Heavy life,
enactive light
With great pleasure we announce our upcoming international conference on an enactive approach to trauma and dissociation. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first ever.
The main objective of the conference is to start building a firm bridge between the domains of trauma and dissociation, and the enactive approach to mind and life. Both fields have for the major part existed in separation of each other to date.
The enactive approach to mind and life is an effort to overcome classic and problematic dualities. The dichotomies include body versus mind, organism versus environment, and cognition versus affect. In enactive lights, we are embodied agents that are intimately and meaningfully intertwined with our environment. To exist and to experience and know ourselves, other selves, and our world more generally, we must act. Like any other organism, we must do something. What we ongoingly do is to bring forth or enact our self, our world, and our self-world couplings. It is in this frame that we make meaning.
The enactive approach is starting to gain solid ground in psychology and philosophy. Yet to date very few proponents of the approach apply the enactive principles to the field of trauma/dissociation. Few seem to realize that doing so can greatly support and enrich the perspective. Similarly, few involved in the trauma/dissociation field seem to see how the enactive approach allows a better understanding and treatment of traumatized individuals.
What may the bridge look like?
Confronted with a violating reality, traumatized individuals commonly enact and reenact two or more dissociative embodied and environmentally embedded agents. Guided by particular longings, as each dissociative agent they enact a particular self-world. For example, some dissociative agents mainly enact and reenact a self that long and strives to life a traumatizing umwelt without realizing that this self and this umwelt in fact belong to past realities. Other dissociative agents in turn enact a different self-world. They long and strive to live daily life, while avoiding to integrate and realize the dissociative agents that typically enact and reenact traumatic experiences and relationships. Treatment, then, involves overcoming the dissociation that started as a creative effort to live a heavy life and that over time became a source of unresolved sorrow.
Early-Bird Ticket Prices
Tickets Conference + eAcademy special
Conference Ticket
+ 6 months membership: €950 p.p.
Get the most out of the conference experience by familiarising yourself with the enactive approach to trauma via the eAcademy.
The eAcademy is Ellert Nijenhuis’ interactive online platform with monthly gatherings. All activities are recorded so you can watch them (again) when it suits you.
Benefits of the eAcademy include:
⎷ access to join interactive online seminars, question & answer sessions, members-only supervisions and other eAcademy activities
⎷ access to all recordings of previous online activities consisting of 50+ hours video material
⎷ discount on selected supervisions with our Associates
Tickets & Discounts
Ticket price: €890 p.p.
We offer additional discounts to:
eAcademy members
Professionals who are based in a “low(er) income” country
Professionals who are based in the US or Canada
All tickets grant you:
⎷ access to all activities of the conference as described on this website
⎷ lunch and refreshments during breaks on all three Conference days
⎷ digital certification of participation
VIP Tickets
VIP ticket: €950 p.p.
Limited availability
Additional VIP benefits include:
Preferential seating; indicate which seat you’d like us to reserve for you at all activities of the conference.
Lunch with the keynote speakers on one day of the conference.
Seamless check-in; you do not need to present yourself at the hostess’ table. You will find your personalised welcome package, complimentary bottle of wine and fruit basket in your hotel room upon arrival, provided you’ve booked your accommodation at The Irish College.
One month complimentary eAcademy membership.
Where
Leuven, Belgium
The Irish College, Janseniusstraat 1, 3000 Leuven.
The Irish College boasts 59 hotels rooms.
visit The Irish College website