CTI—Child Training Institute

The Child Training Institute (CTI) provides cutting-edge training to mental health professionals, including clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, psychologists, and more, who seek knowledge in the latest evidence-based treatments and techniques to help young clients and their families.

Working with children and adolescents who have experienced significant trauma and abuse, who struggle with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, or who lag in emotional, psychological, developmental, or intellectual growth can be challenging. CTI is here to support the professionals who are, in turn, helping these children. We offer programs that encourage new ways to think about and approach the work, provide new skills, and support connections between clinicians and disciplines. We believe that on-going training is essential to each individual’s professional development, as well as the community of clients they serve.

CTI is proud to present live one-day and two-day trainings at our San Francisco location. Trainings are open to the public and provide continuing education credits for qualified participants.

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Upcoming CTI Program Schedule

Save the Dates:

Courage and Fear: The Intersection Between Immigration and Trauma

Thurs., January 16, 2020, 9 am – 4 pm
Trainer: Vilma Reyes, PsyD

This talk will cover the impact of complex trauma, toxic stress, and fear on brain development, learning, and family attachments, as well as ways to intervene. This will be framed in the context of historical immigrant experiences and the current socio-political climate and immigration policy of forced family separations. Trauma informed strategies to foster repair among ruptured attachments will be explored by using case-based learning in small groups. The experience of immigration including potential risk and protective factors will be a thread throughout the conversation.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this training participants will be able to:

1. Explain the impact of interpersonal, complex trauma on brain and cognitive development, emotional regulation, the parent-child relationship, parenting and family dynamics.
2. Describe the influence and significance of historical trauma, the immigrant experience, systemic oppression, and unconscious bias for Latino immigrant families.
3. List the theoretical pillars of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) and its application to working with Latino immigrant families.
4. Critique the behavioral change process and understand how strengths-based interaction helps facilitate positive actions.
5. Describe challenges Latino immigrant families face and ways to support them through those challenges.
6. Demonstrate through case-based application how to integrate CPP ideas and techniques into your work with Latino families.

Register here >

Past CTI Programs

Building Resiliency in Young People: A Trauma-Sensitive Approach

October, 29, 2019
Trainer: Dr. Ken Ginsburg

Young people who have endured adverse childhood experiences may have lifelong effects on their brain, health, and behaviors. The power of caring adults in their life, who can nurture their strengths rather than trigger their earned reactivity, cannot be exaggerated.

This educational seminar for professionals will focus on the importance of healthy, healing connections and strategies that restore control to young people from whom it may have been taken away.

Upon completion of this training participants will be able to:

1. Describe the effects that childhood trauma has on the body, brain, and behavior.
2. Explain the basics of trauma sensitive care, including the critical importance of well-boundaried connection and giving. youth the experience of having control over their decisions.
3. Recite and describe the Seven C’s model of positive youth development and resilience
4. Critique the behavioral change process and understand how strengths-based interaction helps facilitate positive actions.
5. Communicate with youth in a way that builds on existing strengths rather than undermines forward movement.
6. Utilize and develop stress management strategies that are designed to move youth away from self-destructive quick fixes and towards positive behaviors

Register here >

Children’s Yoga & Mindfulness for Professionals

Thurs., August 1, 2019, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm
Trainer: Lani Rosen-Gallagher, M.Ed., RYT 200, RCYT

This workshop will explore the benefits of yoga and mindfulness techniques, and how to utilize them for interventions with children. We will unpack the Social Emotional Learning toolbox and discuss the development of coping skills. Lastly, we will discuss the physiological ways that the brain and body interact.

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• List practical, concrete tools in the Social Emotional Learning toolbox that develop emotional literacy and increase capacity for self-regulation.
• Identify child-friendly terms and phrases to explain the brain’s physiology as it relates to managing emotion.
• Describe in child-friendly terms the relationship between mind and body, self-regulation, impulse control, and positive social skills.
• Demonstrate games and yoga poses that increase capacity for executive functioning.

Each workshop participant will leave with their own deck of Mindful Yoga Breaks® Cards.

Suicide Crisis: Assessing for Imminent Risk

Thurs., May 23, 2019, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Trainer: Igor Galynker, M.D.

Depression and suicidality among adolescents is exceptionally high in the San Francisco Bay Area. This worrying trend has clinicians searching for ways to identify the signs and symptoms of acute pre-suicidal mental states associated with imminent suicide risk. In this important training, Dr. Igor Galynker, M.D. will introduce the suicide-specific diagnosis of the Suicide Crisis Syndrome, provide clinical illustrations that support his work, and introduce us to the leading methods of imminent risk assessment. Reflecting the extensive work introduced in Dr. Galynker’s book The Suicidal Crisis: Clinical Guide to the Assessment of Suicide Risk, this training is a must for all clinicians working with adolescents and young adults struggling with potential suicidality.

