When Insight Isn’t Enough: How Trauma Rewires Brain Networks and What Clinicians Can Do in the Moment

Learning Objectives:

• Explain how trauma disrupts key brain networks involved in threat detection, self-processing, and emotion regulation, for example, salience network, default mode network, and prefrontal–limbic connectivity, and identify how these disruptions present clinically in session.
• Describe how trauma alters memory encoding and temporal processing in the brain, and apply this understanding to pace trauma work, respond to flashbacks, and avoid premature cognitive or insight-based interventions.

CE Hours: 1.0 NBCC; 1.0 WA; 1 Ethics