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Episode 821: The Complex Trauma Training Center with Brad Kammer, LMFT · The Trauma Therapist

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Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
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now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
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Therapist Podcast and signing up today. All right, welcome back to the Trauma
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Thepist podcast. My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist
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be their incredible selves, to be human, to be real, not just
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a clinician. I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than
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what we know, and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability,
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and that requires intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going
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to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com.
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Let's get started. I'm ready, Let's do it all right, So
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five four, three, two and one, our folks willcome back to the
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podcast. Very excited to have back Brad camera. Brad, welcome back.
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Thank you guys, So happy to be back and connecting with you again.
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Awesome. So Brad is a California licensed marriage and family therapist and professional clinical
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counselor. He's trained as a sematic psychotherapist and has worked in the field of
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trauma for over twenty years, specializing in working with adverse childhood experiences and complex
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post traumatic stress disorder. Brad began his career as a humanitarian aid worker in
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Asia, which introduced him to personal and collective trauma. He's now the director
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of the Complex Trauma Training Center that provides training, consultation, and community for
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mental health professionals working with complex trauma. He's also a senior trainer in the
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Neuroeffective Relational Model and provides armed trainings through CTTC. Finally, he's a co
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author of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma and also the executive producer of
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the podcast Transforming Trauma. Brad, Welcome going on there. That's right,
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I've been busy recently, so before we get going here, reminder listeners where
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you're from originally and where you are currently well. Originally, I grew up
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mostly in Ohio, although I bounced around a lot when I was really young.
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But I went to elementary school, middle school, high school in Ohio
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and then did a lot of different international travel and living abroad in different periods
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of my early adult life. And then I've been in Northern California for almost
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twenty years. Now. So. I live about two hours north of San
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Francisco in small town in Mendocino County. Nice. Nice so brand new training
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center. Yeah, how did this come about? What's going on? Let
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let our listeners know. Yeah, it's super exciting for me. February first
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was our official launch date, and I've been the training director at the ARM
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Training Institute since we started that out. I've had a really great fortune in
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my professional life to have great mentors, including doctor Lawrence Heller, who created
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the Neuroffactor Relational Model NORM, and we ended up partnering and creating this institute
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that we were bringing trainings ARM trainings to all over the world even before COVID
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hit. We were doing online trainings and also in person trainings. And then
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over the last couple of years at the phase of doctor Heller's career now,
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he's been moving much more in the direction of getting NORM much more out into
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the public awareness. So he's working on a couple movie projects, documentary projects,
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he's working with different residential centers, doing a lot of online teaching to
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general public and conferences. And me and my two colleagues, the other two
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faculty members, we really wanted to continue focusing on clinical development and really getting
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this work into the hands of more clinicians. And so it became apparent that
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in this very small organization that it was time to make some changes. And
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so it's really going to free both Larry's direction up and also our direction to
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create a new center that's really focused on doing this deeper support of clinicians through
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the Complex Trauma Training Center. So we will be continuing to do arm trainings
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through our center, which is really exciting, and we're developing new programs that
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will be supporting the inner development of therapists so that they can stay healthy and
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stay effective in their work. So let's talk more specifically about that. Talk
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to us about the philosophy of your center, what you're going to be teaching
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specifically, how are the therapist is going to benefit, what can they learn?
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Yeah, thank you for the question. It's you know, I've taught
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intro psychology at colleges for many years and I'm like kind of a nerd about
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the history of psychotherapy. I just love learning about it. And you know,
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one of the things that happened very early before psychoanalysis was really even a
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very formulated is that the Freud used to have these Wednesday evening get togethers at
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eight thirty. He was very kind of strict about time, so he would
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invite folks over at eight thirty at night and they would sit in his you
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know, in his family room or whatever, and they would start coming up
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with these ideas about what later became psychoanalysis. And these were the earliest meetings
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that then turned into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute or society, and then you know,
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in different countries and all around the world they started developing these psychoanalytic institutes
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that had a number of different functions. It was to train clinicians, it
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was to do research, it was to promote advocacy, to get the work
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out into the world. More it was social connection, developing community because it
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was still a very new profession, and that lasted up until the forties,
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fifties into the sixties. Are there also, there are still some left.
