Sleep treatment is not an add-on to your trauma treatment. It is a lens you learn to see through, to identify what is driving your patient’s difficulties, to educate them, gain their cooperation, and repair their sleep problem. It is part of your overall integrated trauma treatment protocol.
All clinical work begins with an evaluation of the strengths and difficulties of the patient. This can consist of information obtained by interview, corroborating accounts from others, results of questionnaires, and other physiological, behavioral, and medical tests. All trauma therapists have their way of doing this. But they may be missing one key ingredient: What happens at night?
We will make suggestions on how therapists can integrate key questions about sleep-wake rhythms into their interviews, support
alignment. Type or paste your text support those findings with additional tests of patient sleep problems, and guide you to making good decisions to help patients move forward most effectively in their individualized trauma treatment plan.
To efficiently adopt inquiry about sleep issues in your patients suffering with trauma, we have developed the Reitav-Thirlwell Trauma -Sleep Inquiry for Sleep Informed Trauma Therapy.
Jaan Reitav, PhD and Celeste Thirlwell, M.D. have my utmost respect for producing a program which teaches therapists in less than a day how to understand the sleep problems of trauma survivors in a way that exceeds the effectiveness of CBT-I for this population. Through the training, I was prepared to provide much better sleep assessments with all of my clients and learned quickly that I need to assess everyone, not just trauma survivors with more than a standard questionnaire. Dr. Jaan and Dr. Celeste have done the work for us by preparing very specific questionnaires to use with all clients, as well as provided scripts with example conversations about sleep. The old adage, "If you don't ask, you don't know" applies to sleep because people who appear to be sleeping well enough aren't necessarily, and people whose sleep is traumatically disrupted can now provide very nuanced feedback to the therapist, thanks to the resources provided in this training, thus increasing the client's trust in the therapy as well as the professional satisfaction and excitement for the therapist when we increase our effectiveness this much. The tuition for the program was very fair given the very detailed information we received about the nature of good sleep, including where the problems will show up in each phase of sleep including the substages of each phase of sleep, and the concrete
tools we were given to use with clients immediately after the training. This program was absolutely fascinating with plenty of case examples. The presenters are very responsive to questions from participants and excellent speakers. I have been in practice for 35 years and this seminar is a standout among the standouts.
I recently had the privilege to attend the Sleep Boot Camp offered by Jaan Reitav and Celeste Thirlwell. There are two aspects that stand out for me personally and professionally that I took away from the experience. Jaan was able to simplify a breathing assessment and teach it to us
in a way that we could pinpoint the aspects of our breath in and breath out that were impaired. Secondly, he gave us a correction and a strategy to use to be able to get access to deeper diaphragmatic breathing. This greatly improved the quality of my sleep and is helping my clients who have chronic sleep problems.
Thank you, Jaan and Celeste for this wonderful workshop. I highly recommend it for therapists personally and in their practice professionally. The fact that Jaan and Celeste have been able to
provide a drawing of the deeper shock pathway from the giant cell nucleus and how it interacts with the shock pathway we are familiar with in DBR was also an important learning experience.
The program highlighted lifetime careers in both presenters who have focused on the study of sleep disturbance, and improving quality of sleep. Thank you so much for sharing with us. It is always a treasure when experts share their gifts with others!
Everyone working with trauma needs to consider the implications of unaddressed sleep issues and how that keeps the trauma-driven sympathetic nervous system online for their clients and consider the TABS approach