Working with Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychosis
Learn how trauma, dissociation, and psychosis are interconnected and discover effective cognitive strategies to address distressing experiences. This course is ideal for mental health workers, therapists, and support workers who want to understand and treat trauma-associated psychosis. Gain a trauma-informed perspective and help clients develop coherent narratives of recovery. With a focus on evidence-based approaches, this course offers video lectures, case examples, and additional resources for study. Expand your understanding of adverse life events and their impact on reactions like dissociation and psychosis, and learn how to support individuals towards true healing.
What you’ll learn
- • Identify possible interrelationships between trauma, dissociation, and psychosis, including ways that psychosis itself can be traumatizing
- • Describe a variety of possible causal routes from trauma to psychotic experiences, and understand the possible role of dissociation within that process
- • Utilize proven cognitive strategies to address command and persecutory voices, and other common & distressing experiences found in trauma-associated psychosis
- • Plan to integrate CBT for psychosis with various trauma therapies to effectively treat clients who have experienced both trauma and psychosis
- • Demonstrate a collaborate approach to helping clients develop coherent and compassionate stories of trauma and recovery
Develop a humanistic understanding of how adverse life events can lead to reactions such as dissociation and psychosis, and then learn approaches and skills which will allow you to support people in changing those reactions and turning toward recovery!
After taking this course, you will be able to bring a truly trauma informed perspective into your work with people who are struggling with the most serious disorders.
Topics covered include:
· Optimal style of therapy
· Shifting from “what’s wrong” to “what happened” & “what next”
· Building coherent, self-compassionate recovery narratives
· Incorporating mindfulness approaches
· Overcoming dissociative splits
· Shifting from suppression to boundaries along with some openness
· Finding & working with themes in metaphorical expressions
· Spiritual considerations
Work toward the possibility of true healing, not just “managing an illness”!
Though mainstream approaches still commonly focus on biological factors, a large body of research now provides strong evidence that psychosis is often an understandable reaction to trauma, abuse, and other adverse experiences, with dissociation commonly at the center of that reaction.
This course presents a science based yet very humanistic and understandable conceptualization of the complex difficulties which can occur in response to adverse life events, and then teaches how CBT and other approaches can be used to help people change their relationship with these experiences, opening up possibilities for recovery.
Included in the course are video lectures, slides with some diagrams, lots of case examples, exploratory exercises, and links to additional resources for study.
The course will take 6 hours to complete.
Who this course is for:
- This course will primarily be of interest to mental health workers who work with people who have experienced both trauma and psychosis
- The ideal student might be a therapist, but case managers, peer support specialists, nurses, medical providers and other support workers will also find much they can use.
- The course may also be of interest to people with lived experience of psychosis and to family members who would like to better understand these tricky experiences and what might possibly help people do better.