Experiential Dreamwork with Leslie Ellis. The Living Process E07 with Greg Madison

Leslie Ellis, PhD, RCC, is a registered clinical counsellor, teacher and author who lives and works along the west coast of Canada, in beautiful British Columbia. Leslie has in-depth, specialized training in focusing-oriented therapy, and dreamwork as a treatment of trauma. She is a specialist in somatic approaches to therapy, and has studied somatic experiencing, the Hakomi method, and psoma yoga. She has developed a method of embodied, experiential dream work which combines focusing with Jungian active imagination techniques. Dr. Leslie Ellis is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019) and offers many training opportunities in embodied, experiential dreamwork based on her book.  She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, with a specialization in somatic approaches. Her dissertation on using focusing-oriented therapy to treat PTSD for refugees with recurrent nightmares won the Ernest Hartmann award from the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Dr. Ellis has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on dreamwork in psychotherapy. She has also presented her work to a worldwide audience. She is vice president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, a Certifying Coordinator and past president of The International Focusing Institute. In this episode, Leslie and Greg talk about her journey into Focusing after her initial training in Jungian analysis and her training in Trauma-informed FOT with Shirley Turcotte. We speak a bit about trauma and working bodily with trauma events and also working with the dreams that can accompany unprocessed trauma. We spent most of our conversation talking about specific ways of working with dreams experientially, including getting help in the dream, retelling the dream from the inside of the dream, and sensing how the dream could carry itself forward. We also muse a bit about the profound and intriguing nature of dreams and how they extend beyond our way of understanding them. For more on Leslie's work see: A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dreamwork – 2020 by Leslie Ellis (Author). Routledge. New York. https://drleslieellis.com