Becoming Trauma Informed: How to Apply the Principles of Trauma-Informed Care to Your Life, Work, and Community

Lesson 1: Introduction

Course Description: While "trauma" has made its way into mainstream discourse, most people don't really understand trauma, how it manifests in the body, and how it impacts human behavior and our communities. This course will teach you that, and so much more. It consists of 10 video modules PLUS a bonus module for educators and a bonus module for evaluators.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Explain how individual, collective, racial, climate, and intergenerational trauma effect you, other people and communities

  • Recognize the impacts of trauma and display greater sensitivity and deeper understanding

  • Apply the principles of trauma-informed care to your life, work and community

Throughout the course, you'll be asked to reflect on various prompts and write in your personal journal. You will have access to outside readings and videos to deepen your learning.

Watch the Lesson Videos

Lesson 2

This lesson focuses on understanding what trauma is. Watch the video lesson here, then read the PDF of Ch 2 of the Little Book of Trauma Healing.

Lesson 3

Lesson 3 introduces us to ACES - Adverse Childhood Experiences. This has been a focus of intense studies since the 1990s and is the foundation to understanding childhood trauma as the nation's largest public health crisis. There is a lot to learn in this unit, and it's so important that I've provided you with a link to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website on ACEs so you can take advantage of all the resources there. Also, on your Supplemental Resources handout you'll find a link to Dr. Nadine Burke Harris' TEDTalk video, which you won't want to miss. Dr. Burke Harris is one of the nation’s leading pediatricians and educators on ACEs and no course on trauma would be complete without her. Watch the video here, then take time to explore the supplemental resources, including a transcript of an interview with Oprah you can find here.

Lesson 4

In this lesson, you'll learn more about the brain's role in trauma responses - and you'll be able to talk to your friends about your "amygdala." No seriously - understanding how stress hormones and chemicals in the brain and body work to embed trauma in our memory and DNA explains why people can't simply "get over" something traumatic without intense personal healing work. Be sure to check out the Supplemental Resources handout you downloaded in the Introduction module. Jacob Ham's metaphor of the Hulk is brilliant! 

Lesson 5

In addition to all the health problems trauma can cause, it is also linked to shame. And shame comes out in different ways - and we often refer to being trapped in the Compass of Shame. You'll learn about this connection in this lesson. And even if you've seen Brene' Brown's TEDTalk on shame, please watch it again - the link is on your Supplemental Resources handout. I've added other videos from Brene' Brown because frankly, she's the world’s best shame researcher and she's able to talk about it in ways we can connect with.

This lesson can bring up some tough emotions, so be sure you are self-regulating and using your journal to process feelings and thoughts.

Lesson 6

So far, we've been learning about trauma to individuals, especially children. But there are things that cause trauma to groups of people on a mass scale - and that's what we'll learn about in this lesson. However, we really can't separate individual and collective trauma, because collective trauma compounds individual trauma. In other words, if you've experienced adverse childhood traumatic events, and you then experience trauma of racism, trauma of climate change, trauma of pandemics (COVID-19), trauma from natural disasters - you're laying the collective trauma experience by groups of people on top of your individual trauma. And this can exacerbate trauma responses.

Even if your ACE score is zero, you're living into collective trauma right now - at the very least climate change and the global pandemic have traumatized everyone on the planet, whether they know it or not.

I'm going to ask you to take a while in this unit and read as much as you can from the Lesson 6 Google folder. It is important that you know how racism causes trauma, and how intergenerational trauma plays out in indigenous and other populations. Don't skip these readings.

Lesson 7

Now that we understand how individual and collective trauma impacts our lives and communities, we can start to think about healing. This involves learning the Principles of Trauma Informed Care and applying them as best as we can.

This is a short lesson - we will dive deeper into the Principles in future lessons - but here, I invite you to start thinking about your own profession, what principles guide your work, and how trauma informed care principles might be integrated. You'll use your journal to respond to some prompts after watching the short video here.

