Embracing Survivorship

Video Link: Embracing Survivorship

Embracing Survivorship: Restoring Balance and Regulation After Intimate Betrayal We invite you to join Alaine Duncan, MAc, LAc, in her keynote presentation about embracing survivorship. We are hard-wired to leave our regulated state when faced with danger or life threat. We are also hard-wired to return to regulation – even if we can’t remember what that felt like. Our biology will take care of us. This experiential workshop promises to leave participants in a more coherent relationship with the support that is available right inside their own skin after experiencing intimate betrayal.

Alaine Duncan is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and an acupuncturist, educator and researcher. Her work integrates the neurobiology of traumatic stress with the wisdom of Chinese medicine. She holds a particular fascination for the place that restoring balance and regulation in trauma survivors has at the interface of individual healing and social transformation.

“Over the years, the boundary between me and military families, immigrants, refugees, and survivors of natural and human-made disasters has grown more and more thin – and that is a gift of spirit. I love integrative medicine. I love what it can explain about life and how it can reach people whose life and health resides at the margins.”

Alaine was a founding member of the Integrative Health & Wellness program at the DC Veterans Administration Medical Center where she served as a clinician and researcher from 2007-2017. Her research background includes serving on studies assessing the impact of integrative medicine on compassion fatigue in military caregivers; the use of acupuncture for the treatment of combat-related traumatic stress, chronic headaches in OIF and OEF Veterans with traumatic brain injuries, pain in Veterans of all conflicts, and for Gulf War Veterans Illness.

Her book, "The Tao of Trauma: A Practitioner’s Guide for Integrating Five Element Theory and Trauma Treatment," co-authored with Kathy Kain, is the foundation for classes she offers somatically-oriented mental health providers, acupuncturists, medical providers and bodyworkers. Learn more at www.integrativehealingworks.net.

This was recorded on 10/16/23 as part of the Survivor Advocacy Network's 2023 virtual healing retreat.