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But in the sixties, fifty sixties, seventies, as people stop getting trained
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so much in psychoanalysis, graduate school started to kind of really replace a lot
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of that, where people were getting more introduced to different models. And so,
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you know, what I've observed in the twenty five years that I've been
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in the field is that there's really kind of three holes that happen when clinicians
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come out of graduate school. One is that they just haven't developed a lot
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of clinical training. It's amazing, actually how little clinical training a lot of
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people graduating from graduate school or even finishing their internship receive. So clinical training
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is why so many people are searching out for models like NARM or IFS or
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somatic experience in MDR. So that's one of the holes. The other whole
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the second hole is ongoing support. Most states in the United States don't require
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clinicians to get any kind of supervision once they've completed their license. I myself
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think that's highly unethical in this profession, you know, particularly when you're working
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with trauma. It's just evoking so much inside of us. I mean,
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so many of your guests talk about that, and I think it's really important
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that we get some kind of ongoing support to take care of our own inner
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world, but also to be more effective with our clients. And then the
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third hole that I see is really the community aspect. Many people end up
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working in private practice and don't even know the other people in their building.
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Often don't have much real in person community. Maybe they have a little online
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community. And then even people that work at centers or clinics, they have
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other clinical staff around them, but they often don't share kind of the same
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perspectives or understanding. At some centers, you have to adhere to the framework
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that they use, and so people kind of are afraid to be creative or
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afraid to be authentic in themselves. And so developing a community of professionals that
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can come together to support each other, not just for networking and for business,
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but also for emotional support in this field since we can't bring it home
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to our spouses or to our friends, because it's all confidential, all of
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that feels so critical in the era we're living in with such fragmentation. Wow.
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Yeah, I mean, as I'm listening to you enumerate these these different
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pillars, I'm thinking to myself, you know, I haven't really heard people
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talk about within this context the uh real need for consultation. Yes, people
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talk about, but when you hear it, it's it's always an add on,
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you know. I mean, you're talking about the necessity the it's it's
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integral. Oh yeah, yeah, So how how is this going to work.
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This is on we're talking about an online platform you're providing. Yeah,
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yeah, we do do some in person trainings, but most of our program
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offerings are all online. So I'll just take you through the three different kind
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of levels that we've talked about. So clinical trainings, we're focusing on norm
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trainings on the neurofestor relational model, and again most of those are online,
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though we do have some that are in person, and you know that that
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is clinical development. So we do a lot of both theory, but also
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half of the training is really supporting them with individualized support, which we call
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active coaching. So we sit with a therapist who's who's working with a client,
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and we we really break down the whole clinical process, which again is
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not something that people are really getting a lot of when they become therapists,
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so we do clinical trainings. The second part about ongoing support is we offer
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monthly console groups. We don't call them supervision because it's kind of a different
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relationship, but ongoing console groups. We do these ongoing active coaching groups,
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which is that people come together online and we will choose a therapist and a
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client and one of the teachers will work with the therapist while they're working with
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a client and allow us to really deconstruct and look at all the different choice
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points. And so people really like getting that active coaching. And then we
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you know, we also do webinars, we do demo demonstration groups, so
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we have different ways that people can plug in as much or as little as
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they'd like to on an ongoing basis so that they can get support for you
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know, to bring back to their to their practice. And then the third
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level of community is you know, developing community events, whether those are retreats
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or their workshops that people are requesting, or we've had like musicians come on
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and we'll get the community together and the musician we'll talk about how trauma has
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impacted them and the art that they've developed. I mean, you know,
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all kinds of different things that we can stay to connected, and of course
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all the different Facebook groups and all that stuff as well. So who specifically
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is this for? What kind of clinician, therapists, mental health provider?
