Live webinar air date: April 30, 2025
Date
CE credits
1.5
Exam items
15
Series
Description
This webinar discusses the presenter’s model of decolonial trauma healing for all. Emphasis is on steps towards developing a decolonial, humble, culturally responsive practice. We explore how to challenge the pathologizing of human responses and distress when a person is trauma-exposed, and consider how to place pathology not in the distressed person, but in structural and systemic forms of oppression and subjugation that create and perpetuate trauma and distress.
Learning objectives
- Examine their own practice for signs of colonization by dominant cultural models of distress.
- Differentiate between the false notion of “competence” and decolonial models of responsivity in working with the intersectional identities of trauma-exposed people.
- Identify and name at least two structural social pathologies that can be a source of trauma.
Presenter
Laura S. Brown, PhD, ABPP
Brown is a semi-retired psychologist living in Seattle on unceded Duwamish land. She has written extensively on feminist therapy and trauma and is now focusing her work on questions of how to deeply decolonize the healing of traumatized people. Her interest in the construct of colonization and decolonizing reflects a career-long engagement with and interrogation of ways in which structural and systemic forms of oppression are the actual pathologies, and her engagement with resistance to the pathologizing of human distress, rather than of oppressive realities. She works as a supervisor and consultant in the U.S. and China, and is currently writing a companion volume to Decolonizing Trauma Healing, in which she explores how to operationalize the constructs of a decolonial, humble, and culturally responsive trauma practice.
