There has been an increasing interest in understanding how PTSD affects the brain (and vice versa). Ideas like the body “keeping score” have helped to popularize the effects of trauma on the nervous system. Understanding brain functioning is helpful to make sense of things. But can that understanding help clients?
Like any information, it depends on how you use it. Many research-based therapies for PTSD are actually consistent with these increasing popular emphases on brain functioning (e.g., prolonged exposure therapy, PE; cognitive processing therapy, CPT).
The NICABM provides training on how to better understand brain functioning in PTSD. It also discusses in-depth ways this can be used in the context of treatment. It also discusses applications pertaining to multiple aspects of PTSD (e.g., survival instinct, freeze responses, dissociation, etc.)
Pros: This training provides treatment applications of concepts that are so foundational and important to the development and maintenance of PTSD. Trainings are provided by a handful of heavy-hitters in the scientific study of trauma and related processes. It also covers a lot of ground within a short period, so you can maximize your time.
Limits: This training does not intend to provide education on conducting any full mode of therapy. It more-so provides information and brief techniques informed by neurobiological understandings. Also, the training boasts itself as novel, but many of the concepts on neurological processes in PTSD have been around long before reaching popularity. Bessel and friends had to get their information from somewhere, right?
Understand the roles played the brain’s key structures can be helpful for understanding client experiences with PTSD. And ways to use that information to inform how to help in therapy ain’t bad either!
