Tara Miller
Gonzaga University, Canada
Biography
What if there was a way to treat traumatic and overwhelming experiences without flooding the patient, re-living the trauma, or re-firing up previously wired neural pathways? When you can’t outthink your own thoughts no matter how smart or well-read you are, when changing behaviour doesn’t change how you feel, when traditional therapy feels infantilizing and artificial and at least ineffective.
Where talk therapy and CBT has been gold standard historically, they have also been limited in allowing a complete healing of overwhelming events. Often causing dissociation or creating long term dependency on therapy for a supportive relationship that is symptom focused but never resolved. Now, advances in neuroscience and what we know about how the brain is impacted by trauma and overwhelm, and how it heals from it, have created a new science in mental health treatment. One that allows a patient to feel in control and doesn’t toss them into sympathetic arousal. Developed over the past 20 years as informed by pioneers in the field including Allan Schore, Peter Levine, Robert Scaer, Robert Post, Stephen Porges, and more...SRT takes the best of brain science combined with knowledge of the nervous system as governed by the reptilian brain to create a non-overwhelming, mind-body integrated therapeutic modality that creates new neural pathways in the brain to rebuild resilience and overall health.
My presentation includes examples from my published case study on treating complex trauma with SRT along with the fundamentals of SRT and applicable uses and considerations for not just therapists, first responders, medical personnel, body workers, and others in alternative medicine practices. Learning how to track activation in the nervous system as well as how to dissipate it using the felt sense - the language of the nervous system - are translated into understandable metaphors and applications of mind-body integration that are non-overwhelming and effective. SRT focuses on healing the root cause of activation, completing thwarted fight/flight/freeze cycles, and can concurrently resolve developmental ruptures. With this we see expedited improvements, improved resiliency, shorter need for therapeutic interventions, and a greater resolution of symptoms through the act of creating new neural pathways that wire and fire together in resourced ways that help the patient move beyond their history of events or diagnoses, often with a reduction or eliminated need for medication, and into fullness and joy in their lives. SRT has promising results in treating not just complex trauma and concurrent disorders, but also, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, autoimmune disease, asthma/allergies, medical/dental procedures, insomnia, migraine, motor vehicle accidents, relational trauma/assault and more.