Faculty Perspectives:
Adithy
Counseling Psychologist, Pune
It was during one of the ‘Member engagement meet-ups’ that happened during a virtual summit/conference in 2020 that I heard from a leader of ISSTD’s Professional Training Program (PTP) that they were looking for new faculty. I then looked up the qualifications required and noted that I needed to be a member for a while longer before I could apply. Many months later, after having thought of making PTP courses available to professionals in India, I wrote to Su Baker, Curriculum Director of PTP Level I. She was very encouraging of the idea, and of working towards making the course culturally relevant. Mary Pat Hanlin, the then CEO also supported the idea wholeheartedly and suggested next steps. I requested a few colleagues from India that I had journeyed with for long, who were doing good work in the field of trauma training and supervision for therapists in India and Asia, to join in preparing to become future faculty for PTP.
We—Hvovi Bhagwagar, Gayitri Bhatt, Karishma Shah Savla, and I—applied, were interviewed and were selected. Together we started preparing to offer the PTP Level I course in India. Our preparation involved auditing the training offered by faculty from around the world, reading, and discussions. When we requested Faige Flakser, the PTP Chair then, to be our mentor, she found time to meet and answer our myriad questions, instilling more confidence in us. Kathia Lopez Murdock, who was also preparing to start as faculty, joined in these meetings and shared her wisdom on cultural matters.
In the meanwhile, participant qualifying criteria and affordable fees were worked out, and Board approval for the course was obtained. In the Summer of 2025, the course was announced. We organized a launch and ‘Meet the faculty’ event with the support of ISSTD Staff, D. Michael Coy (then President), Abigail Percifield (then President-Elect), and Faige Flakser (then PTP Chair). Many therapists in India were looking to deepen their understanding on trauma and found this course offering as an opportunity for that.
From the many applicants, fourteen were selected, and the first PTP Level I course with faculty and participants from India was held from June to December 2025. Throughout this process, I appreciated the generosity and dedication of everyone who walked before and alongside us. I hope more such initiatives would help make PTP more accessible worldwide.
Hvovi Bhagwagar
Psychologist and Psychotherapist, Mumbai
When we began planning the first India-based cohort of ISSTD’s Professional Training Program (Level I), I carried both excitement and quiet self-doubt. Would a discussion-based and reading-intensive format work in our context? Would participants accustomed to lecture-style teaching embrace the vulnerability and rigour required for this kind of learning?
What unfolded over the next six months exceeded our expectations. Fourteen clinicians committed to the process, reading extensively, engaging in complex case discussions, tolerating ambiguity, and reflecting honestly on their own clinical responses.
For me, stepping into the role of faculty came with some bit of apprehension. The format demanded rigour not just in mastering the readings, but in thinking creatively about how to translate the material into conversation points that would genuinely engage participants. During classroom discussions we encountered some periods of silence. These moments could be quite unnerving, as both the faculty and participants were still learning to adapt to the intensity and depth of the assigned readings. At times, the process felt genuinely exhausting, yet it was also profoundly meaningful work.
What became clear over the months was that Indian practitioners were not only ready for structured, research-informed training in complex trauma, but they are genuinely eager for it, willing to meet complexity with thoughtfulness and commitment.
In the end, delivering the internationally recognised PTP curriculum and trying to incorporate an Indian cultural lens, while still maintaining its academic integrity felt both humbling and historic. This first cohort demonstrated that meaningful, ethically grounded trauma education can thrive when global standards and local realities meet in dialogue.
Gayitri Bhatt
Psychotherapist, Bangalore
Our beginnings, preparing to do the course, involved shifting between being students and being teachers. Our tasks involved reading the material, sitting through more than one course to observe how other faculty facilitate, raising questions for ourselves on how the material and methods can be made relevant to practitioners in India. Our excitement and resolve grew as we immersed ourselves in the work.
Coming from a background where learning for me has been both experiential and theoretical, I wondered about the learning styles of prospective participants. Talking about potentially triggering subject material in an online group was likely to have its own challenges. Alongside, we managed to gather many nuggets of warmth and wisdom from our mentor Faige who helped us trust the process.
Applicants ranged from the very experienced to relatively early career therapists; they represented educational qualifications, prior training and geographical regions, paralleling the diversity of our nation. As the cohort came together once every fortnight, the gestalt emerged: some spoke exuberantly and others used a few but weighty words; they shared what touched them or surprised them or what pained them; for some, the reading was new, and for others, it brought back the knowing in a deeper way. There was time to discuss the trauma of caste discrimination and colonization in the context of client work in a changing society.
