The Trauma-Informed Group Therapy Curriculum for PTSD and C-PTSD

When the group goes quiet and every face turns to you, structure is what carries the room. Running a trauma group in an intensive outpatient or partial hospitalization program means holding a coherent therapeutic arc across a circle that changes every week. New members arrive mid-cycle. Diagnoses range from single-incident PTSD to complex developmental trauma. The clinical literature explains why phase-based treatment works, but it rarely tells you exactly what to do on Tuesday morning when one member dissociates and seven others are watching. This curriculum closes that gap. What This Book Delivers This is a complete, session-by-session curriculum for facilitating trauma groups across all three phases of recovery. It organizes twenty-four sessions into stabilization, processing, and integration, with a detailed facilitation plan, a reproducible client worksheet, and a complex-trauma adaptation note for every session. It is built for the group that actually shows up in community and hospital programs: open-enrollment, mixed-diagnosis, and clinically demanding. What Makes This Curriculum Different Three named frameworks carry the work from intake to discharge. The ANCHOR Framework structures every session so the group opens and closes the same way each time. The GROUND Protocol organizes Phase 1 stabilization. The WITNESS Protocol governs trauma processing while the facilitator tracks the activation level of the whole room. The book also covers what most curricula leave out: open-enrollment integration, crisis decision trees, documentation and billing language for group settings, somatic integration, special population adaptations, and a structured plan for facilitator resilience. This book is for readers who: Facilitate or co-facilitate trauma groups in IOP, PHP, or community mental health settings Are licensed clinicians, counselors, psychologists, or psychiatric nurses building a trauma program Need a structured curriculum that works with both PTSD and Complex PTSD in the same room Supervise group facilitators and want a shared clinical vocabulary across a team Want session plans grounded in established, evidence-informed trauma treatment