Vicarious Trauma Training provides participants with the knowledge, skills and tools to look after their own personal mental health and wellbeing, when working with people who have experienced trauma or who are in distress, or with information and materials of a highly sensitive or emotional nature.
What does Vicarious Trauma Training do?
- Protect staff wellbeing and ensure psychosocial safety
- Reduce the risk of compassion fatigue, burnout and prolonged stress
- Reduce avoidable absenteeism and turnover
- Strengthen professional boundaries and team capability
- Improve the quality and consistency of client care
- Support a healthier, more sustainable workplace culture
Because when your people are regularly exposed to trauma and distress, looking after their wellbeing isn’t an optional extra — it’s about ensuring a healthy and sustainable workforce.
Is this what you want for your team?
“It gave me space to reflect on how maintaining boundaries with clients helps me to stay grounded, present, and effective in my work. I’m walking away with a clearer understanding of how to protect my energy while still showing up fully for others.”
– Deirdre Gibson, Mangrove Community Housing
What's Covered in Vicarious Trauma Training?
Vicarious Trauma Training gives people the practical skills and tools to protect their own wellbeing, so they can continue to provide effective and compassionate support to others.
This course is designed to fit the way your organization works. It can be delivered as a comprehensive 2 day program, an intensive 1 day course, or as a series of half-day virtual classroom sessions – making it easier to accommodate different roles, schedules and levels of trauma exposure.
- Understand how the brain and body respond to trauma and potentially traumatic material and information.
- Recognize the complex impacts of trauma exposure and vicarious trauma on emotions, thinking, behavior and overall wellbeing.
- Distinguish between Vicarious Trauma, Secondary Traumatic Stress, Compassion Fatigue and Burnout, and recognize the early warning signs of each.
- Use validated self-reflection tools to identify personal signs of vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction.
- Develop the self-awareness to recognize personal responses, `hotspots´ triggers and coping patterns, that may be helpful or unhelpful.
- Understand how exposure, desensitization and avoidance can affect responses to trauma and influence wellbeing over time.
- Recognize the role of empathy in supporting others, and learn how to use empathy effectively without compromising personal wellbeing.
- Identify and manage unhelpful interpersonal dynamics that can arise when supporting people in highly emotional or distressing situations.
- Maintain healthy professional boundaries while remaining compassionate, supportive and effective in the helper role.
- Apply positive psychology and emotional fitness strategies to strengthen coping, wellbeing and resilience.
- Apply the six principles of Trauma-Informed Self-Care to protect and maintain personal wellbeing.
- Use cognitive strategies to build Compassion Satisfaction and reduce the risk of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.
- Understand how personal and professional beliefs can influence wellbeing, and identify ways to adapt unhelpful thinking patterns to support sustainable practice.
- Apply a healthy debriefing model following challenging interactions, while avoiding patterns of unhelpful or counterproductive debriefing.
- Develop a Personal Resilience Action Plan, including strategies, resources and support pathways to embed learning into everyday practice and build long-term emotional fitness.
What are our Results
your organization. Some of the results we have helped our clients achieve are:
Reductions in psychological injury claims of more than 50% (see right).
Reductions in rates of mental ill health of : up to 80% (depression), 100% (anxiety), 36% (stress).
Testimonials
After you attend this Vicarious Trauma Training, you’ll get FREE LIFETIME ACCESS to our Members Only Academy, packed full of videos, PDFs and tools to continue to grow your mental health knowledge.
