever is most present for them, and at the same time teach them a way of being with their inner experiences that will help them be emotionally and psychologically wiser and more astute. And learning this approach from Ann was wonderful; she is a great teacher, and I think her attention to facilitative language is invaluable.”
Carol Ivan
Clinical Psychologist, Brookfield, IL

So elegant and full of nuance

“If it weren’t for the methods Ann developed in Inner Relationship Focusing, my work with clients and the skills I’m teaching my therapy trainees would not be anywhere near as rich. Every other system of teaching Focusing that I know of is like a simple melody, but Ann’s is like a Brahms or Debussy piano concerto, something so elegant and full of nuance that I can practice and use and teach it my entire life and still find new things about it. It is also so adaptable, and helps me to help people reach such deep places within themselves.

Ann is the person who “carried forward” Gendlin’s early discoveries the best, back when he concentrated on bringing his insights to the moment-to-moment process of psychotherapy. The concept of the Inner Relationship also probably captures more perfectly than anything else the neuroscience of what is going on, the re-wiring of the connections between different nuclei of the brain.”
Larry Letich
Individual & Couples Therapist, Greater Washington Center for Focusing and Focusing-Oriented Therapy, Frederick, Md.

Got Questions? We’ve Got Your Answers…

The great news is that you can take this course whenever it works for you. You get content when you want it, plus lifetime access. No stressing out about being somewhere on time. Way less pressure to move through the material at a pace that might not fit for you. The lessons are compact and set up so that you can do them in small bites or big chunks depending on your learning style and your availability.

No. You’ll have access to the first Module of the course as soon as you sign up. Every 7 days, you’ll get a new module released to you. We provide the content in ‘small bites’ like this because taking time to practice the material and move forward in small, consistent steps supports you in making the kinds of changes you really want to make.

Sure. The classroom is virtual. You’ll get access to the course platform right after registering. Materials are provided via a combination of video, audio slideshows, and written content to cover a variety of learning styles. There is a forum so you can connect with other program participants and be part of a dynamic learning community. And you get lifetime access to all of it. Go through it once and come back anytime you need some extra support to handle life!

Thanks for asking. Each course is licensed to a single user – you! While we can’t authorize you to share the materials, we’d love to have your friend participate too. Please feel free to invite them to sign up too!

Your course comes with a 100% money-back guarantee. If you let us know within 60 days of your purchase that we didn’t deliver what we said we would, just ask and we’ll cheerfully refund the full course fee.

We are always open to discussing experiences with our courses that didn’t work for you or didn’t go the way you expected. Depending on the circumstances, you may want to email your course instructor, the staff member in charge of your course, or Ann Weiser Cornell. Email addresses for all these people will be supplied on registration. We will work with you to find a way to meet your needs.

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