About
What is Constructed Awareness?
Constructed Awareness is a nonviolent, awareness-based approach to resourcing and processing trauma, attachment wounds, and disturbing emotional states. CA provides a blueprint for deep insight and freedom from a variety of mental health issues by relying on three principles:
Bringing awareness to the client’s experience changes their experience. If you’re like most, you were brought up with the belief that hard work is the answer to getting what you want. Though this is true for many task-oriented achievements, willpower alone doesn’t work to regulate emotional experiences, despite the fact that many of the more popular approaches to therapy are rooted in this very notion. Inner peace isn’t earned through willpower; rather, it's discovered simply by teaching the client how to observe their inner experience. Observation alone has the power to bring about the change clients are looking for.
The human experience is made up of three building blocks: thoughts, sensations, and external senses. Constructed Awareness teaches a unique practice of bringing mindful awareness to the client’s own experience—an experience that is constructed by thoughts, sensations, and external senses. In the training, we will look at how thoughts, sensation, and external senses make up the entire human experience, especially in regard to how they construct the client’s emotional experiences and interpretations of self, others, and the world. Expanding awareness of how these three building blocks construct the client’s experiences can transform how they regulate and respond emotionally and relationally.
Most people naturally orient their awareness more strongly to one of the three building blocks. By this we mean some people spend more time in their minds analyzing, fantasizing, or planning. Whereas other people direct more attention to sensations and what they feel in their bodies. And some people focus more on what’s happening around them in their external environment. The Constructed Awareness level one training teaches both structured and informal techniques for determining how the client’s awareness is oriented. A typology of six personality styles will be taught to help the client understand their personality and character traits based on their orientation style. The training will also cover how to determine which resources would be more useful to deepen self-awareness and the ability to self-regulate based on the client’s specific needs.
The Constructed Awareness Institute Offers Four Levels of Training
In level one, you will learn about:
Expanding the client’s awareness and allowing awareness to transform the client’s experience
Helping the client see how their reality is constructed by thought, sensations, and external stimuli
Identifying the client’s orientation style
Developing specific resources based on the client’s orientation style that will help the client’s system learn to regulate itself
In level two, you will learn about:
Using the awareness skills acquired in level one to process traumatic memories
Applying memory reconsolidation research to create a structured, yet intuitive, process of working with disturbing memories
Implementing specific awareness techniques to mindfully and nonviolently guide the client’s process
Identifying the memories that may be fueling present symptoms
In level three, you will learn about:
Engaging in methods that support the natural emergence of trauma responses during therapy, with active attunement to clients' trauma responses while maintaining flexibility and presence.
Integrating polyvagal theory to work with sympathetic and parasympathetic responses and trauma-related reactions
In certification, you will:
Complete twelve hours of CA consultation. All six sessions will be two hours and take place on Zoom. Sessions include instruction, case consultation, personal reflection, and practice time.
Audit and assist at an additional CA level one training
Audit and assist at an additional CA level two training
Participation in a CA-related project
Who is Constructed Awareness for?
Constructed Awareness trainings are for mental health professionals who are curious, open-minded, and eager to learn new ways of resourcing and reprocessing trauma and attachment wounds. CA is for anyone looking to increase their skillset with practical, relatable, and creative therapeutic methods to help clients change their own lives by expanding their personal awareness.
In addition to our CE programs, CA is for therapists who desire to grow personally, not just professionally. Constructed Awareness Institute teaches techniques to use with clients, but more importantly, we strive to offer support and encouragement as clinicians learn to expand their own personal awareness in new ways. We believe it is impossible for therapists to properly guide clients unless they have taken a personal journey within themselves and know the way to deeper realization.
What are people saying about Constructed Awareness?
“CA has been transformative to my practice. The idea that I can support my clients in becoming the best version of themselves in a non-violent way is life changing. CA is the blueprint for deep insight and emotional freedom from layers of trauma and attachment damage.”
Leah Sampson, MSW, LCSW, Director of Clinical Services, Three Oaks Behavioral Health and Wellness, Durham, NC
“The CA process helped to increase my awareness of how I view the world which also helped me to increase the way I regulate and process events both in the here and now and in the past. I'm so grateful for this experience!”
Monica Snyder, LMFT, Clinical Director, Wellspring Counseling, Miami, Florida
“This training really gave me a blueprint for how to be more present with my clients. I thoroughly enjoyed Tyler's teaching/coaching style and gained a deeper awareness of myself. I am confident that this training will vasty improve the therapeutic relationships that I build with my clients. The information is practical and I am impressed with how well this model works.”
Kourtney Young, LPC, EACC Counselor & Intake Coordinator, University of Alabama at Birmingham