Practical Management of PTSD Online Training (1 Day Course) 2nd Feb 2026

Trainer: Phil Harris

Venue: Zoom Online

Trainer's Background: Phil Harris has worked with complex needs for over 28 years as a practitioner, trainer and manager. He has extensive experience across the field frontline substance misuse, homelessness and mental health services. He has managed teams including family, young people, dual diagnosis & personality disorders and substance misuse. And designed a wide range of services from large scale multi-county treatment systems to specialist programmes for groups with complex needs.

Phil is a visiting lecturer at Bristol University Social Policy Unit, advisor to the US BICEP programme and World Health Organisation in the Balkans region. He has written over 20 scholarly articles on effective practice and has published five books on substance misuse, treatment effectiveness, family and young people with complex needs. Visit www.philharris.online for more information.

About the Course: Professional agencies have become increasingly aware of the impact of trauma on clients, especially in the case of those with complex needs. Trauma can be sources from many experiences including childhood abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence or through other form of victimisation or occupational exposure. This course provides a clear understanding of the impact of trauma and the differences between Acute Stress Disorder, PTSD and Complex PTSD. It explains how the brain organizes trauma memories, leading to the experience of intrusive memories, flash backs and avoidance strategies in clients.

Based on this understanding, the course will offer participants a clear structured stepped intervention to support clients who are experiencing PTSD. Moving from initial interventions to support clients to processes emotional responses without revisiting traumatic memories, it will also provide a set of practical interventions to support people change key symptoms of trauma through memory restructuring, grounding and the effective management of nightmares, which in itself can reduce symptoms by 70 per cent.

Who is This Course For?: This course will be helpful for any practitioners who work with trauma on any level, form occupational trauma through to those who have experiences multiple trauma events. As such it will be helpful to those in private practice, as well as those who work with clients with complex needs in supported housing, recovery orientated substance misuse services, women specific services, those working with families, children and young people as well as mental health services. It will also help those working in trauma informed environments such as PIE.

Method of Delivery: The training course is highly interactive, even during presentations. It uses a wide variety of learning approaches including presentations, pairs and small group work exercises and self-assessment. The course is also supported with a comprehensive workbook and free online e-learning and further resources to re-cap, review and refresh learning.

Course Aims & Objectives:

The aim of the course is to equip practitioners with the core skills necessary to identify, support and promote recovery from trauma in a range of community settings.

By the end of the course participants will have had opportunities to:

• Describe how the brain processes trauma memories.
• Understand the difference between Acute Stress Disorder, PTSD and Complex PTSD.
• Support clients to safely process emotions related to trauma.
• Provide a compressive range of symptom management strategies.

Agenda

9.30 Introduction & Climate Setting

9.45 Trauma and The Brain

• Key features of memory
• How the brain processes information
• How the brain processes trauma

10.30 Break

10.40 Trauma

• Acute Stress Disorder
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

11.30 Break

11.40 Witnessing

• Processing Emotion
• Emotions and Language

12.15 Lunch

12.45 Reducing Intrusive Memories

• Dealing with dissociation
• Memory consolidation
• Erasing intrusive memory

1.45 Break

2.00 Grounding & Symptom Management

• Systematic De-sensitisation
• Rebooting Anxiety

2.50 Break

3.00 Sleep

• Deep sleep
• Mastering lucid dreaming
• Re-writing nightmares

4.00 Close and Evaluate