What Lies Beneath: Treating the Trauma Underlying Substance Use Disorders

About the Course:

For many individuals suffering from substance use disorders, making the decision to enter treatment is a challenging process requiring a great degree of humility and courage. Clients often initially approach treatment with limited knowledge and perspective of what is truly required of themselves to benefit from a residential treatment setting. Not surprisingly, surrendering from their “regular lives” into an often novel and emotionally challenging therapeutic setting will elicit self-protective mechanisms. These reflexive responses can prevent both the client and the clinician from gaining meaningful access to the areas of deepest vulnerability and suffering, particularly with a trauma history. Taking a multiplicity of the self-perspective is a useful approach to assist both clients and clinicians in understanding how to collaboratively explore all aspects of what appear to be therapeutic impasses. Using the authentic therapeutic alliance and applying nuanced experiential, somatic, emotion-focused, and family systems-based approaches, can facilitate access to the “parts” of self that rely on substance use to cope. Additionally, we will discuss how more novel experiential treatment approaches including Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy can deepen internal access to one’s self and enhance opportunities for relational intimacy and repair.

This course is based on the recorded webinar, What Lies Beneath: Treating the Trauma Underlying Substance Use Disorders created by Chantelle Thomas, PhD in 2022.

Publication Date:

Course Material Author

Recommended For:

Counselors, marriage and family therapists, psychologists and social workers. This course is appropriate for all levels of knowledge.

Course Objectives:

After taking this course, you should be able to:

1. Define clinical barriers and treatment assumptions uniquely manifesting for co-occurring substance use and trauma from both the clinician and patient perspective.
2. Examine ways to strengthen the therapeutic alliance from an attachment-based lens that emphasizes resiliency and de-pathologizes the concept of "resistance" for dually-diagnosed individuals.
3. Summarize the range of clinical strategies and more novel, somatic-based interventions (Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing) that can promote safety, support emotional intimacy, and invite deeper exploration of the parts of self that have become alienated through trauma and substance use.