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Yeah, I mean the title is Complex Trauma Training Center, So you know,
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I think probably the target market would be therapists who are working with clients
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with complex trauma, which I think is pretty much everyone, right, I
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mean it depends. You know, there's a lot of debate, as you
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know, in the field of trauma, where some people think we're defining it
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too broadly, some think we're defining it too narrowly. So, you know,
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a lot of it is for helping people understand how we work with the
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impact of adverse childhood experiences and complex trauma, developmental trauma, cultural trauma,
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intergenerational trauma. So yeah, therapists that are looking for further training or a
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community or ongoing support graduates, students that you know are eager to learn more
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about trauma. I think both you and I were eager at early in our
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career to learn about it. Interns bringing it to so they don't have to
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be licensed, No, no, exactly, yep. Okay, Now,
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I think a lot of people here maybe don't know or aren't familiar with with
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NORM and it's trainings. Can you just give us like a thumbnail sketch of
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what is NORM. How is it differentiated from you mentioned sematic experiencing or sensory
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motor psychotherapy. Yeah, yeah, Well, obviously there's a lot of overlap
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on those three that you mentioned because they all have kind of a common lineage.
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They all have roots in somatic psychology, so Pat ogg And who created
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sensory motor psychotherapy, Peter Levine, who created sematic experiencing in Lawrence Heller,
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who created no arm they all kind of actually all of them lived in Colorado
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in the seventies and eighties, so they literally come from the same lineage of
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what was happening in the Denver Boulder area then. But yeah, so NORM
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is really specifically designed for working with complex PTSD. And I know we've talked
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about this in other times we've met, but there's really three main categories that
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they've added to the original PTSD diagnosis, and the three categories have to do
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with affect this regulation, interpersonal difficulties, and negative self concept. And so
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these are the three differentiating factors from what we often call shock trauma, which
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is PTSD, And of course most of our clients have an intersection of both
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shock trauma and complex trauma. So it's great to be trained in models that
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are specifically designed for shock trauma and models that can work with complex PTSD.
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And as far as we're aware, I mean, NORM is one of the
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first models that specifically designed through this lens of working with CPTSD. The diagnosis
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hasn't even been officially recognized in North America yet, so you know, we're
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ahead of head of the game in a certain way. So NARM really works
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with these adaptive patterns that we carry forth mainly through childhood, although you know,
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of course trauma can happen at any stage of our life, but often
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through these developmental patterns, these relational patterns that then we carry into adolescence into
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adulthood, and they impact all aspects of our life. They impact our relationships,
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they impact how we feel about ourselfs and the way we regulate ourselves in
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our life. And so NARMA is what we often call a top down,
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bottom up model. We're working both with somatic elements and how people are experiencing
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dysregulation, but we're also working with elements of identity and how people are organizing
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themselves that are keeping themselves stuck in different ways. And then of course the
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R and RM is the relational aspect that there's you know, from our perspective,
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if you're working with relational trauma, we have to bring in the relational
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elements that are happening between the therapists and the client as well. So people
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who let's say are interested in joining the Complex Trauma Training Center, They're going
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to come in and how do they enter? How do they join? What
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are they going to do? Are they going to have a choice of how
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they interact? Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, many pathways,
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and again people can be as engaged or as little engage as they want
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to. I mean that's an important thing for us. A lot of trainings,
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you know, are these huge commitments. I have a colleague and friend
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who just went to study young in work and she is now studying in Switzerland.
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It's a six year program, I mean a six year intensive program.
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Right. Not many people can can do that as adults in our society.
