Training Agenda

Agenda for the 2-Day, 16 CE Program

Day 1: Foundations of Survival Neurobiology, Regulation, and Targeted Memory Updating

Training Day: 8:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Total CE Hours: 8.0

Morning Instructional Block

8:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
CE Hours: 4.0

Non-CE Break: 10:15-10:30 a.m.

1. Orientation, Scope, and Training Framework

Time: 8:30-8:45 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.25

1. Introduction and orientation: trauma-informed, neuroscience-grounded clinical approach designed to complement existing therapeutic work.
2. Review scope-of-practice considerations, training expectations, and the relationship between didactic and experiential learning.

2. Trauma-Informed Care, Applied Neurobiology, and Resilience-Oriented Clinical Practice

Time: 8:45-9:15 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.50

1. Define the course as grounded in trauma-informed care, neurobiologically based intervention, and resilience-focused treatment.
2. Explain how safety, trust, predictability, and agency create the neural conditions necessary for learning and integration.
3. Clarify that trauma responses are understood as learned adaptations, introducing Brain Partnership framework.

3. Survival Neurobiology, Information Processing, and the Development of Self-Experience

Time: 9:15-10:15 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Review the brain’s information-processing sequence, including the thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, autonomic nervous system, and working memory system.
2. Explain how negativity bias, stress-induced structural plasticity, and repeated emotional learning shape present-moment perception and response.
3. Describe how interoception, cognition, autonomic tone, somatic experience, and emotion interact to organize self-experience.
4. Connect chronic survival activation to hypervigilance, shutdown, shame, self-blame, rumination, and reduced behavioral flexibility.

Break Time: 10:15-10:30 a.m.
CE Credit: None

4. State Tracking, Affective Touch, and Working-Memory Redirection

Time: 10:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Introduce real-time state-tracking tools for monitoring distress, activation, and embodied access to adaptive states.
2. Clarify how these measures guide pacing across regulation work, trauma processing, and resilience-building.
3. Review the neurobiological rationale for self-applied affective touch, mindful touch, and tapping, including sensory safety signaling, autonomic settling, and interoceptive support.
4. Explain how structured cognitive distraction redistributes working-memory resources, interrupts threat-dominant loops, and creates space for adaptive processing

5. Integrating State Tracking, Sensory Regulation, and Brain-Care Strategies

Time: 11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.25

1. Teach how state tracking, self-applied affective touch, paced autonomic downshifting, and working-memory redirection can be integrated into a brief, structured self-regulation sequence for use during moments of activation.
2. Explain how these methods support between-session brain-care by helping clients reduce distress, reorient attention, increase interoceptive access, and restore regulatory flexibility.
3. Review clinical applications of these integrated strategies for in-session stabilization, between-session coping, and resilience-building.
4. Experiential: participant practice integrating state tracking, affective touch, paced breathing or autonomic downshifting, and cognitive distraction into a brief brain-care sequence (Truitt, 2025; Truitt & The Truitt Institute, 2025).

Lunch 12:45-1:45 p.m.
CE Credit: None

Afternoon Instructional Block — 1:45-6:00 p.m.

CE Hours: 4.0
Non-CE Break: 3:15-3:30 p.m.

6. Acute Stress and Trauma Encoding: How Threat Is Learned and Stored

Time: 1:45-2:45 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

• Introduce a structured framework for understanding how stressful or traumatic experience is encoded through signal, context, physiological reaction, safety appraisal, and memory storage.
• Explain how intensity, unpredictability, and impaired escape or control increase the likelihood of durable survival-based learning.
• Review how sensory, emotional, autonomic, and cognitive data become linked during acute stress.
• Connect acute encoding to later implicit reactivity, trauma filters, and overgeneralized threat appraisal.
• Experiential: guided application of the encoding framework to a low-intensity clinical vignette.

