Trauma-Informed Care: Treating Self-Injury & Self-Harm Behaviors in Trauma Survivors

Course overview

Given the dramatic uptick in self-destructive behaviors, it's important for clinicians to effectively and confidently know how to work with them. Participants will learn how acts of self-harm are attempts to communicate trauma and pain narratives as well as cope with them, self-soothe, and sometimes numb out the unresolved emotional pain, and the negative, distorted thoughts that can overwhelm and de-stabilize. We will explore both the secure and insecure dynamics of early childhood attachment, and process how the insecure attachment pattern a child is given connects to their inability to regulate their emotions and makes them vulnerable to using self-harm in adolescence and adulthood. Participants will learn how to take a strengths-based, de-pathologized approach to treating self-harm, incorporate psycho-education, and teach clients a specific cycle of self-harm that shows them the role that triggers, anxiety, negative thoughts and feelings, and dissociation play. We will also discuss why standard safety contracts don't work and then learn about CARESS, a treatment model that gives clients alternatives when they get the impulse to hurt themselves. These creative interventions help clients accomplish what self-harm does without evoking guilt, shame, or further injury to the body.