Trauma training for professionals and survivors

Terminal ambivalence – the state of being stuck or being unable to commit to a course of action or to follow through on our decisions – is a remarkably common consequence of complex trauma. Clients say that they want to make progress, but then feel conflicted or end up sabotaging any progress they make. Very often, the therapeutic work stalls and both therapist and client can feel stuck, powerless and without hope. This course explains why this happens, why it’s a direct consequence of trauma, and – perhaps most importantly – what can be done about it.

Working with trauma is an absolutely essential and rewarding area of counselling and psychotherapy. But it also comes with the risk of secondary trauma, whereby therapists experience the same trauma symptoms as their clients, as a result of their empathic attunement to the client’s narrative.

This course explores what secondary trauma is, why it happens, and most importantly what can be done to mitigate it. An essential training for everyone working with clients with a history of complex trauma.

A heartfelt, emotive course on the neurobiology of shame, its overlap with trauma, and how to work effectively with it in the therapy room. With both left-brain neuroscience and right-brain personal narrative, this course uniquely looks at how shame manifests first and foremost in our bodies, and how to work with shame without exacerbating it. Join me on the journey from crippling shame to living with the courage to be imperfect.

Trauma is a supremely physical phenomenon, manifesting not just in our emotions and mental states, but also in our bodies. Trauma results in significant emotional distress and fear-based dysregulation, but also in long-term bodily inflammation and sleep disturbances, which in turn inhibits the processing of traumatic memory. And so it makes sense that our bodies also need to be involved in recovering from trauma: this course shows you how.

Our default response to self-harm and suicidality is to think in terms of ‘risk’. But what if that approach in itself actually increases the risk? What if, instead, we thought in terms of reducing distress, and what if by doing that it in fact also reduced the risk?

This course looks at how to develop a collaborative – and kinder – approach to working with people in intense pain, and explains the fundamental but enlightening neuroscience behind both self-harm and suicide.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the term we give to a set of responses to trauma which are the natural outcome for a childhood of unremitting unsafety, and which result in a fragmented sense of self and disorganised attachment in adulthood.

Join me as I explain how to work with compassion and empathy with people who have suffered the most extreme forms of early life trauma, and expound a treatment roadmap including the principles and pitfalls of this complex work.

In this course I look at the evolution of attachment theory and what this means for working therapeutically with people who have experienced relational trauma, and how its impacts can be reversed through the development of a secure base and ‘earned secure attachment’ through psychotherapy. Aimed principally at professionals, this course is in fact relevant to anyone who has been a child, a parent, or indeed a human being … because attachment theory, quite simply, is relevant to everybody.

Trauma doesn’t just affect the mind and the emotions. It profoundly affects the brain and the body too. Often ‘the body remembers’ what the mind cannot, manifesting not just in long-term psychological difficulties but in physical ones too. Trauma is not something ‘all in the mind’, or something that we can just think or talk ourselves out of.

On this course I look at how there is no real split between ‘body’ and ‘mind’ – and certainly not when it comes to trauma.

Child sexual abuse represents the ultimate betrayal of trust. Working with survivors involves rebuilding that shattered trust and dismantling shame. One of the primary things that survivors need to know is that professionals ‘get it’ and that they can handle their trauma.

This course provides multiple ‘get it’ moments – profound insights into the experience and impacts of abuse which will help to build trust, rapport and empathy and will also equip you to hear with compassion the stories that survivors need to, but fear to, tell.

When faced with overwhelming trauma, dissociation can be the only logical thing our brains are able do to help us to survive.

Join me as I explore what happens in the brain during trauma, why dissociation is the brain’s best way of surviving when overwhelmed by life-threat, how dissociative disorders develop and how best to support trauma survivors rediscover a sense of safety with a dysregulated nervous system.