CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

Supporting Autistic Clients Through Transitions: Integrating Bioenergetic Analysis and Polyvagal Theory
Caio Zenero Pinheiro, PhD

This workshop invites participants to deepen their understanding of autism and other neurodivergent profiles through the embodied and relational lens of Bioenergetic Analysis, enriched by Polyvagal Theory and contemporary developmental neuroscience. Grounded in body-based clinical practice, the workshop will highlight how shifts in autonomic state and changes in context (such as school transitions, family demands, or therapeutic settings) shape communication, self-regulation, and connection. Simple, gentle experiential exercises will offer clinicians a felt sense of how to cultivate safety, predictability, and co-regulation in moments of transition, both in the therapy room and in daily life. Although the primary focus is on autistic experience, these deep forms of embodied care support regulation in people who are highly sensitive to change and can also be safely and meaningfully applied with neurotypical clients. 

Participants will be able to:

• Describe a contemporary, neurodiversity-affirming understanding of autism grounded in Bioenergetic Analysis and modern developmental neuroscience, and identify at least two implications of this perspective for clinical care.

• Identify at least three ways in which sensory, relational, and developmental transitions impact autonomic regulation and clinical presentation in autistic clients, and recognize at least three body-based indicators of emotional dysregulation during such transitions.

• Explain how the integration of Bioenergetic Analysis and Polyvagal Theory can guide clinical decision-making when supporting autistic clients through stressful or uncertain transitions.

• Implement at least two gentle, body-centered interventions from Bioenergetic Analysis that foster emotional safety, predictability, and co-regulation during transitional moments in therapy and in the client’s daily life.

Clinical Updates about Motherhood in Bioenergetics: The Female Body, Desire and Choice
Andréia Gobato, MA, CBT

Within the therapeutic setting, bodily experiences carry the marks of a history that often presupposes motherhood as “natural” or inevitable, influencing both the client’s discourse and the therapist’s listening. By bringing these themes into the field of bioenergetic practice, it becomes possible to refine our clinical perception so that we do not interpret as symptom or suffering the desire of a woman who chooses not to be a mother—or who experiences motherhood through other, more fluid and plural paths.

Through specific bodily interventions, we will explore how repression, social judgment, and the silent pact with the idea of motherhood as a source of completeness become tensions in the body—and how we can create space for more authentic and integrated experiences.

Participants will be able to:

• Describe how contemporary understandings of gender, choice, and embodied autonomy inform Bioenergetic Analysis, identifying at least two clinical implications of viewing motherhood as a possibility rather than a mandate.

• Identify at least three ways in which cultural, relational, and intergenerational expectations around the female body manifest somatically in therapeutic work, recognizing at least three body-based indicators of tension, inhibition, or adaptive compliance.

• Explain how updated readings of Alexander Lowen, combined with feminist and embodied perspectives, can guide clinical decision-making with women navigating desire, ambivalence, or non-motherhood, including at least two considerations for maintaining therapeutic neutrality and choice-centered care.

• Implement at least two gentle, body-centered interventions from Bioenergetic Analysis that help clients explore desire, boundaries, internal permission-giving, and embodied decision-making, fostering grounding, agency, and self-contact.

Titration in Bioenergetic Analysis
Paola Alessio, PhD, CBT

Movement is never just physical—it is a transition, a shift from one state to another. Every movement carries a cycle of contraction and expansion, holding and releasing. When we slow down and bring awareness to movement, we may encounter anxiety, fragmentation, and uncertainty. The act of becoming can feel overwhelming, especially when change threatens our sense of connection and continuity.

This workshop explores titration as a core self-regulating process, using movement as a primary avenue of exploration. Through the framework of a Bioenergetic movement group, participants will explore patterns of organization and disorganization in the body, learn to recognize shifts in activation, and discover how titration may support the capacity to stay present, connected, and embodied.

Through movement, presence, and pacing, participants will deepen their understanding of self-connection, self-expression, and the pulsatory processes that support autonomy and aliveness.

Participants will be able to:

• Identify at least two patterns of organization and disorganization as they emerge in the body during movement and transitions.

• Apply at least three titration techniques in relation to their own character organization 

• Report on at least three markers of the effectiveness of titrated movement, such as sense of presence, social engagement, and regulation of bodily activation.

Navigating the Encounter with Evil: Self and Other
Scott Baum, Ph.D. ABPP

One of the most difficult transitions in self-awareness is from a view of oneself as an innocent to a recognition of one’s negativity. This may be a developmental process of coming into the conscious knowledge that all people including oneself have negative, unpleasant, destructive aspects and impulses. It may be a destructuring of defenses constructed in response to threats to self-esteem coming from outside or inside oneself. And it might be a terrifying and excruciating encounter with one’s evil, emerging out of the identifications with perpetrators of harm in one’s life, and in reaction to that influence. In all cases facing the presence of negative and destructive elements in oneself necessitates acknowledging and becoming accountable for those aspects and their expression. This workshop will focus on that transition into self-awareness especially as it manifests in a psychotherapy process, and in particular what is required of the therapist who will make that encounter in her or himself and their patients.

Learning Objectives

• Participants will describe the concepts of good and evil as active clinical phenomena and their significance in personality organization.

• Participants will practice identifying three manifestations of benevolence and negativity in therapeutic process.

• Participants will practice two psychotherapeutic interventions that address the presence and activation of negativity in the psychotherapeutic relationship.

• Participants will discuss their reactions to intense expressions of negative emotions and list two possible countertransference reactions arising from that.