Healing Trauma Bonds Certificate: Clinical Tools to Break Toxic Cycles, Repair Insecure Attachment & Rebuild Self-Trust

Join Dr. Laura Copley, acclaimed expert in relationship trauma, specializing in trauma bonds and post-traumatic growth, for a ground-breaking workshop. Dr. Copley's celebrated book Loving You is Hurting Me has helped clinicians and clients alike find new meaning after toxic relationships. Now, you're getting the key interventions and somatic exercises directly from Dr. Copley.

• What are we missing with this population?
• Do more effective work with trauma-bonded clients
• Explore Dr. Copley’s research and trauma-informed approaches
• at is needed to do better work with trauma bonded individuals?
• INTERVENTIONS: “Not My Best Moment” visualization exercise and “Self-Forgiveness” practice

• Trauma-informed considerations before beginning therapy
• What is titrating and how to do it?
• Applied Relational Neuroscience and Positive Psychology
• Teaching clients “The Art of Discernment”
• INTERVENIONS: Polyvagal-inspired “Meet Your Nervous System” and “What Grounds Me?” exercise, Havening Techniques for safety, Parts Mapping for “Creating Inner Guardians” and client’s “Gathering Place” Activities, Intro to Bilateral Stimulation

• How the 5 major attachment traumas are linked to worthiness
• Know how attachment traumas play out as current reactions and behaviours
• Examine and undo the impact of family-of-origin roles and attachment wounds
• Reparent the inner child and its wounds
• INTERVENTIONS: “Meeting Your Wounded Inner Child” Parts Work activity and worksheet, “Little Me Reconnection” photograph exercise, and Establishing Unmet Needs, “Dialoguing with Inner Guardians” as a Reparenting writing exercise

• Identifying Protectors, Blocks, and Resistance, and a new mindsight on how to perceive them
• Sensitively overcome client resistance and prepare them for healthy self-disclosures
• Explore the continuum of trauma bonding, red flags and narcissism
• Paradigm shift away from “victim-perpetrator” mindset
• Signs of abuse
• Know the 7 stages of trauma bonding
• INTERVENTIONS: “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” resistance activity, Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples and “The Dance”, “Mapping Out the Toxic Hook” and Somatic Therapy, The Psychology of Ritual “Chord Cutting”, Somatic Experiencing Exercise, “Creating Your Self-Trust Mantra”, clinical movie analysis

• Your role as a guide to corrective emotional experiences
• Gottman’s research on Stages of Repair
• Help clients identify their unmet needs and “toxic hook” cycle
• Explore new narratives with writing exercises from Narrative Exposure Therapy
• How to get clients speaking to their “Embodied Self”
• Apply Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability & Ester Perel’s research on intimacy and connection
• Therapeutic questionnaire for clients’ self-exploration
• INTERVENTIONS: Qi Gong Activity for Healing Energy, Tapping-in (installing) a new narrative (“Even though I feel… I know I am…”), Narrative Exposure Therapy using storytelling and letter-writing,“Know Thyself, Trust Thyself” Exercise and how to speak on behalf of parts, “Getting to Know You,.. Again” re-connection questionnaire

• The key to authentic connections after trauma bonding
• How PTG looks after toxic relationships
• Incorporate the “hero’s journey” into healing
• The 5 key experiences in PTG
• Create interpersonal transformation and growth after therapy ends
• INTERVENTIONS: “Benefit Finding” exercise for Individuals and Couples, “Playlist for Parts” coming to aid an unmet need, Two-Chair Technique from Healed Self to Trauma Wounds, Trauma Transformation Timeline Exercise, and Re-authoring the story 

• When treatment doesn’t work
• The role of personality disorders in treatment
• Address and identify misunderstandings
• Emergence of new symptoms and triggers
• Unmet expectations, drama and disappointment
• Contraindications and Cultural Considerations:
• Newness and evidence for the presented content

Join Dr. Robert Muller, author of psychotherapy bestseller, Trauma and the Avoidant Client: Attachment Based Strategies for Healing, to learn specific, evidence-based techniques using a relational, integrative approach that emphasizes your own healing and countertransference as a therapist.

• When trauma teaches silence: “You mustn’t tell anyone!”
• How trauma stories “leak out” in therapy—even when clients resist opening up
• Avoidance in trauma work: Why clients sidestep painful feelings and relationships
• Mutual avoidance: When both therapist and client unconsciously steer away from trauma—“This feels too overwhelming!”
• Risks and limitations of the research

• Recognizing when a client rushes into trauma work—and why it can backfire
• Techniques to slow down and create a sense of safety before diving deeper
• When the therapist moves too fast: Understanding the impulse to push forward
• How rushing—on either side—can destabilize the process and undermine progress

• Understanding how your own attachment history shapes clinical interactions
• Countertransference patterns in trauma therapy—and how they show up in session
  • The rescue fantasy: The urge to “fix” or save the client
  • Feeling bullied by the client: Power struggles and therapist reactivity
  • Compassion fatigue and disengagement: When hopelessness sets in
• Using self-awareness to strengthen therapeutic connection and resilience

• How enactments—unconscious relational patterns—create ruptures in therapy
• Spotting when the therapeutic relationship is going off track
• The rupture-repair process:
  • Looking inside: The therapist’s role in relational breakdowns
  • Validating: Acknowledging the client’s experience without defensiveness
  • Providing containment: Rebuilding safety and trust
  • Mentalizing: Helping clients reflect on their own emotional responses
• Turning conflict into growth: Using relational challenges to deepen the alliance