Welcome to the Diploma in Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy

Welcome, and thank you for choosing to study trauma-informed psychotherapy with us.

Trauma is, by a wide margin, one of the most common and most consequential factors shaping the people we work with — whether we’re aware of it in any given moment or not. And yet a great deal of clinical and general training still treats it as a specialist topic, something to be addressed only once it’s explicitly disclosed. This course starts from a different premise: that understanding trauma, and understanding how to work with it responsibly, should be foundational to good practice generally, not a niche add-on.

Whether you’re a practising or training therapist, working in an adjacent field such as social work, addiction services, or education, or simply someone who wants to understand trauma and its effects more clearly, this course has been built to give you a genuinely practical, clinically grounded foundation. My aim throughout has been to give you something you can actually use, not simply theory to be recalled for an assignment and then set aside.

The course is structured across six units, each building deliberately on the last:

• Unit 1 — Foundations of Trauma-Informed Care
• Unit 2 — Understanding Trauma and the Nervous System
• Unit 3 — PTSD, Complex Trauma & Dissociation
• Unit 4 — Therapeutic Approaches to Trauma
• Unit 5 — The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference & Countertransference
• Unit 6 — Vicarious Trauma & Practitioner Self-Care

We begin, in Unit 1, with the underlying shift in thinking, and the research base, that everything else in this course rests on. From there, we move through the neuroscience of trauma, the clinical realities of PTSD and complex trauma, and the major therapeutic approaches used to treat them, before turning to the therapeutic relationship itself. The course closes with something I think matters a great deal and is too often left out of trauma training altogether: vicarious trauma, and how to sustain yourself in this work over the long term.

Each unit combines short core reading, video material, and real case material, so that what you’re learning is grounded in how this work actually plays out, not only in the abstract. Throughout the course, I’ve drawn directly on 25 years of clinical experience across addiction treatment, harm reduction, and psychological practice, because I wanted this course to reflect the realities of the work itself, rather than a purely theoretical account of it.

A note worth making at the outset: some of this material may land more personally than you expect, whether because of your own history or because of people you already work with. That’s a genuinely normal response to material like this, not a sign you’re not suited to the work. Please take the course at whatever pace genuinely serves you, and make use of the support resources signposted throughout wherever you need them.

A quick note on how each unit is structured, so you know what to expect as you go. Start with the Core Reading — this is where the real substance of each unit lives, and it’s worth reading in order, since later documents often build directly on earlier ones. From there, move on to the Video Material, which adds real depth and a wider range of voices to what you’ve just read — lectures, clinical interviews, and genuine lived experience, chosen specifically to extend the reading rather than simply repeat it. Finally, each unit closes with a Case Study, where you’ll see the ideas from that unit applied to a real or realistic situation — a useful way to check that the material has actually landed, not just been read.

You’re now ready to begin. Proceed to Unit 1’s Core Reading whenever you’re ready to start.

I hope you find this course genuinely valuable, and I look forward to reading your assignment.

— Dr. John Crimmins