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The Secondary Trauma Resiliency Training Program
Training Overview
The Secondary Trauma Resiliency Training, a comprehensive three-day program, is tailored specifically for care providers immersed in high-trauma professions. Developed by VitalHearts© | The Resiliency Training Initiative, these trainings are conducted regularly throughout the year, available both online nationwide and in-person, with a primary focus in the Denver metro area. With each session catering to a select group of 18-24 participants, our program offers support and strategies essential for professional care-providers navigating secondary trauma and potential compassion fatigue.
What to Expect
The Secondary Trauma Resiliency Training is a program of great power, treating vicarious trauma at its root. This secondary trauma treatment is experienced by those who work in fields of high emotional trauma as having great relevance and huge professional and personal impact.
The Secondary Trauma Resiliency Training can help normalize and attenuate vicarious trauma and reduce the shame often engendered by these stress reactions, while creating valuable mental health tools, increasing care-providers’ ability to work from a place of compassion, enabling them to receive the full measure of self-esteem available from their work, and gaining resiliency regardless of the nature of their organization.
Our post-training evaluations have regularly shown that over 95% of participants report improvement in their secondary traumatic stress symptoms or reactions. People complete the training revitalized, more capable of continuing their work, possessing new skills that enable them to find effective ways of processing or containing the traumas they encounter in their work. Not infrequently, we have been told that this training has saved careers.
Our Trainers
The Secondary Trauma Resiliency Training is led by Henry Tobey, a licensed clinical psychologist who has specialized in working with people affected by violent trauma (including staff and students from the Columbine High School shootings and assisting victims of the World Trade Center bombings). Every training includes a second trainer who is a subject matter specialist in the professions of the participants. ā
We believe this training provides an answer to a critical question: how do we protect care-providers who are being torn down by so much of what they encounter in their work and instead create the resiliency which allows these workers to continue their vital human services?
Training Agenda & Outline
Day 1
Unit 1: Introduction of Vicarious Traumatization
Objective: To honor and bring awareness to the commonality of participants’ care-providing experiences; to foster an open and safe environment for participants to share their Secondary Traumatic Stresses.
Unit 2: A Normalized Appreciation of Secondary Traumatic Stress
Objective: To help participants normalize their personal stress reactions; to reduce the shame some care-providers feel about suffering these consequences of their work; to bring awareness to how trauma is also a body-centered experience.
Unit 3: Attachment to the Outcome of the Work
Objective: To help care-providers shift their work style away from an over-personalized involvement; to find less self-critical ways in which to perform this work.
Day 2
Unit 4: Acknowledgement of Multiple Motivations: Why do you do what you do?
Objective: To recognize how unexamined multiple motivations and sought personal growth benefits make healthcare providers vulnerable to vicarious trauma reactions.
Unit 5: Time Line Mapping of Careers
Objective: To help care-providers understand their career history in order to invigorate their present work capacity; to appreciate what triggers their vicarious trauma reactions.
Unit 6: Empathy vs. Compassion
Objective: To appreciate the costly misuse of empathy and teach care-providers to learn instead to work from a place of compassion.
Day 3
Unit 7: Self-Care Plan
Objective: To create a powerful self support tool for managing the stresses of caring for the traumatized.
Unit 8: Personal Resiliency Within Healthcare Organizations
Objective: To appreciate how your organization supports its professionals and, regardless of its limitations, to understand the need for personal resiliency.
Unit 9: Tolerating My Great Worth
Objective: To overcome barriers that keep providers from receiving the full measure of self esteem available from their work.
Unit 10: Trauma Service as a Life Path
Objective: To appreciate the special human implications of caring for the traumatized
