CBT for Trauma FAQs

This is a on-demand online training you can begin anytime and complete at your own pace. You’ll learn through video lessons, therapy demonstrations, and expert interviews that show CBT for trauma in action.

The content is designed to be clinically grounded, engaging, and easy to apply, with a focus on helping you see exactly how CBT principles translate into real trauma-focused sessions.

With 12 months of access, you can return to key lessons, rewatch demonstrations, and integrate the material into your practice whenever it suits your schedule.
You’ll learn how to use CBT strategies for trauma, including exposure and cognitive techniques. The course shows you how to:

• Address avoidance, dissociation, flashbacks, and nightmares

• Identify and modify unhelpful trauma-related thoughts

• Manage distress and safety concerns in session

• Apply CBT with steadiness and flexibility in challenging clinical moments

This course is designed for mental health and health professionals who want to strengthen their ability to treat trauma and PTSD using CBT. It’s ideal if you already have some CBT knowledge and want to apply it specifically to trauma-related symptoms such as avoidance, flashbacks, and dissociation.

12 CE/CME are available for CBT for Trauma. View the learner notification to see the boards and jurisdictions, learning objectives and speaker disclosures.
A certification of completion will also be awarded. 

Yes. The course covers both PTSD and trauma-related distress across diagnoses. You’ll learn practical ways to support clients affected by trauma, even when trauma isn’t the primary presenting issue.

Yes, absolutely! Exposure is an essential component of any effective treatment for anxiety. This course takes you step-by-step through compassionate, values-based exposure, and how to overcome common barriers to doing it.

Yes. PTSD often occurs alongside depression, anxiety, substance use, or other difficulties that develop as ways of coping with trauma-related distress. The course shows how to understand these co-occurring problems within a CBT framework and identify what’s maintaining distress.

You’ll learn how to focus treatment where it’s most effective, recognising that when PTSD is addressed directly, related symptoms often improve. The teaching also covers how to adapt your approach when conditions such as emotion dysregulation, self-harm, or substance use need additional or concurrent attention.

CBT helps people recover from trauma by addressing the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that keep them caught in distress. It helps clients understand how trauma affects the mind and body and increases awareness of the patterns that maintain fear and avoidance.

Through exposure, clients gradually face memories and situations they have been avoiding, while cognitively focused strategies support them in exploring trauma related beliefs such as self-blame, opening space for more helpful perspectives and ways of coping. Together, these processes reduce distress, rebuild a sense of safety, and support healing after trauma.