Marijuana Use and PTSD – Implications for Treatment
Your client uses cannabis. A doctor may have prescribed it, or not. They tell you it helps them sleep and quietens the intrusions, and next week you are due to start trauma processing with them. Nothing in your training covered what to do about that.
Jennifer Sweeton’s account is deliberately even-handed, which is what makes it usable. The client is not wrong about what they are getting. Cannabis does reduce amygdala activation, which is exactly why it takes the edge off hyperarousal and helps some people sleep. There is research associating medical cannabis with reduced intrusions and, over the short term, better sleep, and the short-term memory effect appears to speed up fear extinction. Psychoeducation that opens by dismissing all of that does not survive contact with a client who knows better.
The problem is what it does to your therapy. Regular use roughly doubles the risk of dropping out of CBT and of pharmacological treatment. Adherence falls, for trauma-focused work and for everything else. Outcomes after trauma-focused treatment, EMDR included, come out worse. And there is a mechanism underneath that is worth sitting with: desensitisation needs the amygdala to activate. If cannabis has already suppressed it, there is nothing there to desensitise.
Then the part you can act on. Outcomes return to roughly what you would expect from a non-user when the client abstains during treatment, and Sweeton works through the graduated options if complete abstinence is not realistic, along with the windows either side of a session and why the second one gets forgotten.
Two hours, and you come out with something you can actually say to a client on Thursday.
You’ll walk away with
- A balanced read of what the research does and does not show, so you can acknowledge what a client is getting from cannabis without endorsing it or losing your credibility
- Abstinence windows you can offer a client, from an eight hour gap through to abstaining for the course of treatment, with the reasoning behind each so you can pitch it to the person in front of you
- Why the window matters on both sides of the session, since memory reconsolidation continues for hours after the client leaves the room
- The reason suppressing the amygdala before an exposure session removes the very thing the session needs in order to work
- The dropout and adherence figures, so you know what you are looking at from the intake onwards rather than three months in
- Plain-language explanations of what cannabis does across the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and reward system, in a form clients will follow and take seriously
- Why the rebound gets steeper with repeated use, and how to explain that to a client without it sounding like a scare campaign
- What to expect when a client does stop, including the rise in PTSD symptoms that comes before any improvement
- Why the picture is materially different for adolescents, including the interruption to normal pruning and the raised vulnerability to later addiction
- Alternatives worth raising with a client’s prescriber for the specific symptoms they are self-managing, including nightmares
Watch the course trailer
CPD Information For Mental Health Professionals
Enjoy complete flexibility with 100% self-paced learning you can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. This course is included with your Tatra Training membership, along with every other course in the library.
Course Duration: 2 learning hours
Certificate and CPD hours: On completion you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion to support your CPD records. Your certificates are yours to keep.
Assessment: Complete a short quiz at the end (80% pass mark), which you can resit as many times as needed.
Revisit Anytime: Come back to the course as often as you like while your membership is active, whenever 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.
Course Content
Meet Your Instructor
Trauma survivors whose PTSD symptoms resist traditional therapy approaches - and clinicians struggling to understand how neuroscience can enhance treatment - may need more than generic trauma protocols to help create lasting healing. Jennifer Sweeton has spent her career bridging cutting-edge neuroscience research with practical clinical application, becoming an internationally recognised expert who has revolutionised how practitioners understand and treat trauma through brain-based interventions.
As a Stanford-educated clinical and forensic psychologist with doctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine and a master's degree in affective neuroscience, Dr. Sweeton represents the pinnacle of scientific rigor applied to trauma treatment. Her Amazon #1 bestselling book Trauma Treatment Toolbox and recognition by Shortform as one of the "100 Best Trauma Books of All Time" demonstrate her ability to translate complex neuroscience into practical tools. Her recent completion of her JD from the University of Missouri-Kansas City adds crucial legal expertise to her forensic psychology practice, making her uniquely qualified for complex cases involving legal proceedings.
Dr. Sweeton's expertise spans PTSD treatment, the neuroscience of mental health, forensic assessment, women's issues, anxiety disorders, and legal aspects of mental health. Her approach integrates evidence-based trauma therapies with cutting-edge understanding of neuroplasticity and brain-based healing. She is the developer of Neural Desensitisation and Integration Training (NDIT), an evidence-informed modular psychotherapy for PTSD that specifically targets neuroplasticity in key brain regions. Her specialisation includes complex trauma presentations, forensic evaluations for legal proceedings, and cases where standard trauma treatments have been ineffective.
What sets her training apart is rigorous science combined with practical application. As a world-renowned trauma treatment expert, Sweeton doesn't just teach trauma techniques - she shows practitioners how specific interventions create measurable changes in brain structure and function. Her experience training over 60,000 mental health professionals worldwide demonstrates her exceptional ability to make neuroscience accessible to practicing clinicians.
For your practice, expect to gain brain-based trauma interventions, specific techniques for treatment-resistant PTSD, and forensic assessment skills for legal cases. Her approach particularly benefits clinicians wanting to integrate neuroscience into their trauma work, those dealing with complex forensic cases, or practitioners seeking advanced training in evidence-based PTSD treatment.
Quick Win: Sweeton's "neural pathway mapping" technique helps clients understand how trauma affects specific brain regions - helping to reduce shame and increase treatment engagement by showing that PTSD symptoms reflect brain changes, not personal weakness.
Qualifications
- PsyD, Clinical Psychology, PGSP-Stanford PsyD Consortium, 2012
- MS, Clinical Psychology, PGSP-Stanford PsyD Consortium, 2010
- MA, Personality Psychology (Affective Neuroscience), Stanford University, 2007
- BS, Cognitive Psychology, University of Kansas, 2004
- JD, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, 2025
- Licensed Clinical & Forensic Psychologist
- Training: Stanford University School of Medicine, Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, National Center for PTSD
Authored Publications
- Traumatic Stress Recovery Workbook (2025)
- Trauma Treatment Toolbox (Amazon #1 bestseller, Shortform's "100 Best Trauma Books of All Time")
- Eight Key Brain Areas of Mental Health and Illness
- Train Your Brain Card Deck: 100 Techniques to Heal Trauma and Build Resiliency
- Multiple book chapters and professional publications
Leadership & Teaching
- Founder/Co-owner, Kansas City Mental Health Associates (group private practice)
- Former President, Greater Kansas City Psychological Association & Oklahoma Psychological Association
- Adjunct Faculty, University of Kansas School of Medicine & University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
- Developer, Neural Desensitisation and Integration Training (NDIT) for PTSD
Professional Experience
- Director of Behavioral Health, Clinton Service Unit, Indian Health Service, 2015–2016
- Telemental Health Psychologist, Oklahoma City VA Medical Center, 2013–2015
- Combat Stress Recovery Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center/Oklahoma City VA, 2012–2013
Training & Speaking
- Trained over 60,000 mental health professionals internationally
- Keynote speaker, trainer, and workshop leader worldwide
- Sought-after expert for legal, corporate, government, and community education events
- Developer of continuing education programs serving 50,000+ licensed mental health providers
Ready to integrate cutting-edge neuroscience with trauma treatment? Discover how Dr. Sweeton's brain-based interventions can transform your ability to help trauma survivors achieve lasting recovery through evidence-based approaches that target specific neural pathways.
Feedback & Reviews
This course includes:
- Lessons 3
- Topics 0
- Duration 2 hours
- Quizzes 1
- Language English