Upon completion of this training participants will be able to:

• Identify five suicide warning signs
• Explain how previous suicide attempts factor into current suicide risk
• List signs and symptoms of the acute pre-suicidal states associated with imminent suicide risk
• Describe two models that explain suicidal behavior
• Describe the suicide-specific diagnosis of the Suicide Crisis Syndrome

Raising a Secure Child—The Child-Parent Relationship

Thurs., April 11, 2019, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Trainers: Alicia Lieberman, Ph.D. and David Oppenheim, Ph.D.

In this training, two internationally known experts in child development and the child-parent relationship will draw on their decades of research, clinical practice, and parent counseling to present the scientific basis for raising secure children. They will describe how to use insightfulness to reconcile child and parent emotional needs and discuss how raising emotionally healthy children calls for understanding the individual and developmental characteristics of the child while giving caregivers the space they need to fulfill their own needs.

Dr. Alicia Lieberman will use the toddlerhood years to illustrate young children’s striving to find a balance between their longing for love and approval and their impulse to assert their wish for independence. She will describe the treatments she developed to help parents understand the connections between their childhood experiences and their parenting struggles and discover rewarding ways of interacting with their children.

Dr. David Oppenheim will highlight how parents foster their children’s emotional health by taking into consideration their inner world and the motives underlying the child’s actions and feelings. Examples from research with normative and at-risk samples will be used to illustrate insightful parenting that promotes child security and self-understanding as well as the barriers parents face in this process. He will also focus on how insightfulness can be fostered to help parents of children with neurodevelopmental challenges.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this training participants will be able to:

1. Describe the basic intentions of toddlerhood
2. Explain at least two principles of Child Parent Psychotherapy
3. Define Insightfulness in the context of the research and work presented
4. Identify three ways in which insightfulness promotes healthy development in children
5. Explain how insightfulness can be of help to parents of children with neurodevelopmental challenges

Trauma Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—Two Day Training

Mon & Tue., October 1– 2, 2018, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm
Trainer: Lisette Rivas-Hermina, LMFT

This training will provide an overview of the importance of both the clinical and societal context of trauma assessment, how to identify appropriate client candidates for Trauma Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and implementation of the model through the PRACTICE components.

Upon completion of training, participants can be expected to:

• Describe the efficacy of the TF-CBT model demonstrated in multiple studies.
• Identify the importance of trauma assessment and how to incorporate it in treatment.
• Describe the central importance of the trauma narrative.
• Explain the PRACTICE Components and their goals in TF-CBT.
• Demonstrate how to implement TF-CBT using a variety of interventions.
• Utilize interventions that integrate cultural values and beliefs throughout implementation of the model.
• Recognize the role of vicarious trauma and the importance of self-care.
• Develop skills for cognitive processing trauma-related thoughts.

PLEASE NOTE PRE-REQUISITE: All participants will be required to complete a web training on the basic principles of TF-CBT prior to this training on October 2 – 3. The TF-CBT web training is $25 and provides 11 hours of CE Credits for eligible licensees. It is a standard pre-requisite for TF-CBT trainings that enables the trainer to focus on practice of skills versus basic theory.

Brainstorm and the Yes Brain: Cultivating Resilience in Adolescents from the Inside Out with Dan Siegel, MD, Expert Trainer

Wed., February 21, 2018, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Trainer: Daniel Siegel, M.D.
Between the ages of 12 and 24, the brain changes in important and oftentimes maddening ways. Daniel Siegel will explore the nature of the changes in the teenage brain and how they set the stage for changes in adolescent mental, physical, and interpersonal well-being. This presentation will explore the increased risk-taking and statistically demonstrated heightened chances of harm during this period of life. But these negative aspects of adolescence are only one side of the coin of this period of life.

Seen from an inside view, adolescence is an essential part of our development and our evolution. This “inside-out approach” to this second dozen years of life, gives us an exciting new perspective on the essence of adolescence. Emotional intensity, social engagement, novelty-seeking, and creative explorations are not aspects of an “immature” stage of development, but actually can be seen as a necessary set of characteristics that are essential for both the individual’s development and for the health and adaptation of our species. Further, these features of the teenage brain set the stage for changes that not only shape our life as adolescents, but can surprisingly be seen as essential to thriving in adulthood. How we approach adolescence as a period and adolescents as individuals can make all the difference in how these important years are navigated.

For more information about CTI trainings, call 415-359-2484 or email [email protected].