Many mental health professionals are now aware that the states of mind we call “psychosis” are often not simply a medical condition – they are instead a reaction to trauma and other difficult or confusing life events. But unfortunately, training in how to help people make sense of their experience and to actively and perhaps completely recover is still rarely available.
To help remedy that, I’ve put together a series of six live online seminars, that are designed to first provide an overview of how therapy for psychosis can work, and then to provide a detailed understanding of how the various problem areas associated with psychosis can be addressed.
This series focuses heavily, but not exclusively, on the most researched approach, which is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for psychosis. Over 50 randomized studies of CBT for psychosis (CBTp) have now been completed, and they show that people experiencing psychosis can learn to reduce distress and disability using these methods. And those who have made complete recoveries after being diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia often credit learning to change thoughts and behaviors in the same ways that are promoted by CBTp.
The seminars also draw on perspectives taken from the Hearing Voices Movement, compassion focused therapy, and dialogical and psychodynamic approaches.
Each seminar will be 4 hours long, and will provide time for questions, discussion, and practice. Continuing education credits will be available for many US professionals (including APA credit): for details on acrediting bodies go to the link for the Overview seminar and scroll down to “CE Info” (note that the credits offered should be the same for each seminar, though credit for some of the later seminars is still pending and so does not yet show.)
Each seminar will be recorded, and those who register will have access to the recording. CE credit however will only be available to those who attend the seminar live, for the entire seminar.
Schedule:
Each workshop will be from 8:30 AM to 12:45 PM Pacific Time / 11:30 AM to 3:45 PM Eastern Time
Date: 11/6/26 An Overview of CBT for Psychosis: Practical and Humanistic Strategies to Support Recovery
Date: 12/4/26 Essential Elements of CBT for Psychosis: Engagement Style, Normalizing, & Developing a Formulation
Date: 1/8/27 Paranoia and Troublesome Beliefs: A CBT Approach
Date: 2/12/27 Voices, Visions, and Other Altered Perceptions: Changing Outcomes with CBT
Date: 3/12/27 Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychosis: CBT and Other Approaches to Understanding and Recovery
Date: 4/9/27 Addressing Cultural and Spiritual Issues Within Treatment for Psychosis
(See further below for a detailed description of each seminar.)
About the instructor: (Ron Unger LCSW): “I’m a therapist who has been specializing in helping people with psychosis for more than two decades, and during that time I have led many seminars on therapy for psychosis (mostly CBTp) at a variety of locations across the US and Canada. These seminars offer a deeply humanistic and open-minded approach to difficult experiences that can otherwise be too easily framed as “not understandable.” I am the author of 3 prerecorded “self-paced courses” related to therapy for psychosis (these courses cover some of the same material that will be covered in these live seminars.) Over the past decade I have worked with the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) and with Mad in America to host webinars with leading experts in therapy for psychosis; recordings of many of these can be found at youtube.com/@RonUnger . My website is https://recoveryfrompsychosis.org/
Options for Registration:
Registration for the first seminar, “An Overview of CBT for Psychosis: Practical and Humanistic Strategies to Support Recovery” on 11/6/26, can only be done individually.
Fee for the first seminar: Early Bird $59 until 10/16/26, then $79 regular.
The five following five seminars, the first of which is on 12/4/26, are available either individually or bundled together at a discounted rate.
The individual price for any of those 5 seminars will be $89 until 3 weeks before each seminar, and then $109.
Or if you wish to purchase all 5 as a bundle, until Friday 11/13/26 the early bird fee for that will be only $299, then $349 regular.
When registering, there is also a 20% discount for those registering in groups of 3 or more.
Click on the links below to register for each seminar. To register for the bundle of 5 seminars, click on this link for the link for the Essential Elements of CBT for Psychosis seminar and choose the bundled registration option. (Note that when you purchase the bundle, you will be automatically registered for the Essential Elements seminar and will receive a discount code allowing you to register for the others without paying anything additional.)
Description of each seminar:
An Overview of CBT for Psychosis: Practical and Humanistic Strategies to Support Recovery
When psychosis occurs, it can be bewildering and frightening—not only for the person experiencing it, but also for those trying to help. Yet a substantial body of research shows that therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Psychosis (CBTp) can be effective despite the obstacles, and this seminar will provide an overview of how that is possible.
Rather than confronting or attempting to suppress unusual experiences and perspectives, CBTp emphasizes collaboration, curiosity, and a process of shared discovery of ways of making sense that help reduce distress and disability. Seminar participants will learn how this approach can be individualized to address a wide variety of psychotic experiences, and how to help people to not just “manage their symptoms” but to create a meaningful life based on their values.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify the creation of dialogue as a “minimal agenda” within CBT for psychosis that can organize sessions even when barriers exist to more organized approaches
- Contrast the process and effect of organizing therapy around client values with that of organizing it around symptoms as defined by professionals.
- Compare the importance given to having a positive relationship versus that given to having a structured agenda within CBT for psychosis.
- Describe basic CBT for psychosis methods, including normalizing, developing a formulation, changing relationships with voices, flexible approaches to inflexible beliefs, and overcoming negative symptoms by focusing on meaning and connection.
Essential Elements of CBT for Psychosis: Engagement Style,Normalizing, & Developing a Formulation
This seminar explores and offers practice in the fundamentals of CBT forpsychosis. Questions will be discussed such as, how is it possible to engagecollaboratively in exploring experiences with people whose view of reality isradically different from your own? How can providers realistically offer hopeto people who may feel their mind is broken?
