When clients have trauma and substance use issues, what do you work on first?

They may not have the stability necessary to work directly on their traumatic pasts...

While at the same time, that unprocessed trauma is contributing to their substance use.

In this session, Dr. Arielle Schwartz — a leading voice in the field of trauma recovery and author of eight books including The Complex PTSD Workbook — will give you tools to get at the root of the problem: the nervous system dysregulation that underlies both trauma and addiction. You'll get:

• Natural vagus nerve stimulation practices to promote calm and present-orientation
• Tools to facilitate embodied self-compassion and a sense of safety
• Strategies to build clients' capacity for distress tolerance and emotion regulation

When they need soothing, predictability, and relief from distress, your clients with attachment wounds can find a reliable source of regulation in addictive behaviors.

And when they try to move away from the addiction, they're met with a sense of emptiness and grief on top of difficulties with regulation.

In this session, DBT expert Dr. Eboni Webb will give you a framework for understanding addiction as a highly practiced regulatory strategy and tools for clients to create alternative sources of relief. You'll get:

• FAST skills and validation for rebuilding strained relationships
• Self-Soothe, TIP skills, urge surfing, and radical acceptance for tolerating cravings
• PLEASE skills, building mastery, and the function of emotions for regulating without the addiction

Attachment wounds live on in the roles a client unconsciously replays in every close relationship they enter as an adult.

And they can't talk their way out of it.

In this session, Dr. Tian Dayton — a foremost expert on trauma and addictions and author of numerous books including Growing Up with Addiction — will share psychodrama's most powerful techniques with you. You'll get:

• An experiential, body-based method that can access what words can't
• Strategies to work with the felt sense of early ruptures in a structured, containable way
• Tools to build empathy for self and other rather than intellectual insight alone

Lasting recovery requires a plan to meet the underlying needs that have fueled addictive urges and behaviors.

And when traumatic experiences have reshaped your client's physiological, emotional, and relational experience.

It's essential to create the kind of awareness and regulation in the present that will redirect energy into healing and growth.

In this session, Rafael Cortina, LMFT — master addictions counselor certified in both trauma and Gestalt therapy — will give you practical interventions from a Gestalt framework to empower your clients when dysregulation arises. You'll learn:

• Functional and embodied assessments to explore and shift addictive behavior
• Tools to increase clients’ ability to stay present without overwhelm and shame
• Relational tracking to create a lived opportunity for connection and co-regulation

Many people who die by suicide have a substance in their body at the time of their death — and that's not counting deaths classified as overdoses, which may in fact have been suicide attempts.

With substance use disorders and trauma being leading risk factors for suicide, it's imperative that you have the tools you need to support safety for your at-risk clients. In this session, Paul Brasler — substance use disorders expert and author of The Clinician's Guide to Suicide Management — will show you core suicide assessment adaptations for this vulnerable population. You'll get:

• A trauma-informed suicide risk assessment approach that respects autonomy and self-determination
• Strategies to accurately assess risk when clients are experiencing intoxication or withdrawal
• Safety planning and treatment planning tools to reduce suicidal thoughts and behaviors

Clients oscillate between numbing and flooding in early recovery.

And your attempts to widen their window of tolerance can backfire if you don't understand what's happening physiologically.

In this session, Linda Thai — distinguished expert in brain- and body-based modalities for the healing of complex developmental trauma — will show you how to read the edges of a client's window of tolerance and how to sequence mindfulness and sensory grounding so they build capacity instead of overwhelming your client. You'll get:

• Skill at mapping each client’s escalation curve and distinguishing actual calm from a “faux ventral” state
• Tools to build an individualized sensory grounding menu customized for each client
• Techniques focused on vestibular and proprioceptive senses that most grounding scripts leave out

Disconnection, shame, and loss of meaning aren't fully addressed by any one therapeutic modality.

But a focus on personal spirituality for clients struggling with trauma and addiction can provide the whole-person approach they need for sustained recovery.

In this session, Dr. Lisa Connors will show you how spirituality can be a key factor in improving motivation, bolstering engagement, strengthening resilience, and supporting posttraumatic growth. You'll get:

• Strategies for talking with clients about their spiritual beliefs and practices
• Culturally responsive interventions to strengthen resilience and support posttraumatic growth
• Tools to help clients explore their values and increase a sense of meaning and purpose

Many clients with trauma and addiction continue to suffer despite symptom reduction.

Because the grief and loss beneath the symptoms remain unnamed, unrecognized, and unresolved.

From loss of control to lost relationships, health, opportunities, and dreams — ongoing nonfinite and ambiguous losses and chronic sorrow impact clients even while recovery is progressing.

In this session, Lara Krawchuk, MSW, LCSW, MPH — sought-after trainer and creator of the Meaningful Grief model — will teach you a therapeutic stance that prioritizes deep presence, validation, compassionate witnessing, and meaning-making rather than fixing, rescuing, or prematurely encouraging change. You’ll get:

• Tools for recognizing and acknowledging relevant losses throughout all phases of treatment
• Practical skills for helping clients tolerate uncertainty and reconstruct meaning
• IFS-informed interventions to lend witness to parts impacted by suffering

Many traumatic experiences cause moral pain — and that pain, along with trauma-related symptoms, may lead your client to self-medicate.

And now their addiction has them going against their core values, creating more injury.

How do you stop the cycle?

In this practical session, Dr. Melissa Smigelsky — moral injury subject matter expert, intervention developer, and implementation scientist — will show you what you need to know to address morally injurious experiences that may serve as barriers to your clients' recovery. You'll get:

• Strategies for bringing morality into the therapy space that encourage clients to open up rather than shut down
• Tools to channel guilt into pro-social behaviors that reinforce clients’ values and contribute to recovery
• Interventions to reduce shame and increase self-compassion and acceptance

Concealment, denial, minimization, inconsistent recall, broken promises, and blame-shifting may leave those impacted by addiction-affected relationships questioning what they saw, what they remember, and whether they are somehow responsible.

Yet not every lie, defensive response, or memory discrepancy is gaslighting — and treating them as interchangeable can obscure risk, intensify shame, and lead therapists toward interventions that do not fit the pattern.

In this practical, trauma-informed session, Dr. Amelia Kelley — international trainer on trauma and empowerment-based therapy and author of Gaslighting Recovery for Women — will show you how to differentiate addiction-related deception, trauma dynamics, and self-protective distortion from gaslighting. You'll get:

• Tools to identify reality erosion and language for reality-based conversations
• Strategies to assess for relational harm, coercive control, and safety concerns
• Interventions for accountable communication, boundary setting, and — when appropriate — relational repair

Your relapsing, resisting, "unmotivated" client has a nervous system that is doing exactly what it was designed to do — protect them.

And when you can shift out of a focus on changing behavior first — and instead center interventions on the underlying dysregulation that drives it — you'll reduce shame, strengthen engagement, and promote lasting regulation and recovery.

In this session, Jan Winhall, MSW, PIFOT, developer of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model and author of 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction, will show you the Four-Circle Harm Reduction Practice Tool to help your client move toward regulation of body, breath, voice, and mind. You'll get:

• A somatic roadmap for shifting clients out of shame and addiction
• Neuroscience-informed strategies for regulation, titration, and pacing
• Attachment-based techniques for grounding, attunement, and relational safety