A Live Virtual Seminar with Inna Rozentsvit, M.D., PhD
August 29, 2026 (11:30am – 3:30 pm EDT)
Virtual Live
Continuing Education: 6.5 CEs for APA, NYS Psychologists, NYS Social Workers
To Register for this seminar, please complete the Registration form
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ~ William Faulkner
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman
Why does an apparently minor loss send one patient into emotional collapse while another remains organized after a life-threatening event? Why do some patients repeatedly return to rejecting relationships, experience bodily alarm without a clear memory, or become newly preoccupied with earlier trauma during illness, aging, or after a stroke?
This seminar explores how overwhelming experience becomes organized within the brain-mind system — and why old patterns of danger, attachment, and self-protection may become active again decades later.
A potentially traumatic or overwhelming event and trauma are not the same. Trauma is the individual response of an overwhelmed brain-mind and nervous system when the person’s available capacities for regulation, connection, information processing, and meaning-making are insufficient to integrate what is happening.
The experience is therefore inherently subjective. An event that fragments one person’s functioning may be endured and integrated by another without producing the same trauma-related organization.
The title phrase “when trauma returns” does not suggest that trauma exists independently and later reappears intact. It refers to the reactivation or renewed expression of trauma-related patterns that were organized within the brain-mind system during earlier periods of overwhelm. These patterns may re-emerge through bodily alarm, emotional flooding, shutdown, altered perceptions of danger, relational repetition, memory fragments, images, symptoms, or familiar modes of attachment and self-protection.
Organized around the concepts of the Beholder’s Mind and Functional PsychoNeuroBiology®, this seminar examines how the brain-mind system receives, assesses, processes, and gives meaning to incoming information. Perception is not a passive recording of objective reality. The brain interprets sensory information through its existing connectome and in relation to previous experience, emotional state, personality organization, bodily condition, and present circumstances.
The developing brain-mind is shaped by repeated experience and by the relationships within which development takes place. Chronic adversity, especially within indispensable attachment relationships, may organize enduring expectations of danger, deprivation, rejection, abandonment, or helplessness. Fairbairn’s concept of attachment to bad objects will provide a focused object-relations lens for examining how the child’s need to preserve attachment may contribute to later patterns of self-experience, affect regulation, relationships, and personality organization.
Borderline personality disorder and borderline personality organization will serve as important clinical examples of what may happen when early relational overwhelm becomes organized within the personality. Affective storms, abandonment terror, splitting, dissociation, shame, self-attack, unstable identity, and repeated attachment to unavailable or rejecting others will be approached not merely as symptoms, but as patterned attempts to preserve attachment and survive overwhelming relationships.
Although ADHD, PTSD, and BPD are distinct diagnostic constructs, they may present with overlapping clinical manifestations involving overwhelm, dysregulation, dissociation, hypervigilance, masking, shame, and relational difficulties. The seminar will use these overlaps to move from diagnostic labels toward the underlying processes of the brain-mind system.
From a neurobiological and FPNB perspective, repeated experience shapes the connectome and increases the availability of particular pathways of assessment and response. The seminar will use the principles that neurons that “fire together wire together,” systems that “wire together mature together,” and functions that are not sufficiently used may weaken.
Under stress, sensory overload, emotional overwhelm, illness, aging, or neurological disruption, the brain-mind system is more likely to recruit pathways that have been activated and practiced most often. The processing of incoming information may become dominated by bodily alarm, autonomic activation, reptilian survival responses, or mammalian emotional and attachment reactions rather than being processed vertically through the full functional organization of the Triune Brain Plus™ system into human capacities for language, reflection, reasoning, choice, and meaning-making.
The seminar will also examine the traumatic effects of living with unrecognized or unsupported neurodivergence. Neurodiversity itself will not be presented as pathology or calamity. Attention will instead be given to chronic environmental mismatch, sensory and cognitive overload, repeated misattunement, masking, shame, exclusion, coercive normalization, and misdiagnosis. Overload will be understood as a disruption of information processing rather than simply as “bad behavior.”
Aging introduces new conditions under which earlier trauma-related patterns may become reactivated. Bereavement, illness, disability, sensory loss, retirement, altered dependency, role loss, and confrontation with mortality may challenge long-established compensatory strategies and increase reliance on familiar pathways of response.
