Nest training

What is NEST?

NEST (New Experience for Survivors of Trauma) is a therapeutic programme for adults who have experienced different types of trauma (e.g. abuse, neglect, witnessing violence), deprivation and/or loss. The significant personal losses addressed by NEST include the loss of a reasonable childhood and pregnancy loss (miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth and early infant death).

The aim of therapy is to help a person overcome the psychological conflicts and relational difficulties associated with his/her past experiences, as well as offering a context where s/he can learn essential life skills and more adaptive ways of responding to stressful situations.

The therapeutic process unfolds in 8 subsequent stages:

1. The organization of a therapeutic system, which involves informed consent to therapy and commitment to the ground rules of the process, as a foundation for therapeutic work.
2. Dealing with traumatic experiences.
3. Addressing existential questions, like survivor guilt, and fostering an inner sense of personal worth.
4. Getting in touch with the authentic self of the person and with his/her possibilities, through identifying and discarding social masks and grieving the loss of the “person one could have been”, had trauma and loss not interfered with his/her personal development.
5. Dealing with the effects of significant personal losses e.g. pregnancy loss that may have occurred in the person’s life.
6. Reconciliation.
7. Learning essential life skills, like planning, decision making and negotiation.
8. Ending therapy. Reviewing progress and consolidating the changes made.

Throughout the therapeutic process the following aspects are facilitated:

• understanding past events and the connections between these and present day difficulties experienced by a person
• identifying, expressing and dealing with feelings of pain, fear, confusion and anger
• learning adaptive responses to trauma, like assertiveness and flight when necessary
• the initiation of natural psychological mechanisms like grieving losses and forgiving hurts.

» What is NEST?

» Application of NEST therapy

» Theoretical background and therapeutic practices

» Training in NEST therapy

» Feedback from trainees

» NEST organisation

» NEST code of ethics and practice

» Nest therapists, supervisors & trainers

» Application form