Course Description
In traumatic experiences people are often pushed beyond their mental and physical capacity. The impact of common stress responses can lead to issues with cognitive processing and memory encoding that are the foundation of cognitive-based therapeutic interventions (Van der Kolk, 2016). The focus on more cerebral approaches and even exposure based approaches can exacerbate feelings of helplessness or shame as clients struggle to integrate the mind and body.
Somatic Experiencing and other body-oriented approaches have been shown to be an effective addition to work with PTSD and prolonged trauma response experiences (Kuhfuß M, Maldei T, Hetmanek A, Baumann N. (2021). These interventions use bottom-up processing to help clients gradually reduce the activation associated with a traumatic event. Through resourcing and body awareness, clients go through a “discharge process” that significantly reduces the impact of traumatic memories and symptoms (Brom et al. 2017) .
In this CEU therapists will learn how to integrate somatic tools in the treatment of sexual trauma. This approach can offer a safer and more integrated approach to trauma treatment allowing survivors to reconnect with pleasure, safety, and self-agency in their lives.
Learning Objectives
- Identify what happens in the body during & after Sexual Trauma
- Demonstrate how to integrate somatic healing techniques into a trauma-informed therapeutic approach
- Identify factors that affect somatic healing from Sexual Trauma
- Describe at least 3 Somatic Techniques for the treatment of Sexual Trauma
Your instructor
Khumo Masege (she/her) is a New York Licensed Therapist and a Certified Holistic Sexuality Educator who provides somatic trauma and sexuality coaching, education and consulting as the CEO of KM Healing & Consulting based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Khumo takes an intersectional, decolonized, sex-positiveand trauma-informed approachin her clinical and educational spaces.
As an individual and relationship clinician, she specializes in working with QTBIPOC folks of the diaspora navigating identity exploration after cultural and sexual trauma, depression, anxiety, and relationship issues. She provides a monthly free support space for folks who cannot afford therapy and supports clinicians around the world in decolonizing their sexual health practice through her monthly workshop titled Decolonizing Sex in the Clinical Space.
Khumo makes use of Somatic Experiencing, Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems and Emotion Focused Therapy and prioritizes the creation of a collaborative, compassionate and playful healing space.
