Trauma Resources

Change is part of our lives. We know this. However, the pandemic has reminded us how difficult change can be by forcing us into living in ways we could not have imagined, and this is not only related to the struggles of COVID-19. The struggle with change may be related to determining and accepting that daily exercise is good for us. Or it may be becoming comfortable sharing that we are enjoying quiet moments or that we could use more quiet time because of the stress of adapting.

Professor Carol Hostetter invites us to consider change in a different way. Acknowledging that we do not need to beat ourselves up because we are being or feeling different at different times in our lives, especially now when we are still trying to figure out how to move forward without letting go of everything. Prof. Hostetter writes, "We all have aspects of ourselves that we do not love and wish to change. We 'work on' ourselves and beat ourselves up in ways we would never accept from others. In seeking change this way, we defeat the chance of change. Change happens all of the time—everything changes within us and around us. By trying to force change, we impede it. When we accept ourselves with our flaws - not in spite of, but because of, we allow the change process to begin. By accepting ourselves where we are and loving who we are, we create the foundation for change. Only when we value ourselves as ourselves can change happen."

To learn more about the Paradoxical Theory of Change:

• The Paradox of Change Explained
  Length: 7 min
• The Paradox of Change and Stability
  "Change requires embracing the paradox that the changes must coexist with a certain level of stability. While letting go of the things that need to be changed, the core values must be kept intact. This paradox reflects the very human need for growth with the equally important need for security."
• The Paradox of Change Work
  "What could it feel like to stop working so hard to change me and instead to embrace who I am now?"

• ULifeline Mental Health Screening
  Overview: A screening instrument that connects you to your campus resources.
• Personal Wellness Inventory
  Overview: Assess how you are doing in all eight dimensions of wellness
• WellTrack
  WellTrack is designed to help you understand your mental health and to provide you with the help that you need right now. WellTrack is a suite of online tools and courses that uses aspects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help you identify, understand and address issues that you are having.
• The Shrink Space
  The Shrink Space is reshaping the way students access mental health services. We have partnered with university counseling centers to seamlessly connect students to private therapists for continued care. Sign up for free to complete your professional profile.
• Trauma-Informed Care on a College Campus
  Overview: Provides a general definition of trauma, how it manifests, and its impact on self, relationships, and ability to cope.
• The Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security is Threatened
  Overview: The Little Book of Trauma Healing contains the core concepts and models of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program. Includes a downloadable study guide.
• How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across A Lifetime
  Length: 16 min
  Overview: Provides a brief introduction to understanding childhood trauma and its long-term impact. Will be of interest to graduate students with children.

• Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Van Der Kolk)(complete book)
• This Is What Racial Trauma Does To the Body And Brain
• Why Black Lives Matter
• Intimate Partner Abuse, Sexual Assault and Trauma
• Intimate Partner Violence 
• 6 Steps to Support a Survivor 

