Collection: Working with Trauma: Principles and Best Practices

The world we live in is an incredible place, with awesome physical beauty and populated by many who daily engage in acts of kindness, generosity, and love. But for victims of trauma, the world is dangerous, cruel, and unpredictable. Those who have been subject to abuse, torture, unjust captivity, or other violence are unlikely to feel safe anywhere. People who have fled wars, survived natural disasters, or been eyewitness to terrorism have experienced gross violations of their human rights and boundaries. Their profound need is to find a way to make meaning of unthinkable events and re-establish a sense of safety, wholeness, and connection with life. The courses in this collection examine strategies and interventions for addressing trauma and traumatic stress in both adults and children.

Many of the courses highlight the unfortunate reality that sometimes trauma comes to those who would have been more vulnerable in the first place, without additional trauma. The course, Counselling Trauma-affected Clients with Diverse Abilities, shares ways of treating traumatised clients with diverse abilities from different backgrounds. Explicitly addressing those with a non-dominant cultural background, the course, Refugee and Immigrant Youth: Challenges and Interventions to Promote Recovery from Trauma, examines the myriad challenges for the refugee population. Several courses recognise the vulnerability of young children, looking at what happens, and how we can best intervene, when young children suffer trauma. A clear source of trauma for half the world’s population is that which accrues from intimate partner violence; that is reviewed in the context of the cycle of violence, and the high priority on meeting safety needs. Disasters create trauma all around: for survivors and for those assisting the survivors; thus, the courses in this collection address the trauma effects of disasters for both groups, and include the need for self-care when compassion fatigue strikes the disaster mental health helper. On the bright side, increasing therapeutic and research attention has recently been directed to the notion that survivors of trauma can grow, as well as have P.T.S.D from trauma; Trauma-informed Care: Mindfulness-Based Treatment for Post-Traumatic Growth explores this intriguing possibility.