Trauma Competency for the 21st Century
What you'll learn
- Recognize and appreciate the seminal 19th and 20th Century luminaries and their discoveries that have led to the current state of the art and science in treating post-traumatic stress
- Discover the “active ingredients”/common elements for treating post-traumatic stress advocated as best practice for the treatment of PTSD by leading agencies and organizations (e.g., APA, VA/DoD, ISTSS, Phoenix Project).
- Employ a staged “active ingredient”/common elements approach to evidence-based practice for treating survivors of trauma.
- Learn and employ the Empowerment and Resilience Treatment Structure (Gentry, Baranowsky and Rhoton, 2017) for delivery of treatment with trauma survivors
- Efficiently and effectively facilitate resolution and healing of post-traumatic conditions
- Learn specific psychoeducation and cognitive restructuring techniques for maximizing engagement and participation in early treatment
- Explain the symptoms of traumatic stress to clients in a way that helps makes “good sense” of their experiences, that facilitates self-compassion, and helps them to understand their symptoms as adaptations to past painful learning experience instead of a pathological affliction
- Maximize engagement and collaboration in the healing process utilizing evidence-based skills of data collection and feedback processing with clients
- Acquire insight into the Polyvagal Theory and how this explanation of ANS functioning assists clients with understanding their symptoms and clinicians to conceptualize tasks of treatment with trauma survivors
- Develop, practice and master skills of interoception and acute relaxation to monitor and self-regulate clinician’s own autonomic nervous system as a primary intervention to facilitate a rapid return to comfort in the body (i.e., stress amelioration), maximize neocortical functioning and the ability to remain intentional instead of instinctual reactivity. (Note – This is a primary skill for professional resilience and the prevention of compassion fatigue. This course teaches the participant to develop mastery of this skill BEFORE beginning to teach clients this skill.)
- Teach clients skills for self-regulation of their own autonomic nervous system and then to employ these skills to catalyze reciprocal inhibition and Direct Therapeutic Exposure to lessen their anxiety symptoms immediately
- Develop CBT skills for helping trauma survivors to rapidly develop stability, self-efficacy, anxiety management, and relational capacities
- Learn empirical markers to know when it is both necessary (i.e., Criterion B symptoms still present) and safe to transition from the safety/stabilization phase of treatment into the trauma memory processing phase without guesswork and minimal crises
- Learn and practice a five-part Narrative Exposure Therapy process to integrate and desensitize trauma memories in a safe and efficient manner. Participants will employ graphic, written, non-verbal, verbal, and recursive narratives paired with regulated arousal to catalyze reciprocal inhibition in a method that prevents abreaction and the risk of re-traumatization
- Develop state of-the-art insight and skills techniques supporting and facilitating healthy grieving and healing complicated bereavement
- Learn to effectively employ Forward-Facing Trauma Therapy ™ as a self-employed method to facilitate post-traumatic growth and resilience for clients.
Requirements
- No Prerequisites
Description
Trauma Competency for the 21st Century teaches cutting-edge interventions and protocols that clinicians can immediately implement to augment their work treating survivors of trauma. This training teaches and clarifies skills drawn from recent research that evolves treatment beyond the antiquated notions and practice of the 20th Century into simple principles and practices that rapidly resolves the effects of traumatic stress.
Deeply rooted in the science and with an eye to the art of treating traumatic stress, Dr. Gentry will stimulate participants with both principles and techniques for rapidly and safely accelerating treatment with clients who suffer from traumatic stress. The two-day symposium provides mental health professionals with unique training grounded in scientific literature and evidence-based practice but without demanding that clients undergo any particular treatment protocol.
Instead, this training teaches clinicians to implement an “active ingredient” approach that extracts and catalyzes each of the common elements of all effective trauma treatments into a set of stages called The Empowerment and Resilience Structure (Gentry, Baranowsky and Rhoton, 2017). This structure firmly establishes a clear pathway for rapidly, effectively and safely resolving the symptoms of traumatic stress that breaks with much of the archaic treatment approaches that are presently utilized to treat trauma.