7. Trauma Filters, Survival-Based Patterning, and Precision in Target Selection

Time: 2:45-3:15 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.50

1. Explain how primary threat, sensory cues, and environmental context become linked and later drive disproportionate distress responses.
2. Review how repeated survival activation organizes beliefs, autonomic responses, somatic experience, and emotion into enduring maladaptive patterns.
3. Teach participants to differentiate broad narrative distress from the specific sensory, emotional, physiological, or cognitive cue driving present-moment threat activation.
4. Emphasize that precise cue-based targeting is more neurobiologically efficient and less flooding than broad, undifferentiated exposure.

Break

Time: 3:15-3:30 p.m.
CE Credit: None

8. Targeted Desensitization and Memory Updating Under Conditions of Safety

Time: 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Introduction to the structured desensitization process for reducing the emotional and physiological intensity of distress-linked material.
2. Review the mechanisms involved: brief reactivation, concurrent safety signaling, working-memory engagement, and prediction-error learning.
3. Explain how mindful touch and attentional redirection support the destabilization of survival-linked associations without overwhelming the system.
4. Clarify distress-rating-based pacing and the decision points for continuing, pausing, or returning to regulation.

9. Targeted Desensitization Practice

Time: 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

• Guide participants through supervised practice using low-intensity, clinically appropriate targets.
• Practice precise cue identification, minimal narrative elaboration, and distress-rating-based pacing.
• Reinforce the use of safety cues and working-memory tasks during repeated brief intervals of activation.
• Debrief likely outcomes, including reduced intensity, altered perception of the target, and increased distance from the material.

10. Day 1 Integration and Transition to Structured Case Formulation

Time: 5:30-6:00 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.50

1. Consolidate Day 1 learning around survival neurobiology, regulation, threat encoding, and targeted desensitization.
2. Preview Day 2 morning’s shift into structured neurobiological history-taking, present-moment pattern mapping, and survival-pattern restructuring.
3. Review the limitations of the research and potential risks. Examine clinical considerations for special population symptom presentations.

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Day 2: Structured Neurobiological History-Taking, Survival-Pattern Restructuring, Narrative Integration, and Future Rehearsal

Training Day: 8:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Total CE Hours: 8.0

1. Structured Neurobiological History-Taking

Time: 8:30-9:15 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.75

1. Introduce the structured history-taking framework that examines stressors, developmental and relational history, autonomic responses, self-perception, emotions, and current relational dynamics.
2. Explain how this process translates narrative history into clinically useful information about nervous-system patterning, emotional learning, coping, and worldview.
3. Emphasize its function as a bridge between descriptive history and targeted intervention.

2. Translating History Into Present-Moment Patterning and Treatment Planning

Time: 9:15-10:00 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.75

1. Show how current difficulties can be mapped across belief systems, autonomic patterns, somatic memory, and emotional reactivity.
2. Identify how repeated exposure to threat, attachment disruption, and self-protective adaptation become embedded as implicit expectations and physiological habits.
3. Clarify how threats to safety, belonging, and agency shape both symptom presentation and treatment priorities.
4. Experiential: case-formulation exercise moving from structured history to present-day neural, emotional, and somatic targets.

Break Time: 10:00-10:15 a.m.
CE Credit: None

3. Restructuring Survival-Encoded Patterns After Desensitization

Time: 10:15-11:15 a.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Introduction to trauma integration as restructuring the strongest linked belief, autonomic response, somatic cue, or emotion after the original distress target has sufficiently decreased.
2. Review of client readiness criteria, including that the original distress target has already been reduced enough to allow restructuring without flooding.
3. Exploration of prediction patterns and integration of neurobiological rerouting of entrenched survival patterns through restructuring.
4. Teach the restructuring sequence using brief activation, repetition, mindful touch, and careful monitoring of physiological and emotional shifts.

