Building Your Trauma and Resilience Informed Approach
Overview
Delve into a wide variety of resources to support your trauma and resilience informed approach to your life, work, and play environments. The content describes the foundations of trauma and resilience informed practices as well as tools to infuse into your everyday life. This is a curated collection of a variety of resources in multiple formats to meet your needs, regardless of the amount of time you have to explore. This collection is intended for all audiences.
Courses
Assess, Recover, Mitigate, Strengthen (ARMS): A Wellbeing Regimen for Professionals
Assess, Recover, Mitigate, Strengthen (ARMS): A Wellbeing Regimen for Professionals was developed by Dr. Bill Nash, a pioneer and expert in the prevention, recognition, and treatment of moral injury and leading researcher, educator, and clinician in psychological health. This course covers concepts and tools to prevent and recover from occupational moral distress, moral injury, and burnout. It is appropriate for all human service professionals, including those in health care, social services, education, crisis response, and any other role requiring compassionate service to others. The framework ...
Enhancing Professional Wellbeing
The Enhancing Professional Wellbeing course is designed to explore ways to maintain personal wellbeing, support a positive working environment, and reduce feelings of burnout. Learn about wellbeing from fellow LA County employees and explore fictional situations to gain strategies for supporting professional wellbeing.
Foundations for Building Family Resilience
FOCUS (Families Over Coming Under Stress) is used to teach strategies for building resilience in families, within the context of each family's story and goals. Use the FOCUS techniques to help the families you work with to stay strong and support one another during times of stress or transition.
Kindness Counts: Strategies for Self-Compassion
An introduction to mindful self-compassion as a research-based tool for reducing stress, building resilience, and enhancing wellbeing in the workplace.
Printable Tools
Abdominal Breathing Script
Practicing deep breathing helps reduce stress and promote a sense of calm. Use this script to practice abdominal breathing during times of stress.
CALMR Worksheet
Communication challenges arise when interacting with others. The CALMR strategy is a simple reminder of how to respond during difficult or even combative situations. The strategy focuses on calming down and staying aware of non-verbal communication to help ease tension and reactions. Use the printable tool with students to help them navigate their responses to challenging interactions.
Core Principles of Trauma and Resilience Informed Care Worksheet
There are six core principles that contribute to trauma and resilience informed care. Use this printable to identify ways in which your organization's current practices align with those principles. You can also use the printable as a tool to brainstorm new ways to support and enhance each principle.
Deep Breathing for Children
Deep breathing promotes relaxation. Use this deep breathing script to teach this helpful skill to youth. Optimal times to introduce this technique may be during transitions between activities or at the end of a long school day.
Videos
Emotion Regulation: Getting Back to Comfortability Demonstration
A helpful emotion regulation tool is the Feeling Thermometer and its handy color zones for manageable (or less manageable) emotion states. The “green zone” is optimal for learning and communicating with others. Watch this demonstration of how to use the “Getting to Green” handout to identify individual strategies to stay in your optimal performance zone.
Feeling Thermometer Demonstration
The Feeling Thermometer can help us talk about our feelings without oversharing. It emphasizes how manageable or unmanageable we feel so we can help ourselves spend more time in manageable feelings and bring emotion regulation skills to unmanageable moments. This tool works for all ages, from very young children to very mature adults. Watch this demonstration of how the Feeling Thermometer can be used at home.
Mental Health 101 & Access to Care
The Department of Mental Health (DMH) School Based Community Access Platform (SBCAP) has developed this workshop to provide a basic understanding of mental health and to assist with identifying mental health signs and symptoms. This video also provides information and a step-by-step tutorial on accessing services through the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.
Mindful Breathing Demonstration
Box Breathing (also called “tactical breathing”) is a breathing exercise that controls the pace of our breath: guiding the breath from a dysregulated pace (associated with stress, anxiety or panic) to a regulated breath (associated with calm and focus). Watch this demonstration of how Box Breathing can be led in a group setting.
Video Series
Stories From the Frontline
Using the Assess, Recover, Mitigate, and Strengthen (ARMS) framework, Dr. Bill Nash explores with guests their individual and community strengths, challenges, distress, and recovery. Guests from a variety of backgrounds share their stories. The stories are intended to be watched after completing the Assess, Recover, Mitigate, and Strength (ARMS): A Wellbeing Regimen for Professionals course.
Learning Pathways
Somatic Series: Widening Our Window of Tolerance
This pathway provides an overview of the Window of Tolerance and accessible, body-based mindfulness practices to support yourself or those in your communities. Learn how the Window of Tolerance concept applies to wellbeing and practical body-based strategies to support wellbeing, nervous system regulation, and a wider Window of Tolerance. This pathway includes explanations, examples, and opportunities for practice. Get ready for a different type of experience: after the first step of the pathway, the milestones will guide you through real-life practices. How to get ready to complete ...
Trainings
Maintaining Professional Wellbeing
A look at the ways working with individuals who have experienced trauma can affect our professional wellbeing. Participants will explore the impact of secondary traumatic stress and learn strategies to enhance both personal and professional wellbeing.
Prevention in Practice
A Look at Religion and Resilience
In an interview with Dr. Bill Nash, Katherine Brown-Saltzman recalls a time she mustered the energy to attend church while experiencing intense burnout at work as a nurse. During church, they read a story that spoke of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. Katherine had heard this religious teaching her entire life, but on this day, she heard the story in an entirely new way.
Supporting Family Resilience
An unexpected or difficult event always has the potential to get us down; being resilient refers to our ability to move through tough times, grow and adapt in the face of stress, and support our overall wellbeing. Key skills that support resilience can be practiced as an individual or as a family. Communication, problem-solving, setting effective goals, and managing stress all contribute to resilience. Practicing skills that support resilience can be helpful, even when times are difficult. Here are a few of our favorite strategies.
Mobile Tools
Calm Together
Visit the Calm App's Calm Together blog to enjoy meditations, sleep stories, movement exercises, journals, and music handpicked by the Calm App Team. Each resource is free to use and share with colleagues, friends, and families.
Podcast Episodes
Acing Wellbeing in Tennis and the Workplace
Listen in on a discussion of mental health challenges in the workplace, highlighting Naomi Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam tournament winner, the first Japanese player to win a Grand Slam singles title, and currently the second-ranked woman in tennis. The conversation explores how Osaka’s story applies to the rest of us.
