The Advanced AARM Training?

A minimum caseload of five weekly clients over a six month timeframe following the Basic AARM Training is the basic requirement. This advanced training reinforces the basic methodologies of the AARM while having a concentrated focus on:

• Subtle blockages to the natural healing process
• The neurobiology of attachment including the PolyVagal Theory
• Treating chaotic attachment disorders and dissociative identify disordered clients

For practitioners interested in becoming certified in the AARM, another three months of specialized training is required at a minimum. The three-month period may be extended to ensure that the key elements of the AARM have been mastered.  The format is again weekly virtual sessions using the AARM with a minimum of  five ongoing clients immersed in the AARM process as the basis for the training. Those interested in certification also need to submit  videos demonstrating a cross section of vignettes from this active caseload. Reviewing three  one-hour videos over the three-month period constitutes a significant piece of the learning experience. Also, shadowing the trainer, Peter Cummings or designee, for one full day in the in person day long Basic AARM Training is required.

The AARM is a comprehensive model to address complex trauma. It is important for the prospective trainee to consider that the AARM is not worth learning as an adjunctive clinical tool to be accessed once in a while. The skill level to master the AARM requires a consistent use of the model over an extended period of time.

• Willingness to sensitize to the issue of attachment trauma by such actions as viewing a documentary on attachment trauma: Netflix, Cracked Up, Darrell Hammond’s life story. This is a good way to see if you as a clinician are willing to take on clients who can feel just as needy and desperate as Darrell Hammond and similar works.
• Experience as a body worker, energy worker or other alternative healing approaches.
• Experience in neuromodulating approaches: EMDR, NLP, TFT, etc.
• Deepen one’s knowledge base through reading within Attachment Theory as the overarching conceptual guideline for the training.
• Interest in neuroscience, especially as it relates to how the brain operates in connection with other people
• Interest in energy practices using sensory imagery in place of cognitive insight as the transformative medium for change
• Willingness to embrace the treatment of emotional trauma as a long-term treatment effort covering several years, which defies the quick fix mentality interwoven into most all current psychotherapy approaches that are collectively classified as talk therapy.

• Prior experience as a healer-practitioner
• The trainee must be engaged in an ongoing caseload of clients under the rubric of coaching or psychotherapy. Wanting to develop a caseload in the future is not sufficient.
• Willingness to self-identify as a practitioner who treats emotional trauma
• Willingness to be coached intensively in the presence of other trainees
• Willingness to seek out personal healing with an independent practitioner of their choice should the training stimulate unresolved traumas from the past
• Recognition that paradigm shifts in theory and practice can evoke unexpected emotion in the new trainee. To explain further:

Thomas Kuhn, an American physicist and philosopher of science wrote a controversial book in the 1960’s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  (1962). His main point was that rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, scientific disciplines undergo periodic paradigm shifts that are radically different and unsettling to the current worldview. The current state of science, especially neuroscience, has been gradually moving from reductionist theory to a new model for explaining the inner workings of the brain. This movement produced what is called Complexity Theory. The AARM embodies this paradigm shift in scientific inquiry from reductionism, where each individual variable is controlled  to Complexity Theory where random variables are expected and left to combine together for the eventual emergence of a new order.

At the core of the AARM’s paradigm shifts is the favoring of a physical healing script as the source for change, a silent body dialogue without words. The body sensation is an intense focal point over the pursuit of cognitive insight through intellectual inquiry using dialogue. The dominant physical sensations are the source for the client and therapist to decode their meaning.