News From Maggie Phillips, Ph.D.
June 2013

In This Issue
* Teleseminars & E-Courses
* Live Training Events
* News You Can Use -Dealing with a World of Hurt

     

 Maggie Phillips

Maggie Phillips, Ph.D.
2768 Darnby Dr.  
Oakland, CA  94611 USA
510-655-3843

reversingchronicpain.com 

 

 

  


June 19 2013 
Teleseminar

8th session on Freedom 

From Pain

 

June 27 2013
Teleseminar 
 
 

Pain, Trauma and Addiction

 

Sept.11-17 2013 
Live Event

South Africa

Intermediate Somatic Experiencing 

Certification

 

Sept. 21-22 2013
Live Event
France 

Finding the Energy to Heal: Learning What the Body Knows


Sept. 27 -28 2013
Live Event
Switzerland

Resolving Prenatal, Perinatal 

and Early Childhood Trama through Somatic Ego State Therapy


Sept 30-Oct 4 2013 
Live Event
Germany

Working with the Deep Self

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greetings! 

 

This is one of those times of year that nature expresses itself in sometimes wildly swinging polarities. I spent the end of May and first few days of June on the east coast of the US visiting family, friends, and making a presentation at the ACEP (Energy Psychology) conference, one of my favorites. The temperatures ranged from cold (10 degrees Celsius) to the mid-90's (35+ degrees Celsius). Our events this month hopefully will offer some support toward balancing bipolar experiences. The last of our 8 month Freedom From Pain webinar series with Peter Levine and me will be held on Wed, June 19, from 11 am - 12:30 pm Pacific. I have also decided to "fly solo" and present a master class webinar on Trauma, Pain, and Addiction on Thursday, June 27, from 9 am - 10:30 am Pacific. The News You Can Use article for this month is: "Dealing with a World of Hurt" (scroll down to 

find it).

 

Hope you enjoy a great month,

Maggie 

 

PS: To make the best use of our extensive calendar of events, click on the left panel to reach the information that interests you, or scroll down and read as much as you'd enjoy!

 

    
  
 
Teleseminars
 

  

We experienced a satisfying conclusion to our 3 part couples webinar series in our May 24 session with Bill O'Hanlon on Love is a Verb. I have to tell you, this is one of the most innovative series we've done, with three very different perspectives on working with couples. I personally enjoyed participating and received many emails with lots of positive feedback. To refresh your memory, the 3 sessions included: 
  1. Interpersonal Neurobiology and Couples Therapy: Working with the Brain in Mind with Bonnie Badenoch and me; 
  2. Bring Back that Loving Feeling: Practical Energy Psychology with Couples with Fred Gallo and me; 
  3. Love is a Verb: Using Action Talk and Action Methods to Solve Relationship Problems presented by Bill O'Hanlon and me. 

The information is so rich and the learning package such a value, we've decided to extend the deadline to purchase the package at a 10% reduction through midnight, Pacific time, June 20. When you register, you will receive access to 270 minutes of content-packed audio presentations that you can keep in your permanent library, power point handouts for two of the 3 sessions, 3 study guides, and the opportunity to purchase 3 edited transcripts and optional CEU's (6 for the series) at a small additional fee. 

 

But there's more! Each event also features these valuable bonuses

 

For the first event: Bonnie Badenoch's article on "Keeping Balanced with Couples" and the edited complete transcript with Kathy Kain and me on

Resilience and Self-Regulation in the Somatic Treatment of Early Trauma

For the second event with Fred Gallo: A 60 minute audio presentation with Dr. Bob Schwarz on Teaching Couples to PlayCreating Positive Energy and Deeper Connections, based on his new book We're No Fun Anymore; 

For the last event with Bill O'Hanlon: Access to a special video prepared by Bill that demonstrates his "Love is A Verb" approach and an additional set of power points. 

You will receive this exceptional learning program- Three Ways to Help Couples Create Lasting Love and Connection -as described above for less than the cost of a one day workshop and NONE of the additional costs for travel, accommodations, and other expenses. 

Don't delay. This special offer disappears on June 21st. Please order now!

Couples Series Only 10% off: Click Here
Couples Series with Highlights (Edited Transcripts) 10% off: Click Here
 

 

 

The eighth and last session of our Freedom From Pain webinar series takes place on Wednesday, June 19, from 11 am - 12:30 pm Pacific. During this session, Peter Levine and I will cover the following topics:
  • Methods for finding and developing states of resiliency;
  • How to meet the top 3 challenges of recovery from pain to promote ongoing transformation;
  • How to identify and work effectively with individual rhythms of recovery;
  • Ways of finding portals to the deep self;
  • New technology in the treatment of pain.
We will also follow-up on the previous clinical cases we have discussed during this course and welcome any further clinical questions or pain cases for consultation. Please send these directly to me at   mphillips@lmi.net

Since we are not providing individual transcripts for the Freedom From Pain series, if you would like to order the e-book we will compile from the transcripts, please click here now The e-book is available through midnight, June 19, when the 8 month series ends, and includes most of the highlights of the  8 weeks of material.

