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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.
“As always, empowering the professional, the survivor and anyone else supporting. Consistently well researched and well presented training that is concise, clear and above all, hopeful.
I’ve lost track of the number of colleagues I have told to do ANY training, but preferably ALL training with Carolyn. It is accessible but thorough and insightful. It’s like really good supervision in a training course.
Thank you again Carolyn. I now have some more online courses to do and look forward to the new one coming soon.”
“This is an excellent course, clearly presented with lots of supporting documents and resources. I have learnt a lot from Carolyn and am sure that I will be dipping into the material on many occasions as Carolyn’s descriptions of Dissociation and the ways that she recommends for counsellors to work have already been very well received by my clients.”
“Clearly and sympathetically presented, with a lot of information that would be helpful to any therapist encountering a client with DID. It helps dispel myths and misconceptions about the condition, explains everything you would need from start to finish, along with excellent handouts and plenty of direction for further reading.”
“As a trauma survivor I am still at the relatively beginning of my journey. I was unaware until two years ago when I had a massive breakdown that caused me to suffer from PTSD.
I was recommended to Carolyn’s website by my NHS therapist when my ‘20 sessions’ were up. I have learnt so much from your training and recommend it to my professionals so they can support me in the best way possible.
Thank you for sharing to help others understand.”
“As always, this training is of incredible value. I have not had a personal experience of a client with DID and it as really helped me to build a compassionate, kind, non-judgemental understanding of this survival strategy and I am now confident that if I experience a client with DID, I will know how best I can help them. The training structure on the website is incredibly easy to use, I thought the length was good as there is no rushing, the aura is very calm and considered.”
“Found this training fantastic.
“I thought it was very informative and explained DID extremely well.
“I enjoyed learning about DID as it was an area that I did not know much about. As always Carolyn’s approach to very difficult psychological issues, helps me to
“I thought the course was amazing, I found it really interesting and it allowed me to think about past clients and present clients and how this may link to them and how I can work with them in the future.”
“Very helpful, DID is complex but Carolyn has a wonderful way of simplifying, clarifying and clearly explaining it in a way that makes total sense. I hope I can emulate this for my clients!”
I believe that recovery from trauma is possible. That’s not some kind of rah-rah empty statement intended to inspire and draw a cheer whilst lacking substance. It’s a simple statement of fact based on the logic of how trauma impacts the brain.
By divorcing the symptoms of trauma – what we often refer to as mental illness – from the trauma itself, and from the brain and body’s evolutionary survival instincts, we create a narrative of hopelessness and powerlessness: I’m too messed up to heal. My symptoms are too bad. I’m too crazy.
For sure, trauma has devastating impacts. I’ve lived and still live those impacts myself. But the main reason we become stuck with those impacts is because we haven’t understood the basic neurobiology of trauma, and we’ve tried to fix the symptoms on their own, rather than the cause. It would be like trying to deal with an infectious disease outbreak (pandemic, anyone?) without a basic understanding of germ theory.
This course shows that there is nothing crazy or even ‘mentally ill’ about the traumatised brain. ALL of our symptoms make perfect sense in the light of our evolutionary response to life-threat. And if they make perfect sense, and we can understand them, then we can also work with our brains and bodies to heal from the symptoms of trauma. That’s the hope for recovery right here.
On this course I look at the trauma narrative of my own life expounded through the lens of neuroscience and clinical theory. I cover topics such as:
This is a course designed not just for counsellors and psychotherapists but for anyone working with or coming alongside trauma survivors. It’s also aimed specifically at trauma survivors themselves, providing a wealth of psychoeducational material that aims to reduce shame by making sense of our way of interpreting and responding to the world. (Spoiler alert: we’re neither bad nor mad!)
This course looks at the neurobiological fundamentals of our trauma response. Dissociation happens to everyone, in varying degrees, whenever there is trauma, and so this course is relevant to everyone. It is not a basic course, but a deep dive into the way that our symptoms of trauma are our best attempt to survive and how and why we get stuck with them – and what to do about it.
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.
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.
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