This advanced-level training is designed for licensed mental health professionals seeking to deepen their clinical skills in working with complex and developmental trauma. Building on foundational trauma-informed care principles, the course focuses on assessment accuracy, clinical decision-making, and treatment pacing when working with clients whose trauma histories are chronic, relational, or developmentally rooted.
Participants will explore the critical distinctions between traditional PTSD and complex trauma, with particular attention to attachment injury, nervous system adaptations, and state-dependent functioning. The course emphasizes understanding symptoms as adaptive survival responses rather than pathology, helping clinicians avoid common misdiagnoses and premature trauma processing.
Through structured video instruction and applied interactive activities, clinicians will learn to assess dissociation, evaluate risk and readiness, and determine when stabilization, further assessment, or trauma processing is clinically appropriate. Special focus is placed on recognizing dissociation across its full spectrum, differentiating motivation from readiness, and using the window of tolerance in real-time clinical decision-making.
This course is highly practical and designed to directly support ethical, effective trauma treatment. Clinicians will leave with enhanced confidence in pacing trauma work, documenting from an adaptation-based lens, and providing care that prioritizes safety, regulation, and long-term therapeutic outcomes.