Neuroscience for Clinicians: Powerful Brain-Centric Interventions to Help Your Clients Overcome Anxiety, Trauma, Substance Abuse and Depression

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Jennifer Sweeton, PsyD, MS, MA Related seminars and products

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Dr. Jennifer Sweeton is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and internationally-recognized expert on trauma, anxiety, and the neuroscience of mental health. Dr. Sweeton has been practicing EMDR for nearly a decade and has treated a variety of populations using EMDR and other memory reconsolidation approaches, including combat veterans, individuals with PTSD and complex trauma, and those suffering from treatment-resistant anxiety. She completed her doctoral training at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and the National Center for PTSD. Additionally, she holds a master’s degrees in affective neuroscience from Stanford University, and studied behavioral genetics at Harvard University.

Dr. Sweeton resides in the greater Kansas City area, where she owns a group private practice, Kansas City Mental Health Associates. She is a past president of the Oklahoma Psychological Association and holds adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. She is the president of the Greater Kansas City Psychological Association. Dr. Sweeton offers psychological services to clients in Oklahoma, Kansas, and internationally, and is a sought-after trauma and neuroscience expert who has trained thousands of mental health professionals in her workshops.

 

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Jennifer Sweeton is in private practice. She has an employment relationship with the Oklahoma City VAMC. Dr. Sweeton receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.  She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.

Non-financial: Jennifer Sweeton has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.
 

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Objectives

1. Communicate the findings regarding neuroscientific research on the interplay of mental health and key nervous system structures, functions and pathways and recognize how understanding neurological processes can help mental health professionals improve clinical outcomes.
2. Develop a case conceptualization that draws upon neuropsychological principles and can help inform therapeutic methods and goals with clients suffering from anxiety and depression.
3. Analyze how CBT, meditation and other treatment approaches can strengthen or weaken neural pathways regulating stress and reward, and connect this information to your utilization of therapeutic interventions to reduce stress and manage addiction.
4. Maximize capacity for change in clients with neuro-informed explanations that shift the way they feel about themselves and engage them in the therapeutic process.
5. Evaluate how the science of memory malleability impacts clients working through trauma and elucidate how an understanding of implicit memory can be used clinically to identify rigid and maladaptive mental schemas, bring them into conscious awareness, and create new emotional and behavioral habits.
6. Teach clients to identify the brain’s Default Mode Network and Task Mode Network and instruct them on mindfulness, meditation, and somatic techniques that can help them switch between these circuits, redirect their attention, and reduce the stress response.

Outline

• Tour through the Brain: What clinicians need to know from neurons to structures, to pathways, to networks
  • See brain structures in 3-D
  • How the brain processes top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal
  • The interplay of mental health and key nervous system structures, functions, and pathways
  • Work with implicit and explicit memories
  • How key pathways inform clinical interventions:
    • Pain Pathway
    • Reward Pathway
    • Fear-Stress Pathway
• Nervous System Networks and the Social Brain: We are wired for attunement
  • Default Mode (DMN) and Task Mode Networks (TMN)
  • Healing attachment
  • Activate mirror neurons bottom-up
• Neuroplasticity and Neurogenesis: How the brain can change
  • Three timeframes for change
  • Neuroplasticity at the synapse
  • How to foster neuroplasticity in clients
  • Neuroplasticity in action: Exercise your brain!
• Practice Interventions for Healing: Bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal
  • Sensory Awareness
  • Meditation and Mindfulness
  • Body Work
  • Unconscious and the DMN
  • The Mind-Body Link
• Integrate the Brain into Treatments
  • Stress
    • How stress alters the nervous system
    • Calm the stress/fear pathway
    • Develop alert/relaxed attention for better coping
  • Trauma
    • Foster confidence with yoga
    • Malleability of memories and clinical implications for treating trauma
    • Reconsolidate implicit memories
  • Anxiety
    • The anxious brain reaction
    • Work top down/ bottom up/ horizontally
    • Calm the limbic system bottom up with movement
    • Soothe the insula through meditative sensory awareness
    • Deconstruct sensations mindfully
  • Substance Abuse
    • Brain areas involved in addictions
    • Rewire the reward pathway
    • Detach from pleasure and pain
    • Prefrontal connections and judgment
  • Depression
  • The depressed brain pattern
  • Effects of yoga and meditation on the nervous system
  • Regulate the limbic system: the prefrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus and mindfulness
  • Unify real and ideal
  • Foster joyful relationship through mirror neurons
  • Develop compassion and gratitude

• 6 Principles for Incorporating the Brain into your Therapy

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