COURSE 9 OF 12 · SPRING SEASON
Experiential Approaches
to Attachment Trauma
Recovery and Strengthening the Inner
Voice
Experiential Approaches
to Attachment Trauma
Recovery and Strengthening the Inner
Voice
Experiential Approaches
to Attachment Trauma
Recovery and Strengthening the Inner
Voice
Helping clients move from self-silencing to clear, grounded, and embodied self-expression.
Some clients go quiet, over-explain, or lose track of what they feel the moment a partner reacts. This course treats silence as a learned strategy, not an absence of feeling, and gives you experiential tools to help clients hear their inner voice and express it with clarity.
3.0 CE Contact Hours
(NYS) LCAT + LMHC
Self-Study
About this course
This continuing education course explores experiential approaches for helping adults impacted by attachment trauma reconnect with and strengthen the inner voice, particularly when self-expression becomes difficult within intimate relationships. Participants will examine how criticism, dismissal, shame, relational conditioning, and
attachment-based protective strategies can contribute to self-silencing, emotional shutdown, over-explaining, and difficulty trusting one’s own feelings and needs.
Using an attachment-informed framework, clinicians will learn to help clients distinguish fearful or protective inner messages from more grounded intuitive truths, understand silence as a learned strategy rather than an absence of feeling, and recognize how hidden needs and emotions may initially emerge through sensation, image, metaphor, and creative expression. Somatic awareness, parts-based reflection, expressive arts, and guided experiential practices are used to support greater inner coherence, self-trust, discernment, and authentic communication.
How this course follows the SEED Framework
Across three lectures and an experiential art activities, this course moves through every step of the SEED Framework, so you experience the process yourself before you guide clients through it.
S – Soulful Inquiry
Introduces the inner voice as an inner frequency with many channels, and asks: Which inner voices feel fearful, urgent, or protective, and which feel steadier, wiser, or more intuitive? An Inner Voice self-assessment helps clients find where they lose contact with their truth.
E – Exploration
In The Body Speaks, clients map where emotionally evocative words land in the body, noticing sensation, color, shape, and texture. The course frames silence as a learned protection rather than an absence of feeling, and explores how the hidden voice often speaks symbolically first.
E – Expression
Revealing What’s Hidden uses white oil pastel and watercolor resist to let hidden needs and messages surface on the page: What did the art reveal that I did not expect? What message wants to be honored, even if it is not ready to be spoken?
D – Deep Receiving
Clients name the limiting beliefs that keep their voice quiet, ask whose voice each belief sounds like and what it has protected, then reframe it through compassion and soulful inquiry and anchor the new belief with EFT tapping. My voice is worthy of expression.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
OBJECTIVE 1
Identify at least three attachment-related protective responses that may interfere with a client’s access to and expression of emotional truth, including self-silencing, emotional withdrawal,
over-explaining, urgency, or conflicting internal messages.
OBJECTIVE 2
Differentiate protective inner voices from more grounded, intuitive, or self-led responses by
identifying differences in their emotional function, tone, urgency, and relationship to fear,
needs, and self-trust.
OBJECTIVE 3
Apply at least two experiential interventions using somatic awareness, symbolic expression, or expressive arts to help clients identify hidden emotional material and translate internal experience into more conscious, discerning self-expression.
This is for you...
This is for practitioners who…
✓ Work with adults who struggle to identify or express what they feel, want, or need in intimate relationships.
✓ Support clients who alternate between shutting down, staying silent, over-explaining, escalating, or trying excessively hard to be understood.
✓ Want to help clients distinguish attachment activation and protective strategies from intuition and grounded self-trust.
✓ Are interested in integrating attachment theory with parts-informed work, somatic awareness, symbolism, and expressive arts.
✓ Want experiential interventions for helping clients reclaim authentic self-expression without forcing vulnerability before sufficient internal safety has developed.
This will help your clients…
✓ Recognize when silence, withdrawal, pleasing, urgency, or over-explaining may be serving an attachment-based protective function.
✓ Develop greater awareness of the different internal “voices” associated with fear, protection, unmet needs, intuition, creativity, and grounded self-leadership.
