Understanding Complex Trauma and Paths to Recovery

 Earn 2 CE Contact Hours

In this 2-hour workshop, participants will gain an understanding of Complex PTSD—a diagnosis now recognized in the ICD-11 (2018) and developed to describe the impact of prolonged and repeated trauma. Complex trauma is commonly seen in survivors of political imprisonment, torture, hostage-taking, cult involvement, human trafficking, intimate partner violence, and childhood abuse. In each of these circumstances, the survivor endures a state of captivity maintained by coercive control.

Methods of coercive control—taught across cultures by secret police forces and perpetrators of organized crime—instill fear, terror, and shame. This shame contributes to a profoundly defiled sense of self, while survivors struggle with chronic distrust of others, suicidal ideation, and self-destructive behaviors.

Because trauma arises from helplessness and isolation, recovery is rooted in empowerment and community. For this reason, group treatment for survivors is a particularly powerful modality. This workshop will review the stages of trauma recovery with detailed attention to the design of survivor groups in early recovery, where the focus is on safety and self-care, and in the middle stage, where the focus shifts toward integrating traumatic experiences into an ongoing life narrative.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Name the seven methods of coercive control.
• Name the cardinal symptom categories of CPTSD.
• Name three benefits of group therapy for survivors.

Who Should Attend:

Mental health professionals, therapists, counselors, social workers, and clinicians who work with survivors of trauma or who seek a deeper understanding of Complex PTSD, coercive control, and group-based approaches to trauma recovery.

Meet Judith Lewis Herman:

Judith Lewis Herman, MD, is Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry (part time) at Harvard Medical School. For thirty years, until she retired, she was Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program at The Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, MA. She is the author of the award-winning books Father-Daughter Incest (Harvard University Press, 1981), and Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984 and the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. In 2007 she was named a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Her new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, was published in March, 2023.