A New Approach
Trauma 101 is a 5-week group at ITTC set up to explore concepts such as stress in the body, social determinants of health, Adverse Childhood Experiences and other contributing factors for trauma and complex trauma. These themes are important to be explored as the groundwork practice before individual therapy. By incorporating Trauma 101 into a group therapy model, we are making trauma psychoeducation more efficient for both client and clinicians.
A Case for Clinicians
As clinicians, we find sometimes that folks come to therapy not quite sure what to expect or what they’re looking for, especially when working with trauma. Trauma 101 is normalizing that process, no matter if this is their first time in therapy or not. While this group is not designed to be an end-all-be-all to trauma psychoeducation, it does set the foundation for clients to take back to discuss with their individual therapists and learn more to build on what they’re already working on in sessions.
The Need for Education
Several epidemiological studies have reported high lifetime prevalence of traumas, such as 61% percent of men and 51% of women reported experiencing at least one trauma in their lifetime according to the SAMHSA and reported as high as 89.6% in a survey of Trauma in Detroit. These staggering numbers drive the need to make trauma education accessible and understandable.
Conveying the Information
Another important aspect of our Trauma 101 group is not only the psychoeducation for clients, but for student mental health therapy interns to learn how to access and convey this information. Student interns will learn how to create and establish group norms, managing group members, and conducting group sessions by observing a mental health clinician run Trauma 101. Then, the student intern will have a turn to run the group themselves with the support of the clinician. From there, the student interns take these concepts in the next steps of their career. This process allows for an integrative approach for students to learn trauma informed methods and establish these concepts early.
The Groundwork
From a trauma therapist lens, this group is designed to approach these concepts similarly to the treatment phases of trauma through Phase I Safety, Phase II Processing, and Phase III Integration. We know that these phases do not happen chronologically though. Sometimes folks will spend time in these phases throughout different chapters in their life, but using this framework allows clients to see into the vital groundwork for their treatment in services with Integrative Trauma Treatment Center and beyond.
Join Trauma 101
Our summer session begins 6/29 and runs for 5 weeks on Thursdays at 5:00 pm. Or reserve your spot early for our Fall session beginning 10/12! Learn more about joining this group or others, here!