The Empowerment and Resilience Treatment Structure for Traumatic Stress (Gentry and Rhoton, in press) utilizes four stages to navigate the treatment for those survivors suffering symptoms of posttraumatic stress. These are (1) Preparation and Relationship Building; (2) Cognitive Restructuring and Self-regulation; (3) Desensitization and Integration; and (4) Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience. Included in these stages and taught throughout the two days are the factors that current researchers have identified as effective in therapy with trauma survivors and include: Feedback-driven treatment to build, maintain and enhance therapeutic relationships; motivational interviewing and polyvagal aspects to develop and enhance positive expectancy; psychoeducation and cognitive restructuring to facilitate self-compassion and engagement; interoception and acute relaxation to teach and coach survivors to self-regulate and interrupt their threat response; reciprocal inhibition to facilitate in vivo exposure (instead of the 20th Century focus upon imaginal) exposure to rapidly desensitize and integrate trauma memories, lessen symptoms and improve quality of life; and Forward-Facing ™ Trauma Therapy to stimulate post-traumatic growth and to heal the moral wounds of trauma survivors. This workshop trains the clinician to competency in trauma treatment by engaging generic skills, that do not require the professional to learn and master any particular model of trauma treatment but does, however, accommodate and make an excellent delivery platform for those clinicians who come to the training already trained in one of these protocols (e.g., EMDR. CPT, PE, SE, etc).
For those that do not have training in of these evidence-based models, this two-day workshop also provides instruction in a narrative exposure technique (Baranowsky and Gentry, 2015) to safely and successfully resolve Criterion B (Intrusion) symptoms of flashbacks and nightmares using a five-narrative approach to desensitization and integration.
While this training is science and evidence-based, it is delivered by a clinician that has over 35 years of experience in treating traumatic stress. Dr. Gentry shares lessons from many of his mistakes and helps clinicians avoid many of the common pitfalls that beleaguer clinicians early in their career of treating traumatic stress.
Who this course is for:
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Nurses
- Physicians
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Instructor
- 4.7 Instructor Rating
- 693 Reviews
- 3,088 Students
- 9 Courses
J. Eric Gentry, Ph.D., LMHC, D.A.A.E.T.S. is the founder of the Forward-Facing® Institute. Dr. Gentry is a board-certified and internationally recognized leader in the study and treatment of traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. His doctorate is from Florida State University where he studied with Professor Charles Figley—a pioneer of these two fields. In 1997, he co-developed the Accelerated Recovery Program (ARP) for Compassion Fatigue—the world’s only evidence-based treatment protocol for compassion fatigue. Dr. Gentry was original faculty, curriculum designer and Associate Director of the Traumatology Institute at Florida State University. In 2001, he became the co-director and moved this institute to the University of South Florida where it became the International Traumatology Institute. In 2010, he began the International Association of Trauma Professionals. He has trained tens of thousands of professionals to more effectively treat traumatic stress. In 2005, Hogrefe and Huber published Trauma Practice: Tools for Stabilization and Recovery—a critically acclaimed text on the treatment of traumatic stress for which Dr. Gentry is a co-author. The third edition of this text was released in 2015. In 2016 He released his revolutionary Forward-Facing Trauma Therapy book. He is the author of numerous chapters, papers, and peer-reviewed journal articles in the areas of traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. Dr. Gentry is a licensed psychotherapist with over 33 years of clinical practice. He is the CEO and owner of Compassion Unlimited-- a private psychotherapy, training, and consulting practice.
What is Forward-Facing®? Forward-Facing® is a unique process for resolving our painful past while living a principle-based life here in the present. It is the marriage of science-based self-regulatory skills paired with resilient intentional living. Engaging these skills lowers stress symptoms while simultaneously enhancing quality of life and well-being. The skills are deceptively simple and easy to implement. Anyone can learn them in a short period of time…and then work the rest of our lives to master them. While Forward-Facing® is a bona fide protocol for addressing and resolving traumatic stress, it is equally effective for developing stress-management, resilience and optimization skill for professionals, parents, couples, athletes and performers.