The Bernstein Institute for Trauma Recovery offers a comprehensive and supportive resiliency training program to address the self-care needs of professional staff due to the impact of patient or client trauma. Exposure to client suffering, hardships, and shared traumatic events can leave a residue of emotions which, when left unresolved, may lead to compassion fatigue. Our program provides proactive skills for self-care and mutual peer support through team building that will enhance personal resiliency and increase professional effectiveness
We can customize our resiliency training for any work setting in which professional or volunteer providers encounter high levels of stress due to patient or client trauma alone, or in combination with a highly demanding work environment. Our program is educational and interactive in nature and addresses possible negative outcomes such as compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization, secondary traumatic stress reactions, empathic strains, and burnout. Through a combination of teaching and facilitated practice of resiliency skills and techniques, program participants will gain powerful tools to combat tension, stress, fatigue or exhaustion, and emotional imbalance that would diminish their ability to function effectively.
Our flexible approach can include both one- or two-day workshops followed by ongoing teaching and support. An initial seminar to teach resiliency and team-building skills can be followed up with monthly conferences to help integrate and enhance the seminar content, delivered either in-person or by distance pathways. A concluding workshop to help put plans in place to sustain resiliency efforts – either for all program participants or targeted toward training team leaders – is a valuable option we offer.
Our resiliency seminar agendas are customized and client-driven, consisting of a combination of didactic presentations, followed by interactive small group exercises. Plenty of time for participant questions and feedback follow each teaching and exercise segment to facilitate new skill integration. Program content for seminars and follow-up conference series uses our unique “3-D” approach: Design, Decompress, and Debrief.
Design – Decompress – Debrief
- Design: Intentional, continual, and purposeful use of life skills which will anticipate and reduce emotional and physical stress related to caring for survivors of trauma.
- Decompress: Awareness of and prompt response to the inevitable build-up of compassion stress with practical, effective self-help tools.
- Debrief: Utilization of customized support and debriefing methods within a safe and trustworthy team setting, following extraordinarily stressful events or situations in the lives of clients and their families.
Through this three-fold format, program participants proactively build self-care skills into their daily lives, develop go-to techniques to deal with the build-up of emotional stress, and establish supportive teams to strengthen all team members’ efforts. Program content combines the latest methods of self-care and resiliency with over fifty years of experience in the field of trauma recovery.
Dr. Peter Bernstein and the Bernstein Institute for Trauma Recovery offer you an extremely effective answer to professional staff stress due to trauma exposure and demanding work settings. Please contact us at 707.781.3335 for more information.
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