Resilience and Post-Traumatic Growth: Healing from Loss and Trauma with Compassion, Clarity, and Courage
Course Content
People do learn and grow from meeting the challenges and adversities of life when they have the support, resources, and skills to do so.
Helping clients strengthen their capacities – innate in their brains – to cope with any level of adversity – from a series of small annoyances to the troubles and tragedies that break their hearts to the utter catastrophes that change their lives forever – is at the heart of the therapeutic process.
This training teaches clinicians the basics of harness the brain’s neuroplasticity to help clients learn more flexible and adaptive coping strategies and rewire negative coping patterns that block their recovery, learning and growth.
Clients learn the techniques that reverse the impacts of stress and trauma, shift the functioning of the brain out of reactivity, contraction, dissociation into more receptivity and openness to learning, help clients once again trust other people as refuges and resources, discern new options, and deepen the meaning and purpose in their lives. The direct measurable outcome is resilience.
Program Outline
What Resilience Is
- Emerging definitions from behavioural sciences, modern neuroscience, the field of post-traumatic growth. Example from American Psychological Association: “Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress.”
How Resilience Is Developed…or Derailed
- Relevance of modern neuroscience: resilience is a capacity innate in human beings because it is innate in the human brain.
- Impact of attachment conditioning and trauma on the development of the brain and resilience…or not
Role of Neuroplasticity
- Because the brain learns and rewires itself from experience, teaching clients the experiential tools that will strengthen the structures of the brain that support flexible and adaptive coping strategies, and rewire negative coping patterns that block their learning and growth – in ways that are safe, efficient, and effective.
Somatic Intelligence
- Use body-based tools to help clients reverse the impact of stress and trauma on their nervous system, returning to an inner sense of safety and equilibrium, their natural range of resilience
Emotional Intelligence
- Help clients manage disruptive emotions, deepen self-compassion and empathy, and cultivate the positive emotions that antidote the brain’s negativity bias and shift brain functioning from contracted survival responses to openness to learning and growth
Relational Intelligence within One’s Self
- Cultivate the self-awareness and self-appreciation that help clients heal form toxic shame, retire the inner critic, and recover their inner well-being
Relational Intelligence with Others
- Teach the relational skills – reaching out for help, communicating without shame or blame, negotiating change, setting limits and boundaries, resolving conflict, repairing ruptures, and practicing forgiveness -that allow clients to trust other people as refuges and resources in difficult times
Reflective Intelligence
- Adapt practices of mindfulness to help clients identify dysfunctional patterns of coping and discern new choices of behaviour
Post-Traumatic Growth
- Help clients apply evidenced-based tools to the five factors that predict genuine post-traumatic growth:
- Acceptance of reality (and the consequences of what happened);
- Resourcing with family, friends, friends, and community
- Recognising the positive in the midst of the difficult; finding the gifts in the mistakes
- Writing a coherent narrative of the event within the larger life story
- Appreciating the new opportunities and deeper meaning that emerges because of the difficulties, not just in spite of them.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of the training, participants will be better able to:
- Describe the differences between stressors (external events) and stress (internal reactions to external events) and the differences between stress and trauma (an overwhelm of defenses against stress or external events)
- Apply techniques of memory deconsolidation-reconsolidation to help clients change how they perceive and respond to memories of past traumatic events.
- Utilize practices of self-compassion that help clients counter the harshness of the inner critic and inner toxic shame, deepen their self-acceptance of all inner parts and voices, and strengthen the inner secure base of resilience.
- Incorporate techniques to cultivate positive emotions that help clients antidote the brain’s negativity bias and shift the functioning of the brain from contraction and reactivity to responsiveness and openness to learning.
- Teach clients to use five body-based tools to regulate automatic survival responses and return the body-brain to its natural physiological equilibrium
- Teach clients three practices of guided visualisation to create inner resources of resilience
- Identify 7 steps of mindfulness practice that allow clients to monitor and modify their responses to experience
- Use tools of written narrative and reflection to help clients find the silver lining or lessons to be learned from traumatising events.
- Identify three common de-railers of resilience in therapeutic sessions
- Describe 5 factors essential to post-traumatic growth
CPD Information For Mental Health Professionals
Enjoy complete flexibility with 100% self-paced learning you can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Pay once for lifetime access.
Course Duration: 4 learning hours
Certificate and CPD hours: On completion you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion to support your CPD records.
Assessment: Complete a short quiz at the end (80% pass mark), which you can resit as many times as needed.
Lifetime Access: Your access to the course does not expire, so you can revisit key concepts anytime you want a refresher for practice.
