Bonnie Badenoch Interview

David Van Nuys

 

 

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Dr Dave:  And I am delighted to have you here I must say. Let me start out by saying how very impressed I am by your book Being a Brain-Wise Therapist, and accompanying the book your Brain-Savvy Therapist’s Workbook. Each one of these is a tour de force and the fact that you have written these two volumes … I can’t tell you how impressed I am.

Bonnie: Well, thank you!

Dr Dave:  You have mastered an incredible amount of information, but I think in your workbook you have created a path for other therapists to follow and get some of this extensive information about the brain under their own belt.

Bonnie: Well, that was certainly my wish, with the second book in particular, a kind of a pathway from the beginning of therapy through transition … but also to provide, in the first six chapters of the book, a pathway for us to pursue our own healing as well.

Dr Dave: Yes. You know the old joke “How do you eat an elephant?” and the punchline is of course “One bite at a time!” … I have to ask you, how were you able to master all this information about the brain and then how to apply it to psychotherapy?

Bonnie: Well, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be in Dan Siegel’s study group for five years, and what I discovered by being part of that wonderful group was that Dan went over the same information again and again because I don’t think you get any of this in one pass, or maybe even ten, but over the year of being there it began to not only get into a left-hemisphere understanding but it began to really change how I saw the world—it began to become more embodied. And so I think that was hugely helpful to have the repetition…

 

Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, LMFT, is an in-the-trenches therapist, supervisor, teacher and author who has spent the last ten years integrating the discoveries of neuroscience into the art of therapy. She co-founded the nonprofit agency, Nurturing the Heart with the Brain in Mind (Portland, OR) in 2008, and was founder and former executive director of the Center for Hope and Healing (Irvine, CA) for 17 years. Her work as a therapist has focused on helping trauma survivors and those with significant attachment wounds reshape their neural landscape to support a life of meaning and resilience. Bonnie currently teaches at Portland State University in the interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) certificate program and speaks internationally about applying IPNB principles both personally and professionally. She takes particular joy in offering longer term immersion training for therapists and others in the healthcare professions at her home in the Pacific Northwest because these experiences support personal transformation through embodiment of the principles of interpersonal neurobiology. Her conviction that wisdom about the relational brain can transform human experience led to the publication of Being a Brain-Wise Therapist: A Practical Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology in the Norton Interpersonal Neurobiology Series in 2008 and The Brain-Savvy Therapist’s Workbook in 2011. In 2013, she and Susan Gantt co-edited and contributed to a new book, The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Group Psychotherapy and Group Process. Therapists are saying that these books fill the gap between science and practice with clarity, compassion, and heart.
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