eiseEducation

We are beginning to flesh out the story that Janet began telling some time ago: that Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), as we now understand it, like many other disorders, emerges from disruptions in interpersonal regulation and integration. For all of us, the development of basic capacities—for rest and regulation; playful, lively, and loving connection to self and others; speaking and moving with safety, comfort, delight, flow, and grace; and internal and external coordination and collaboration—depends on “good enough” early care, followed by ongoing maintenance and restoration. Even when these capacities are established, they and our consciousness can falter under the impact of covert or overt loss, trauma, or overwhelming stress.

To re-establish rhythms, connections, and coordination, we must follow the threads of experience and memory, engaging in shared work of weaving, darning, repairing, and growing integration together. We are searching for rehabilitation—in its original sense, from habere, “to hold”—and for ways of coming home (ngurra) to ourselves and to one another. The layered connections within and between us are what support this work.

This webinar will explore a number of these threads and layers, tracing and weaving them to support new connections. We will consider attachment organisation and disorganisation, drawing on markers from the Adult Attachment Interview, Communicative Musicality, dyadic indicators from the CARE-Index, and contemporary approaches to embodiment. These ideas will be grounded in clinical vignettes, transcripts, and research from collaborative WPP studies with people experiencing Functional Neurological Disorder and complex trauma.

The Conversational Model provides a strong and secure base for this work. It emerges from an integrative dialogue between developmental psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, psychodynamic theory, and common-factors practice, and adopts an open, evolving theoretical stance. Throughout, we will also weave in a fundamental gift from Indigenous Australian knowledge systems: attention to the mother–child connection—Yothu Yindi in Yolŋu, and nganajungu yagu – nganajungu mayu in Wajarri (a Yamatji language from Western Australia)—as part of a Bothways approach to healing.

So much of what we need, do, and long for rests in a heartfelt, layered, and woven presence with one another—painfully absent when missing, and profoundly restorative when offered. A little poetry and music will also accompany this human conversation of healing, song, and dance.