  

 

 

On Thursday, June 26, from 9 am - 10:30 am Pacific, I will present a Master Class webinar on Working Effectively with the Triple Challenges of Pain, Trauma, and Addiction. In the past weeks, I have received numerous requests to present more live events on my approaches to pain. My schedule is already bursting at the seams, BUT thanks to our recently updated technology, utilizing video web access, we can stage this event at minimal cost and maximum benefit for you. Here's what the webinar will cover:  
  • Why and how one in four chronic pain patients become addicted to pain medication; 
  • Why doctors continue to prescribe narcotic and opioid drugs even if signs of tolerance and dependency develop; 
  • How to prevent dependence and addiction if opioid drugs are used for pain management; 
  • How pain and trauma are intimately related and how either and both can lead to addiction; 
  • 5 natural methods that resolve the root causes of trauma, pain, and addiction; 
  • How to teach self-regulation to clients who struggle with trauma, pain, and/or addiction symptoms. 
This master class is appropriate for clients who suffer from pain, trauma, and/or addiction and who would benefit from the information as part of their treatment. The event is also designed for professionals who treat this challenging triple threat within medical, mental health, or alternative healing practice settings. To Register for Working Effectively with the Triple Challenges of Pain, Trauma, and Addiction please click on one of the links below:
 
Teleseminar Only $50: Click Here
Teleseminar with Highlights (Edited Transcripts) $65: Click Here

For more information about my books on pain, Reversing Chronic Pain, and Freedom From Pain (written with Peter Levine), visit here. 
 
Save the Dates: From November 4-9, I will be participating, along with some of the field's leading experts, in a very exciting 6-day online training event called Innovations in Trauma Therapy. Please check this newsletter each month, and look for specific informational emails to follow, in order to learn more about this unique program.
 
 

Live Events
 

For those of you who like to plan ahead, there are several live events I want to announce now for the fall.

 

First, in early September, I travel to Stellenbosch in South Africa to teach the Intermediate II/III level of the Somatic Experiencing certification training. I really enjoy teaching in this delightful university town in the middle of wine country near Cape Town. The dates are September 11, 12, 13, 14, (15 off), 16, 17. If you are eligible for this level of SE training, and would like to combine this work with a visit to South Africa, please contact the organizer Callie Hattingh. If you are in the area and would like to schedule SE sessions with me or with members of my team, those appointments are possible on September 10th, 15th or 18th. Please  email me directly.

 

Afterwards, I fly to Avignon, France where I am teaching a workshop Finding the Energy to Heal: Learning What the Body Knows on 21-22 September. Day one will present the healing principles and techniques of Energy Psychology to maximize resiliency and rejuvenation. Day Two features ways of working with somatic experience to help resolve inner conflicts related to various symptoms and re-regulate the nervous system through connection with the body's natural resources. Join me in this charming city in Provence for an early autumn learning adventure. For more information and registration, contact  Guillaume Poupard.

 

During the last weekend of September, 27-28th, I am presenting a very special workshop in Zurich, Switzerland on Resolving Prenatal, Perinatal, and Early Childhood Trauma through Somatic Ego-State Therapy.  This workshop will feature approaches to identify and resolve attachment and shock trauma in early life before, during, and after birth. We will also explore and practice somatic methods to find and work with ego states encoded in body experience to repair and complete childhood trauma experiences and strengthen the fully embodied self. Please contact Silvia Zanotta, co-director of Ego-State Therapy Switzerland, to learn more and to register.

 

In early October, I look forward to teaching a five day workshop in Germany with my dear friend, colleague, and trauma expert, Dr. Luise Reddeman. From Monday, 30 September through Friday, 4 October, we will be co-teaching Working with the Deep Self.  This is an intensive program designed to provide personal growth experiences as well as training for psychotherapists and has been a highly popular seminar that Luise and I have taught in two day and five day formats. Please contact Gunde Hartmann for more information and registration.

 

 

Email Communications

 

We've had a lot of difficulties lately with some of you registering for webinars or teleseminars and then not receiving the access instructions. This is very bizarre because our shopping cart uses the email addresses that you supply when you pay for the course or product. This is why we have now added a box at the very bottom of the order form that you MUST now check to indicate that you agree to terms and conditions before you can complete your order. The terms and conditions read:

 

"I confirm that I have added the following email addresses to my safe sender list so that I will receive all emails in regards to this order: mphillips@lmi.net,assistant@maggiephillipsphd.com, and Peggy@reversingchronicpain.com."

