Advanced Psychotherapy Training for Complex Practice

This professional development course is a clinically intensive, two-year, in-person

psychotherapy training program delivered in person in Warrnambool, Victoria. Led by Associate Professor of Psychotherapy Traill Dowie, the program is grounded in a depth-oriented, trauma-focussed, and reflective approach to therapeutic practice in a case based learning model. It is designed to build advanced capacity for practitioners managing complex client presentations in under served contexts. Structured around weekly in-person contact hours (3 hours per week) with an additional 2:1 ratio of structured case-based study and reflection (8 hours/week), the program emphasises clinical reasoning and formulation, relational capacity, and situated therapeutic work as a foundation for learning..

 

Duration:

24 months (84 weeks total)

Location:

Warrnambool 

Weekly In-Person Contact:

3 hours (1 x weekly block)

Self-Directed Study:

4 hours/week guided by case material, reflection exercises, and curated readings

Total Study Commitment:

912 hours: 567 hours in-person instruction and 336 hours structured case-based

learning, peer dialogue, and integration task

Dates:

January 2026

 

​YEAR 1: Foundational Knowledge and Core

Practice Skills (Weeks 1–24)

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Weeks 1–12: Foundational Frameworks and Theoretical Orientation

1.Program Welcome, Induction & the Integrative Psychotherapy Framework

2.Lifespan Development I: Infancy, Attachment, and Relational Templates

3.Lifespan Development II: Adolescence, Identity, and Transitional States

4.Lifespan Development III: Adulthood, Aging, and Existential Tasks

5.Neurobiology of Emotion, Regulation, and Core Affect

6.Attachment Theory in Clinical Depth: Patterns and Repair

7.Sociocultural Perspectives: Power, Difference, and Relational Fields

8.Transpersonal Dimensions of Human Experience: Psyche, Soul, Spirit

9.Metacognitive Therapy (MCT): Origins, Structure, Clinical Use

10.Relational Psychodynamic Therapy: Drives, Defenses, and Development

11.Neuropsychotherapy: Trauma, Memory, and Brain Plasticity

12.Workshop 1: Case Formulation Across Theoretical Lenses

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Weeks 13–24: Trauma-Informed Clinical Practice I

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1.Trauma Theory: Categories, Continuums, and Cultural Complexity

2.The Neurobiology of Trauma: HPA Axis, Polyvagal Theory, Somatics

3.Attachment Trauma: Disorganised States and Interpersonal Schemas

4.Dissociation and Fragmentation: Ego States, Parts Work, IFS

5.Assessment Tools I: LEC-5, PCL-5, CAPS-5 – Diagnostic Literacy

6.Trauma Narratives: Voice, Silencing, and Testimony

7.Embodiment and the Traumatized Body: Somatic Awareness and Containment

8.Transference/Countertransference in Trauma Therapy

9.Shame, Avoidance, and Affective Freezing

10.Assessment Tools II: SCID-5, CCRT, Narrative Inquiry in Trauma

11.Vicarious Trauma and Self-Regulation in the Practitioner

12.Workshop 2: Trauma Typologies and Live Skills Supervision

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Weeks 25–36: Trauma-Informed Clinical Practice II

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1.Therapeutic Pacing: Titration, Pendulation, and Window of Tolerance

2.Trauma and Identity: Fragmentation and Narrative Reconstruction

3.Intergenerational Trauma: Epigenetics, Story, and the Unspoken

4.Cultural Trauma and Collective Wounding

5.Ethics in Trauma Fields: Disclosure, Consent, Power, and Witnessing

6.Working with Structural Dissociation: Mapping Inner Worlds

7.Body-Based Interventions: Touch, Movement, and Sensory Grounding

8.Traumatic Memory: Procedural, Episodic, and Emotional

9.Trauma and the Politics of Diagnosis: Critiquing the DSM

10.Working with Refugees, Survivors of Violence, and Complex Displacement

11.Relational Trauma and the Dyadic Field: Enmeshment and Repetition

12.Workshop 3: Supervision Intensive – Mapping and Matching Interventions

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Weeks 37–48: Modalities and Applied Clinical Skills

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1.Modal Integration: Trauma-Informed Application Across Modalities

2.CBT, MCT, and Narrative Approaches in Early Interventions

3.Motivational Interviewing and Solution-Focused Trauma Work

4.Somatic Awareness in Session: Orienting, Grounding, Reframing

5.Relational Depth in Brief and Crisis Work

6.Working with Shutdown, Resistance, and Withdrawal

7.The Use of Metaphor, Story, and Imaginal Language

8.Flexibility in Modality Selection: Practicing Adaptive Clinical Thinking

9.Peer Consultation and Applied Supervision Skills

10.Ethics and Practice in Regional and Remote Contexts

11.Workshop 4: Integrative Skills Laboratory – Modalities in Motion

12.Mid-Program Integration and Personal Reflection: Trajectory Mapping

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YEAR 2: Advanced Clinical Integration,

& Special Topics (Weeks 49–72)

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Weeks 49–60: Advanced Relational Practice and Intersubjectivity

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1.The Intersubjective Field: Mutuality, Projection, and Reverie

