Tian Dayton – Relational Trauma Repair Course: Psychodrama-Based Tools, Role Plays and Embodied Exercises for Experiential Trauma Healing

What you’ll learn in Relational Trauma Repair Course

Module 1: Attachment Trauma and an Introduction to Psychodrama, Sociometry, and Embodied Practices

Get ready to move your treatment beyond words and into healing through action and experiences! In this foundational module, Dr. Dayton will take you on a deep dive into how early attachment trauma from unresolved childhood experiences shapes your clients’ emotional, cognitive, and relational struggles.

Then she’ll turn her decades of experience into easy-to-use interventions that let clients safely revisit the moments that hurt them, access emotions they’ve long avoided, and begin to rewrite their internal stories with new feelings of safety and connection.

Outline

• Overview of childhood trauma
• Trauma, prefrontal cortex functioning and limbic response
• How childhood trauma shows up in adults
• Self-regulation issues
• Emotional and relational dysregulation
• Somatic symptoms
• Cognitive distortions – catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking
• Core processes of relational trauma repair through action and connection
• Introduction to psychodrama, sociometry, and embodied practices
• Floor Checks to engage, bond and build emotional literacy and co-regulation
• The Empty Chair embodied dialoguing with parts of self or others
• Doubling to give voice to the unspoken
• Role Reversal to foster empathy, perspective and action insight
• Timelines to fill in context, reveal problematic relational dynamics, and develop resilience
• Social atoms to map relational systems and quality of connections
• Adapting techniques for individuals, groups, couples, and telehealth
• Clinical risks, safety, and limitations

Module 2: Trauma and Resilience Timelines: Tools to Identify Moments of Rupture and Strengthen Inner Resources

Trauma disrupts a client’s sense of time. Memories don’t unfold in a neat sequence—they can feel fragmented, blurred, and surface without warning. Without that clarity, the path to healing can feel blocked, leaving clients stuck—unable to fully process their trauma or restore a sense of safety and control.

In Module 2, Dr. Dayton will teach you how to use Attachment Trauma and Resilience Timelines—structured, experiential processes that help clients put trauma into context and real-time, and uncover hidden reservoirs of strength and resilience they need to heal.

Outline

• How trauma distorts time, memory, and narrative
• How childhood attachment ruptures shape adult patterns
• Neuroception and autonomic states
• Polyvagal Theory as a map for understanding trauma responses
• Felt safety as a prerequisite for effective treatment
• Adult attachment styles and reactivity in relationships
• Boundary confusion and identity enmeshment
• The Attachment Trauma Timeline Step by Step
• Identify core moments of rupture, abandonment, neglect, or betrayal
• Integrate somatic cues, emotional responses, and relational patterns
• Anchor the past to present-day symptoms and behavior
• The Resilience Timeline: How to Unearth Your Client’s Strength to Support Healing
• Map moments of safety, regulation, and support
• Reframe trauma narratives through evidence of healing and survival
• Repair inner child roles and rehearsing new behaviors

Module 3: Map Relational Patterns, Externalize Relational Pain and Create Healing Moments

Many clients can’t easily explain how their attachment wounds show up—or where they learned their current patterns of closeness, distance, or disconnection.

In this module, you’ll learn how to use powerful experiential tools to help clients visually map their key relationships, highlight missing support, and reveal inherited roles—creating moments of recognition and emotional integration. Dr. Dayton will show you how to apply this approach with individuals, couples, and groups, offering step-by-step guidance and real client demonstrations.

Outline

• Role theory and the systems that shape us
• Role conflicts: the tension between who we are, were, and want to be
• How to use social atoms to map clients’ social systems and internalized roles
• Simple role plays and role reversals to access emotion, build empathy, and rework patterns
• Work with inner parts as roles in conflict or collaboration
• Access core emotion through movement and embodiment
• Address wounds from the family of origin
• Build and rehearse resilient roles: protecting, nurturing, truth-telling, boundary-setting parts
• Guide clients in constructing repaired systems for identity, healing, and connection

Module 4: Relational Trauma, Loss, and Grief: Experiential Tools for Processing What Was and What Wasn’t

In this powerful module, you’ll learn how to use experiential techniques to help clients process both tangible and invisible losses. Through role plays, timelines and somatic awareness that give grief shape, voice, and movement, you’ll learn how to help clients speak “to” who or what they’ve lost, not just “about” it—opening pathways for healing that traditional talk therapy often leaves untouched.

Outline

• How experiential and embodied methods support clients grieving both death and non-death losses
• Role plays to reconnect with who or what has been lost (people, roles, identity, safety)
• The power of talking “to” rather than “about”: facilitating direct expression and closure
• Access and process grief through somatic cues and bodily awareness
• Differentiate types of grief: acute, anticipatory, ambiguous, disenfranchised
• Use Grief Spectrograms to externalize and normalize grief reactions and symptoms
• Floor checks to help clients explore grief themes, emotional states, and relational impact in real-time
• Structuring role plays for unresolved grief, complicated grief, and internal conflict
• Use timelines to chart loss experiences, developmental impact, and moments of resilience
• Addressing non-death losses (estrangement, missed childhoods, betrayal, identity loss)
• Experiential letter writing: for closure, unmet needs, goodbyes, or unspoken truths

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