Workshops: Helping the Helpers
1. Mitigating the impact of secondary trauma and burnout in the workforce.
2. Implementing Somatic strategies with your service users.
Course Details
Fees: from £80 per person
Dependent on the workshop booked
(Minimum 10 participants)
Deposit to secure the workshop date: £300
(This is non refundable)
Venue:
Online or in person
(travel expenses may apply)
Length:
Workshop One: 4 Hours
Workshop Two: 7 Hours
The Centre of Somatic Resilience Training recognises the significant challenges faced by those at the forefront of addressing issues such as domestic violence, childhood trauma, sexual exploitation, assault, and poverty-related stress and trauma that affect individuals and families. Frontline professionals operate in high-stress environments, regularly exposed to traumatic stories and prolonged or consistently intense experiences.
The link between exposure to traumatic material, through working with traumatised populations, and physical and mental distress is well documented, and stress-related work absences account for a loss of £28 billion a year to the UK economy. The call for effective strategies to combat the impact of chronic stress on workers has never been more important.
Somatic Experiencing®, upon which these workshops is based, has been shown to be an effective strategy for the treatment and prevention of secondary traumatic exposure. The desired outcome of the workshops is, therefore, to equip workers with an understanding of Somatic awareness and management tools, as well as resilience-building strategies to positively impact the work environment, leading to increased job satisfaction, enhanced coping mechanisms, and lasting positive influence on the mental health and effectiveness of the participants.
Workshop one includes:
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Develop a working understanding of the differences between, and associated symptoms of burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary stress disorders and vicarious trauma.
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Cultivate awareness of the nervous system's structure and functions and understanding of survival physiology and its impact on stress responses.
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Learn how to connect the felt senses to our cognitive understanding of emotion.
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Acquire the ability to identify signs of stress and secondary trauma, enabling participants to proactively manage their well-being and recognise potential challenges in others.
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Identifying and practicing resources that can be deployed in the service of sustained personal and professional well-being. Linking these to the felt sense of safety.
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Equip participants with practical tools and strategies for self-care, empowering individuals to take an active role in their well-being.
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How helping oneself can lead to the wellbeing of those you work with.
Workshop two includes:
Having developed a greater sense of nervous system self awareness and self care in workshop one, participants will learn strategies that can be deployed with the people they work with.
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Recognising nervous system dysregulation in others.
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How nervous systems speak to each other.
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Creating an atmosphere of safety before work begins.
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Practical strategies for regulating others by orienting, grounding, engaging socially, and felt sense awareness.
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Demonstration of how to work with a dysregulated nervous system.
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Guided experiential practice exercises to help you put these strategies into practice in your work.
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The importance of educating your 'clients/service users' and normalising their responses.
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Integrating somatic awareness and strategies into your current work.
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How to use a nervous system model and language that is accessible to all.
Tutor
Greg James is a psychotherapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). He holds a Master’s degree in counselling and psychotherapy practice and an SEP qualification endorsed by the European Association of SE and Somatic Experiencing International. He works in private practice specialising in the treatment of primary and secondary trauma. Alongside his private therapeutic and teaching work, he is a member of Somatic Experiencing International’s global outreach team; The SE Committee for Humanitarian Response (SECHR), for which he heads the sub-committee for the continent of Africa. The SECHR’s mission is to teach somatic interventions and to help resource traumatised populations in the face of natural or man-made disasters as well as longer-term on-going trauma.
Greg is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization, ACTS
(Access to Community Trauma Support). Based in Southern Africa ACTS
trains individuals on the frontline of social care in the prevention of secondary traumatization and supports the mental health training of individuals at the grassroots level, ensuring that somatically informed treatment of trauma exists within the communities that would otherwise not have access to it.