 

As shown in the example below:

 

We regret that we must ask you to take this extra step but the frustration involved in not reliably receiving information on time far outweighs the few seconds to add the three email addresses so we can reach you. All of us these days experience feeling "held hostage" by technology to some extent, and I believe this problem contributes to the cultural and global stress we are all aware of.

 

Please join us in taking these simple steps to avoid problems and reduce stress for all of us. If you have any questions about how to add to your safe sender list, please contact Peggy (not me), who now handles all customer service issues. This will insure that your request is handled promptly and professionally. Thanks for your support and attention to this detail.

  

 

News You Can Use
 

Dealing with a World of Hurt


had a rare opportunity last week to listen to an entire radio interview in my car (rare because I work at home so time spent commuting is as minimal as I can make it!). Terri Gross of US public radio's program "Fresh Air" was talking with Barry Meier about his just released e-book, "A World of Hurt: Fixing Pain Medicine's Biggest Mistake" (2013) (which can be ordered here).

 

I was captivated by their discussion for several reasons. First, Gross and Meier waded into the continuing controversy about the use of opioid medications with chronic pain patients. Second, their talk highlighted the challenges presented by efforts to treat persistent and chronic pain patients: Resistance to treatment with many therapies including prescription drugs; the fact that pain patients require much more time than other patients; and the often irritable, demanding, complaint-filled interactions that often ensue.

 

Meier, a veteran reporter for The New York Times and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is well-regarded for his reports on the intersections between business, medicine, and public health. He has exposed the dangers of various drugs and medical devices and interventions and was the first journalist to shed a national spotlight on the abuse of OxyContin.

 

 A World of Hurt traces the rise of opioids in the treatment of various pain conditions, dating from the mid-1980's. His Ground-breaking reports first released in 1986 by Dr. Russell Portenoy, pain specialist in New York, and his colleagues, suggested that not only could cancer patients use opioids for many months effectively without addiction, but so could patients suffering from more common pain conditions such as back pain and nerve damage. Although Portenoy's research was based on only 38 patients, it made a huge impact, serving as the impetus for a campaign known as the "War on Pain."

 

The War on Pain

 

Supported by pain experts as well as pharmaceutical companies, the goal of this effort was the eradication of pain as if it were a conquerable disease, instead of the multi-determined complexity that more recent research has revealed. However, the simplicity of the "War on Pain" movement made it both compassionate and compelling. Why should millions of pain patients "suffer without drugs because of outdated medical views and social stigmas?" (Meier, 2013, p. 49).

 

OxyContin became the "flagship drug" of the pain movement and it was heralded as a long-acting, time-release medication that was safer than faster-acting painkillers like Percocet. Prescribing doctors were easily reassured at this point, and the opioid painkiller boom was launched.

 

Meier points out that in 2012, doctors prescribed enough opiates to "keep every man, woman, and child in the U.S drugged round the clock for days."  (p. 65). More disturbing, prescription overdose deaths (second only to deaths in car accidents) are now at the root of the country's biggest public health disaster.

 

Recent findings have linked the long-term use of narcotic painkillers at high doses to many difficulties including addiction, psychological dependence, reduced sex drive, extreme lethargy and sleep apnea, as well as increased falls and fractures in the elderly. Meier and other have also emphasized that long-term use of prescription narcotics may even worsen pain conditions. Studies published by German researchers in 2013 concluded, for example, that when some long-term opioid users were weaned off the drugs, they reported less pain then when they were on medications. Other data has demonstrated that instead of helping workers injured on the job return to work, they have led to thousands of workers becoming disabled and chronically unemployed.

 

In the 1990's, professionals including Dr. Jane Ballantyne, now pain management specialist at the University of Washington, became convinced that the constant increase in dosages of narcotic medications due to tolerance (patient habituation to dosage leading to plateaus so that more medication is required to provide the same results) was far more damaging than originally believed.

 

Ballantyne published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, suggesting that ever-increasing doses of narcotics to overcome tolerance might actually alter the neurological system itself and create significant hypersensitivity to pain. In time, other physicians began to join her cause, which endeavored to undo some of the damage that the "War on Pain" had generated.

 

 

Addiction, Pain and Opiate Medication

 

Health care and insurance experts became concerned about the costs stemming from the large percentage of injured workers treated with high-dose opioids who did not return to the work force. The pendulum began to swing the other way among insurers who had originally been attracted to the low costs of treating chronic pain patients with medication when compared with pricy, multi-disciplinary alternatives.

