Designed to augment the skills for Clinical Trauma Professionals, this advanced course integrates recent developments in the field of trauma treatment to provide our clients a more robust, effective, and gentle path towards helping them heal the current effects of their painful pasts. The mission of this course is to help trauma practitioners understand the importance of and gain competence with addressing the somatic and neurophysiological manifestations of traumatic stress before beginning to treat cognitive and behavioral issues.

Drawing from the soon-to-be-published Trauma Practice IV: A Cognitive Behavioral Somatic Therapy (Baranowsky & Gentry, in press), this workshop is dedicated to practitioners who frequently treat clients suffering from posttaumatic stress, PTSD, and C-PTSD. The training focuses upon skills development – not theoretical approaches. It will offer hands-on, practical, and easy-to-implement interventions for our clients.

The course will first provide multiple somatic, cognitive and behavioral strategies for early treatment to help our client achieve safety and stabilization. We will practice and engage these skills throughout the morning. The afternoon will focus upon learning and practicing Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) process for desensitization and integration of traumatic memories. Participants will learn how to help clients create five separate narratives. The protocol instructs clients in the creation of a timeline, written and pictorial narrative in preparation for their sharing of a verbal narrative. A recursive narrative—told by the therapist to their clients—completes the five-narrative process. This intervention is a powerful story-driven procedure to help survivors address, articulate desensitize, and integrate their trauma memories that have been causing them distress here in the present.

Participants of this course will be invited to learn and master this protocol by working through a mild past experience from their own lives. Join us for this charged, exciting and safe training to evolve your trauma practice.