Trauma Competency for the 21st Century teaches cutting-edge interventions and protocols that clinicians can immediately implement to augment their work treating survivors of trauma. This training teaches and clarifies skills drawn from recent research that evolves treatment beyond the antiquated notions and practice of the 20th Century into simple principles and practices that rapidly resolves the effects of traumatic stress.

Deeply rooted in the science and with an eye to the art of treating traumatic stress, Dr. Gentry will stimulate participants with both principles and techniques for rapidly and safely accelerating treatment with clients who suffer from traumatic stress. The two-day symposium provides mental health professionals with unique training grounded in scientific literature and evidence-based practice but without demanding that clients undergo any particular treatment protocol.

Instead, this training teaches clinicians to implement an “active ingredient” approach that extracts and catalyzes each of the common elements of all effective trauma treatments into a set of stages called The Empowerment and Resilience Structure (Gentry, Baranowsky and Rhoton, 2017). This structure firmly establishes a clear pathway for rapidly, effectively and safely resolving the symptoms of traumatic stress that breaks with much of the archaic treatment approaches that are presently utilized to treat trauma.

The Empowerment and Resilience Treatment Structure for Traumatic Stress (Gentry and Rhoton, in press) utilizes four stages to navigate the treatment for those survivors suffering symptoms of posttraumatic stress. These are (1) Preparation and Relationship Building; (2) Cognitive Restructuring and Self-regulation; (3) Desensitization and Integration; and (4) Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience. Included in these stages and taught throughout the two days are the factors that current researchers have identified as effective in therapy with trauma survivors and include: Feedback-driven treatment to build, maintain and enhance therapeutic relationships; motivational interviewing and polyvagal aspects to develop and enhance positive expectancy; psychoeducation and cognitive restructuring to facilitate self-compassion and engagement; interoception and acute relaxation to teach and coach survivors to self-regulate and interrupt their threat response; reciprocal inhibition to facilitate in vivo exposure (instead of the 20th Century focus upon imaginal) exposure to rapidly desensitize and integrate trauma memories, lessen symptoms and improve quality of life; and Forward-Facing ™ Trauma Therapy to stimulate post-traumatic growth and to heal the moral wounds of trauma survivors. This workshop trains the clinician to competency in trauma treatment by engaging generic skills, that do not require the professional to learn and master any particular model of trauma treatment but does, however, accommodate and make an excellent delivery platform for those clinicians who come to the training already trained in one of these protocols (e.g., EMDR. CPT, PE, SE, etc).

For those that do not have training in of these evidence-based models, this two-day workshop also provides instruction in a narrative exposure technique (Baranowsky and Gentry, 2015) to safely and successfully resolve Criterion B (Intrusion) symptoms of flashbacks and nightmares using a five-narrative approach to desensitization and integration.

While this training is science and evidence-based, it is delivered by a clinician that has over 35 years of experience in treating traumatic stress. Dr. Gentry shares lessons from many of his mistakes and helps clinicians avoid many of the common pitfalls that beleaguer clinicians early in their career of treating traumatic stress.