Student tickets and scholarship opportunity

The term trauma is ubiquitous in psychological practice; it is often used in a taken for granted manner in both research and in clinical settings. This taken for grantedness often means that the term trauma is used in a wide variety of inconsistent ways. These variations generate implicit assumptions about the nature of trauma and its treatment and create inconsistency in the field.  This training seeks to qualify and explicate this taken for grantedness and build a clear and explicit meta-perspective for both the clinical and theoretical dimensions of the trauma field. 

 Trauma practice just like psychotherapy more generally, rather than becoming theorised in a unified manner, has become dominated by bifurcated and specialised approaches generated by a number of key figures (Van Der Kolk, Ogden, Levin, Perry etc) or represented by a number of key acronyms (EMDR, S.E etc). All these approaches, whilst valuable in their own right, cannot help but create discrete schools of practice, ideology and thinking. This fact ultimately reduces the integration within the trauma practice field as a whole, which can compromise both case formulation and treatment practices when dealing with the complex area of trauma. In recent decades, psychotherapy has begun a shift towards integrated practice, influenced by the likes of Norcross, Goldflied, Prochaska, and Wampold and a variety of transtheoretical and integrative approaches to both conceptualisation and treatment have become recognised as paving the way forward. In the same way that generalized psychotherapy has required an integrating and meta-perspective to optimize clinical practice, so too trauma-focused practice requires the development of an integrating framework which brings together the key theoretical and technical aspects of the best practice approaches to trauma treatment.