Trauma & Dissociation:

Assessment & Treatment of Dissociative Disorders

Friday, April 10 - VIRTUAL ONLINE - live interactive virtual course

8-3 PST / 9-4 MST / 10-5 CST / 11-6 EST

6 CE’s available for psychologists in Washington.

6 CE's available for counselors and marriage and family therapists in:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

Social Workers:

Trauma & Dissociation: Assessment & Treatment of Dissociative Disorders, course number 6673, is approved by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program to be offered by Emma Sunshaw as an individual course. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE course approval period 3/3/26-3/3/28. Social workers completing this course receive 6 (6 Clinical) continuing education credits.

For CE credit, your zoom sign-in must match your registration name and email. Course completion requirements must include attending the entire course and completing evaluation. Certificates will be issued by email within the week following the training. Please contact us if you have not received your certificate by Friday, April 17, 2026.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Registration Deadline: Friday, April 3rd, 2026.
Cancellations up through Friday, April 3rd, 2026 may be credited for a different training.

ADA Accommodations: Zoom captions will be enabled as needed.
Contact us HERE for other ADA accommodation requests by Friday, April 3rd, 2026.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This training provides an integrative framework for understanding, assessing, formulating, and treating dissociative disorders within relational, developmental, and systemic contexts. Dissociation is presented as an adaptive organization of experience shaped by attachment, betrayal, deprivation, and chronic interpersonal trauma, with attention to historical foundations, attachment and betrayal trauma theory, structural and multiplicity models, phenomenology, and contemporary neuroscience findings related to dissociative identity disorder and complex trauma. The course emphasizes assessment as a relational and ethical process that attends to power, pacing, and state dependent access to memory, and it supports differential diagnosis through phenomenological and attachment informed listening. Treatment content includes phase oriented care, safety and stabilization, titrated trauma processing, state inclusion, ethical memory work, transference and countertransference dynamics, and synthesis as expanded coordination and meaning making over time.

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES:

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

  1. Describe dissociation as both a process and an organization of experience shaped by attachment, betrayal, deprivation, and relational trauma.

  2. Explain how state-dependent access influences self-report, memory coherence, and diagnostic formulation in dissociative presentations.

  3. Apply phase-oriented treatment principles to support safety, stabilization, trauma processing, and integration in dissociative disorders.

  4. Describe state inclusion practices and articulate the clinical differences among language frameworks such as states, parts, selves, and survival strategies.

  5. Identify and respond ethically to transference, countertransference, traumatic transference, relational capture, attachment bondage, and institutional betrayal within dissociative treatment.

AGENDA TIMELINE:

30 minutes – Historical Foundations

60 minutes – Theoretical Backgrounds & Neuroscience

5 minute break

30 minutes – Phenomenology & Recognizing Dissociation

60 minutes – Assessments: Clinical Interviews & Differential Diagnosis

30 minute lunch break

60 minutes – Treatment Planning

30 minutes – Phase One: Stabilization & Safety

5 minute break

30 minutes – Phase Two: Memory Work

60 minutes – Phase Three: Relational Treatment & Synthesis


SPEAKER BIO:

Emma Sunshaw, Ph.D., has a Bachelor's Degree in Human Development, a Master's Degree in Professional Counseling, and her Doctorate is in Marriage and Family Therapy. As a licensed clinical counselor, she has been in private practice since 2003 and licensed and working in the field since 1999, with additional experience in ER triage, inpatient psychiatric, residential treatment, school-based, and outpatient settings. She was a 2025 clinical honorarium of the Harvard University Women Kennedy School of Government Women and Public Policy Program. 

She is on faculty with the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), and teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses about complex trauma and dissociative disorders.

She offers frequent trainings for therapists and psychoeducational classes for peer consult groups. She has served as the international clinical coordinator for humanitarian aid organizations offering counseling and trauma resiliency training to government leaders, humanitarian aid workers, and first responders in war zones and natural disaster sites. Dr. Sunshaw has published articles, written books, and she lectures internationally about trauma and resiliency.