Lesson 8

Super short lesson here - but important - because we define some key terms that you need to know. Watch the video before moving on to the next lesson.

Lesson 9

Here's where you put all of your hard-earned knowledge to work! In additional to watching the video, I'm challenging you to do some document analysis using two resources in your Lesson 9 Google folder. This may not be very easy but give it a try. What this exercise will do is help you see how different people have incorporated the Principles of Trauma Informed Care in their work. By reading the documents and noting where the principles show up, you'll learn skills that you can transfer to your own workplace or organization.

Lesson 10

Congratulations! You've reached the last official lesson in the course! And it's full of take-aways - trauma informed practices you can use anywhere! But remember if you are an educator or an evaluator, I have special modules just for you that take these practices to a deeper level. Of course, you are welcome to enjoy these modules even if you're not an educator or evaluator! Watch the video here, then visit your Supplemental Resources handout as we wrap up the course with more videos from Dr. Brene' Brown and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. 

Now, it's time for you to go into the world and apply the Principles of Trauma Informed Care to your life, work, and community. Be the change you want to see in the world - and we need to see that world through a trauma informed lens. Be well.

Educator Bonus Module:

Welcome educators! This special module provides you with even more trauma informed practices that you can use in any educational setting. In your Google folder, you'll find more downloadable articles and resources that focus on trauma informed education.

Evaluator Bonus Module:

Welcome evaluators! This module is just for you and gives you specific ideas that you can apply to your evaluation work. In the Google folder for this module, you'll find trauma informed evaluations and other articles that you are welcome to download and read.

  • I am well-familiar with trauma (my ACES is 5), but this webinar is helpful for me to organize what I know and think even more deeply about how it fits with my work. I’m doing more and more around racism and equity and working with coalitions. My son, a police officer, is off work right now battling PTSD. He was in a special facility in California for a month just before things shut down. I went out to see him there and met his therapist. He is processing 18 separate traumatic events – the most she has seen among any officer. He was a street cop and then detective for domestic violence, detective for child abuse, and school resource officer. He will be unable to return to police work, and is first having to go through some specialized therapy to manage the PTSD, then will have to rethink his entire career. Fortunately, he is with a department that supports officers’ mental health needs. So lately, trauma has once again played a HUGE role in my life. This webinar is really firing up my synapses to think about how we fail to recognize its role in so much of our programming and policy. So, as an evaluator, I need to think about how I can influence some change.

    Susan Wolfe

  • Thank you for your thoughtful and obviously very well-crafted webinar. It was a pleasure to participate in something so well done. I am very familiar with trauma but only through personal experience and an individual recovery lens--applying it in a systems and framework sort of way to my work makes so much sense and feels incredibly timely. I wanted to reach out to you because you called out both of my comments and I suspect we might be happy collaborators: I was the one who wrote about the Frameworks and ToCs we build and activate needing to shift and curious about how the practices of evaluation might contribute to healing and living into that inquiry. Could we maybe set up a phone conversation? I'm interested in co-developing a webinar on either/both of these topics to begin offering. I also have a few ideas for ways to apply the trauma-informed concepts specifically for an international development (my current space of practice as a consultant in design/evaluation) audience and would welcome your thoughts and collaboration if you are interested.

    Anna Martin

  • One of my colleagues at Abt Associates attended your recent AEA training on trauma-informed care training for evaluators and reported that it was one of the best trainings she’s taken in her career. I co-lead an internal group at Abt that focuses on our staff’s professional development in qualitative and mixed methods and we’re very interested in bringing your excellent content to more of our colleagues here at Abt. I’m hoping you can tell me about your offerings for such an event. If you have a summary of formats/lengths and target audiences, I’d be happy to look at it, or to hop on the phone to talk about presentation or training options and tell you more about Abt’s staff and work. 

    Anna Jefferson