​A Career in Trauma Treatment and the Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) for PTSD and Complex PTSD

In this episode, Janina discusses her career in learning, treating, and teaching about PTSD and Complex PTSD. She discusses being inspired when hearing Judith Herman talk about how that the events in one’s life shape our experiences, as opposed to just being driven by childhood sexual fantasies as was the main viewpoint based on Freud’s work. She explained how the prevailing thought in treating trauma for decades has been that the client needed to tell the story of the trauma, but we have no research that proves that view. Instead, she proposes that the way to treat trauma is to change one’s relationship to the symptoms, rather than re-live the event. She discussed her experience working with Bessel Van Der Kolk, and how he encouraged her to teach about working with PTSD. Additionally, he encouraged all of his clinicians to be trained in a Somatic approach, which lead her to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training and to EMDR. She discussed her work and how she helps clients to engage their frontal lobes, the thinking brain, and works with clients as fragmented, incorporating Internal Family Systems and working from a Structural Dissociation perspective. We discussed how she treats suicidality in trauma clients as a part trying to protect the client from being overwhelmed by vulnerability. She discussed how her model, Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) is an integrative approach, incorporating parts work, EMDR, somatic, and Structural Dissociation, and she is training others in her model throughout the world. Finally, we discussed the clients’ experience in therapy and working with them where they are, as the client who has experienced trauma may not be able to “trust” the therapist enough to try something new.

Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist and a former instructor at the Harvard Medical School and former instructor at The Trauma Center, a research and treatment center founded by Bessel van der Kolk. She is known as an expert on the treatment of trauma, and has also been treating individuals, couples and families since 1980. She is past president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation, an EMDR International Association Credit Provider, and Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. Janina lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to the integration of the neurobiological research and newer trauma treatment paradigms into traditional therapeutic modalities. Janina is the author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017), Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021), and The Living Legacy Instructional Flip Chart (2022). She is best known for her work on integrating somatic interventions into trauma treatment, and the development of her approach Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), which one can be trained in by going to https://therapywisdom.com/healing-the-fragmented-selves/. You can learn more about Janina at her website, www.janinafisher.com.