Stroke and other neurological calamities may further alter inhibition, affect regulation, language, autobiographical continuity, identity, and the channels through which experience can be expressed. Neurological injury does not necessarily “unlock” intact repressed memories. It may instead change access, salience, containment, symbolic expression, or the urgency to communicate previously unformulated or insufficiently integrated experience.
The post-stroke artistic work of Auschwitz survivor Marian Kołodziej will serve as a central psychobiographical illustration. After decades of relative silence about Auschwitz, Kołodziej created an extensive visual testimony following his stroke. His case will be used to explore how neurological and existential rupture may alter the form through which traumatic experience becomes represented, without treating stroke as proof of a simple recovered-memory mechanism.
The Beholder’s Mind remains central throughout. What returns is encountered by a present brain-mind shaped by developmental history, connectome organization, personality, bodily and emotional state, age, culture, relationships, and neurological condition. It is also interpreted by clinicians, caregivers, family members, historians, and psychobiographers whose own expectations and theoretical assumptions influence what they perceive.
Rather than adding another diagnostic checklist, the seminar offers clinicians a functional way to ask what is happening within the patient’s brain-mind system: What information is being registered as danger? Which well-practiced pathways are taking over? Is the patient functioning primarily through bodily alarm, survival response, emotional-relational activation, or reflective thought? What kind of regulation and relational support is needed before interpretation becomes possible?
Clinical work will be framed as helping the person observe, regulate, differentiate, symbolize, and integrate emerging experience without extracting memories or imposing a predetermined interpretation. The clinician as Expert Companion brings knowledge, attunement, co-regulation, curiosity, and clinical judgment while remaining alongside the person as meanings are discovered, revised, and created.
The seminar will briefly address post-traumatic growth as one possible, but not inevitable, development. Renewed regulation, relational support, creativity, mourning, testimony, and meaning-making may sometimes permit the brain-mind system to reorganize experience in ways that increase agency and psychological integration.
Participants will engage in brief experiential exercises — including abdominal breathing, selected meditative practices, and a Triune Brain Plus™ check-up — to reinforce the importance of practicing regulation in functional sequence: bodily and autonomic regulation, emotional and relational regulation, and then reflective thought, reasoning, and meaning-making.
1. The Beholder’s Mind and the Functional Brain-Mind System
How previous experience, connectome organization, personality, bodily state, and present context influence perception, assessment, prediction, response, and meaning-making.
2. Childhood Adversity, Attachment to Bad Objects, and Personality Organization
How chronic relational overwhelm within indispensable attachment relationships may contribute to enduring patterns of affect regulation, self-experience, relationships, and borderline personality organization.
3. Connectomic Patterning, Repeated Use, and Vertical Integration
How repeated activation strengthens familiar pathways through the principles of “fire together—wire together,” “wire together—mature together,” and “use it or lose it”; and how stress may interrupt vertical processing through the Triune Brain Plus™ system.
4. Neurodiversity, Overload, and Traumatic Environmental Mismatch
How sensory, attentional, communicative, emotional, and executive-function differences may interact with masking, misattunement, shame, rejection, exclusion, and chronic overload.
5. Aging, Loss, and Neurological Calamity
How illness, disability, dependency, sensory loss, stroke, and other neurological disruptions may reactivate familiar trauma-related patterns or alter inhibition, expression, identity, and autobiographical continuity.
6. Regulation, Creativity, Meaning-Making, and Possible Post-Traumatic Growth
How bodily and autonomic regulation, emotional and relational support, creativity, testimony, life review, and the clinician’s role as Expert Companion may support renewed organization and meaning-making.
At the conclusion of this educational activity, participants will be able to:
Inna Rozentsvit, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, MSciEd is a neurologist, neurorehabilitation specialist, and psychoanalytically trained clinician whose work bridges neuroscience, depth psychology, and meaning-making across the lifespan. She is the founder of Functional PsychoNeuroBiology® (FPNB), an integrative clinical framework that she has developed and taught at ORI since 2012, applying it to addiction, trauma, ADHD, neurodiversity, spiritual experience, and — most recently — the neurobiology of aging.
