War trauma is a great teacher, would that we could learn from it. It not only generates extensive dysregulation, it engenders the most profound moral wounds; as painful as any bullet. It can also teach us about coming back to life: post-traumatic growth, the conditions for change, and how the healing process unfolds. It holds lessons for working with a range of other trauma.

For ten years, the instructor and his team at Coming Home Project offered integrative residential retreats for thousands of veterans, families and children from around the country. They uncovered a robust and reliable process called Turning Ghosts into Ancestors which helps transform anguish and restore aliveness, hope, growth, and connection with others and self. Their integrative approach, confirmed by peer-reviewed research, draws both from psychoanalytic and Buddhist principles, seamlessly melded in a non-denominational relational setting. It was successfully adapted to help care providers and is being developed to help survivors of other cumulative trauma.

Drawing from his book, Waking Up From War: A Better Way Home for Veterans and Nations (foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama), the instructor will present the voices of veterans and families interwoven with relevant interdisciplinary theory, as he articulates his innovative, empirically-confirmed model for transforming (not eliminating) some of the most treatment resistant trauma.