Trauma Centered Psychotherapy
Become a Certified Trauma Centered Psychotherapist (CEUs available)
🔹 Foundations Course
8 hours | Online
An introduction to the core principles and axioms of trauma-centered psychotherapy. Learn the neurobiology of trauma and key concepts that distinguish traumatic memory, traumatic experience, imagined experience. Learn about getting the details, unhooking trauma schemas and near experience questioning. This course lays the groundwork to enable clinicians to ask about trauma with clarity, empathy, and structure.
🔹 Level 1 Certification
One-year program | Two training weekends + Monthly group supervision + Closing weekend
This year-long certification includes experiential training, monthly supervision, and a supportive learning community. Practice and receive feedback trauma inquiry and learn core techniques such as getting the details, decoding and differentiating, disclosing the perpetrator, zooming in, not understanding, jumps, stomps, bridges, and more. Designed for therapists who are ready to lead and refine their trauma-centered practice.
🔹 Level 2 Certification
One-year program | Two advanced weekends + Monthly group supervision + Closing weekend
Level 2 expands your clinical knowledge with more nuanced approach. You’ll explore complex trauma, intergenerational dynamics, and the correlations between DID and BPD, and how TCP can support clients with these diagnoses. You will receive close supervision and feedback through out the year along with plenty of experiential learning.
Trauma has the tendency to distort one's perception of reality.
What is Trauma Centered Psychotherapy?
Trauma Centered Psychotherapy is a warm, empathic and direct psychotherapy approach to trauma treatment. It includes imaginal exposure, desensitization techniques, somatic interventions, CBT, humanistic stances, reduces PTSD symptoms and other conditions like anxiety and depression as it relate to the treatment of trauma.
What is Trauma?
Traumatic events and harmful experiences rattle us, hurt us, or terrify us—often beyond what is humanly comprehensible. We define trauma as a forced accommodation to an overwhelming experience. There is a perpetrating force - a person who is a perpetrator or oppressor, a system of harm, a force of nature like a tsunami or fire that causes destruction etc. There is a survivor who is impacted by this perpetrating force.
Trauma Schemas, Trauma Shapes & Trauma Imprints
Trauma leaves us feeling frozen, afraid, avoidant, or anxious—wanting to do anything in our power to avoid the memories of those events and prevent something like that from ever happening again. It can distress our nervous systems, cause inflammation, chronic pain, nightmares, and discomfort in our bodies. It causes shifts in mood, disrupts our eating or sleeping patterns, shapes how we think and view the world, and affects our relationships—including our relationship with ourselves—and so much more.
How Does Society and Culture Respond to Trauma?
Too often, when we have experienced trauma, we are silenced or shamed—for it happening, or for talking about it. We are made to feel like we are burdening others with the gruesome details of what has happened to us, and we are afraid that the memories of these events can upset both us and those around us. Society often wants people to bury their trauma and keep it to themselves.
Trauma-Avoidant Therapy
Therapists who are not trained in trauma-centered care are often worried about re-traumatization and leave the onus on the client to bring up their traumatic past. This leaves the client in an abyss, and the therapist unknowingly colludes with societal norms of silencing—neglecting the client in their own suffering. The client is left wondering when is the “right moment” to bring up the events that bother them in their own therapy session, worrying about burdening the therapist, and continuing to feel disappointed that no one will ever reach them or help unburden their traumatic past.
The Trauma-Centered Psychotherapist
The trauma centered psychotherapist is unafraid, leans in, and gets into the trenches with you. Trained not to shy away from making space for clients to explore traumatic material, TCP therapists are actively engaged and directly ask clients about their traumatic experiences from the very start of treatment. Together, the therapist and client explore the details of the events, identify trauma schemas, assess for safety, name triggers, desensitize the nervous system, differentiate the past from the present, process emotions and bodily sensations, find humor, cry, laugh and move toward healing.
TCP Techniques
Getting the Details, Decoding, Differentiating and Disclosing the Perpetrator...
Zoom In. Looking Around, Not Understanding...
Finding slivers, glimmers. Embracing play, awe, wonder and curiosity.
Healing the TCP Way
In TCP, the way out is through. The way out is under and over. The way out is around. The way out is in—and within.
What we mean by that is: we do not shy away from the traumatic memories from the past that scare us. We process them, rehash them, shake them off, cry about them, scream about them, laugh about them—and transform them.
Unlike most desensitization therapies, which focus solely on clients directly exploring their trauma, TCP takes a more rounded approach—not just digging deep into the traumatic past, but also making room for the body, for creativity, for joy and healing.
Triggers & Glimmers
Triggers cue us to feel fear; glimmers offer a path back through warmth, safety, connection, and joy.A glimmer is a small moment—a sound, a smile, a feeling—that lights up the nervous system with safety or hope, often rooted in memories of care or play. For those who’ve lived through ongoing trauma—especially in childhood—these moments may be rare or hard to remember. The emotional map is often skewed toward vigilance and survival.
But that map can be redrawn. Therapy can become a place where new positive moments are planted—experiences that help the body and mind learn what safety feels like, sometimes for the first time. Over time, these moments accumulate, helping the client build internal evidence that they are safe now, they can be joyful now, they can experience awe and wonder now —even when their body initially says otherwise.
Fissures & Slivers
Fissures are psychological cracks or trauma portals that we fall into, when we are in the fissure, our behaviors and patterns make us act as if we are experiencing the trauma again, when in reality we might actually be safe in the current moment.
Slivers are little things that we can identity in the current moment to help us differentiate the past from the present. In trauma-centered psychotherapy, differentiation is the process of distinguishing between a past traumatic experience and the present moment. For trauma survivors, triggers can cause the body and mind to respond as if the traumatic event is still happening. The emotional, physiological, and cognitive systems become fused—what was is experienced as what is.
Therapeutically, differentiation (a key TCP technique) is like playing a psychological version of “spot the difference.” Clients begin to identify slivers—small but significant distinctions that separate the current environment from the trauma context. These slivers might include recognizing:
-
“I am in a different place.”
-
“The person who hurt me is not here.”
-
“I have more choices now than I did then. I am not alone right now”
-
“The color of the ceiling is different from the color of the ceiling when I was hurt.”
Each sliver reorients the nervous system to present-day reality and expands the client’s capacity for agency, grounding, and healing.
