Advanced Trauma-Skilled
Practitioner Program
For wellness professionals with over 5 years of experience
Learn clinically effective approaches for supporting persons with trauma
The world has an urgent and unmet need for experientially educated and deeply embodied leaders for trauma support.
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To be "embodied" means that one has faced their own shadows and has become the embodiment of their work as a pre-requisite for service. That's why this program is a journey in personal transformation and professional development.
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This program is for educators, therapists, coaches, holistic health practitioners, community support leaders who wish to increase their skill, experience, and understanding around effective approaches for working with persons with trauma.
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Completion of this program will provide you with the skills and body-centered awareness required for creating safe space to host trauma-informed workshops, support groups, retreats, and to support clients and loved ones affected by trauma.
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The program is capped at 7 students.
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Train with Amanda Blain
Clinical Mind-Body Therapist and Trauma Specialist
As a holistic clinical therapist who has personally healed from Post-Traumatic Stress, I regularly see clients with trauma who were deeply discouraged during years - even decades - of traditional therapy that seemed to provide little to no relief of post-trauma symptoms.
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After less than one year of working with the approaches you'll learn in this training, clients report a significant reduction in post-trauma symptoms, a renewed sense of self and personal agency, improved mental and physical health, and a sense of higher purpose that is no longer limited by the painful past.
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Here's what one client had to say about their
trauma healing experience...
I found Amanda by chance ... I had just spent a year reliving my extensive past trauma over and over in talk therapy. The therapists weren’t providing any ways to deal with all the reactions my body was having.
I wanted to know how I was supposed to cope with it in real life. How was I supposed to be able to make it through this journey to heal - one that I doubted was even possible for me?
My complex trauma started when I was 2 months old, so I have no memory of a life without PTSD symptoms.
I'm 40 years old now and have been in and out of traditional talk and psychotherapy since I was 12.
I ranged from having very little improvement in my quality of life from my best therapy interactions to being re-traumatized in other sessions. In 28 years, therapy just hadn't helped. I'd resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be how I was the rest of my life, even though I desperately wanted to heal.
I'd cycle between feeling a little better and capable to bouts of depression that all the yoga, meditation, exercise, eating healthy, etc, could not keep at bay. Those moments are honestly indescribable - though I'll try.
Feelings of hopelessness - that no matter what I do or how hard I fight that I'll always end up back in that dark place, blaming myself for just not being capable enough to "be like everyone else," deeper loneliness than I can ever fully express.
...Not actually wanting to die - but to keep living felt unbearable.
It seemed like no matter how much progress I thought I'd made, I always ended up back feeling that way...trapped in an endless cycle.
I've had 14 private sessions with Amanda now and I have taken it quite slow, I'm a little over 9 months into my work with her. In the beginning I honestly didn't trust that it would really work, I thought maybe I'd learn a few more coping skills and count it a success. I don't think I'll ever be happier about being wrong.
Working together, I've been able to recognize what being triggered feels like in my body, how the things I think affect that, and how physical movements can help. I've been able to relieve symptoms during flashback, to calm panic attacks on my own, and release trauma from my body.
I now feel that there is a reality where this doesn't rule my life. Knowing that I now have agency has been life-changing. It's like I was living in a dark forest of perpetual night and the sun is just rising for the first time.
​-Alex in Oregon
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Program Curriculum
Module 1: Finding Rhythm
As practitioners, our job is to help our clients master their nervous systems. Yet, many practitioners work and overexert from chronically dysregulated nervous systems. This dampens the impact of the practitioner-client relationship.
Tracking the nervous system means examining the use of our creative energy, our ability to rest, to play, to recognize and respond to our internal needs, to advocate for ourselves, to set healthy boundaries, and to harmonize our yin and yang energies. This is achieved through rhythm.
Rhythm is necessary for effective self-care and human service, and it is an essential piece of trauma healing. Discover how creating rhythm in your psyche, body, and relationships can help you master your nervous system, transform your life, and condition you to host powerful healing space for your clients.
Module 2: Subconscious Mastery
The subconscious mind governs over 90% of psycho-emotional and physiological behaviors. The subconscious operates on the level of the felt-sense - which begins as subtle physical sensation and then incites emotional stories and narratives.
The felt sense is the foundation from which all of our experiences arise. It is the foundational layer beneath thoughts and emotions, and it's vastly overlooked in mainstream therapy.
Addressing the subconscious as it shows up in both mind and body is critical to put an end to retraumatization and chronic stress that stems from threat perception.
Discover how developing an intimate, daily relationship with your own subconscious can help you masterfully guide your clients into this part of themselves and create a foundation for transformation.
Module 3: Parts of Self
For trauma work to be effective, we as practitioners must address the multidimensionality of an individual - including psyche, body, and spirit.
Effective therapy means looking for how the various parts of self have been fractured (often through shame and dissociation) and creating a safe container in which clients may suture that fracture.
To be an effective guide in this process, we must do this work within ourselves first. This month will be personally transcendental and will deeply activate the healer within you.