Dr. Rozentsvit serves as Scientific Faculty Member and Programs Director at the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ORI) in New York City. She is the founder and Executive Director of Neurorecovery Solutions, Inc., a nonprofit supporting neurologically impaired individuals and their families — work that has brought her into direct clinical contact with older adults navigating illness, institutional transitions, and end-of-life decisions, including serving as health-care proxy and trusted confidant in complex late-life situations.
Her published work on aging includes “The Neurobiology of Aging: Clinical Wisdom, Psychodynamic Depth, and the Adaptive Mind” 2025 article in The Clinician, as well as “Still Becoming: Psychohistorical Notes on Aging, Neuroplasticity, and Life’s Meaning” in Clio’s Psyche.
Dr. Rozentsvit is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MindConsiliums, a peer-reviewed transdisciplinary journal, and an associate editor of Clio’s Psyche. She is co-director of the Psychohistory Forum and founder of MindMend Publishing Co. and the ORI Academic Press.
Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis
2026 ORIPP The Beholder’s Mind When Trauma Returns: From Childhood
Adversity to Personality Organization and Aging – Inna Rozentsvit, M.D., PhD
August 29, 2026
Online
Joint Accreditation Statement
In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by Amedco LLC and Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. Amedco LLC is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.
Professions in scope for this activity are listed below.
Amedco Joint Accreditation Provider Number: 4008163
Psychologists
This course is co-sponsored by Amedco and Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. Amedco is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Amedco maintains responsibility for this program and content. Maximum of 6.50 hours.
The following state boards accept courses from APA providers for Psychologists/Counselors: AK, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA (LEP ONLY), MD, ME, MN, MO, NC, ND, NH, NE, NJ, NM, NV, OH, OK*, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, WY
MI: Accepts courses from APA for Psychologists. No general CE requirement for Counselors.
OK: Accepts APA credit for live, in-person activities but not for ethics and/or online courses.
The following state boards accept courses from APA providers for MFTs: AK, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IN, KS, MD, ME, MO, NE, NC, NH, NJ, NM, NV, OH, OK*, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WDC, WI, WY
AL MFTs: Credits authorized by NBCC or any other state licensing agency will be accepted. MA MFTs: Participants can self-submit courses not approved by the MAMFT board for review. MI MFTs: There are no CE requirements for MFTs in MI.
The following state boards accept courses from APA providers for Addictions Professionals: AK, AR, CO, CT, DC, DE, GA, IA, IN, KS, LA, MD, MO, MT, NC, ND, NE, NJ, NM, NY (held outside NY ONLY), OK*, OR, SC, UT, WA, WI, WY
The following state boards accept courses from APA providers for Social Workers: AK, AR, AZ, CA, CO, DE, FL, GA, ID, IN, KY, ME, MN, MO, NE, NH, NM, OR, PA, VT, WI, WY
New York Social Workers
Amedco SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0115. 6.50 credit hours.
New York Psychologists
Amedco is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0031. 6.50 hours.
Early Bird registration (before August 7, 2026)
$60 regular/ $40 grad students & candidates/ $20 undergrad students
If CEs are requested, please register as a licensed practitioner and pay the “regular” fee for attending this educational event. There is an additional fee of $25 (can be paid prior or on the day of the conference).
Regular registration (August 7, 2026 – before 6pm EDT/ NYC time on August 28, 2026)
$80 regular/ $50 grad students & candidates/ $25 undergrad students, parents, and parent coaches.
If CEs are requested, please register as a licensed practitioner and pay the “regular” fee for attending this educational event. There is an additional fee of $25 (can be paid prior or on the day of the conference).
Registration ‘at the door’ (after 6pm EDT/ NYC time on August 28, 2026)
$90 regular/ $65 grad students & candidates/ $30 undergrad students, parents, and parent coaches.
If CEs are requested, please register as a licensed practitioner and pay the “regular” fee for attending this educational event. There is an additional fee of $25 (can be paid prior or on the day of the conference).
SPECIAL SCHOLARSHIPS are available for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for retired or disabled practitioners, those with financial need and/or those living outside the United States.