2.Clinical Presence and the Body as Instrument of Knowing

3.Silence, Stillness, and the Unspoken in Therapy

4.Rupture and Repair: The Arc of Relational Depth

5.Therapist Use-of-Self: Reflexivity, Countertransference, and Boundaries

6.Managing Erotic and Idealising Transference

7.Shame, Gaze, and Intersubjective Exposure

8.Small Community Ethics: Dual Relationships and Interlocking Fields

9.The Ethics of Witnessing, Refusal, and Withholding

10.Case Consultation Roundtable I: Supervision in Relational Complexity

11.Relational Enactment and the Therapist’s Vulnerability

12.Workshop 5: Relational Mapping, Process Work, and Live Supervision

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Weeks 61–72: Complex Presentations and Reflective Practice

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1.Borderline Organisation and Attachment Repair

2.Narcissistic Structures and Therapeutic Challenge

3.Dissociative Disorders and the Multiplicity of Self

4.Addictive Processes and Repetitive Compulsion

5.Grief, Loss, and Existential Despair

6.Suicidality and Ethics of Holding Risk

7.Psychosomatic Expression and Symbolic Breakdown

8.Trauma and Psychosis: Phenomenology and Containment

9.Working with Gender, Identity, and Queer Clinical Frames

10.Neurodivergence and Attunement Across Spectrum Presentations

11.Class, Rurality, and Clinical Blind Spots

12.Workshop 6: Deep Supervision and The Art of Listening

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Eligibility & Fees

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• Minimum 1 year post-qualification experience or equivalent

• Registered clinician (psychotherapist, psychologist, social worker, counsellor)

• Active practice in a MMM 3–7 area of Victoria​

• 10,000 dollars per year

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Case Based Learning

In the context of psychotherapy training, case-based learning must be understood not as an ancillary pedagogical tool but as a primary epistemological structure—a mode of

knowing that privileges encounter, specificity, and situated complexity over abstraction

and prescriptive formula. It is through the disciplined engagement with particular cases

that the clinician learns to think, feel, and act in ways that are attuned to the irreducibility of the clinical moment. The case becomes not merely an example but a site of revelation. Psychological practice unfolds in a terrain marked by indeterminacy, ethical ambiguity, and symbolic excess. Case-based learning respects this terrain. It foregrounds the reality that clinical knowledge is not simply acquired, but co-constructed—emerging in the. reflective tension between theory and practice, between subjective encounter and intersubjective field. The clinician learns not by assimilating fixed models but by inhabiting the liminal space of the case, where frameworks are tested against lived process, and where the therapist’s own subjectivity becomes a site of inquiry

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Pedagogical Model: Case Based Learning

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The value of this learning architecture lies in its capacity to hold contradiction. A case

invites the clinician to track multiple layers simultaneously: diagnostic formulation,

affective tone, narrative structure, embodied gesture, contextual forces. It cultivates

a form of clinical reasoning that is recursive rather than linear, interpretive rather

than algorithmic. The movement is not toward closure, but toward a more capacious

understanding—an ability to dwell with ambiguity, to tolerate not-knowing, and to

act with ethical imagination. Crucially, the case functions as a mirror. The clinician’s

engagement with the material is never neutral; it elicits affect, projection, fantasy,

and resistance. In this way, case-based learning serves as a reflective crucible

through which practitioners encounter their own countertransference, positionality,

and moral commitments. It demands a reflexive posture—one that recognises that

therapeutic action is always situated, always entangled in systems of meaning,

history, and power.

 

Relationally, case work opens onto the intersubjective textures of the clinical

encounter. It makes visible the microprocesses of transference, the embodied

registers of attunement, the significance of silence, rupture, and repair. These

phenomena are not incidental—they are the very substance of psychotherapy. To

learn through the case is to learn how to be with the other in the conditions of

psychic extremity, to bear witness to suffering without collapse or colonisation. This

is especially vital in contexts where clinicians are working at the margins—

geographically, culturally, or institutionally.

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Pedagogical Model: Case Based Learning

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Case-based learning makes space for the specificity of context: the clinician working

alone in a rural community, the client navigating intergenerational trauma in a

postcolonial setting, the therapist confronting systemic erasure or ethical deadlock.

These are not deviations from normativity; they are the real-world conditions of

practice. Through case work, training becomes attuned to the actual lives, bodies,

and histories of those present in the room. Moreover, the case allows for a deeper engagement with the ethical dimension of therapeutic work. Clinical scenarios rarely present clean dilemmas with clear resolutions. Instead, they confront the practitioner with entangled responsibilities, partial knowledges, and the demand for judgment. Case-based learning rehearses this ethical complexity. It refuses simplification and instead calls forth the clinician’s capacity for moral discernment—anchored not in certainty but in reflective presence and practice.

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Why This Model Matters?

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In many parts of regional Victoria, clinicians are working at the edge of the system—often alone, under-supported, and managing complex trauma and risk without adequate infrastructure. This program is:

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Advanced

Brings advanced training to rural clinicians on-site

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Practical

Centres clinical material from participants’ actual practice

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Community Based

Builds community of practice through relational and reflective learning

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Regional

Responds to the ecological, systemic, and ethical realities of regional mental health care.

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For Enrolment Contact 

zarawaeny@gmail.com