✓ Strengthen the ability to remain connected to their own
emotional truth when another person disagrees, withdraws, or has a strong reaction.
✓ Discover needs, desires, boundaries, and emotional truths that may have been difficult to access through words alone.
✓ Move toward clearer, more compassionate self-expression by learning to listen inward before deciding what needs to be spoken, processed privately, acted upon, or given more time.
Tools to use in practice
A self-assessment, based on the lesson topics
Guided visualization and expressive arts exercise
A story-based scripted EFT Tapping Practice
Downloadable guidebook and lesson summaries
TESTIMONIALS
What practitioners are saying...
"Invigorates my practice."
"As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with over a decade of experience, finding continuing education that not only meets my licensure requirements but also invigorates my practice is rare. The courses offered by Briana’s continuing education school have been so helpful. Her psycho-spiritual approach deeply resonates with my work, and I've been able to integrate the concepts into therapy with profound results."
- Lena M. LMHC
"A rich tapestry of insight."
"As an art therapist, I'm always seeking ways to deepen my skill set and offer more to my clients. The workshops and seminars at Briana's school are exceptional; each course is a rich tapestry of insight, practical skill-building, and transformative knowledge."
-Michelle C. LCAT
"Fills a gap in the field."
"Holding licenses in both clinical social work and art therapy, I find Briana's continuing education offerings to be unparalleled in their depth and relevance. Her unique blend of traditional psychotherapy with spiritual and creative modalities fills a gap in our field."
- Patricia M. LCSW, LCAT
ENROLLMENT
Choose Your Plan
SINGLE COURSE
$97
Experiential Approaches
to Attachment Trauma
Recovery and
Strengthening the Inner
Voice
3 Contact Hours for LCATs and LMHCs in New York State
Self-Study
NO REFUNDS
BEST VALUE
THE spring SEASON
$194
Courses 1, 2 & 3 · buy two, get one free
9 Contact Hours for LCATs and LMHCs in New York State
Self-Study
NO REFUNDS
About your instructor
My name is Briana MacWilliam, and I’m a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT), Board Certified Registered Art Therapist (ATR-BC), educator, and the founder of Soul-Centered Security®.
I didn’t come to this work because my own relationships were easy. Divorce, grief, and heartbreak brought me face to face with the same attachment patterns I was helping my clients understand. What helped was building a deeper relationship with my body, emotions, creativity, and spirituality.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve served more than 6,000 clients and students across inpatient psychiatry, community mental health, higher education, and private practice. My work weaves together attachment theory, creative arts therapy, embodied practice, and spiritual growth.
I also have additional training in trauma-informed somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), hypnotherapy, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. And I am the author of Secure in the Spark: A Spiritual Path to Heal Attachment Wounds, available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
My courses for practitioners share the tools and creative processes that supported my own growth, and the healing of the people I’ve had the privilege of serving.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to take the 12-part courses in order? No. Each course stands alone and is designed to be entered at any point. That said, we recommend starting with Course 1 if you're new.
How will I receive my certificate? After completing your course work, there will be a learning evaluation, instructor evaluation, and webform to complete. After submitting your webform, your certificate will automatically be emailed to you.
How long will I have access to the course? Your purchase includes lifetime access, including to any updates we might make in the future. If a course is retired in the future, we will email you the digital files to download to your own device.
Which boards approve these courses? Briana MacWilliam, Inc. is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists (#CAT-0014) and licensed mental health counselors (#MHC-0224). The ATCB has also accepted our courses in the past, because of our state approval, however, we recommend contacting the ATCB directly if you have a concern.
What if I have further questions? You can contact us at [email protected].
Start where your clients are stuck.
PROVIDER INFORMATION
Briana MacWilliam, Inc. is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists; #CAT-0014, and is also an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors; #MHC-0224.
PLEASE NOTE:
While some subject areas overlap in education, a course that includes art therapy directives does not qualify a counselor to practice art therapy, and similarly an art therapist is not qualified to practice as a counselor, without proper licensing.
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