Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist for Family (CCTS-F)

Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist for Family (CCTS-F)

Do You Feel the Limits of Traditional Family Trauma Work?

The Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist for Family (CCTS-F) training, presented by Dr Robert Rhoton, PsyD, LPC, F.A.A.E.T.S., is a 3-day training designed to equip clinicians and helping professionals with a working knowledge of trauma treatment within a family context.

Family trauma rarely sits neatly within one person. It moves through relationships, caregiving patterns, attachment ruptures, emotional regulation, conflict, grief, mistrust, and survival strategies that may have been shaped across generations. A child’s aggression may be labelled as “bad behaviour”. A parent’s withdrawal may be mistaken for indifference. A family’s resistance may be understood as non-compliance, when these may in fact reflect the biological and relational consequences of toxic stress, adversity, and trauma.

This training guides participants beyond simply “fixing” symptoms or managing crises. Drawing on evidence-based, leading-edge interventions and protocols, CCTS-F helps clinicians understand the family as a living relational ecosystem — one where healing requires safety, regulation, coherence, and the restoration of capacity across the family system.

At the heart of the course is an “active ingredients” approach to trauma treatment. Rather than replacing the family therapy models in which clinicians are already trained, CCTS-F strengthens clinical effectiveness across models by helping participants identify the dynamic elements that support stabilization, self-regulation, trauma resolution, grief work, and post-traumatic growth.

This training also introduces a salutogenic approach — shifting the focus from pathology and deficits toward assets, resilience, coherence, and biological capacity. Participants will learn to view behaviour as communication, regulation as foundational, and family healing as the creation of safer relational environments where lasting change becomes possible.

REGISTER HERE

Clear Learning Objectives Tailored for Family Trauma Practice

• During this training, you will learn to:
  • Conceptualize the specific clinical tasks within each of the active ingredients of trauma treatment.
  • Apply trauma-informed principles and techniques to support resolution, healing, and recovery within family systems.
  • Explain the symptoms of traumatic stress to clients and family members in a way that helps them make sense of their experiences.
  • Strengthen engagement, collaboration, and shared understanding in the healing process.
  • Help trauma survivors stabilize and develop practical skills for self-regulation.
  • Identify empirical markers that indicate when it is safe to transition from the safety and stabilization phase of treatment into trauma memory processing, reducing guesswork and minimizing crises.
  • Construct verbal, graphic, and non-verbal trauma narratives, identified by research as one of the critical ingredients in resolving traumatic stress.
  • Use state-of-the-art techniques and activities to support healthy bereavement.
  • Recognize when to support natural mourning processes.
  • Identify when mourning processes have become thwarted, and learn how to facilitate healing from diagnosis through to termination.

Powerful Benefits for Clinicians and Helping Professionals:

• A Stronger Family Trauma Lens: Understand trauma not only as an individual experience, but as something that shapes attachment, caregiving, communication, emotional regulation, family roles, and relational safety.
• Greater Confidence with Complex Presentations: Learn to work more effectively with families where trauma appears as conflict, resistance, dysregulation, mistrust, withdrawal, grief, aggression, or repeated crises.
• A Shift from Pathology to Capacity: Move beyond a disease-centric or deficit-focused approach by identifying family strengths, protective resources, survival adaptations, and existing capacities for change.
• Practical Tools You Can Apply Immediately: Gain interventions and protocols that can be integrated into counselling, family therapy, social work, school counselling, child and youth work, and other helping practices.
• Improved Stabilization and Self-Regulation Work: Develop skills to help clients and families regulate before attempting deeper trauma processing or cognitive problem-solving.
• Clearer Treatment Progression: Learn how to assess readiness, pace treatment, and move from safety and stabilization toward trauma memory processing with greater clinical clarity.
• Stronger Family Engagement: Learn ways to explain traumatic stress that reduce blame, increase collaboration, and help family members make better sense of one another’s responses.
• Enhanced Trauma Narrative Work: Build skills in verbal, graphic, and non-verbal trauma narratives to support meaning-making, integration, and recovery.
• Better Support for Grief and Bereavement: Strengthen your ability to support natural mourning processes, while recognizing when grief has become blocked, complicated, or thwarted.
• Greater Clinician Sustainability: Develop a more grounded and structured approach to complex family trauma work, reducing overwhelm and supporting more confident, compassionate practice.

What You Will Receive at the End of This Training:

• Access to ongoing weekly mentoring with Dr Robert Rhoton to support the practical application of skills learnt during the training.
• Meets educational requirement to apply for CCTS-F certification from Trauma Institute International after completion of the training workshop.
• A certificate of attendance from the Arizona Trauma Institute (ATI).
• Participants may clock the 18 training hours as part of their Counselling Professional Development (CPD) hours.
• 1 soft-copy workshop manual.

Who Should Attend:

• Therapists
• Counsellors
• Clinicians
• Family therapists
• Child and adolescent mental health professionals
• Social workers
• Case workers
• School counsellors
• Youth workers
• Family service professionals
• Helping professionals working with children, parents, caregivers, couples, and families affected by trauma
• Anyone keen on supporting trauma survivors within a family context

Enrol Now – Strengthen the Way You Work with Family Trauma

Trauma does not occur in isolation, and healing often requires more than individual symptom reduction. Families need safety, coherence, regulation, understanding, and relational repair.

The CCTS-F training equips clinicians and helping professionals with a practical, structured, and compassionate framework for supporting trauma recovery within the family system. Whether you work with children, parents, caregivers, couples, or whole families, this course will help you better understand the biology of trauma, strengthen family engagement, and support meaningful change across the relational environment.

Take this step to expand your trauma practice and deepen your capacity to support families from surviving toward healing, resilience, and connection.

REGISTER HERE

Disclaimer:

Materials in this course may include interventions and modalities that are beyond the authorised scope of expertise or licence of the training participant. As a licensed professional, you are responsible for reviewing your scope of practice, including activities that are defined in law as beyond the boundaries of practice, in accordance with and in compliance with your profession’s standards.

Additionally, many of the topics being taught may require supervision and/or mentorship, which is not included in this course.