COPING WITH TRAUMATIC EVENTS: THREATS, CRISES, AND PTSD

Course overview

This live webinar will focus on how people react to and cope with traumatic events, threats, and crises. The presentation will begin with a description of how our behavior results from an interaction of four major brain processes, perception, thinking, emotions, and memory, that create the cognitive appraisals and core beliefs that produce, respectively, emotions and moods. Positive and negative emotions will be described along with how a unique individual pattern of behavior called personality is produced. The presentation will show how cognitive appraisals of threatening and traumatic events produce a life saving mental and physical response called stress, which is created by the emotions of fear and anger. The usually good acute and typically bad chronic stress will be differentiated along with the physiological, perceptual, and imaginary causes of stress. There will be a discussion of how powerful and sustained stress often develops into anxiety disorders like panic disorder and dental phobia and trauma disorders like PTSD. The importance of locus of control in producing and managing stress will be emphasized along with a discussion of the common things people typically stress themselves about in 2019, including an analysis of the number one fear, mass shootings. Traumatic events and psychological trauma will be defined. Resilience, the learned buffer against trauma disorders, will be explained along with examples of resilient stress management in response to traumatic events such as Captain Sully and the Miracle on the Hudson. The seminar will include descriptions of stress management strategies like mindfulness, relaxation response, and cognitive behavioral therapies. Stressor related and trauma disorders will be described and discussed, including early childhood trauma disorders like reactive attachment and disinhibited social engagement, adjustment disorders, and the two stress disorders, acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. PTSD will be addressed in detail, including detailed presentations of rape trauma syndrome, military stress and suicides, continuous traumatic stress from the COVID 19 pandemic, secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue in healthcare professionals, methods of crisis intervention, and specialized treatments like trauma informed care, cognitive processing therapy, exposure therapies, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).