Training to Support Health in Trauma Workers
- Secondary Trauma and Human Service Organizations – Beyond Self Care
- Therapist Reactions in Trauma Treatment
- Secondary Trauma: Impact on Staff and Organizations
- Resiliency: The Hope of Overcoming Adversity
- Promoting Resiliency in Students and Staff
- Developing Psychological Hardiness
- Wellness Issues for the Experienced Worker
- How to Stay Positive While Working With Difficult Clients
- The Challenge – Caring for Self while Caring for Others: An Interactive, Experiential Workshop
- Worker Resiliency – What Organizations can do to support Staff who work with Traumatized Populations
These workshops are available by request.
If your organization or group is interested in any these workshops please contact: Sandra Marshall – Coordinator, Training and Development
training@ckmconsultation.com
Secondary Trauma and Human Service Organizations – Beyond Self Care
Length: 1 or 2 days
Description:
Working with clients who have experienced trauma will have a variety of effects on mental health workers. Research points to an inevitable conclusion that working with trauma survivors will irreversibly change the way human service workers view the world. They are likely to experience reactions that mirror symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress. Research shows that the effects of secondary trauma will be cumulative and permanent and be evident in both the workers personal and professional life.
Secondary Trauma is an occupational hazard for mental health workers who work with this population, and may manifest itself through: decrease in quality of service to clients; poor management of professional boundaries; increased professional errors and subsequent liability; demoralized work group; toxic work culture; counselor’s reenactments; loss of employees; more sick time, stress leaves and increased cost of sick benefits to the organization; increased management / employee conflict
This workshop will address:
- Effective training and subsequent interventions with organizations including an approach that addresses all facets of workplace stressors at all levels within the organization
- how an organization is managed and its impact on staff health and moral
- how organizational procedures and policies support good communication and professional self care
- how administration and front line communicate and work together
- what supervisory practices are in place that allow issues such as secondary trauma to be addressed
- what benefits should ideally be available to staff
- how organizations traditionally deal with conflict and pain
Who Should Attend:
This training is designed to be more thorough examination of the issues of human service organizations, secondary trauma issues and self care. Focus will be on the development of practices and procedures that are directed at minimizing the impact of social service and mental health work, both at an organizational level and at a staff level.
Therapist Reactions in Trauma Treatment
Length: 1 full day
Description:
The treatment of people who have experienced trauma is challenging and can be full of risks and pitfalls for the client and worker. Recent attacks on therapists’ credibility and disputes around memory are now common place. Research now confirms that the events that we are asked to listen to and work with will effect us personally and professionally. Considering the subject matter how can the work not elicit strong reactions?
It is our professional duty to use these reactions for the best benefit of our clients. We will look at the use of various creative strategies to help therapists stay in touch with their reactions.
Case examples will be used to demonstrate some common therapist struggles.
This workshop will address:
- Counter-transference /Transference
- Identifying your reactions and vulnerabilities
- the therapist’s reactions to deepen the work with clients
- Common mistakes that therapists make
- What to do when your reactions are interfering with the work (i.e. anger towards client, dislike of client, fear around legal matters, sexual attraction to client)
- How to use your reactions to deepen the work
- When to use supervision and consultation
- How to handle mistakes
- Developing standards of care
Who Should Attend:
Therapists, counsellors, clergy who work with trauma survivors
Secondary Trauma: Impact on Staff and Organizations
Length: 1 full day
Description:
Staff are effected and changed by working with victims of trauma. Helping those who have been abused is important work and can be both rewarding and challenging for the helper. Organizations and workers who want to remain effective need to understand the impact of the work on them. Ignoring the impact of working with traumatized people has the potential to harm workers, clients and the organizations for which they work. Addressing this issue can lead to increased effectiveness, self-growth and satisfaction.
The presenter will draw from the writings and models developed by leading researchers in the area of secondary trauma. Through the use of case examples, as well as her own experience, the workshop leader will present practical, useful strategies to minimize the negative impact of trauma work to staff and their organizations. The workshop participants will be challenged to implement new strategies in their work and workplace.
This workshop will examine:
- the effects of working with trauma on workers and their significant others
- how to recognize the signs and symptoms and contributing factors of secondary trauma
- the role of transference and countertransference
- realistic strategies for preventing and minimizing secondary trauma
- ways organizations can address secondary trauma in the work place
- strategies to designing a self resilient life style
- the rewards of doing trauma work
Who Should Attend:
Staff who work in Human Service Organizations
Resiliency: The Hope of Overcoming Adversity
Length: 2 hour presentation
Description:
Pain, grief, hurt, loss, betrayal, trauma – these are some of the challenges that are part of the tapestry of our lives. How is it that some survive their painful experiences and others are crushed? How can we use these experiences as opportunities to learn about ourselves and connect with others? In this service we will explore the qualities we can nurture in ourselves and in others to transform pain into something useful, to live life with resiliency.
Who should attend:
Anyone wishing to learn more about how people who are faced with sometimes almost insurmountable obstacles are able to overcome and thrive.
Promoting Resiliency in Students and Staff
Length: To be determined
Description:
Educators are at the forefront of assisting youth. Many youth struggle with more than the normative issues of growing up. Some youth are facing difficult family problems, addictions, and a pull to join gangs or engage in other anti-social behaviour or have been the victim of any number of kinds of abuse and violence. Some face issues of poverty, homelessness and racism.
