Managing Vicarious Trauma
This one-day interactive professional development training explores the nature, dynamics and risks of vicarious trauma (VT), contrasts it with burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder and compassion fatigue, and supports you to stay healthy and safe in your work with people impacted by diverse traumas.
The training distinguishes the differences between, and appropriate responses to, direct trauma exposure and secondary forms of trauma exposure.
It is appropriate for all workers who work with trauma clients and/or are exposed to traumatic material such as other people’s trauma stories, reports with trauma content, reading material, legal reports, compensation claims, visual trauma material and media content.
It focusses on your emotional, psychological and other needs, and provides practical strategies on how to manage the impacts of doing your work, and how to build resilience so that you can continue to provide quality care to others.
This training, informed by current research, will provide you with the knowledge, skills, and tools to better recognise the early signs of VT and intervene accordingly. It equips you with a range of organisational, interpersonal and personal strategies to address the risks of VT and its impacts, and foster possibilities for post-traumatic growth and vicarious resilience.
You will also be supported to develop your own wellness assessment and plan to enhance your wellbeing.
By participating in this professional development training, learners will:
- Demonstrate knowledge of trauma, its impacts, stress response, survivor coping strategies and possibilities for recovery
- Define Vicarious Trauma, its development, risk and protective factors, resilience, barriers to identifying it, and distinguish VT from other stress experiences
- Analyse the role of organisations, trauma-informed supervision and self-care in managing vicarious trauma risk
- Conduct a wellness assessment and take home tools to create a personal wellness plan
Material presented in the training will be comprehensive, and will draw on the research based on the Blue Knot Foundation's Practice Guidelines for Treatment of Complex Trauma and Trauma Informed Care and Service Delivery and other relevant research.