 

It seems like the war on pain has come full circle.  Meier concludes that both government and insurers should be encouraged to pay for ways of treating pain that don't involve drugs such as physical therapy and other alternative approaches. Unfortunately, however, just this year, more insurance companies cut their coverage of physical therapy, massage therapy, acupuncture and other non-drug modalities.

 

A clear barrier to treating both pain and addiction, according to the latest issue of the American Psychological Association's Monitor, is the lag between science and practice. Author David Sheff, who will speak about his new book, Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy at APA's annual convention in August, found help for his meth-addicted son and learned first-hand about how our current system fails those in most need.

 

Sheff has chronicled the fact that even though effective treatment methods have been developed, few of them exist in existing treatment programs. The science-practice gap may be due to several factors-a long history of treating substance abuse as a moral failing, a health insurance industry that rarely covers addiction treatment in any depth, and a licensing system that does not consistently require addiction counselors to have adequate training.

 

Unfortunately, even when the best treatment programs and their use of "evidence-based methods" such as structured motivational interviewing and cognitive-behavioral approaches have been studied rigorously, the findings point to only a slight increase in retention rate in the programs, and the targeted non-drug treatments did not improve the outcomes for patients in the end.

 

 

The Third Challenge of Trauma

 

Perhaps part of the reason why extensive research has not been able to demonstrate efficacy in the area of pain and addiction is because neither research or treatments have pinpointed the root causes of these disorders. The role of childhood trauma in "driving" pain and addiction is gaining increasing scientific traction in linking various types of trauma to the underlying causes of pain and addiction.

 

Neuroscience has clarified that early life experience via attachment programs the brain and body for the environment it encounters. A relatively calm, nurturing environment will orient a child to thrive, while a stressful, chaotic, and agitating one tends to predispose it to connect with conditions of anxiety and unpredictability. The research is clear that early neglect, as well as early abuse, is an important part of this picture.

 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study involving 17,000 participants in California's Kaiser Permanente insurance program, found highly significant relationships between severe childhood stress and all types of addictions. Adverse childhood experiences measured in the ACE study included emotional, physical and sexual abuse, neglect, having a mentally ill or addicted parent, losing a parent to death or divorce, living in a house with domestic violence and having an incarcerated parent. Similarly, incidence of various types of trauma has been linked to the tendency to develop chronic pain. Individuals who have experienced significant trauma are more than 20-50% times more likely to suffer from chronic pain than those with a low incidence of trauma.

 

Further, the work of Stephen Porges and colleagues exploring the polyvagal nervous system sheds important life on even earlier trauma (view here). Porges has suggested that when a fetus or infant is in a state of chronic, global high activation (for example, the mother is in an abusive relationship and is chronically, highly stressed), the child absorbs the stress and unfortunately, the autonomic nervous system becomes chronically disregulated so that any approach to the infant, even if soothing or tender, becomes a threat and triggers further activation. This kind of situation can set the stage for the inability to bond, as well as various difficulties, which can lead to attachment trauma.

 

Yet the role of trauma is just now being addressed in the treatment of pain and addiction (Levine & Phillips, 2012).  Our Freedom From Pain program suggests simple skills that can be learned and practiced to help resolve this underlying traumatic stress that results in chronic hyperactivation (mobilizing of the sympathetic fight/flight responses that can manifest as anxiety, fear, and rage) as well as hypoactivation (turning on the dorsal vagal shutdown that results in numbing, dissociation, withdrawal, and other similar symptoms). We can teach clients to regulate both types of activation, which when long-standing can keep the individual outside of their window of experiential tolerance and therefore vulnerable to the use of drugs, alcohol, food, and other substances in their attempts to regulate their distress.

 

Depending on where the individual is "trapped" in autonomic disregulation, symptoms of pain and other health problems can ensue, such as anxiety that leads to irritable bowel, chronic muscle tensions and spasms, and panic at

tacks (hyperactivation) and chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, reflux, migraines, and low heart rate or blood pressure (Levine, 2012).

 

The good news is that there are ways to emphasize the use of medications at doses that will help to regulate pain and trauma symptoms while the individual learns skills that will maintain autonomic balance - in other words, the judicious use of medication in a program that emphasizes skills rather than pills.

 

If you'd like to learn more about this skill-based approach, please sign up now for my webinar Working Effectively with the Triple Challenges of Pain, Trauma, and Addiction on Thursday, June 26 from 9 am-10:30 am Pacific (time of the live event though as always we provide immediate replay and download if your schedule is in conflict). 
 

 

 

Thanks for your interest in my work and for your time to read this newsletter.

 

Enjoy the beginning of summer,

Maggie



It is my hope that you are interested in hearing from me periodically with news; however, if at any time, you wish to stop receiving emails from me, just use the options at the bottom of this email to instantly unsubscribe or send an email with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject to assistant@maggiephillipsphd.com (please allow 7 days for processing).