• Sleep
  Length: 45 minutes 
  Overview: Includes sleep hygiene handout and sleep diary PDF. Learn how sleep impacts wellness, understand the impact of sleep on mental and physical health, identify strategies for improving sleep
• Virtual Care and Support and Resources
  Length: 30-60 minutes
  Overview: Presentations with accompanying worksheets on Dealing with Stress, Self-Compassion, Managing Emotions, Establishing Boundaries, and Managing Thoughts.
• Coping with Depression – 3 webinars – link gives access to all 3 webinars 
  • Coping with Depression: Basic Self Care
    Length: 31 minutes
    Overview: Reviews symptoms of depression, general overview of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT―thoughts/feelings/behaviors), triggers for depression, and reviews basic self-care (sleep, exercise, and nutrition).
  • Coping with Depression: How You Think Effects How You Feel
    Length: 36 minutes
    Overview: Understanding depression symptoms and introduction to CBT (identifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors, automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions).
  • Coping with Depression: Identifying Your Values as a Coping Strategy
    Length: 30 minutes
    Overview: Understanding depression symptoms, a brief introduction to CBT, and the Cross-Sectional Formulation. What are values vs. goals? Introduces a Values Bullseye.
• Beating Anxiety – 2 webinars
  • Beating Anxiety: Reducing Worry
    Length: 40 min
    Overview: Stress vs. anxiety. Physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms of anxiety. Fight/flight/freeze response.
  • Beating Anxiety: Think and Feel
    Length: 32 min
    Overview: How you think affects how you feel. Explore how thoughts impact feelings and behavior. Understand common anxiety symptoms, emotional control strategies, and automatic thoughts and how they impact anxiety. Identify common cognitive distortions.
• Coping with COVID-19 – 2 webinars – link gives access to both webinars
  • Coping with COVID-19: Managing Anxiety & Acute Changes
    Length: 36 min
    Overview: Normalization/validation for feeling anxious during a pandemic. Explains fight/flight/freeze response underlying anxiety symptoms. Presents five tips for managing anxiety and asks listeners to identify ways to incorporate each one into their own lives.
  • Coping with COVID19: Social Isolation
    Length: 34 min
    Overview: Normalization/validation of feeling anxiety during a pandemic. Presents five tips for managing anxiety and asks listeners to identify ways to incorporate each one into their own lives.
• Notice the Rage Notice the Silence
  Length: 103 min
  The best laws and diversity training have not gotten us anywhere near where we want to go. Therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is working with old wisdom and very new science about our bodies and nervous systems, and all we condense into the word "race." Krista sat down with him in Minneapolis, where they both live and work, before the pandemic lockdown began. In this heartbreaking moment, after the killing of George Floyd and the history it carries, Resmaa Menakem's practices offer us the beginning to change at a cellular level.
• Post-Traumatic Thriving: The Art, Science, & Stories of Resilience by Randall Bell.
  This book addresses trauma...we will discuss both trauma and a path to healing.
• Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategies
• The Tree of Contemplative Practices
  Overview: Offers a variety of contemplative practices (e.g., yoga, meditation, journaling) to use when reflecting on one's experiences and/or to use to alleviate stress

• APA: Grief
  "Coping with the loss of a close friend or family member may be one of the hardest challenges that many of us face. When we lose a spouse, sibling, or parent, our grief can be particularly intense. Loss is understood as a natural part of life, but we can still be overcome by shock and confusion, leading to prolonged periods of sadness or depression. The sadness typically diminishes in intensity as time passes, but grieving is an important process in order to overcome these feelings and continue to embrace the time you had with your loved one."
• Bereavement and Grief
  Mental Health America's programs and initiatives fulfill its mission of promoting mental health and preventing mental illness through advocacy, education, research, and services. MHA's national office and its 200+ affiliates and associates around the country work every day to protect the rights and dignity of individuals with lived experience and ensure that peers and their voices are integrated into all areas of the organization.
• CDC: Grief and Loss
  "Many people are experiencing grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grief is a normal response to loss during or after a disaster or other traumatic event. Grief can happen in response to loss of life, as well as to drastic changes to daily routines and ways of life that usually bring us comfort and a feeling of stability."
• Reflection on Loss and Hope (created by Michael J. Sheridan, PhD)
  "Tara Brach, founder and guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC (IMCW), says, "Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely intertwined with how we relate to change and loss." This last year of the pandemic has given us so many opportunities to expand this capacity as there has been so much change… and so much loss."
• Five Stages of Grief (Kübler-Ross Model)
  "Throughout life, we experience many instances of grief. Grief can be caused by situations, relationships, or even substance abuse. Children may grieve a divorce, a wife may grieve the death of her husband, a teenager might grieve the ending of a relationship, or you might have received terminal medical news and are grieving your pending death. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five common stages of grief, popularly referred to as DABDA."
• The Journey Through Grief: The Six Needs of Mourning
  "I have also learned that the journey requires mourning. There is an important difference, you see. Grief is what you think and feel on the inside after someone you love dies. Mourning is the outward expression of those thoughts and feelings. To mourn is to be an active participant in our grief journeys. We all grieve when someone we love dies, but if we are to heal, we must also mourn."

• ACES Connection
  ACEs Connection, an ever-growing social network, connects those who are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science. The network's 40,000+ members share their best practices while inspiring each other to grow the ACEs movement.
• Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice.
  "The Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) was created in December 2015 by 25 representatives from diverse sectors, including education, mental health, justice, and government. We share a common commitment to inform and advocate for public policies and programs at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels that incorporate scientific findings regarding the relationship between trauma and related social and health challenges across the lifespan. We work in collaboration with government, organizations and citizens to develop trauma-informed, prevention-focused, evidence-informed policies and practices that promote a comprehensive, integrated multi-sector approach for building trauma-informed communities. CTIPP operates completely on volunteer labor."
• STAR: Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience Training (Eastern Mennonite University)
  "Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience's (STAR) framework integrates material from:
  
