Janina Fisher: Integrating somatic approaches to trauma with ‘parts’ language

Trauma often inculcates fears of body awareness and incapacitating shame that complicate the use of somatic approaches. As Janina Fisher explored how to help such clients with befriending their emotional and body responses to trauma, she began to develop a way of helping them to understand themselves as fragmented and to become more aware of their ‘parts’ or states. With a body perspective and parts language, she found that they could better observe their emotional and somatic experience without the fear that the language of the body evoked. Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is the Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, an EMDRIA-approved EMDR Consultant, and a former instructor, Harvard Medical School.  An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015) and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation (2017) and the forthcoming book, Working with the Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma (in press).  See website. Published February 2019. See other conversation with Janina Fisher.