847-869-1500 
Becoming a Right Brain Whisperer: How Understanding and Interpreting Enactment can Promote Safety in Psychotherapy
Virtual
Zoom
Colleagues & Conversations @ Yellowbrick
Becoming a Right Brain Whisperer: How Understanding and Interpreting Enactment can Promote Safety in Psychotherapy
Presented by David H. Baron, MD
November 19, 2024 | 6pm-7:30pm CST
Conference Description:
Working in an intensive treatment setting with young adults who have serious dysregulation of mood, sense of self, and behavior can be a risky business. “Contained” or locked treatment facilities that rely significantly on externally imposed rules and structure—such as locked doors—can sometimes fail to accomplish more than driving the patient’s troubles underground through deception, false compliance, and “waiting out” the confinement. Skills-based therapies can have a significant impact on some patients and some behaviors but often fail to show their effects when the patient has had significant trauma leading to dissociated self-states, i.e., a disconnection either from any awareness of what drives their problematic behaviors or if they are aware cognitively, no emotional connection to this awareness.
The use of enactment theory (Schore, Ginot, others) as a basis for psychotherapeutic intervention and interpretation involves the therapist’s ongoing efforts toward awareness of shared, “right-brain-communicated” nonverbal affective experiences, that form a representation of the patient’s implicit early life trauma-associated affects. Offering an understanding of these experiences as an interpretation in the moment can powerfully impact the patient’s understanding thus creating an opportunity for safer attachment, which is crucial to any change in treatment (Winnicott).
This talk will attempt to describe and elucidate the above technique as applied at Yellowbrick, an intensive multi-modal and multidisciplinary treatment program for Emerging Adults, and how this approach can achieve a co-created sense of safety in an otherwise potentially terrifying context of risk.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn about nonverbal communication between the emotional/right brain experience of the patient and that of the therapist
- Learn to recognize this process as and when it happens
- Understand the technique of enactment interpretation as a therapeutic tool, and how it expands the range of emotional safety within the therapeutic relationship.
Presenter
David H. Baron, MD
Medical Director, Yellowbrick
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David Baron, MD, was born and raised in part in New York City, and later in Livingston, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in Psychology (magna cum laude) and M.D. degrees from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Baron went on to complete his psychiatry residency at Tufts/New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Dr. Baron is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Rosalind Franklin University/The Chicago Medical School. In that role, he supervised psychiatric residents in their community psychiatry rotation for 15 years. During that time he also served as Administrative Psychiatrist, and Interim Director of Mental Health Services, for the DuPage County Health Department, supervising 50 psychiatrists and over 200 other clinical staff.
Dr. Baron’s clinical and administrative experience and practice since completing his training in 1989 has been within a developmental neurobiological understanding of mental illness. Over the course of his career, he has worked to understand mind and brain as different languages for the same essential human experience, including the complexity of neuroscience, the evolutionary basis of the human brain and behavior, and the deeply personal subjective experience of every individual.
Dr. Baron is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He served on the Ethics Committee of the Illinois Psychiatric Society as a member from 2001 to 2006, and as Chairman from 2006 to 2011.
Dr. Baron resides in Evanston. He enjoys travel, golf and cooking. He is a father to one emerging adult son.
Questions:
Call Tracy Ashworth 847-869-1500 ext. 207
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Yellowbrick collaborates with adolescents and emerging adults, ages 16-30's, their families and participating professionals toward the development and implementation of a strategic “Life Plan.” An integrative, multi-specialty consultation clarifies strengths, limitations, and risks, and defines motivations, goals and choices.
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847-869-1500