The Center for Treatment of Developmental Trauma Disorders (CTDTD) brings together developers of leading evidence-based trauma treatments (EBTT) for children victimized by developmental trauma and professional and lived experience experts on culturally responsive trauma-informed services, to enhance clinical and peer providers therapeutic competence nationally and to enhance public understanding of and reduce stigma associated with DTD.
Over the 5-year funding period, CTDTD will expand, and develop training curricula based on, its groundbreaking 35-webinar series Identifying Critical Moments and Healing Complex Trauma (https://learn.nctsn.org/course/index.php?categoryid=78), thus providing experiential training that will enhance the ability of more than 25,000 peer and professional counselors to treat more than 125,000 children safely, culturally responsively, and effectively for DTD—as well as creating a permanent archive that will benefit providers and children for decades to come.
The Critical Moments webinars show professionally produced films with professional or peer therapists handling moment-to-moment therapy crises with dramatized child/family clients of diverse ethnoracial/cultural backgrounds who are recovering from developmental and historical trauma. They offer unique added insights via post-session filmed reflections by the therapist and client(s) and in-depth commentary by youth and adults with lived and professional experience.
From 2021-2026, CTDTD will produce and disseminate nationally: (a) 25 webinars with new films of dramatized crisis therapy sessions (and post-session commentary) that will be conducted by professional and peer therapists from NCTSN Category III Centers Affiliates as well as by CTDTD faculty EBTT experts, with a different theme each year focused on stigmatized and polyvictimized children; (b) a companion set of 25 filmed dramatized multi-disciplinary family service planning session webinars including parents/caregivers, teachers, child welfare workers, probation officers, healthcare providers, and mentors (and the youth/client if s/he is a teen), with post-session commentary; (c) a companion set of 50 Digital diary films in which each dramatized youth/client describes current and past stressors and turning points, in their own words, with youth and adult commentary highlighting key developmental dilemmas and evidence of youths’ resilience; and (d) a Core Skills Checklist that references specific time points in filmed therapy sessions in which the therapist demonstrates each core skill, to translate NCTSN’s Prerequisite Clinical Competencies and Core Child Trauma Curriculum into practice-based learning.
CTDTD will extend its formative work on core therapy skills by collaborating with Category II Centers to create curricula for the core skills necessary for training, treatment, and system transformation, in a new Core Skills Consortium (CSC) organized and convened by CTDTD.
Finally, to serve as a resource for NCTSN and nationally on DTD, CTDTD will continue to provide annual up-dates of 3 professional resources begun in 2017: the DTD Clinician Toolkit, DTD Assessment & Treatment Update,, and DTD: Innovations in Conceptualizations & Services.