• Do you know how to match the modulation of your presence to the emerging capacities for supporting your patients turn towards the unbearable, the unpalatable, the unthinkable, the unsayable, the unknowable?
• How might you differentiate between the skills of attunement and therapeutic presence?
• How does the use of language in DBR promote processing differing shock-based states and the core pain of aloneness?
• Do you feel lost for words or use too many words?

In DBR therapeutic presence is not what the therapist does, but rather how the therapist signals their state of ‘being’ to enhance temporal continuity, spatial stability and vertical alignment. This requires precise brainstem-to-brainstem synchronous communications in which proximity and presence become crucial modulators for processing.

In this workshop, we shall explore how rhythm and resonance, especially through vocal tone and vocalisation, become a form of neural pacing. How and when we vocalise is as important as what we say.  We shall also be exploring how therapeutic presence in DBR can be readily expressed through the dynamic use of silence and words.

This workshop explores how we can use language that is simple, concrete and sensory tethered with an emphasis on the use of short but spacious verbal markers that acknowledge micro-shifts without directing them. You will learn to use language with developmental precision without activating interpretive, affective or narrative systems.

In DBR language functions as a scaffold for midbrain processing rather than as a tool for interpretation.    Timing and language operate together as a synchronous system and the words we use require we modulate our proximity and presence at the edges of emerging experience.