I am grateful for the many opportunities for connectedness—collaborative team work, guidance from mentors from ISSTD, the trust of colleagues who joined us to co-create a learning environment.
Karishma Shah Savla
Counselling Psychologist & Psychotherapist, Mumbai
It has been 3 months since the end of our first cohort for the Level I course; it remains a surreal feeling. As budding clinicians many years ago, our first encounters with trauma and dissociation were unstructured. We often relied on whatever training materials we could find. We attended sporadic workshops and shared articles, piecing together our understanding as best we could. It has been an immense privilege to be a part of a group that is bringing to India an organized, well-structured, research-based learning to Indian clinicians. Later in my career, I was honored to have the opportunity to learn about complex trauma from mentors in India and other countries. I credit those learning opportunities for being able to work effectively over two decades. The Professional Training Program at ISSTD made it possible to help bridge a gap in our learning journeys, through a culturally adaptive lens.
I felt a frisson of excitement every session as we studied together, the trepidation of first-time faculty easing as sessions progressed. It has been incredible to witness the many facets of gaining knowledge—the ‘aha’ moments, the applications translated from theory to clinical work, to the myriad perspectives of years of clinical wisdom we embodied during the length of the course. We, as faculty, take back with us and into the next cohort the humility of always learning and being curious, a sense of community with fellow clinicians and an experience of making a difference in small ways—a difference, nonetheless. As Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Participant Perspective
Shama Shah
Psychotherapist and supervisor in a private practice, Bangalore
To be a participant in the first-of-its-kind offering from the ISSTD enhanced the significance of the learning journey for me (and possibly for the entire cohort of attendees). When it comes to understanding and working with trauma, the relevance and importance of cultural realities is lost on no one in our fraternity. This course was designed to enable faculty from India to be engaging with participants from India, thus bridging the gap of conversations that hold cultural realities at the core of its conversation.
The format required of us to be familiar with the recommended reading materials in a graded manner. This was further organized through a list of specific chapters and articles shared with us ahead of time, allowing for adequate time to read through (and hopefully marinate with some of it in the process) the material and come in prepared. I believe this is where the therapists are most likely to be tested on their grit levels since all of us in the cohort were working professionals with varying levels of commitments. When the reading material involves journeying through the history and foundations of trauma work along with case vignettes—both hypothetical and actual client work—I guess it is easy to appreciate the extent of emotional and cognitive effort one takes to continue to show up prepared for discussions. In a way, with adult learning spaces sometimes your learning becomes as good as your classmates’ ability and willingness to show up because so much depends on engagements and perspectives and sharing. I am grateful to have learnt with (and from) deeply human practitioners in this journey.
Another element to adult learning that enhances the experience is the facilitators—their knowledge base, their exposure, their humane-ness, and invariably their ability to anchor conversations that tend to become heavy and deeply stimulating. Our course facilitators brought in rich insights and points of reflections through their own practice trajectories while also being professionals who are curious and reflective in their own right—soaking in so much from the group interactions too. The facilitators actively took feedback between sessions regarding levels of interactions and learning and participation comfort. We witnessed them incorporating real time feedback into the classroom space as well—doing a delicate dance between being teachers, anchors, sounding boards, and safe spaces for the group.
The flow of the course, retrospectively, was quite appropriate in an intuitive sense where we began with the heavier and challenging aspects of being reminded of how trauma work—the way we understand it today—has been a laborious journey to bring it to the forefront of the conversation in mental health work. Sessions then built on the understanding of assessments and phases of treatment with eventually coming to a closure through a more reflective and contextual learning of culture, spectrum of identities, as well as acknowledging the often-invisible nature of impact therapists carry from trauma-informed-focused care and work.
What I sit with a few weeks after the course’s closure is how the readings have stayed with me. A lot of the discussions, nuances of trauma work, as well as points of reflections that came up during the classroom hours continue to pop up for me during client work. I believe, as participants, we were all impacted by different theories, different pieces of information, and different reflections that would have stayed with us. But (if I may safely assume on behalf of the group here) the one part of experience common to us all was the sense of stimulation and safety we carried along with the sense of being held, collectively, as practitioners by the experienced facilitators.