OPA March Webinar | Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychosis: CBT and Other Approaches to Understanding and Recovery
Thursday, March 13, 2025, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST
Category: Events

OPA March Webinar Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychosis: CBT and Other Approaches to Understanding and Recovery
Presented by Ron J. Unger Thursday, March 13, 2025 | Attend via Zoom
Description:
A large number of studies now provide strong evidence that psychosis is often an understandable reaction to trauma, abuse, and other difficult life experiences. This training will introduce you to a science based yet humanistic conceptualization of extreme human experiences that can be related to trauma, and will demonstrate how to help people change their relationship with these experiences, for example, by collaborating with them in building coherent and compassionate self-narratives that can set the stage for a strong recovery. Dissociation can be a normal response to traumatic stress and can, in its more extreme forms and when misinterpreted, easily lead to psychosis. Drawing on this understanding, the possibility of addressing dissociation and misinterpretations of dissociation using methods drawn from diverse sources such as CBT, the Hearing Voices Movement, mindfulness, and psychodynamic approaches will be presented. These approaches can help people to regain perspective and personal power and create an opportunity to resolve internal conflicts rather than remaining stuck in endless efforts to suppress whatever is disturbing them.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify three possible interrelationships between trauma, dissociation, and psychosis, including ways that psychosis itself, and reactions to psychosis by others, can be traumatizing
- Create a plan to integrate CBT for psychosis with therapy oriented towards trauma to effectively treat people who are struggling with both trauma and psychosis
- Describe a collaborative approach to helping clients develop coherent and compassionate stories of trauma and recovery which provide an alternative to both fragmented "psychotic" stories, and to helplessness-inducing "mental illness" stories
Rob J. Unger
Ron Unger LCSW is a therapist and consultant specializing in CBT and related approaches for psychosis. For the past 2 decades he has been providing continuing education seminars on therapy for psychosis, working with the intersection of trauma and psychosis, and addressing cultural and spiritual issues within treatment for psychosis, at universities and mental health facilities across the United States and internationally. His seminars help people relate to the basic humanity in otherwise puzzling extreme states of mind, and reveal possible pathways people can take toward deep recovery and healing. He chairs the Pacific NW Branch of ISPS-US, and maintains a blog at recoveryfrompsychosis.org
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