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Dialectical Behaviour Therapy for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

From November 18, 2025 to December 10, 2025

WHAT TO EXPECT

This 4-week course provides a comprehensive examination of DBT-PTSD based on a psychosocial model. Dysfunctional behaviors are understood as strategies to avoid or escape from trauma-associated primary emotions like powerlessness, threat, anxiety,

disgust, humiliation, or sexual arousal. DBT-PTSD proposes that these emotions are corroborated by dysfunctional cognitive assumptions and dysfunctional behaviors such as self-injury, suicidal ideation, dissociation or intoxication. It further proposes that

problematic secondary emotions such as shame, guilt, self-hatred, or chronic anger develop over time into problematic self-concepts which impair quality of life.


DBT-PTSD helps clients: a. Revise their fear of trauma-associated primary emotions, b. Question whether secondary emotions like guilt and shame fit the facts, and c. Radically accept the fact of trauma in their lives to establish a life worth living. The treatment program is designed to be delivered in a residential program (three-months) or in an outpatient setting (45 weeks).


This course provides comprehensive training in DBTPTSD including a manual. The course also fulfills the prerequisite for enrolling in the Advanced DBT for Complex PTSD course that is offered alongside this foundational training course.


Accredited by the Ontario Psychological Association for 28 hours of continuing education.


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