Community Building Activity
Connect Clients to a Diagnosis: Trauma Assessment Tools
- Simple vs. complex trauma
- Intergenerational trauma
- Symptom clusters and physical manifestations
- CAPS-5 and PCL-5
- Primary Care PTSD Screen
- Dual diagnosis
Mindfulness & Mindful Movement
The Neuroscience of Trauma and Mechanisms of Change
- Key brain areas involved in trauma
- Fight, flight, freeze, fawn survival responses
- Clinical implications of the freeze response
- The neuroscience of EMDR, exposure therapy and cognitive therapy
Stabilize Your Clients Prior to Trauma Work
- Trauma treatment roadmap – order of operations
- Bottom-up techniques to reconnect and feel safe in the body
- Self-soothing techniques
- Grounding strategies
- Breathwork
- Gauge when a client is ready for intense trauma/cognitive work
The Therapeutic Alliance as a Brain-Based Approach
- Explore the power of right brain psychotherapy
- Applied polyvagal theory as co-regulation in psychotherapy
- Embedded relational mindfulness as a foundation of presence
Dyad Work
- Explore proximity awareness between therapist and client
- Skillfully work with push-pull dynamics with clients
Mindfulness & Mindful Movement
EMDR vs EFT vs Neuromodulation Including Gratitude Practice
- Practices to enhance vagal tone
- Practice EFT tapping for Trauma Recovery
Narrative Therapy Exercises: Rewrite Traumatic Experiences with Small Group Integration
- Interventions to help clients talk about hotspots
- Reclaim identity with the “Tree of life” exercise
- Awareness and closure - create life stories
Solutions to Trauma Treatment Roadblocks
- How to handle the angry client
- Strategies for the resistant trauma client
- Boundary concerns
- Dealing with crises, suicidality, substance use
- How parts, ego states and defenses create walls to change
- Compassionate strategies for “Resistant” clients
- Skill: Understand emotional dysregulation as a “part”
- Skill: Build allies for a part of self
- Skill: Connect to the adult self
- Skill: Facilitate repair scenarios
Session Demos, Video Demos
- Strategies to help clients manage emotional dysregulation in session
- Describe the co-regulation tools of pacing and orienting for resource development
Group discussion
- Deepen your knowledge of the application of this work as applied to your practice sessions
- Explore how to bring mind-body interventions into your clinical work
Somatic Movement to Integration
- Somatic repatterning movements for trauma recovery
- Discover the satisfaction cycle from body-mind psychotherapy
Somatic Approaches: Address Physical Symptoms of Trauma
- Relevance of Polyvagal theory and early trauma
- Assess for readiness to apply somatic tools
- Teach body awareness
- Manage unease with “Felt sense” exercises
- Resourcing strategies to create a safe space
CBT Coping Skills: Manage Emotions
- Identify inaccurate trauma-related cognitions
- Exposure, titration and pendulation to slow emotions
- Cognitive reframing and reappraisal interventions
- Memory reconstruction techniques
- Develop emotion regulation strategies to build resilience
EMDR-Based Techniques: Resolve Traumatic Memories
- Adaptive Information Processing Theory
- EMDR vs EFT vs neuromodulation
- Resourcing strategies
- Combine memory reprocessing with cognitive restructuring
- Using “restricted processing” with complex trauma
Reintegration and Post-Traumatic Growth with Practice work & Small Group Discussion
- Better than normal – the neuroscience of post-traumatic growth
- The therapeutic alliance as a brain-based approach
- The power of forgiveness in moving forward
- Meaning making exercises
- Cultivating resilience and personal growth through reintegration strategies