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So you know, we're trying to make it that you don't have to sign
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up and give your life over to you know, one particular training. So
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there's different pathways or different on ramps. People can just come in and be
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part of our console groups, or people can come in. We do these
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webinars and so for example, the next webinar we'll be doing in May is
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about complex trauma and eating disordered patterns. We did one last month on complex
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trauma and dissociate identity. Disorder. So these are on ramps that people who
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don't even have any training or further engagement with us can enter in. A
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lot of people come in because they are seeking training in NORM. They've heard
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about it in different ways, and so that is a lot of how people
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do. They sometimes will take one of our workshops first to kind of learn
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a little bit about NORM, and then they'll sign up for one of our
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one year trainings and then they can go further from that point if they choose
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to. But so there's oh and then the podcast. Of course, there's
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many different on ramps that people can come and engage with us. No I
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know before, but you're obviously so passionate about this. How the heck do
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you keep your interest and passion alive in this work? Yeah? I love
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that question. I mean, it's my own relationship to my own trauma,
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you know, And I was doing things before I even understood the word trauma
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that we're all about, trying to regulate myself or trying to learn to grow
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and shift these patterns, and you know, I just feel very committed to
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doing that, both for myself and also helping people that are interested in doing
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that both for themselves. And also if they're therapists or clinicians to help their
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clients do that. And the cool thing about this field is that it's just
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really still very and it's much in its infancy. I mean, like we
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talked about before, CPTSD hasn't even become officially recognized yet. So I just
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find it really exciting. And you know, over the five or ten years,
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it has been interesting to see trauma becoming much more of a household name,
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and you know, TikTok and all this stuff. Bessel vand Kolk's book
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has been on the Amazon bestseller for ten years now, I believe, and
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I'm a strong advocate for continuing to get this work out there, and I
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know there's pushback in different ways. There's the number one book I just read
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this morning on Amazon is a book called Bad Therapy, which is about I
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don't want to not do justice to it because I haven't read the book,
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but I did listen to the podcast, and it's basically kind of an attack
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on some of the trauma informed movement and therapy, you know, over therapizing
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people in our society. And I just have a very different perspective that I
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think that we are a very non self reflective society, which is why we
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act out our inner stuff all over the place. And the more we can
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help both adults and children learn to look inward and deal with some of the
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unresolved material inside, we can make the world a better place. And so
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for me, you know, I'm not so much. When I was younger
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in my life, I was much more kind of politically out there and trying
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to change larger systems. And now I really believe in the ripple effect of
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working with clients and changing it from the ground up. I love that.
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So when you work with people with let's say you work with people who haven't
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really done a lot of education around learning about trauma and so forth, what
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do you see in a lot of the maybe the younger therapists or people who
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are just learning. What do you see when they come to you for education
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and so forth. Yeah, well, first of all, I see people
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that are also very passionate. I mean, our field is just I mean,
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as you know more than I do. I mean, we just have
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some incredible people in our field that have dedicated them their lives to helping others
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heal. And you know, this isn't a big money making business for the
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most part. I mean, we're just doing the best we can to help
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people, and I just find it very inspiring that people are willing to make
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these commitments to develop themselves and to bring this work to other people. I
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would say I do have some critiques. I mean, I think we you
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know, it's like anything, pendulum shift, and I think that there was
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a really important movement that happened in the sixties and seventies and still today that
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we became much more empathic as therapist and started, you know, stopped kind
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of interpreting other people's experiences and started to like bring more understanding and compassion and
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care. And in NARM we talk about something called unmanaged empathy that you know,
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a lot of therapists can actually be using empathy as part of an adaptive
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strategy. For example, many of us who become therapists kind of played that
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role in our younger life. We were taking care of people, and that's
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why we're so good at it as we get older. But it also has
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some cost, both costs because unmanaged empathy can burn ourselves out very quickly,
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and also because it can lead us to acting out even with the best of
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intentions. We can choose sides in people's lives and ways that might not be
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supportive. We can get very pulled into enactments. I'm very passionate about helping
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therapists learn more about therapeutic enactments that are happening between them and clients that are
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often pretty unconscious. Give us an example of that. What does that look
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like? Yeah, Mac, we talk a lot about two different kinds of
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enactments. One has to do with kind of counter transference transference patterns. So
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you know, a therapist, a client is expecting us to be a rejecting
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person because they've had all these experiences of rejection. I mean, you know,
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we get clients who I've been to twenty five therapists and they fired me,
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and you know, I'm getting fired from jobs and you know, and
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relationships, and so there's a way that then we can get pulled in in
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both or either directions, either to become like the rewarding kind of surrogate that
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is going to make sure that we're going to be the savior and help this
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client no matter what, which often has a lot of costs to us,
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or we kind of start to resonate with the part that is kind of rejecting
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of the client, and we can start to become cynical or resentful, or
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we look at our schedule and we have that dread of seeing that client that
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day. I think a lot of us have had that, So you know,
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there's a lot of different forms of enactment that. And I always say
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it takes two to be an enactment, which means that clients will always be
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coming in and inviting us to walk into an enactment, and it's on us.
