Trauma Resolution Training

"Shadows dissolve as life stirs again"


Training and Certification

To medical facilities, and other health care organizations, we offer customized services to address stress relief, and self care for staff and employees and/or patients. Ashlar staff will teach, among other techniques, breathe work and light meditations to calm the nervous system and support a more rapid recovery. For clinical staff, we provide prevention and treatment strategies for compassion fatigue and burn-out. Our plans are customized to fit the needs of contracting clients.

*Client Centered Trauma Resolution - phase one

C-CTR – Client Centered Trauma Resolution is a protocol that is proven effective in eliminating/reducing symptoms of severe/traumatic stress and PTSD.  Our training includes reviewing the ingredients of the protocol, which has been used nationally and internationally for many years.  C-CTR is also very appropriate for communities suffering with transgenerational trauma.  First responders and lay people have been taught this protocol in order to work with trauma in their own communities.  We feel that the process will be used more readily by community members when the providers are known and trusted.  Additionally, there is not the stigma attached when the person who provides relief is someone who could be your neighbor.  A lay person using this protocol does not advise, analyze, interpret, or diagnose.  While the process is not psychotherapy,  it is therapeutic.

The first phase of training consists of an evening introduction and three day long sessions.  We have an introductory eveening to briefly review/teach the neuroscience underlying traumatic stress. The neuroscience is an important part of the educational aspects of training.

The majority of the weekend will be devoted to learning and practicing trauma resolution seasoned with discussion - didactics will be balanced with experiential applications. Like anything else, the more the trainee practices, the more confident she/he becomes.

The best introduction to the work is for the trainee to apply the protocol to her own life story. This becomes the medium of the training

Process and Goals

Participants will understand, learn, practice and demonstrate the arts of deep active listening, presence and facilitation of trauma resolution without interpreting, analyzing, advising or diagnosing.  Trainees will learn the history of the work and the neuroscience that underlies it.  They will be able to articulate who is and who is not appropriate for the work and have learned at least two approaches to helpng their students/clients quiet the nervous system. In training participants will have bclass="nav">egun work toward creating/forming their own narrative.

*We direct the trainee's to the initial Trauma page for books to review and websites to visit.

Certification requirements: 

1. Each process: C-CTR , Expressive Arts and Expressive Writing require 45
    hours training and 60 hours of supervision in each area.
2. A working knowledge of the neuroscience of trauma.
3. 8 hours a year of CEU's to maintain certification,
4. Demonstration of the underlying theories of trauma resolution practices
    and/or the arts and writing approach (depending on the certification
    desired). Written and oral.
5. 20 hours of personal work with trauma utilizing methods from each
    category.
6. Each trainee will have a working knowledge in methods used to calm the
    nervous system.

*Expressive Arts Training: the arts answer to memoir: – phase two

In this training workshop the artist will learn about the biochemistry of trauma and techniques to work with it and how arts processes help resolve or relief severe stress. Each participant will be invited to create a symbolic record of his/her life using a variety of art materials. The arts answer to the written memoir. This work is based on cross cultural practices used to record and transmit individual stories, and tribal history– celebratory or traumatic, extraordinary or mundane.

This process also is being used with traumatized and sometimes non-literate people in refugee camps for both healing and as a means to record human rights abuses.

In our teaching, we will explore the current model as well as use the mythological ideas of Mircea Eliade (a precursor/teacher of mythologist Joseph Campbell and the like) and those of our Native American friends of the Haida and Tlingit traditions.

Artists wishing to continue on to certification can use this as an introduction to the work.

The participant will learn:

1. Rules of engagement; no analyzing, interpreting, advising or diagnosing.
2. Deep listening and mindful presence.
3. Expressive arts in relation to trauma.
4. How to deal with difficult emotions as they arise in clients.
5. Creating ritual objects: sculptural pieces constructed in memorial for
    personal
    and collective use and the Life Line of each participant
6. Gathering arts materials; bought or recycled.
7. Sand-tray as theater -- used to resolve traumatic nightmares and painful
    experiences.
8. Creating a Life-Line or Native American Life Ball.


Suggested book list:

Charlotte: a diary in pictures. By Charlotte Solomon  (this book first published in 1963 is still a favorite example of the illustrated memoir  --   a creative person or an arts diarist can see many ways in which to expand the process using other arts media.)
Art as Medicine by Shaun Mc Niff  (all books by him are popular).
Children and Traumatic Incident Reduction, edited by Marian Volkman

*Expressive Writing – phase three

Andrea Steffens and Jennifer Nolan have been teaching writing through the body for nearly thirty years and working with writers to help them resolve the traumatic stories that inevitably comes up in every group, in every writer at some point in the process -- each of us has a story like this.

Writing through the Body is a technique that that moves the would-be writer inward toward the embodiment of images and then rendering the results in language. Work coming from this source is fresh, powerful and effortless once the method is learned.  The trick? -- Learning the method -- strengthening and refining the Imaginal Body.  This method allows the writer to be present inside of the story or poem as he/she writes it. Some of the stories that emerge – especially as the would-be writer begins the process -- are stories of loss, betrayal and trauma. These are the stories that have been waiting to be told.  They are there in each of us.

In order to write unselfconsciously, the writers need a community that can be trusted to contain the story which is what the writing group becomes.

Few people know that understanding the healing power of writing early on came from poets:  like Ellen Bass, foremother of writing about trauma and Maxine Hong Kingston, a poet and a peacemaker.  Ellen Bass began her writing workshop with women nearly forty years ago.  Their writing became a book, No More Masks  about sexual trauma and its prevalence which to that point in time was culturally unacknowledged. Ellen's second book for survivors is a classic that she co-authored with Laura Davis: The Courage to Heal.  Maxine Hong Kingston, also a poet, wrote with Vietnam vets for many years which culminated in the book: Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. There are now writing groups offered for vets throughout the V.A. system - though not enough which is another reason why we want to teach our process. The list of writing groups and writers teaching them has grown exponentially over the years.

It has only been in recent years that mainstream psychology has acknowledged and embraced writing as a healing process for trauma – both psychologically and physically.  James Pennebaker, PhD created well known studies with participating students that showed significant fewer health challenges over a years' time. Today the studies are many and demonstrate that writing about adverse events or conditions positively impacts all aspects of health – physical and psychological.

As in any of our trainings, we feel the best introduction to the work is for the trainee to apply the protocol to her/his own life story.*

Certification requirements:  40 hours of training and 50 hours of superision.

The training includes: The How's, Why's and What-for's of organizing and facilitating writing groups as well as learning:

Rules of engagement.

1. The technique: Writing Through The Body.
2. Demonstrating deep listening skills and presence.
3. History of expressive writing groups.
4. How to deal with difficult emotions as they arise.
5. The process of creating a script for the groups
6. Participation in the Word Jazz Theater process.


Suggested book list:

Bird by Bird, by Annie Lamont.
The Writing Cure; how expressive writing promotes health and emotional well-being, edited by Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smyth with an epilogue by James Pennebaker.
Writing to Heal, James Pennebaker.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.
Old Friend from Far Away by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Cures, edited by Gillie Bolton, Stephanie Howlett, Colin Lago and Jeannie  Wright.
The Write-Your-Life-Whole Suggestion Pamphlet by Andrea Steffens

*All the trainings can be taken without the goal of certification.
*These trainings can be contracted and offered at the site of the contracting group.