Friday, October 17, 2025

Therapeutic Nurturing: Restoring the Missing Piece in Clinical Practice

(One-day Live Training with CHRISTINE FORNER, MSW, RSW)

Learn how to activate evolved brain networks in therapy, embody presence as intervention, and reclaim what has been missing in modern clinical practice.

Date & Time: Friday, October 17, 2025 — 9:30 AM–4:30 PM MT
Format: Live Online Training

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Why Therapeutic Nurturing Matters

Despite extensive training, many clinicians sense that something vital is missing from modern therapy — the human warmth that heals.

For centuries, nurturing has been devalued or pathologized, reduced to caregiving tasks rather than recognized as a core biological survival system. As a result, clinical education under-trains practitioners in the science of nurturing and overlooks the evolved brain systems that regulate safety, connection, and healing.

NEED THE FULL ACADEMIC OVERVIEW?

(Perfect for university or CE approval submissions)

REGISTRATION & PRICING

Early Bird DISCOUNT: $349.99 (until October 10)
General Registration (to Oct 17): $399.99
Student: $249.99

COURSE INFORMATION DOWNLOAD

REGISTRATION

The Limits of Traditional Clinical Frameworks

Most dominant frameworks — CBT, psychodynamic, humanistic, medical — were built inside historically narrow paradigms. Even systemic and trauma-informed approaches, though broader, often miss a critical component of human healing.

These Frameworks Miss the Broader Evolutionary Context

Current approaches tend to focus on thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms, rarely addressing:

How humans are biologically wired for safety and co-regulation
How chronic fear and disrupted attachment activate emergency cascade defenses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse, submission)
How dissociation extends far beyond PTSD

The Brain’s Has Hidden Blueprints for Safety

Key networks that evolved to support nurturing — prefrontal cortex, insula, anterior cingulate, hippocampus, amygdala — remain essential to recovery.

Therapeutic Nurturing directly engages these evolved networks, regulating fear, restoring safety, and meeting unmet needs.

The Bridge to an Evolved Understanding

Clinicians need a bridge from the models they were taught to an expanded understanding that integrates evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and the lived reality of trauma.

Therapeutic Nurturing: Restoring the Missing Piece in Clinical Practice offers that bridge.

Unlike protocol-driven techniques, it’s not an add-on — it’s the missing foundation that strengthens any modality by aligning with how humans evolved to heal.

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Why Attend

Join Christine in Therapeutic Nurturing to gain a new lens for therapeutic change that aligns with human biology, fills gaps left by dominant models, and restores the original blueprint for healing. You’ll learn to activate evolved networks in therapy and embody presence as a primary intervention.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this training, you will be able to:

Describe the evolutionary basis of nurturing as a neurobiological survival system.
Identify the brain networks (PFC, ACC, insula, DMN, Salience Network) that support nurturing and therapeutic presence.
Explain how chronic fear and disrupted nurturing lead to emergency cascade defenses and dissociation beyond PTSD.
Differentiate cultural/patriarchal views of caregiving from the evolved, biologically-driven process of nurturing.
Apply principles of therapeutic nurturing to enhance co-regulation and healing in trauma and dissociation.
Recognize signs of renurturing syndrome and implement pacing strategies to prevent retraumatization.

Who Should Attend

Psychologists, social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists
Trauma specialists and dissociation-informed clinicians
Mental-health professionals seeking to deepen clinical presence
Practitioners integrating neuroscience, attachment, and evolution in practice

ABOUT CHRISTINE FORNER

Christine Forner, BA, BSW, MSW, RSW—known as The Fierce Nurturer—is a trauma therapist and international educator specializing in dissociation, mindfulness, and securefulness. A protector of the vulnerable, she has over 35 years of clinical experience helping clinicians and communities understand the central role of safety and nurturing in healing trauma.

Christine is the author of Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations (Routledge, 2017) and the forthcoming The Craving: How Prolonged Fear Shaped Humanity. She has introduced pioneering frameworks such as Securefulness, Primal Isolation Anguish, and Renurturing Syndrome, which have reshaped how therapists approach dissociation care and the art of nurturing presence. A past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), Christine continues to teach, write, and consult worldwide, guiding clinicians to embody presence, attunement, and secure care.

What people have to say…

Dissociation 101 was a radical and powerful course with ideas that could, and should, create a sea change in contemporary mental health practices. Christine Forner has created a course that celebrates hope, healing, nurturing and love. She challenges ideas that dissociation is to be ignored, at best, and disbelieved at worst. She challenges ideas that the therapist job is to challenge and dissuade when, most simply, it is to love. I encourage anyone who works with trauma, which is most of us, to begin your journey of reconceptualizing the treatment of trauma here, with Christine.

Michelle Kennedy, M.C., R. Psych; Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
I am deeply grateful for everything that I learned in this course, both as a person on a human healing journey and as a clinician.

J.G., Clinician
The Dissociation 101 course provided compelling information that was eye-opening and incredibly helpful to any clinical mental health practitioner. Christine is passionate about the content and shares her decades-long experience in this packed course. It provided historical and theoretical information as well as clinical applications and signs/symptoms. I highly recommend this course to clinicians looking to expand their knowledge of trauma treatment and understanding dissociation and systemic issues that impact treatment on a deeper level.

Jennifer, Clinical Director/Registered Social Worker; Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of learning about dissociation from a master clinician and teacher, Christine Forner. Christine’s approach is both wide and specific. She captures the history of what has been written about dissociation and dives deep into its historical inaccuracies, including the Freudian pivot from naming abuse to locating the problems solely within the victim. Her teaching is passionate, compassionate, comprehensive and understandable. It helped me see dissociation in a new way and gave me a new stance with which to approach my clients.

Matt Fried,MA, Ph.D.,MFA
Lic. Psychologist