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We can't change our clients, so it's on us to figure out what
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where our hooks are and getting pulled in. And like for my personal example,
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I talk about, like a lot of therapists struggle with clients who have
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addictive disorders. And because I didn't grow up with that, that wasn't part
23:08
of my history growing up, that there's very little hooks for me around addiction.
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But my joke here is that if you put a narcissistic client in front
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of me, I got hooks all over the place. It's like I'm in
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a field of land mines because I had you know, I grew up with
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a lot of narcissism. So we all have different kind of hooks and getting
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to know those and then just the last enactment we talk about. The second
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nactment we talked about is parallel process, which is, for example, let's
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say you know your best friend has been going through chemotherapy for the last couple
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of years, You've been by their side, and they just passed away in
23:42
the last you know, month or two, and you're you know, you're
23:45
still grieving the process. And then you get a client that's coming to you
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who's in the middle of chemotherapy. You know that's very likely going to kind
23:55
of evoke difficulty for you to really stay present both for your with the client.
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And so how do we work with these parallel process or I was I'm
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working on a class that I'm teaching next week, and the example I give
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is a client's just found out that their partner cheated on them, and the
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therapist has had a recent infidelity in their relationship as well, and it can
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be very difficult to hold neutrality and openness and curiosity when you're getting activated in
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a very similar way that your client is. And that's just so rich and
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it's not really clinical. There's not really a clinical model for that. It's
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really more about this inner, inner landscape of us getting to know more about
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ourselves so that we can see these patterns more clearly and where we're getting hooked
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into them. Yeah. I love all that, and of course that is
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not easy for a lot of us. No, it's you know, self
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awareness and you know, do your work, your work and you can we
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always use those phrases. But how freaking hard and challenging is that to do
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exactly and to be able to be in the moment when you're working with a
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client. No, exactly. I always thought, like, you know,
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you learn these different models, and often the clinical model will start with something
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like this. They'll say something like, you know, once the relational attunmant
25:25
is set up, then you start doing this, this and this, and
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how I always like, well, like, you can't just do that,
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you can't just say that, right. I assume that the relationship is going
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to be built, and I think that we haven't. I mean, I
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know there's been a lot of talk from Rogers on about like what really helps
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in a therapeutic relationship, But I think a lot of therapists here's another critique
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here of mine. A lot of therapists we assume that because we're so empathic.
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We're really good relationally and empathy is just one aspect of relationship. I
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think there's a lot of aspects to it that we really need to deconstruct,
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and some of them were we are really good at, and some of them
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we need to strengthen and we need to get better at. And I think
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that that's part of what's getting missed a lot as we move towards models that
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are, you know, more evidence based and less relationally oriented. Love it,
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Love it. So the Complex Trauma Training Center, how do people find
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out about this? Yeah, well, of course the easiest way is the
26:30
website, Complex Trauma Trainingcenter dot com. We're really proud of our podcasts.
26:36
I've told Guy this before for all those listening to me for the first time,
26:40
but I've modeled in some ways our podcasts on your podcast because I just
26:45
find it to be incredible how you've created this and the content and the people.
26:51
So, you know, we've tried to kind of capture a similar spirit
26:53
trum. It's called Transforming Trauma. And we also have presence on Facebook and
27:00
Instagram and YouTube. We put all of our podcasts up there and we have
27:06
some other videos up there, and also you know the book that Larry and
27:11
I created that came out in twenty at twenty two called The Practical Guide for
27:17
Healing Developmental Trauma for anyone that specifically wants to learn about ARM, that that
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book and the book that came before that called Healing Developmental Trauma would also be
27:26
good specifically for learning more about ARM. Awesome, Okay, We'll have each
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of those linked up here at the show notes page at the Trauma theaprispodcast dot
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com. Brad Man, super inspiring, dude. I'm so excited. Really,
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I'm so excited for this new training center and I can't think of a
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better person to have at the HELM than you. Yeah. I'm excited to
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help support you in any way I can and look forward to talking to you
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again. Yeah, well you already have. And yes, thank you so
28:03
much. That really touches me so great, brother, checting with you.
28:06
Yeah all right, take care, Thanks you too,