Workshops & Consulting

Workshops, Webinars & Trauma Consulting Services

I hold various webinars and workshops about trauma, empathy, and self-care all designed to provide information on the dynamics of what happens to people in pressure filled situations. My goal is to help you manage and effectively respond to these stress filled situations.

All workshops can be scaled. Flexibility is built into the programs to ensure that they accommodate your needs. 

Please email for details and more information.

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Self-Care

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Empathy Fatigue

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Managing Anxiety

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Negotiating Gender

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Confronting Difficult Content

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Empathy

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Effective Communication

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Understanding the Effects of Trauma

This workshop emerged from my research with museum and memorial employees who confront trauma chronically through reading, writing, exhibiting, interviewing, collecting, narrating, and advertising stories and material that include a trauma narrative. It can be tailored to managerial training as education or for workers who are looking for techniques to manage content or to relieve stress. This workshop asserts that certain costs exist for chronic exposure to traumatic content. These costs might be related to immediate need – responding to a school shooting or COVID-19 and urgently collecting highly emotional material – or to the longer-term act of memorializing victims of mass trauma. In all cases, a portion of the job involves remembering victims, telling their stories, recognizing survivors, and paying attention to the needs of the community (all while adhering to institutional demands). This workshop normalizes the spectrum of responses to this kind of work outlining how to manage the work through three perspectives: individual, operational or departmental, and institutional. Considering these levels is important because when mass trauma is the topic, mass trauma is also the ethos of the work environment. Participants leave with an awareness of the dynamics at play when the content of work is trauma and will have begun to develop a set of skills that can be applied to a variety of circumstances.

“Self-Care.” These two words are in high circulation in contemporary culture. But what do they mean exactly? What is self-care? How do we make self-care part of our daily life so that we can function at optimal levels? Caring for the self is necessary at all times, but critical in times of crisis. In this workshop, you will learn different aspects of self-care as a means of showing yourself compassion. The workshop will teach you that self-care is not only a mechanism for relaxing or disconnecting (getting a massage or vacationing at the beach) but also a means for calming or soothing yourself in order to engage at optimal levels amidst stress. The latter entails regulating the central nervous system. In this workshop, you will learn how to relax and how to calm yourself, while examining the profound ways that attending to the self can be done in any situation. You will leave with more intentionality towards self-care and tools to employ care for yourself in any environment.

Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress whether that stress is connected to fear of a situation or apprehension about what is yet to come. Employees with whom I have worked report that anxiety is one of the primary factors that inhibits work performance and interferes with personal satisfaction. This workshop considers the mechanisms in the body that take over and precipitate anxiety, fear, and confusion. Structured like an open dialogue, we will consider the sources of anxiety, understand how anxiety affects the ability to stay calm and function at the most optimum levels, and then finally develop techniques for responding to anxiety. Participants will walk away from the workshop with knowledge about how they respond to anxiety and a set of practical tools which meet their personal needs.

The complications of gender relations inside and outside the workforce have manifested most recently in the #metoo movement. This workshop addresses the effects of the behaviors that spawned the movement, acknowledging that we must find an equitable, safe, new normal in private and public settings. Not addressing the challenges of sexual tension in work settings makes individuals and institutions vulnerable to turmoil, demoralization, and additional conflict. The aim of this workshop is to create the foundations for safer workplace and social environments for all, especially survivors, while providing guidelines for appropriate behavior. This workshop, which will be amended to the needs of your group, includes training about human behavior and biology alongside social conditioning related to gender, to establish a deeper understanding of human behavior and how to create safety, connect with resources, and more effectively communicate and claim personal space. Participants will also learn about implicit bias and boundary setting in an atmosphere that fosters dialogue.

Empathy is the capacity to imagine feelings and experiences of other people through cognition, emotions, and bodies. As a precondition to successful relationships with others, empathy requires attentiveness, reflection, and a willingness to adjust to change. In this workshop, you will learn how to recognize when you are experiencing empathy (this often happens without your awareness) and also how to listen deeply, both to what others are verbalizing but also to what they are saying that is not being communicated through words. To facilitate this, we will practice deep listening and learn how this practice enhances understanding. Exercises will help you locate yourself in the empathic dyad while uncovering ways you block empathy or experience it too profoundly. Thus, the goal is to find the balance of empathy that will foster harmonious interactions in relationships whether that be with family members, customers, clients, or patients.

Effective communication lies at the heart of interpersonal skills. Although communication is always individual and there is no “right” way to communicate well, an awareness of the ways in which you communicate increases your capacity to communicate effectively. This workshop helps you identify what is working in your communication style, while making you aware of your style and vocabulary so that you can improve. For instance, the use of the words “need,” “should,” and “must” exert undue pressure on people and convey a sense of obligation that can block progress or success; changing this vocabulary to include words of invitation or words that spark creativity establishes a much stronger foundation for growth. Depending on the timing of the workshop, an additional element would be to consider how communication is not always verbal; we communicate with our bodies and our facial expressions. Exploring this dimension of communication will enhance how we understand others and how we express ourselves to them. In any workshop structure, participants will walk away with an understanding of their communication styles and how to improve these in a variety of settings.

Unfortunately, most of the world’s population has experienced trauma. Only a lucky few can say that they have lived life trauma free, whether that trauma relates to childhood events, an assault as an adult, the surprising death of a loved one, or the experience of great loss after a disaster. This workshop is for survivors, friends, and family members who desire to understand what they or a loved one experience after trauma. The approach for learning is a psychoeducational model where the first step covers education about trauma and its effects on the self. The second step entails training in coping skills for all parties. Finally, participants think about how to build social support – a very necessary component in growth after trauma. The suggested time for this workshop is a minimum of three hours (one hour for each component of the psychoeducational model), but time can be amended related to the needs of the participants.