CPD Eligibility: This program may be suitable for CPD for professionals such as:
- Psychologists
- Counsellors and Psychotherapists
- Social Workers
- Community Workers
- Mental Health Nurses
- General Practitioners (GPs)
- Occupational Therapists
CPD requirements vary between professional bodies, so please check with your association or credentialing body to confirm you can claim CPD hours/OPD points for this program and what evidence they require.
Meet Your Instructor
Clients overwhelmed by stress, trauma, and life's inevitable crises - and therapists seeking to understand how neuroscience can enhance therapeutic healing - may need more than traditional approaches to build genuine resilience that lasts beyond the therapy room. Linda Graham has spent almost 30 years pioneering the integration of neuroscience, mindfulness, and relational psychology, becoming one of the world's leading authorities on the neuroscience of resilience and helping thousands of practitioners understand how to literally rewire the brain for greater well-being.
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1995 and award-winning author of Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, Graham represents the perfect synthesis of clinical expertise and cutting-edge research. Her Books for a Better Life Award (2013) and Better Books for a Better World Award (2014) reflect her exceptional ability to translate complex neuroscientific concepts into immediately applicable practices. Her timing was "blessed," as she puts it, to help pioneer the clinical interest in resilience neuroscience, training thousands of practitioners across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East in evidence-based approaches to building authentic resilience.
Graham's expertise spans the neuroscience of resilience, stress and trauma recovery, anxiety and depression management, mindfulness, self-compassion, somatic psychology, couples therapy, and contemplative practices integration. Her approach integrates modern neuroscience with ancient contemplative wisdom, recognising that true resilience isn't about bouncing back to where we were, but about bouncing forward to who we can become. She specialises in helping clients shift from reactive patterns to response flexibility, transforming "regrettable moments into teachable moments," and developing what she calls the four intelligences: somatic, emotional, relational, and reflective.
What sets her training apart is scientific rigor combined with contemplative wisdom. Graham doesn't just teach resilience techniques - she shows practitioners how specific practices literally rewire neural pathways to strengthen capacities for coping, connection, and conscious choice-making. Her integration of Eastern contemplative practices with Western psychology and neuroscience provides a comprehensive framework for sustainable therapeutic change.
For your practice, expect to gain exposure to up to 80 experiential exercises for building resilience, specific neuroscience-based interventions for stress and trauma, and frameworks for integrating mindfulness and self-compassion into existing therapeutic approaches. Her methods particularly benefit clinicians working with trauma survivors, those interested in mindfulness-based interventions, or practitioners seeking to understand how therapy creates lasting neuroplastic change.
Quick Win: Using the DBT "STOP" technique (Stop, Take a breath, Observe what's happening, Proceed mindfully) helps clients quickly shift from reactive to responsive mode - helping provide instant emotional regulation while building the neural pathways that support long-term resilience.
Qualifications
- Master's Degree, Clinical Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy, John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, CA
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), California, since 1995
- Advanced training: AEDP, DBT, EMDR, EFT for couples, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Mindful Self-Compassion protocol
- 30+ years clinical experience
Authored Books
- Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster (2018)
- Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being (2013, over 80 experiential exercises, award-winning)
Professional Experience
- Author & International Speaker, Resilience and Neuroscience, 2013–present
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Private Practice, San Francisco Bay Area, 1995–2023
- Clinical Training Provider, Neuroscience of resilience workshops, USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, Middle East, 2013–present
Publications & Media
- Weekly "Resources for Recovering Resilience" newsletter, 2008–2023 (archived at website)
- Regular contributor: The Psychotherapy Networker, Mindful magazine, Wise Brain Bulletin, Greater Good Science Center newsletters
- Podcast guest: The Adult Chair, One You Feed, numerous resilience and mental health podcasts
- Featured expert on resilience and mindfulness topics
Clinical Specialties
- Neuroscience of resilience and post-traumatic growth
- Stress and trauma recovery using neuroplasticity principles
- Integration of mindfulness and self-compassion in therapy
- Couples therapy with attachment-based and mindfulness approaches
- Anxiety and depression management through resilience building
- Somatic approaches to emotional regulation
- Response flexibility and perspective-shifting techniques
Teaching Focus
- Integration of modern neuroscience with contemplative wisdom
- Four intelligences: somatic, emotional, relational, and reflective
- Transforming "regrettable moments into teachable moments"
- Building authentic resilience beyond mere bouncing back
- Conscious, compassionate connection as foundation for healing
Ready to help clients build genuine resilience that creates lasting neuroplastic change? Discover how Linda Graham's evidence-based, contemplatively-informed methods can transform your understanding of how therapy rewires the brain for authentic well-being and post-traumatic growth.
Feedback & Reviews
This course includes:
- Lessons 1
- Topics 6
- Duration 4 hours
- Quizzes 1
- Language English