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Join Dr. Robyn Walser in Atlanta, March 5-7, 2027, for a three-day immersive ACT Bootcamp training for trauma and complex trauma integrating exposure, embodiment, and values-based living to help clients move from surviving to living with purpose and connection. Earn up to 23.5 CE hours!
About the event: In a time marked by widespread exposure to trauma, chronic stress, and moral distress, clinicians need approaches that move beyond symptom management toward deeper recovery. This training provides a coherent ACT framework to help clients move from surviving to living with purpose and connection.
Trauma often arises in the context of war, interpersonal violence, systemic betrayal, and chronic threat, and is associated with posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, shame, moral pain, substance use, and profound disconnection from values and community.
While ACT is transdiagnostic in scope, it is particularly well suited for working with trauma – historical experiences that disrupt meaning, identity, relational safety, and one’s capacity to engage fully in life.
Participants will learn how to apply ACT to trauma and complex trauma using a coherent, process-based approach. The training explores how to integrate exposure, embodied awareness, and values-based action to help clients safely engage with traumatic material while building meaningful and connected lives.
The bootcamp will also explicitly address the integration of ACT with established trauma-focused approaches, including Prolonged Exposure (PE), Written Exposure Therapy (WET), and EMDR. Written Exposure Therapy or Expressive Writing will be highlighted as a particularly elegant example of values-consistent exposure, emphasizing narrative coherence, willingness, and repeated contact with traumatic material while minimizing therapist-driven control. Participants will learn how ACT processes, such as acceptance, defusion, and self-as-context, can strengthen engagement in written, imaginal, and interoceptive exposure while maintaining clinical flexibility and responsiveness.
The training will also incorporate a body-focused perspective grounded in ACT’s present-moment awareness and acceptance processes. Participants will learn how interoceptive exposure, mindful contact with physiological arousal, and embodied values-based action can support trauma recovery. The body is approached as a site of learning and contact, rather than something to be fixed, managed, or overridden, allowing clinicians to work skillfully with pain, dissociation, hyperarousal, and numbing within a coherent ACT framework.
Finally and centrally, this training will explore the therapeutic relationship as a living context for change. Participants will explore how therapist stance, moment-to-moment responding, and willingness shape exposure-based learning, particularly with trauma-exposed clients for whom issues of safety, power, and trust are paramount. Attention will be given to pacing, consent, and collaboration, as well as to recognizing and responding to therapist experiential avoidance.
Through didactic instruction, experiential practice, clinical demonstrations, and case-based application, participants will develop the capacity to flexibly integrate ACT with trauma-focused methods while maintaining theoretical coherence. The bootcamp emphasizes moving beyond symptom management toward helping clients build meaningful, values-consistent lives.
https://www.ibh.com/event/act-bootcamp-for-trauma-atlanta-march-2027/