Janina Fisher – Brain to Brain: Interpersonal Neurobiology & The Traumatic Transference

Psychotherapy is a complex, shifting, neurobiological exchange or “dyadic dance” between two human beings. How we “dance” is determined by unconscious body and emotional memories of our early attachment experiences that have determined patterns of eye contact, proximity or distance, autonomic arousal, internal sense of safety or danger, trust and mistrust. When their early experience includes neglect and abuse, our clients find themselves driven by conflicting wishes and fears of relationship. While wishing to trust or tolerate disappointment and misattunement in the therapy, powerful emotional memories of threat, humiliation, hurt, and betrayal invade the therapeutic relationship. Rather than making things better, the therapist’s expressions of empathy or attempts to process what happened in the transference often seem to make things worse.

Interpersonal neurobiology offers therapists a new window into how we can change the post-traumatic “dance” without the need to process empathic failures and misattunements intellectually. Maintaining a smooth dance rhythm with our clients requires knowing how to monitor and regulate our own nervous systems and somatic experience, as well as theirs. Utilizing insights gleaned from the field of interpersonal neurobiology and from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-centered talking therapy for attachment and trauma, we can learn to facilitate moments of attunement and connection even with our most challenging clients.