EMDR training
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Free Course
Trauma and the Body
How well do you understand the ways in which trauma manifests in the body? The Trauma & the Body course, led by Alison Leslie, LCSW, offers a deep dive into the physiological impact of trauma and how it can shape your clients’ physical and mental health. This course is designed to help therapists recognize and address the complex interplay between trauma and the body’s survival mechanisms. You’ll learn about the critical role of the autonomic nervous system in trauma responses and how unresolved trauma can lead to chronic health issues and emotional dysregulation.
In this course, you’ll gain practical strategies for helping clients navigate the physical aftermath of trauma, from understanding the threat response cycle to working with implicit memories that are stored in the body. This course equips you with the knowledge to support your clients in healing from the inside out, promoting recovery that integrates both mind and body. Whether you’re looking to deepen your expertise or expand your therapeutic toolkit, this course is essential for any therapist committed to addressing the full impact of trauma.
Practical Skills
Practical Interventions You'll Learn
In this free trauma and the body course, you'll learn how to:
- Recognize how trauma lives in the body, not just in the story, and how the body's response shapes a client's physical and mental health long after the event
- Identify the threat response cycle (fight, flight, freeze, and collapse) as autonomic survival responses rooted in the body, not psychological choices
- Distinguish between explicit and implicit memory, and understand how implicit traumatic memories continue to drive symptoms outside conscious awareness
- Recognize signs of a nervous system stuck in hypervigilance or shutdown when trauma has not been resolved
- Understand the role of the HPA axis in trauma's long-term physical effects, including chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and memory disruption
- Apply co-regulation and supportive environment principles to help clients recalibrate their body's stress response set points
- Recognize when a client's symptoms are body-based responses to unresolved trauma rather than separate medical or psychological issues
- Build a foundational body-based trauma framework you can deepen through more advanced clinical training
What You Get
What's Waiting for You Inside This Training
Trauma as a body response
Understand trauma as the body's response to overwhelming experience, not just the event itself.
The threat response cycle
Identify fight, flight, freeze, and collapse as autonomic survival mechanisms rooted in the body.
Explicit and implicit memory
Distinguish between conscious and unconscious traumatic memories and how each drives symptoms.
The HPA axis and chronic stress
See how prolonged trauma activation leads to inflammation, insulin resistance, and memory issues.
Autonomic nervous system patterns
Recognize when a client's nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance or shutdown.
Co-regulation and recovery
Apply supportive environment principles to help clients recalibrate their stress response over time.
Lifetime on-demand access
Go at your own pace and return to the material whenever you need a body-based refresher.
Free community membership
Join TTI's shame-free community of practitioners for ongoing conversations, support, and resources. No cost, no catch.
Meet Your Trainer
About Your Trainer
Alison Leslie
LCSW, SEP
Alison is a licensed clinical social worker who lives in Bloomington, IN and owns her own private practice, Empower Healing.
Alison approaches therapy through the lens of presence and attunement and believes in being a guide to help clients find their own internal healing powers. She has a background in animal-assisted services and includes the human-animal bond and nature in the therapeutic experience. Alison Leslie is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Transforming Touch Therapist as well as an EMDRIA-approved therapist and consultant, advanced trainer, Basic Training facilitator, and EMDR Basic Training trainer-in-training with Trauma Therapist Institute.
In consultation, Alison likes to meet the consultee where they are at and support helping the consultee become embodied in the work they are doing and lean into their own internal guide as she supports growth in EMDR skills and Somatic Therapy through openness, curiosity, and compassion.
Take The Next Step
Ready to Begin?
Trauma Lives in the Body
Long after the event has passed, the nervous system continues to respond as if the threat is still here. This free course gives you the threat response cycle, the implicit memory framework, and the HPA axis foundations to recognize and address the body-based dimensions of trauma in your clinical work.
Free. Lifetime access. ASWB and NBCC CEs.