Building Emotional Literacy in Clinical Practice

Many clients arrive in our offices with profound disruptions in their capacity to recognize, name, and safely experience emotion—a legacy of early relational trauma, insecure attachment, or developmental adversity that shapes every aspect of the therapeutic encounter.

This training provides you with an integrated neuroscience-informed framework for cultivating emotional literacy as a cornerstone of trauma treatment. Drawing on polyvagal theory, attachment research, and developmental neurobiology, you will examine how emotional awareness develops through early co-regulatory experiences, how trauma disrupts this developmental trajectory, and how therapeutic relationships can serve as powerful agents of neuroplastic change. Dr. Patti Ashley - psychologist with over 40 years of clinical experience working with complex trauma - will guide you through the neurophysiology of shame, the autonomic foundations of emotional safety, and the clinical application of right-brain therapeutic processes that support genuine transformation.

Through this training, you will:

• Refine your clinical assessment skills by recognizing how emotional literacy develops in early childhood, identifying the neurophysiological signatures of attachment trauma and shame, and distinguishing between autonomic states (dorsal vagal immobilization, sympathetic mobilization, and ventral vagal social engagement) that inform treatment planning.

• Integrate polyvagal theory into your therapeutic approach using the Three Rs framework—Recognizing autonomic states, Respecting adaptive survival responses, and Regulating through co-regulation—to create holding environments where clients can safely explore emotional experience without retraumatization.

• Implement attachment-informed interventions tailored to specific relational patterns (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized), utilizing strategies that range from playful engagement to environmental soothing, while addressing shame-based defenses including grandiosity, perfectionism, isolation, and people-pleasing.

• Strengthen your therapeutic presence through right-brain empathy, mirror neuron activation, and embodied attunement that models the co-regulatory capacity many trauma survivors never experienced, supporting the development of new neural pathways through sustained relational connection.

This training will equip you with evidence-based assessment tools and intervention strategies grounded in contemporary neuroscience and attachment research. By refining your capacity to work with neuroception, facilitate ventral vagal engagement, and support clients in moving from implicit shame responses to explicit emotional awareness, you will enhance therapeutic alliance and create the relational conditions necessary for lasting change in clients presenting with complex developmental trauma, affect dysregulation, and disrupted emotional literacy.