Resourcing Resilience: Working With Trauma

Many people involved in socially engaged work – activism, human rights defence, and political organising – encounter situations which can be traumatising. Learning to work with these experiences is key to creating resilient cultures for social change.

Direct experience of violence and repression, as well as the accumulative influence of stresses, can be traumatising. Post-traumatic conditions can have a strong influence on our wellbeing, our work and lives. Identifying and transforming these tendencies can help us to continue to bring the best of our hearts and minds to our work and lives.

An inability to identify and transform individual and group patterning associated with these issues is a common source of burnout, conflict and dysfunction in our groups and organisations. As such, addressing trauma is a political issue. Unless we learn to work with trauma, repression and violence (both overt and subtle) consistently succeed in blocking meaningful social change.  Knowing how to work well with trauma, to transform, mitigate and grow beyond it, can be crucial for the longevity of our activism and our groups.

This training will offer the skills and experience to increase your capacity to respond usefully to trauma. How can we work with our own symptoms and patterns? How can we support others? How can we recognise and transform trauma as it shapes the wider social field? What do we need in place so that our groups and organisations can work well with trauma, support each other adequately, and build a more resilient culture?

On this course you will:

• Gain a theoretical understanding of trauma

• Learn useful trauma ‘first aid’ skills

• Gain hands on experience of a range of tried and tested approaches which can be applied in different settings including:

– Somatic Experience

– Organic Intelligence

– Mindfulness- based interventions

• Be offered an overview of the range of other methods in the field, and an understanding of their pros and cons, including: Tension Release Exercises (TRE), EDMR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and narrative based approaches

• Explore how these skills and understandings can be taken back into groups and organisations in order to create a more resilient culture.

The team have a diverse background in therapeutic work dealing with developmental trauma, as well as interventions in an activist context as well as situations of humanitarian crisis. and conflicts.