Tackling Trauma for Youth Workers
Serving others is rewarding – and exhausting. What you see, hear, and experience leaves you with memories you’ll never forget. These memories do not have to be painful. When we work with youth, we hear stories that crush our heart and make us question humanity. That doesn’t mean we must be forever burdened. There are ways to work through these traumas. We can do the hard work of caring for others and enjoy life.
In our Tackling Trauma for Youth Workers program, we expose the truths about trauma that we’ve never been taught. We’ll explain the nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive memories. We’ll learn to acknowledge our avoidance of places or situations as a part of our trauma, and how the traumas we see today are connected to our experiences growing up.
The program framework includes preparatory work, a half-day workshop, reinforcement learning, and optional interactive sessions where people can share – or not – based on their willingness, desire, and need.
Preparations include learning what trauma is and why it has such a powerful effect on us. This effect is something that we rarely recognize.
In the workshop, participants receive the tools they need to deeply understand trauma and how all humans respond to it. Rather than a trap that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, we show how events can be processed and how they can even lead to growth. The workshop ends with skills practice, working on the real traumas that people have experienced.
Over the next year, we’ll deliver 5-15 minute packages of training that reinforce and build on the skills developed in the workshop. These sessions help to bring the experience of the workshop to the reality of day-to-day experiences in the organization.
We also provide dedicated and shared time to discuss traumas and support processing them for the first year. The safe spaces that are a part of the program encourage a habit of sharing and co-processing traumas in a way that heals everyone.