Loading...
Learn the initial basic clinical concepts clinicians should know regarding the assessment and treatment of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Learn how trauma is defined socially, culturally and clinically, as well as how to assess and identify trauma histories in your clients. Examine strategies to clinically explore these histories in healing ways, including specific interventions to support clients in the clinical hour and manage your own feelings as you hear clients’ stories of trauma. Study helpful self-care strategies for clients with PTSD, as well as psycho-educational materials that can help support clients in reframing their trauma histories and starting along the path to healing. Teaching techniques include large- and small-group discussions, exploration of vignettes and a guest speaker.
Course Outline
Expand or collapse section
Course Objectives
- Explore different definitions of trauma, post-traumatic stress and the effects of trauma
- Study concepts of resiliency and coping in trauma survivors
- Introduce important assessment strategies and techniques when reviewing traumatic histories with clients
- Discuss basic initial intervention strategies related to working with clients with histories of trauma
- Manage transference dynamics that can develop in the clinical relationship
- Use psychoeducational strategies to assist clients in coping with post-traumatic stress
- Introduce concepts related to vicarious traumatization
- Explore strategies for managing clinicians’ countertransference when working with clients with histories of trauma
What You Learn
- Definition of trauma, including common assumptions of its meaning
- DSM definition and political elements of PTSD
- Judy Herman’s definition of complex trauma
- Introduction to psychobiology
- Assessment strategies, including a person’s history of trauma, disclosure, and coping skills and resources
- Basic beginning interventions/modalities and conceptualizing a course of treatment
- Goals for treatment/criteria for resolution of the trauma Initial interventions: validating, normalizing, naming
- Psycho-education
- Stages of recovery
- Dissociation as adaptation/self-soothing/self-care
- Boundaries in the clinical relationship when dealing with clients with trauma
- Survivor's transference
- Basics of EMDR
- The importance of managing counter-transference, including shock, disbelief, mourning, scoffing and minimizing
- Vicarious trauma: symptoms, research, examples and coping
How You Learn
- Large- and small-group discussions
- Exploration of vignettes
- Guest speaker lecture