2011 Pre-Conference Workshops

Phyllis Klaus, MFT, LMSW is a licensed psychotherapist, marriage, family, therapist, and social worker. Formerly at the Milton H. Erickson Institute in Santa Rosa, California, she currently practices in Berkeley, California, providing psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and counseling to individuals, couples, families, children, and groups. She has worked with the concerns, both medical and psychosocial of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period for the past 30 years, and has been involved in research and training of maternity caregivers.
Much of her clinical management in the perinatal period has focused on the following: 1). women with a history of childhood sexual abuse and its effects on childbearing; 2) the use of hypnosis and brief psychotherapy to alleviate clinical symptoms of pregnancy such as premature labor, hyperemesis gravidarum, bleeding; and the psychological issues of anxiety and depression; 3) attachment disorders; 4). issues of birth trauma and loss; 5) postpartum mood disorders: and 6) methods of pain relief in labor with self-hypnosis. In addition, she has a general practice with extensive experience working with grief and loss; trauma; abuse; dissociative disorders; anxiety, depression; somatic and medical disorders and conditions; family of origin; attachment, and parent-child issues.
She is a National Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Hypnotherapy and in the American Psychotherapy Association, as well as the American Academy of Experts of Traumatic Stress. She is an EMDR Institute Facilitator, Approved Consultant, and Trainer, and has incorporated EMDR into her work for the past 13 years. She consults and gives lectures and psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and EMDR workshops nationally and internationally. She is co-author of several articles as well as Mothering the Mother, Your Amazing Newborn, Bonding, a video, The Amazing Talents of the Newborn, The Doula Book; and When Survivors Give Birth.

Gregg Lahood PhD is an independent anthropological researcher and transpersonal gestalt psychotherapist. His interests include the transpersonal, spiritual, evolutionary and perinatal dimensions of childbirth. He has interviewed over 100 women in Australia and New Zealand and written and about the unique woman centered participatory events that women can participate in during childbirth in dozen articles on childbirth and transperspersonal psychology. Gregg's work suggests that women's spiritual events in childbirth are a valid but overlooked dimension in childbirth and psychology. He has developed Birth Centered Healing which combats harmful technocratic ritual wounding at childbirth with a healing counter ritual.