As a practitioner, you will call upon this wisdom to help clients activate their own inner healer so they can learn to cultivate a safe sense of home within themselves. This is how clients shift from a phase of healing into empowered embodiment.
Module 4: Navigating Survival Responses
Survival responses go far beyond the "fight-flight-freeze" many of us are accustomed to hearing about. Additional survival responses have been identified in the most recent trauma research. Each of these responses operates differently at the level of the psyche, body, and spirit. These responses also vary in expression from person-to-person.
As practitioners, we need to be able to accurately detect the characteristics of each response, and be able to skillfully tailor our support to work with these responses. For instance, we cannot work with the immobilization response in the same way we work with a fight response.
We cannot talk our clients out of these responses because talk therapy works with the brain's neo-cortex, while survival responses are linked to the sub-cortex. This is why CBT is usually an incomplete solution for trauma healing. For effective healing to take root, we must work to balance the part of the brain most impacted by trauma. That means we must be able to support the physiology of the survival response as well as the psycho-emotional and spiritual components.
This month, we'll explore all 6 survival responses including flight, freeze, immobilization, attach and cry-for-help, collapse-and- submit, and please-and-appease. You'll come away with the understanding and skills to support clients in each unique response.
Module 5: Unconscious Beliefs
When we experience sudden, unexpected stress, like shocking news, loss, an experience of being isolated or violated, or any crisis that takes us by surprise, something curious happens inside of our brains - something that science has been able to measure.
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For just a moment (20-seconds to be exact), our brain waves will dip from the fast high-beta frequency of extreme fear, down into a much slower theta frequency. During these 20 seconds, we’re no longer processing life events through our conscious mind. We’ve entered what’s commonly referred to as “going into shock,” (usually made visible by the gazed look in our eyes).
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Inside of this 20-second blip, an unconscious belief is formed. From this moment forward, without us even realizing it, our brain (the reticular activating system) will filter out everything that contradicts this belief, and it will magnify and remember everything that reinforces the belief.
And because all of this is happening outside of our conscious awareness, we won’t even realize this is what we’re doing.
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This often leads to retraumatization and "self-fulfilling prophesies" of being wounded or disempowered.
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This month, you'll be given an assessment tool that can help you and your clients shine light on the unconscious beliefs that have added insult to injury over the years. You'll also receive nuanced coaching in body-centered interventions that help override these beliefs and build new neural pathways that lead to a future that isn't a replica of the past.
Module 6: Healing to Embodiment
Your client's deepest wish is to no longer be defined by their past and to launch into a life that is not limited by trauma symptoms. In other words, your clients want to move out of the healing phase into empowered embodiment.
Clinically, this means that your clients will be able to track their nervous system, respond to their needs in an effective manner, regulate their responses to sensory input, and feel connection to a strong sense of self that guides them into new territory and allows them to live up to their deeper reasons for being.
This month, you will learn the art of helping clients shift from a traumatized identity into a desired experience of their very own creation. This is where all the healing work begins to pay off. This is what makes the challenging path of healing worthwhile. This is how you fulfill your mission as a trauma-informed practitioner.
Meet the Teacher
I'm a Clinical Mind-Body Therapist, Trauma Specialist, and Cross-cultural Educator. While working in Chicago's health care sector, I observed the link between mental and physical health. I helped dialysis clinics improve patient outcomes by implementing mind-body education and depression management services. I was later discouraged by industry norms that prioritized profit over impact. I left in 2013 to volunteer in the Peace Corps in South Africa. ​
That's when I met David Patient, one of the first people to be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Doctors told him he had 6 months to live, and there were no effective drug therapies at the time. But David pioneered his own holistic treatment plans and lived another 34 years. He co-authored the book, The Healer Inside You, and was my mentor from 2013-2017 until he passed away from other causes. While in South Africa, I trained with David and his colleague Neil Orr, a psycho-neuro immunologist, who were consultants to NIH and the United Nations.
Afterwards, I moved to Colorado to mentor with a body-centered psychotherapist and studied with the world's leading experts on trauma in Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's Traumatic Stress Studies Certificate program. I also take continuing education classes through the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine to stay up-to-date on the most advanced psych research.
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Personally, I've experienced my own suffering, and healed naturally from adult onset asthma, IBS, adverse childhood events, and complex trauma. Because I know disorder and dis-ease intimately, and because I've experienced the miracle of healing, I'm committed to helping people finally breakthrough when nothing worked.​​
Today, I live in a Mayan community in rural Guatemala, where we're creating a regenerative community homestead and preparing to host cross-cultural retreats. It's here that my professional background and scientific study meet indigenous wisdom - a powerful combination that we look forward to sharing with you!
From my clinic on Lake Atitlán, I work in-person and remotely to help people heal the psychologic roots of chronic illness, autoimmunity, digestive issues, and trauma. Most of these individuals report breakthroughs and healings - which come as a tremendous relief after being discouraged by decades of unsuccessful mainstream and alternative approaches. I operate independently of any institution or licensure, which enables me to serve people who feel that their ability to heal has been limited by conventional protocols.
It is my passion and honor to watch people overcome and create new chapters of their lives in which their symptoms do not define them.
