Trauma, Developmental Disruption, and Attachment

Bringing Attachment Theory and Somatic Developmental Psychology Together. USABP Members contact [email protected] for your $45 dollar discount code.

Course Description

This course will cover the basics of focusing as developed by Gendlin, including experiential guidance so you can bring the essence of this gentle yet powerful practice into your body. Dr. Leslie Ellis will describe how focusing opens the doorway to implicit embodied knowledge, including early relational patterns and trauma. She will then describe how dreams and focusing powerfully combine to unearth information about what are bodies are trying to tell us NOW. According to Gendlin, dreams bring “just what you need” and focusing is a way to capture their helpful, “life-forward” essence.

Main points of the course:

  • An overview and experience of focusing
  • Understanding focusing as a doorway to implicit knowing
  • How focusing helps unearth and tend to trauma in the body
  • An introduction to focusing-oriented dreamwork
  • Finding the ‘help’ or life force in the dream
  • Experiential practice or demo of focusing dreamwork
  • Questions and discussion


Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Describe the history and basics steps of Gendlin’s focusing
  • Understand and begin to apply focusing as a way to access embodied implicit memory
  • Describe how focusing naturally moves a person forward in an organic way
  • Understand how to use focusing to work with a dream (or daydream)
  • Understand how to find the helpful ‘life-forward’ energy in dreams


Course and CEU Fees:

This Course is available for $45. For an additional $15 processing fee you can receive 2 CE credits for this course. USABP Members do not have pay the $45 dollar course fee. Use your member discount code during the check out process. Contact [email protected] for your member discount code. Members do have to pay the CE processing fee. NOT A MEMBER and WANT THE DISCOUNT? Join us.

Your Instructor


​Raja Selvam, PhD
​Raja Selvam, PhD

Raja Selvam, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist (California, PSY30233) is a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE) professional trauma trainings and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) (www.integralsomaticpsychology.com). ISP is a complementary body and energy-based modality informed by Western and Eastern psychology and the emerging neuroscience of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior. It’s aim is to improve outcomes and shorten treatment times in all therapies including body-oriented modalities through building a greater capacity for a wider range of emotions. It is taught in over a dozen countries in North and South Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Dr. Selvam’s eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of Postural Integration, Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Polarity Therapy, body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), Affective Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, Yoga, and Advaita Vedanta.


Frequently Asked Questions


When does the course start and finish?
The course starts now and never ends! It is a completely self-paced online course - you decide when you start and when you finish.
How long do I have access to the course?
How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to this course for as long as you like - across any and all devices you own.
What if I am unhappy with the course?
We would never want you to be unhappy! If you are unsatisfied with your purchase, contact us in the first 30 days and we will give you a full refund.

Get started now!