  • trauma and resilience studies
  • restorative justice
  • conflict transformation
  • human security
  These five foundational fields draw upon deep academic and practical knowledge housed within the faculty and staff of EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding; each training draws on both this expertise and the wisdom contained in the experience of each group of STAR participants."
• The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education
  The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE) is a multidisciplinary academic association with an international membership of educators, administrators, staff, students, researchers, and other professionals committed to the transformation of higher education through the recovery and development of the contemplative dimensions of teaching, learning and knowing.
• The Armah Institute for Emotional Justice
  "We envision a global community in which emotions and emotionality are understood in the context of race, gender, culture, and history, thereby fostering greater harmony in human relationships and heightened productivity that improves the quality of life for all.
  
  We treat the emotional as structural, as holding a pivotal role in developing, upholding or dismantling systems of inequity due to trauma from global histories of white supremacy.
  
  We connect the emotional and the fiscal to build a powerful, profitable future that does not privilege some but profits all. Emotionality education expands our notion of culture.
  
  We do that by engaging, implementing, amplifying the framework 'EMOTIONAL JUSTICE'."
• Mental Health America Annual Conference

EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
www.emdria.org

Somatic Experiencing
https://traumahealing.org

CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

• Cognitive Processing Therapy
• TF-CBT (trauma-informed)
• Prolonged Exposure Therapy

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/index.asp

Trauma-informed skills for coping, grounding, and processing

The Butterfly Hug Technique

• EMDR-based
• Created by Lucina Artigas for use with children in the aftermath of Hurricane Paulina (1998).
• Taught by Artigas and her colleagues to humanitarian aid workers in the field as a self-administered daily intervention for adaptive information processing (NOT a substitute for processing of past traumatic memories – that should be referred to a trained EMDR clinician).
• YouTube demos by Ignacio Jarero:
  1. In English: https://youtu.be/BGl5QOFHtbE
  2. In Spanish: https://youtu.be/nthOmHBxs4s

Tips for a Trauma-Informed Workplace (Credit: Sarah Finke, LCSW, sefinke@iu.edu)

1. Don’t idolize/reward overwork
   “They’re sooo dedicated to the cause…”
2. Model and support a culture of self-care e.g., Normalize talking about the impact of the work on the self/team, accessing EAPs, use of SUDS (Subjective Units of Distress – from EMDR) as a measure
3. Pro-Active Resourcing
   • The first-aid kit that doesn’t fit in a box (EAP, EMDRIA, word-of-mouth, maintain a vetted list of local recommended trauma-informed clinicians)
   • Try out the resources before sending your staff in that direction (You wouldn’t recommend a restaurant you never tried, so….)
4. Deal with your own “stuff”
   Be the mental stability you wish to see in the world
5. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable
   “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf”
6. Don’t go for the Solve
   • You’re instinct to try and “fix it” might be off the mark
   • Instead, create the space for venting and then actively listen
7. Know your team and know your boundaries
   • What motivates them, what type of feedback/support works best, etc.
   • You can be supportive on personal issues, but you can also refer out
8. Know when you’re out of your depth
   You are not a therapist (even if you are, you’re not their therapist) … and that’s OK

Online Video Resources

MedCircle
Videos on mental health topics by experts. https://medcircle.com/

TED
www.ted.com 
Videos on a variety of wellness topics including emotional first aid, anxiety, PTSD, depression, work/life balance, and domestic violence

Recommendations:

• The mental health benefits of storytelling for healthcare workers
  
• Why we all need to practice emotional first aid with Guy Winch, Ph.D.
  
• Why (even affluent, successful) domestic violence victims don’t leave
  

Books

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
• Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body [Somatic Experiencing] by Peter A. Levine, Ph.D.
• The Gift of Fear: and other survival signals that protect us from violence by Gavin de Becker
  

Podcasts

• The Mental Illness Happy Hour with Paul Gilmartin
• Your Mental Breakdown with Doug Friedman & Meredith Levy - a good way to understand “what is therapy like?” for those considering trying therapy for the first time
• The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe - interviews with highly successful and/or famous people who live with depression and other mental health issues
• Trauma Therapist with Guy MacPherson, Ph.D. - aimed at the mental health professional but can/does have appeal to some folks in trauma recovery looking for a more detailed understanding of trauma, trauma responses, trauma recovery, trauma interventions, etc.
• The OCD Stories - real stories that educate and inspire those with OCD