4. Survival-Pattern Restructuring Practice

Time: 11:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.25

1. Supervised restructuring practice using previously desensitized or low-activation material.
2. Practice identifying the strongest linked cognitive, autonomic, somatic, or emotional element and working with it directly.
3. Reinforce pacing, therapist restraint, and when to return to stabilization if arousal rises.
4. Debrief the distinction between reducing distress and reorganizing a broader survival-based response pattern.

5. Morning Integration

Time: 12:30-12:45 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.25

1. Consolidate the morning’s work on structured history-taking, present-moment pattern mapping, and survival-pattern restructuring.
2. Prepare participants for the shift from trauma integration into adaptive-state development, narrative integration, and future-oriented rehearsal.
3. Review the limitations of the research and potential risks. Examine clinical considerations for special population symptom presentations.

Lunch 12:45-1:45 p.m.
CE Credit: None

Afternoon Instructional Block — 1:45-6:00 p.m.

CE Hours: 4.0
Non-CE Break: 3:30-3:45 p.m.

6. Building Adaptive States, Interoceptive Ownership, and Positive Emotional Salience

Time: 1:45-2:30 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.75

1. Introduce the resilience-focused phase of treatment as building states the nervous system can genuinely access when threat no longer dominates.
2. Define an adaptive target state as a tolerable, repeatable, embodied experience of safety, connection, steadiness, confidence, or agency.
3. Explain how adaptive-state development relies on regulation, emotional salience, repetition, and interoceptive congruence.
4. Review the role of intentional savoring, sensory amplification, and mental rehearsal in stabilizing adaptive neural pathways.
5. Experiential: Guided practice identifying and strengthening an adaptive target state.

7. Narrative Updating of the Past and Future-Oriented Rehearsal: Conceptual Overview

Time: 2:30-3:30 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Introduce narrative updating as a process used after distress has already decreased and the nervous system can access a more adaptive internal state.
2. Clarify that the aim is not to deny factual history, but to update autobiographical meaning by integrating safety, agency, resilience, and choice into past representations.
3. Introduce future-oriented rehearsal as a method for reducing anticipatory threat while strengthening realistic, adaptive performance.
4. Review the neuroscience of salience networks, executive control, working memory, autobiographical meaning-making, anticipatory learning, and repeated mental rehearsal.

Break Time: 3:30-3:45 p.m.
CE Credit: None

8. Past Narrative Updating Practice

Time: 3:45-4:45 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Guide participants through supervised practice using a benign past event or previously processed low-intensity material.
2. Practice bringing the adaptive state into the old memory while rehearsing a new, client-centered outcome or meaning.
3. Reinforce the importance of interoceptive authenticity, client authorship, and realistic meaning-making.
4. Debrief how narrative updating differs from initial desensitization and from restructuring survival-linked responses.

9. Future-Oriented Rehearsal Practice

Time: 4:45-5:45 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 1.00

1. Guide participants through supervised practice using a mild future-oriented challenge such as a difficult conversation, performance demand, or anticipated stressor.
2. Practice identifying the worst-case anticipated moment, strengthening the preferred internal state, and rehearsing a realistic future response sequence.
3. Reinforce the role of repetition, salience, and embodied congruence in future-oriented neural learning.
4. Debrief how future rehearsal supports choice, flexibility, and reduced anticipatory threat.
5. Review the limitations of the research and potential risks. Examine clinical considerations for special population symptom presentations.

10. Final Integration, Application, and Closing

Time: 5:45-6:00 p.m.
Instructional Hours: 0.25

1. Integrate the full two-day arc: survival neurobiology, regulation, threat encoding, target precision, desensitization, restructuring, adaptive-state development, narrative integration, and future rehearsal.
2. Reinforce the clinical decision tree: regulate first, target precisely, reduce overactivation before restructuring, and move into resilience and future rehearsal only when the system can genuinely hold it.
3. Highlight repetition and between-session practice as central to durable neuroplastic change.
4. Close with application across clinical settings and final questions.