Diane Poole Heller, Dare 3 Neurobiology of loving relationships

Integrating essence

The Neurobiology of Loving Relationships
Discover the latest research in Neuroscience that enhances our capacity for deepening intimacy. The foundation for establishing healthy relationships relies on secure attachment skills, increasing your sensitivity for contingency.
According to Allan Schore, the regulatory function of the brain is experience- dependent and he says that, as an infant, our Mother IS our whole environment. In this module we will learn to understand how the early patterns of implicit memory – which is pre-verbal, sub-psychological, and non-conceptual – build grooves in our brain that affect our attachment styles; and how we can break such ingrained associative patterns in the established neural network, by bringing in new and different experiences in the Here and Now.

The role of the Therapist
Healing into wholeness takes the active participation of at least one other brain, mind, and body to repair past injuries – and that can be accomplished through a one-to-one therapeutic relationship, or one that is intimate and loving. In exploring the “age and stage” development of the right hemisphere and prefrontal cortex in childhood, we will discover how the presence of a loving caregiver can stimulate certain hormones, which will help support our growing capacity for social engagement and pleasure in all of our relationships. Love and connection lead to brain integration throughout our entire life span.

Healing with Neuroscience
In this training we will also bring deeper focus to the role of Neuroscience in restoring the brain's natural attunement to Secure Attachment. Our brain is a social brain – it is primed for connection, not isolation, and its innate quality of plasticity gives it the ability to re-establish, reveal and expand one’s intrinsic healthy attachment system.
The training will approach topics specific to neuroscience, such as myelination, synaptogenesis, neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, brain pruning and priming, and implicit / explicit memory functions. You will gain useful knowledge that will greatly benefit precise clinical application in the relational field, facilitating actual brain integration.
You will learn to use valuable tools to identify the specific Attachment orientations of your clients, such as observing their Narrative styles, or using interactive resources like the Schemas questionnaire, an organized test and process revealing projections of expected outcomes that intensely affect our relationships and our perspective of the world.
Together we will look into the power of mastering Brain-to-Brain / Body-to-Body interactive regulation that starts with mother and infant, and evolves with partner-to-partner or therapist-and-client relationships.

We will also learn repair of mis-attunements, promoting safety and protection through healing techniques that facilitate true mutuality and help us cross the bridge back to Secure Attachment, including:
• intergenerational focus to counter the effects of role reversal
• the practice of mindfulness
• contact nutrition through nourishing gaze, prosody in the voice or safe
touch.

Based on the contributions of Mary Ainsworth, Ellyn Bader, John Bowlby, John Gottman, Louise Kaplan, Heinz Kohut, Mary Main, Dan Siegel, Marion Solomon, Daniel Stern, Stan Tatkin, Donald W. Winnicott, Jeff Young and countless others, this work embodies a compassionate, integrative understanding of how to help heal the dys-regulation of the Autonomic Nervous System as well as Attachment Disruptions.