This workshop focuses primarily on specific interventions and emotional stuck points that can occur when addressing traumatic memories and nightmares from a survivor’s past. Although cognitive interventions have gained more attention as gold-standards for working among clients diagnosed with PTSD, these interventions fall-short of fully processing the stuck emotions of grief and guilt often embedded within a survivor’s trauma—leaving survivors to still struggle with many of these feelings even after they’ve gained skills from evidence-based PTSD therapies. Accomplishing a shift of cognitions can be more effective by using a client’s emotional stuck points to process through problematic thoughts which maintain re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD. By utilizing the interventions described in this workshop, the mental health counselor may be able to intercede against negative thoughts by accessing underlying emotions of which the client may be struggling; and eventually using the process to suggest more functional behavioral actions as a follow-up. In addition, the clinician’s own feelings and thoughts will be discussed as either contributors to, or barriers against, the therapy process in the form of countertransference reactions.
This workshop is open to professionals with mental behavioral health related graduate degrees (i.e., MSW, MA, MS, MSN), physicians, dentists, and psychologists (i.e. AMA, ADA, APA) and those professions who are qualified for membership in, or are members of their respective professional organizations. Graduate students in an accredited mental behavioral health program may also participate in this training.