Heather Laface

About Heather Laface

Understanding” and other cognitive approaches like explanations, definitions, and categories often don’t actually heal or promote lasting change. Individual practices based primarily on insight and self-awareness or “Individual” focused approaches won’t bridge the natural gaps between us: the co-constituting relationship between what you think is you and what you think is not you. The “space between” us make us who we are - radically. This is the irreducible role of experience at the very heart of transformation. Experience is irreducible because of the relationship between self, world, and perception. My expertise is in self-organization theory applied to group process. I am currently developing the social emotional practice called MOVN.This approach to understanding experience as an affective dynamical system relies on frameworks derived from the every-day principles that govern living systems, namely the human central nervous system.A MOVN framework assumes no clear cut separation between world and ourselves, either at the level of nervous system relations or the level of seeing. This framework can be applied to over-come traditional views in psychology that dehumanize and marginalize psychological experience, where the human being is reduced to a version of mind that occurs solely inside an individual, isolated, skull-bound brain and is treated as such. MOVN calls for the integration of the bodily, experiential, and social dimensions into a unified approach to healing our radically embodied self. I love meeting new people and bringing them together, dancing, reading phenomenological philosophy, and the exploring the embodied and enactive paradigms within the field of cognitive science. I’ve worked as staff psychologist at an inpatient psychiatric hospital (a so-called IMD) with people experiencing extreme states of being, commonly referred to as psychosis. This experience radically altered how I see togetherness in human beings and the primacy of relational, or reciprocal affect in organizing our experience - lightning fast, for better or for worse, and whether we like it or not.This process - along with influence of mentors and heroes in my life, namely my patients, has made me a champion of the unseen - at both individual and collective systemic dynamic levels. I hope my work can serve as a call to action to help us see how we see, help others see us, and make meaning out of it when they don\'t. The goal is never to abandon a perspective, but to discover how comes to be in the first place.

Experience

1. Adjunct Faculty

   Pacifica Graduate Institute

   Jul 2012 — Present · Carpinteria, CA, US

   Affective neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, and Depth psychology

Education

• Pacifica Graduate Institute

  Ph.D., Clinical Psychology

  2004 — 2011

Skills

• Anger Management
• Cognition
• Psychiatry
• Family Therapy
• Clinical Research
• Psychotherapy
• Counseling Psychology
• Group Therapy
• Life Transitions
• Play Therapy
• Post Traumatic Stress
• Psychological Assessment
• Mindfulness
• Therapists
• Working with Adolescents
• Young Adults
• Adolescents
• Clinical Supervision
• Self-Esteem
• Cbt
• Psychology
• Dual Diagnosis
• Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
• Clinical Psychology