Healing Workshop
Why a Healing Workshop?
Many health problems are caused in part by difficult life experiences or trauma. People who have been affected by these experiences often do not seek out healing support because they struggle with guilt, shame, and feelings of unworthiness. Those affected by difficult life experiences or trauma:
Often move on with life while silently struggling to hold things together, but their experiences continue to affect their ability to function day-to-day.
May rely on substance dependence to help overcome their emotional pain.
Need a place to go for healing support where they can feel safe, accepted, and understood. Emotional healing and recovery can only take place within the context of supportive relationships.
The Healing Workshop helps to overcome these barriers to healing by providing the support, knowledge, and skills needed to restore a sense of well-being.
What is the Healing Workshop?
The purpose of the Healing Workshop is to help you understand the effects of your experiences and learn new healing skills and self-care practices.
We provide a safe and supportive environment of peers and trained facilitators to help build new relationships and create a sense of acceptance and belonging.
The workshop uses short videos and exercises followed by group discussions. You always have the choice to participate or just observe.
We do not discuss personal trauma details in the group.
The workshop is a ten-week program that meets for one 2-hour session per week (20-hours total).
Group size is limited to 10-12 people to facilitate individual participation and group interaction.
Workshop is for participants age 18 and older.
The first part of the workshop is focused on gaining understanding and learning key healing principles.
The second part is focused on developing a personal healing practice, and includes gentle, mindful movement.
core beliefs
The Healing Workshop is based on the following core beliefs:
You're Not Alone.
It's Not Your Fault. You're a Good Person.
What You Feel is Normal...
...given what you have experienced.
You Can Learn Skills to Help Yourself Feel Better.
Healing is also Normal...
...with understanding, support, and practice.
The workshop is focused on creating new, supportive relationships and empowering survivors to manage their own healing and recovery with greater understanding and new healing skills and self-care practices.
“To hear someone tell me ‘I was a good person’ and ‘it wasn’t my fault’ seems like such a simple thing, but it was the simple thing I needed to hear. Processing those words, giving them meaning, allowed me to open to the healing message that is so lovingly given in this workshop. ”
Source Materials
The Healing Workshop is based on healing principles and practices identified by leaders in the trauma recovery field, such as Judith Herman, M.D. (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror) and Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma).
In her book, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman states:
"The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation."
The Healing Workshop, then, is focused on creating new, supportive relationships and empowering survivors to direct their own recovery with greater understanding and new healing skills and self-care practices.
The book, For the Love of Katlyn: Principles and Practices for a Better Life, by Frank Alix, is used as source material for workshop exercises and discussion. The book teaches universal principles to create a better life, centered on love and kindness, acceptance, understanding, gratitude, and humility. The book also teaches daily practices that can be used to facilitate healing based on the author's own experience with trauma recovery.
Access To Healing Workshop
The Healing Workshop material is now being offered for free at Katlyn’s Healing Center in an online Healing Support Program. The ten-week Program will be available beginning in November 2018 and will provide weekly video sessions for use by individuals or groups. If you are interested in accessing the Healing Workshop material, please review the presentation on the Healing Support Program, available at Katlyn’s Healing Center, for further information.