This workshop will address:
- how educators and others who work with youth can assist them in learning the skills that will enhance their resiliency.
- as youth learn best by example, this workshop will also explore how staff can utilize the same principles to enhance their own outlook and be a role model for students.
Who Should Attend:
Educators who want to understand how they can promote resiliency skills.
Developing Psychological Hardiness
Length: To be determined
Description:
New workers to the field often find their first years of practice unsettling. While most training programs have prepared the new worker to manage difficult clinical situations, workers find the stresses of full time practice challenging and often struggle to maintain a psychological equilibrium.
The recent research on work place stress and wellness promotes the ideal of workers learning to create a psychological hardiness in order to be able to endure the rigors of mental health work.
What are the practices that all workers should incorporate in order to protect their mental health and minimize the incidences of secondary trauma?
This workshop will address:
- the issues that are pertinent to new workers in the first years of their practice.
Who Should Attend:
This workshop is designed for workers who are just starting out. It specifically addressed their difficulties and shock of being exposed to certain experiences for the first time. New workers will b e encouraged to establish a life long practice of skills to ensure psychological hardiness.
Wellness Issues for the Experienced Worker
Length: To be determined
Description:
Recent research validates that workers who are exposed to traumatic incidences through their work will experience secondary trauma. The risk to this occupational hazard increases over time. Therefore, the worker who is more experienced will need to take particular care in managing stress and processing their responses and feelings with regards to trauma clients.
The more senior workers will be further challenged by their own life stage and development. Such issues as aging parents, relationship breakups, losses, deaths and our own health issues add to the challenge of maintaining a balanced work and personal life.
This workshop will explore:
- the essential skills and practices that the more experienced worker needs to maintain their own health
- best personal practices to ensure psychological hardiness
Who Should Attend:
Senior staff who have been in the field for a number of years, particularly those who are experiencing some of the stressful impact of their work.
How to Stay Positive While Working With Difficult Clients
Length: 1 full day
Description:
We are challenged to help children and families with many serious issues and problems. Our clients’ styles of coping and their resultant behaviour will stir up powerful feelings in the staff who try to help them. Their behaviour can elicit anger in us, leave us frightened, or overwhelm us. These feelings, when not acknowledged and processed, can result in inappropriate or ineffective treatment responses.
By attending this workshop you will learn to:
- examine defenses staff can employ while working with difficult clients
- identify personal triggers and biases that can lead to negative interactions
- understand the importance of self care and management of workers feelings and reactions, and the potential influence on maintaining a positive therapeutic stance
- gain an understanding of the defenses clients use to cope
- develop skills to stay positive and effective with clients
Who should attend:
Staff who are working with difficult children and families who are searching for ways to stay positive and maintain a beneficial therapeutic relationship with clients that they find challenging.
The Challenge – Caring for Self while Caring for Others: An Interactive, Experiential Workshop
Length: 1 full day
Description:
Research on secondary trauma has confirmed what every trauma counsellor and caretaker experiences….you are affected and changed by the work you do.
Every day that you go to work, you know there is a good possibility that you will be asked to listen to experiences of abuse, suffering or trauma. You will be asked to engage with compassion, sensitivity and warmth to people's experiences of pain and despair. At times, the work may leave you feeling cynical, weary, depleted and devoid of hope.
Trauma counsellors/caretakers experience many of the same symptoms that trauma survivors face: psychic numbing, despair, cynicism, and intrusive imagery. For some counsellors, this may lead to depression, addictions, inappropriate reactions and a loss of interest in work. Secondary trauma can also impair work with clients when the counsellor responds with denial, minimization or over-involvement. These reactions can make counsellors vulnerable to professional mediocrity and possible complaints of professional misconduct.
Through interactive and experiential exercises, this workshop will examine:
- “How does one care for oneself while caring for others?”
- how to ameliorate, mitigate and transform the impact of secondary trauma personally and professionally
- explore realistic strategies for maintaining a balanced, self-resilient lifestyle
Who Should Attend:
This workshop is for those staff working in the human services sector and want a more experiential workshop about how to work with their own secondary trauma difficulties.
Worker Resiliency – What Organizations can do to support Staff who work with Traumatized Populations
Length: 1 full day
Description:
The essence of most work in human services is enhancement of quality of life. Most of our clients have experienced abuse, deprivation, loss or marginalization. A major source of stress for those in the helping professions is constant proximity to great pain. This dynamic can take its toll, both personally and professionally, and managers need to support workers, while ensuring that clients' needs are being met.
Organizations and professionals who do not acknowledge and prepare for the psychological impact are vulnerable to poor work performance, high turnover, boundary violations, ethical breaches, poor interpersonal work relationships, addiction, illness and difficulties in personal relationships.
This workshop will examine:
- how to recognize the impact of working with stressful individuals and institutions
- the risks of unrecognized secondary trauma
- ways to enhance worker resiliency within organizations and develop an integrated approach to enhancing psychological hardiness
- common psychological phenomena that play out in the workforce
- how organizations can minimize negative effects
- principles that encourage resilient organizations
- how accountability can enhance resiliency in workplaces
- a model of how to minimize the stress of organizational change
Who Should Attend:
Managers, administrators, executive directors. This training focuses on organizations and how through the development of practices, policies and procedures