One CBT method that conveys hope and facilitates engagement is that of normalizing. Framing psychotic experiences as extreme versions of normal reactions “puts them on the map” of healthy human functioning and allows people to consider transitioning to less extreme approaches. Once experiences are understood in a normalized way, it is then possible to follow up by helping people map out or develop formulations about what is happening. These formulations then can be used to develop specific suggestions about what might be done to effect change.
Learning Objectives:
· List four key elements of a collaborative engagement style consistent with CBT for psychosis, and demonstrate this style in practice
· Apply the practice of normalizing while discussing psychotic experiences
· Based on descriptions of psychotic experiences, create CBT formulations which map out what may be happening and what might be changed to “shrink” the problem
Paranoia and Troublesome Beliefs: A CBT Approach
In an increasingly polarized world, more are noticing how difficult it can be to talk to someone whose beliefs are quite different from our own. It can be even more difficult when trust is broken, and paranoia is strong.
In this seminar, the focus will be on establishing helpful conversations with people whose paranoia and extremely different beliefs have led to a diagnosis of psychosis. Rather than a “one size fits all” approach, the emphasis will be on finding a method that works for an individual as that person exists in the current moment. While “reviewing the evidence” and helping the person challenge the belief may sometimes be effective, at other times it may work better to simply accept the belief and to find ways to live successfully while holding it. And at other times, the best approach might be understanding the belief as an indicator of underlying conflicts or vulnerabilities that need to be addressed before the belief can change.
Learning Objectives:
· Describe the possible functions of paranoia in the formation of troublesome beliefs or delusions
· Identify 4 different but complementary approaches to reducing disturbances due to troublesome beliefs
· Demonstrate how to collaboratively explore evidence for and against an apparently delusional belief
Voices, Visions, and Other Altered Perceptions: Changing Outcomes with CBT
We depend on our senses for accurate information about the world, but for many people, a significant portion of what they experience as sensory information has no apparent basis in our shared world. One might suspect this would always lead to trouble, yet, research in the last quarter century shows that only some of the people who hear voices and see visions have significant problems from these experiences; others seem to get on with their lives successfully.
What makes the difference? One huge factor is how people interpret and relate to these experiences. This training will explore CBT methods of shifting from often unproductive or even counterproductive attempts to eliminate “hallucinations,” to constructive ways of coping. With this change in relationship, experiences like voices may fade, become less troublesome, or even shift into something the person experiences as an overall positive in their lives.
A special area of focus will be the problem of compliance with command voices. Patterns of compliance with command voices dramatically increase the risk of self harm and other destructive behavior; we will review and practice CBT approaches which have been shown to be effective in significantly reducing such compliance.
Learning Objectives:
· Use an acceptance and commitment therapy approach to help people change relationships with voices, visions, and other “hallucinations.”
· Identify relationships between problems with voices and with difficult emotions, allowing attention to shift to facing core issues and schemas
· Utilize a proven CBT strategy to help people reduce even partial or imagined compliance with command voices
Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychosis: CBT and Other Approaches to Understanding and Recovery
A large number of studies now provide strong evidence that psychosis is often an understandable reaction to trauma, abuse, and other difficult life experiences. This training will introduce you to a science based yet humanistic conceptualization of extreme human experiences that can be related to trauma, and will demonstrate how to help people change their relationship with these experiences, for example, by collaborating with them in building coherent and compassionate self narratives that can set the stage for a strong recovery.
Dissociation can be a normal response to traumatic stress and can, in its more extreme forms and when misinterpreted, easily lead to psychosis. Drawing on this understanding, the possibility of addressing dissociation and misinterpretations of dissociation using methods drawn from diverse sources such as CBT, the Hearing Voices Movement, mindfulness, and psychodynamic approaches will be presented. These approaches can help people to regain perspective and personal power and create an opportunity to resolve internal conflicts rather than remaining stuck in endless efforts to suppress whatever is disturbing them.
Learning Objectives:
· Identify possible interrelationships between trauma, dissociation, and psychosis, including ways that psychosis itself, and reactions to psychosis by others, can be traumatizing
· Describe a possible causal route from trauma to psychotic experiences, and describe the role of dissociation within that process
· Plan to integrate CBT for psychosis with various trauma therapies to effectively treat clients who have experienced both trauma and psychosis
· Demonstrate a collaborate approach to helping clients develop coherent and compassionate stories of trauma and recovery which provide an alternative to both fragmented “psychotic” stories, and to helplessness-inducing “mental illness” stories.
Addressing Cultural and Spiritual Issues Within Treatment for Psychosis
There is not just one way of making sense of reality; instead, each culture or even each subculture goes about it differently. Further, many or even most people affirm beliefs in various “spiritual” aspects of reality that transcend everyday experiences. But this leads to the question: how are we to distinguish healthy diversity in culture and spirituality, from that which is pathological or “psychotic?”
One approach to this question is to assert that if a way of making sense is common in a culture, then it is sane and acceptable, while if it is unique, then it is pathological. While this approach makes room for diversity that is well established in large social groups, it continues to risk pathologizing possibly healthy innovations made by individuals.
This training will explore how CBT for psychosis can be practiced in a flexible way to adopt to cultural and spiritual differences, allowing for collaborative and respectful explorations of both the possible value as well as dangers of various ways of approaching reality. Based on such explorations, people can discover their own paths to a healthy integration and a path forward in their lives.
Learning Objectives:
- Demonstrate the ability to adopt CBT for psychosis approaches to meet the needs of individuals from varying cultural groups
- Explain the role of cultural humility, and an awareness of the uncertainty of one’s own knowledge, in respectful and effective therapy for psychosis
- Utilize cultural competence in addressing spiritual issues within a recovery oriented approach to psychosis while working with individuals from a variety of traditions and subcultures