Trauma and Memory Systems
Dr Nick Bendit
About this course
Much of long-term psychotherapy with clients experiencing BPD, dissociative disorders, chronic depression and other complex presentations involves working with emotionally traumatic experiences originating in early childhood. These disruptive and disorganising experiences can be held within early memory systems that are not readily available for conscious reflection—yet they can continue to profoundly organise emotional experience, relationships and behaviour. This presents an important challenge for psychotherapy.
If traumatic experience cannot simply be accessed through conscious remembering, how does therapy reach—and ultimately modify—these early memory systems? In this clinically focused webinar, Dr Nick Bendit explores the relationship between trauma, attachment and the development of memory systems, and considers what this means for therapeutic change.
Drawing on contemporary psychotherapy approaches, Nick examines how psychodynamic therapies and third-wave cognitive behavioural models have evolved in response to early attachment trauma. He then introduces principles from the Conversational Model of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy to illustrate how psychotherapy can work with and modify traumatic memory systems.
Deepen Your Understanding of Traumatic Memory
Discover how early attachment trauma is held in memory systems—and what this means for effective psychotherapy
THE COURSE CURRICULUM
Deepen Your Understanding of Traumatic Memory.
Learn What Creates Therapeutic Change
Self-paced module: 5 lessons · 2 hours video · slides · quiz · 90 day access · instant 2-hour CPD certificate.
Understand Traumatic Memory. Deepen Your Practice
Discover How Traumatic Memory Shapes the Present
About Dr Nick Bendit
Dr Nick Bendit is a staff specialist psychiatrist working at the Centre for Psychotherapy (Newcastle), an outpatient public psychotherapy unit offering long-term psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and eating disorders. He treats patients with BPD using the Conversational Model and DBT, as well as supervising mental health clinicians in the management of patients with BPD. He is the current Director of Training of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists (ANZAP). He has published articles on mechanisms of change in psychotherapy, reviewing the effectiveness of DBT in borderline personality disorder, and mechanisms of chronic suicidal thoughts in patients with borderline personality disorder. He has been a co-author on the most recent Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines on deliberate self harm in borderline personality disorder (RANZCP, 2016). He is the co-author of the second-largest randomised clinical trial of the effectiveness of psychotherapy in BPD, comparing DBT and the Conversational Model (Walton et al., 2020).