Lissa Rankin – Healing The Trauma That Surrounds Medical Syndromes

Lissa Rankin – Healing The Trauma That Surrounds Medical Syndromes

Who will benefit from this workshop?

• You have a basic understanding of Internal Family Systems (IFS);
• You sense that there’s more to optimal health outcomes than just drugs, surgeries, diet, exercise, avoiding toxic substances, and following doctor’s orders;
• You’re interested in learning to facilitate an IFS-informed approach to parts that might be using the body as a trailhead for underlying traumas in need of healing as part of a comprehensive medical treatment plan;
• ​You’re in the helping professions working with anyone who identifies as being in recovery from illness, injury, or trauma (therapists, doctors, nurses, complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, health coaches, life coaches, yoga instructors, etc.) and you’re interested in making your practice more trauma-informed and safer for patients and clients;
• ​You or a loved one is sick and you’re interested in learning this material for self-help purposes or to support a loved one who might benefit from this trauma-informed approach to illness.

This workshop will offer experiential exercises to help you learn to listen to the parts that are affecting your body and to those who know how to heal it and increase your access to healing Self energy. Learning Objectives

• Understand the science behind trauma-informed medicine- how trauma predisposes the body to illness and the physiology and neurobiology of how treating your traumas might cure disease.
• Learn an IFS-informed approach to working with the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself from Mind Over Medicine so you can help your patients, clients, yourself, or your loved ones optimize your chance for the best medical outcome.
• Witness Dick Schwartz performing an IFS demo on the parts of someone with a physical illness.
• ​Learn the basics of how to work with protectors that might be impacting the body somatically until the exiles they protect are unburdened.
• ​Have the opportunity to do some Self-healing work with your own physical symptoms using IFS and the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself.
• ​Learn an IFS practice to work with somatic symptoms in yourself or help clients and patients get insight into their own protector parts.

• The scientific evidence linking childhood trauma to both pediatric and adult onset disease is ironclad at this point, as evidenced by the mountain of data that came out of the CDC/ Kaiser Permanente study on Adverse Childhood Experiences in the 1990’s and the Harvard Mastery of Stress study from the 1950’s.
• The cutting edge of trauma-informed medicine focuses on whether effective trauma treatment might actually reverse diseases we might think of as “incurable” or even “terminal.” Early evidence and countless anecdotes suggest it might.
• The trauma healing modality Internal Family Systems (IFS) has proven effective with medical syndromes (Shaddick et al., 2013), and more research is ongoing. Dick Schwartz’s years of clinical practice and available research supports that IFS can have an effect on medical syndromes. “Parts” might be using the body to communicate about unhealed traumas or unmet needs and these “parts” can affect our bodies when they have no other route to get through to us. IFS can help those parts realize they don’t have to do that.
• IFS founder and family therapist Dick Schwartz initially developed IFS as an effective treatment for hard-to-treat eating disorders, but it has since been proven to be an evidence-based treatment for many mental illnesses, as well as rheumatoid arthritis.
• Doctor, author, and trauma-informed medicine teacher Lissa Rankin, MD was on a decade-long quest to research her seventh book Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest To Unravel The Mysteries of Healing when she bumped into the IFS model. Anecdote after anecdote from IFS therapists and their clients who were treating their traumas using IFS revealed a curious phenomenon: when people’s traumas were getting treated with this cutting-edge treatment, at least sometimes, their mystery illnesses and chronic symptoms seemed to be improving.
• Lissa’s deep dive into IFS was a complete game-changer in her search for answers to why some people seem to have radical remissions from seemingly “incurable” or “terminal” illnesses- and others don’t. This insight led her to write a revised edition of Mind Over Medicine, the New York Times bestseller published in 35 languages that was the centerpiece for a PBS special and several TEDx talks. She now trains physicians and therapists in the Whole Health Medicine Institute, using an IFS-informed approach to helping patients and clinicians optimize their chances of becoming “miracle prone.”

Lissa Rankin and Dick Schwartz co-taught the sold-out IFS As Medical Treatment workshop at the last in-person IFS Conference and are expanding on what was taught there to learn an IFS-informed approach to working with the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself from Mind Over Medicine so you can help your patients, clients, yourself, or your loved ones optimize your chance for the best medical outcome.