New Rules for Treating Trauma: Integrating Neuroscience for Resilience, Connection and Post-Traumatic Growth

CPD

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Faculty

Courtney Armstrong, LPC, MHSP Related seminars and products

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Courtney Armstrong, LPC, MHSP, has over 20 years’ experience and is a Board Certified Fellow in Clinical Hypnotherapy who has trained thousands of mental health professionals nationally and internationally in creative, brain-based strategies for healing trauma. She is a bestselling author of the book, The Therapeutic “Aha!”: 10 Strategies for Getting Clients Unstuck and Transforming Traumatic Grief and contributes to publications such as the Psychotherapy Networker, Counseling Today, and The Neuropsychotherapist. She has been featured as a trauma and grief expert on national television and radio programs and is the owner/director of Tamarisk: A Center for Mind-Body Therapy in the state of Tennessee.

 

Speaker Disclosure:

Financial: Courtney Armstrong is in private practice. She is an author for WW Norton and receives royalties. Ms. Armstrong receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.

Non-financial: Courtney Armstrong is a member of the Institute for Rapid Resolution Therapy.

Additional Info

Program Information

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Objectives

1. Summarize how a clients’ emotional trauma is processed in the brain as it relates to case conceptualization.
2. Analyze why the use of clinical exposure techniques alone are not enough to relieve post-traumatic stress symptoms.
3. Breakdown the three phases of trauma-informed treatment put to practical use in-session.
4. Compile recent neuroscience discoveries regarding memory reconsolidation and its clinical implications for treating trauma.
5. Characterize the five steps that several evidence-based trauma therapies have in common.
6. Utilize two experiential techniques that can be used to resource, uplift, and empower clients to reduce feelings of shame and helplessness.

Outline

• Simple ways to understand the brain
• A healthy emotional brain & how it develops
• 7 primary emotional systems
• How trauma and disrupted attachment alter the brain
• 3 neuroscience breakthroughs that change how we treat trauma
• Resilience, connection and post-traumatic growth

• 5 simple questions to assess for PTSD
• Beyond words: build trust and safety with right brain to right brain communication
• Help clients understand trauma responses
• Calm fear with mindfulness and imagery techniques
• Deal with dissociation: practical tools for grounding and orienting
• Shift shame and nurture self-compassion
• Defuse anger with play and humor
• Empower with movement and metaphor

• Revise not relive: why exposure can retraumatize
• Memory reconsolidation: a mechanism for healing trauma
• 5 simple steps for reconsolidating a traumatic memory
• Create the future-self template and the brain’s blueprint for healing
• Neutralize negative beliefs with resourceful emotional states
• Facilitate corrective emotional experiences with powerful imagery, metaphor, music and movement techniques

• The 3 qualities of post-traumatic growth
• Create a positive post-trauma identity
• Nurture a secure attachment system after trauma
• Find meaning and purpose after trauma
• Happiness and the power of intention

• Sexual trauma survivors
• Childhood abuse and neglect
• Traumatic grief after sudden or violent deaths
• Medical trauma, car accidents and disasters
• Military, police and first responders
• Children and adolescents after trauma
• Cultures and faith traditions
• Prevent burnout and vicarious trauma

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Therapists
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Case Managers
• Addiction Counselors
• Nurses
• Other Mental Health Professionals

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