Immersive relational neuroscience training

Overview:

This data-driven training explores the impact of trauma on the nervous system and highlights the importance of attuned therapeutic presence. Grounded in interpersonal neurobiology, this course offers comprehensive clinical applications for the practice of relational neuroscience as participants learn practical strategies to support connection, integration, and regulation in their clients. Through experiential and applied frameworks, this course equips clinicians to create safe, transformative therapeutic experiences that promote lasting intra and interpersonal change for clinicians and clients. 

Discover how trauma shapes the nervous system and how relational neuroscience can guide healing in therapy. This training offers practical tools and insights to help clinicians foster connection, regulation, and integration with their clients. Learn to bring presence, attunement, and evidence-informed strategies into every session, creating meaningful and lasting change.

Course Descriptions and Learning Objectives 

1. Understand Trauma and Implications for the Nervous System

• Describe how trauma affects the nervous system, attachment, and relational capacity
• Recognize the neurobiological underpinnings of dysregulation, hyper- and hypo-arousal, and relational disconnection

2. Increase Insight and Awareness of Therapists’ Lived Experience 

• Explore therapists’ implicit and explicit factors of presence 
• Elective and non-elective factors of identity
• Professional identity formation

3. Explore Integrative Practices 

• Sandtray exercises, non-dominant hand drawing, and collage work
• Prosodic vocalizations, indigenous drumming, and rhythms 

4. Enhance Therapeutic Presence

• Cultivate clinician attunement, presence, and embodied awareness in clinical practice
• Tenants of relational attunement to foster trust, connection and safety

5. Promote Connection and Integration

• Implement techniques for co-regulation, attunement, and integration
• Explore adaptive coping strategies, and rupture and repair sequencing in trauma-affected clients

6. Apply Relational Neuroscience to Clinical Practice

• Apply experiential exercises to integrate neuroscience into practice
• Evaluate and adjust clinical strategies to facilitate client progress

Specifications

This course is a year-long immersive study of the application of Interpersonal Neurobiology referred to as relational neuroscience. This course is based on the seminal research of Daniel J. Siegel, Ph.D. and Bonnie Badenoch, Ph.D. and is designed to support professional counselors and therapists in deepening their therapeutic presence, improving nervous system literacy, providing conceptual clarity, and developing applied skill in working with trauma, attachment, and nervous system regulation from an neuroscientific perspective. 

Relational neuroscience offers a crucial connection for clinicians between neurobiology and lived human experience, emphasizing that healing occurs not in isolation, but through safe, attuned relationship.

Clinical presentations of developmental trauma, chronic stress, dissociation, and relational injury are increasing. This immersive study is intended to support a more embodied, ethical, and effective therapeutic practice grounded in both science and human-to-human connection.

Immersive Course Design 

The immersive study will unfold over twelve months and include a combination of:

• Didactic study of relational neuroscience literature and contemporary research
• Ongoing reflective practice and self-observation
• Clinical application and case conceptualization through a nervous system lens
• Experiential learning focused on embodiment, presence, and relational safety
• Integration periods to support consolidation and ethical application

This structure allows learning to occur gradually and organically, supporting depth rather than performance-based mastery.

Emphasis will be placed on noticing the therapist’s internal experience as data, including somatic cues, affective shifts, and relational responses with opportunities for personal and group reflections.