Event info

A Master class in Trauma Work
10 May 2019 - 09:00 - 17:00

This Master class in trauma work with Trauma Heart author Judy Crane, and Tom Pecca, focuses on strategies to help people break the Cycle of Trauma using effective, evidence-based strategies. It will be highly practical experience, enabling the opportunity for participants to practice in a simulated environment, exploring what is required of us and the roadblocks that get in the way of helping as a professional and career.

The most important thing is to mirror, model and witness and in that process, we can help to heal attachment disorder.

This is a thorough and holistic experience based on dyadic attachment and experiential training. The vital components will include somatic work, therapeutic alliance and trauma brain, underpinned by the attachment trauma model and its connection to trauma work. Participants will be asked to look at attachment styles and how dyadic attachment and the relationship with the individual contributes to the healing process. This in-depth opening into the vigorous modules in trauma training will give participants a greater understanding of what trauma work truly looks and feels like.

Master class participants are invited to attend the 2nd day - Body Mind and Spirit Recovery a practical and inspirational event giving additional support to developing insight and networks.

This Master class has 6 CPD hours.

Body, Mind and Spirit in Recovery
11 May 2019 - 09:00 - 14:00

This Body Mind and Spirit Recovery Event brings together influencers that will share their stories and experiences of developing ways to heal their traumas and to lead fulfilling lives in recovery, whilst giving back to those that are sill struggling. This event is for people in recovery and those that are working with people who have experienced trauma and want to be part of a supportive network of supporters.

SONY HALL
At 20 years old, Sonny Hall has modelling contracts in London, Milan and New York, has fronted a global Burberry campaign, has 119,000 Instagram followers and just published his first book of poetry. Yet just two years ago, his use of drugs and alcohol was so out of control that
he barely remembers three years of his life. Concerned friends staged an intervention, and after five months in rehab in Thailand, Sonny has begun to build a stellar career and is today deeply committed both to the recovery that has rebooted his life, and to sharing his story with searing honesty to help others.

Born into a household blighted by drugs, alcohol and violence, Sonny was adopted at the age of four, and although his new family was loving and stable, he never ceased to feel the overwhelming need to escape. He
started smoking weed at 12 and quickly progressed to drink, opiates and benzodiazepines with which he would routinely start his day. The loss of his birth mother to a heroin overdose when he was 17 looked for a moment to be a wake-up call, but in the end only sent his use spiralling.

In recovery himself since 1998, creative producer and rehab consultant Mark Herman was involved in the intervention that started Sonny’s treatment, and personally oversaw his early recovery, visiting him frequently in Thailand. ‘I’d always

felt that I had this fire and drive in me,’ says Sonny, ‘but I could never connect with it. Like me, Mark’s adopted, and even though he’d come from a background of alcoholism and addiction too, I saw that he’d done well for himself. That helped me find the will to get clean, to do the best I can for myself. The addict brain is very capable. While I was using, although I never had any money, I would find a way to get what I needed every day, whatever it took. Now I put all that energy into something good.’

Mark has remained a guiding presence in Sonny’s life and career ever since. ‘Once you can understand and accept that you’re an addict, and learn to look after yourself,’ he says,’you can start to learn how you can harness that character trait to your advantage. The creativity that Sonny’s recovery has unleashed in him is a perfect example. And now that at last we are waking up to the extent of the mental health challenges young people face, it’s
so important to help those with addiction to find and pursue that potential in themselves. Tough as it might seem, the benefits of rechannelling that energy will absolutely outweigh any number of nights out partying.’

After the hedonism of London, Sonny found his raw, rural surroundings in Thailand grounding in a way he had never experienced, and starting to exercise, rediscovered a passion for football he’d abandoned years before. More transformative still was the writing he started when his counsellors suggested he keep a journal. ‘I’d write what was in my head in a jumbled way, and then I realised I was kind of writing poetry. I started painting too, I found something meditative about both things, and started to find my own voice for the first time.’ Sonny has since written hundreds of poems, and turns to writing whenever he faces dark times.

Since completing rehab in September 2017, Sonny has lost three friends to overdoses, and another to suicide. ‘I get through with the tools I acquired since getting clean, the love and support I luckily have from my tribe, the ability I now have to talk honestly about how I feel, and the fellowship. And my writing, it lets me make sense of things. Either my dark thoughts are banished, or I become proud of them, because I’ve created something beautiful from them.’

In their 90-minute discussion in Reykjavik’s Harpa conference centre, Sonny and Mark will explore themes around young people, addiction and mental health including the crucial role of family and support networks in recovery, childhood trauma, suicide, specific pressures on young men, the impacts of social media and the challenges of being an addict in the fashion and entertainment industries.

VEIGA GRÉTARSDÓTTIR
Veiga Grétarsdóttir courageously in 2019 will become the first Icelandic woman takes on the battle against the strong arctic waves and circumnavigate Iceland’s coast, today she will take us on her life journey and how it has brought her to embarking on this incredible positive example of the body, mind and spirit connection. She will share her experience in recovery, from a traumatic childhood and adult life, to how she has victoriously come through, a literally, life changing experience. Four years ago, Veiga transitioned gender at 38 years old. She will tell us how this latest challenge is symbolic of the challenges that have occurred in her life and she will openly talk to us about how, before transitioning, she felt that suicide was the only way out from the unbearable experience in life. Veiga will offer the audience her insight, strength and hope on how to face the unimaginable and how she got to where she is today. Her documentary is called Against the Current filmed by Paul Sveinsson and Peter Einarsson. She will also be raising funds for Pieta, an organization which provides support and counselling to people dealing with suicidal thoughts and suffering from grief due to the loss of a loved one from suicide.

ÞORLÁKUR "TOLLI" MORTHENS
Tolli will talk on how meditation, wilderness and spiritual connection have enhanced his recovery and continues to ignite a passion for his work and the helping of others. He will share how to enhance positive qualities and transform fear into courage, delusion into wisdom and egocentrism into solidarity and will take us on an experiential journey showing us techniques of mindful meditation. Tolli will explain the powerful positive energy that can come from connecting with the outdoors, telling us of his experiences and offering metaphors on how experiential wilderness activities can help us make changes towards positive recovery. Tolli learned to overcome difficulties without ever ceasing to paint. He harnessed his addiction and transformed it into performance and an enthusiasm for his work.

HELGA ARNARDOTTIR

Helga will be asking, in what ways are you already good enough? Through exploring this question, she will show how Self-Compassion and acceptance is vital and what it means and how it helps nurture balanced mental health and open to life’s opportunities. She will talk about how being highly self-critical (the opposite of self-compassion) causes us stress and lowers our well-being. This opportunity will offer an increased knowledge of positive psychology and its methods for good mental health and well-being, and, increased knowledge of self-compassion.

Helga’s own personal struggles in her early years were the seed for her journey, today she is an expert in psychological well-being and positive psychology and is
a CMA-certified teacher in mindfulness. She teaches positive psychology at the University of Reykjavi´k, she also works as a counsellor at the Icelandic Mental Health Alliance (Geðhja´lp) and delivers seminars mostly for people struggling with addiction, unemployment or other challenges. Her work is about helping people develop ways increase their psychological wellbeing, i.e. through mindfulness, self-compassion and positive psychology interventions.