Upcoming Retreat (April 3-6, 2025)
Healing Leaders: A Transformative Leadership ExperienceJoin us at Drala Mountain Center in Colorado for a unique retreat for leaders who want to step up but feel held back for some reason. Throughout this long weekend experience, I’ll invite you to go deeper as a leader with self-reflection, relational leadership skills, transformative writing prompts and more. Candis Fox will bring their financial wellness magic to help heal wounds around money (a stand-in for power, pleasure, giving, and receiving). We’ll conclude each program day with somatic practices to release stored emotion. Together, we’ll correlate how your survival strategies have kept you from playing bigger. You’ll reconnect to your innate wisdom and the healing power of community—and you’ll remember the gifts you are here to contribute.
Discounted tuition available. Learn more »
Why Trauma-Informed Facilitation Matters
Negative encounters throughout our lives can range from mildly stressful to severely traumatic. That spectrum impacts how we engage with others, process information, and generally function as humans. These experiences shape our nervous systems, our relationships, and our capacity to be in collective spaces.
While most of us carry the weight of personal trauma, many also bear the burden of intergenerational and/or collective trauma—patterns of harm passed down through families, communities, and cultures.
Understanding these varied impacts compels us to approach our interactions within groups with heightened awareness and intentionality, especially when gathering in collective spaces. This is where trauma-informed care and practices become essential.
What is a Trauma-Informed Practice?
As we increasingly gather in groups to organize, resist, and cultivate community, understanding and being mindful of trauma becomes crucial.
These gatherings, whether intimate or larger in scale, can inadvertently activate trauma responses in participants, making it essential for facilitators and organizers to be trauma-aware or trauma-informed (but not trauma-responsive). Those are three different things.
Activist, healer and writer, Christiane Pelmas offers that “a trauma-informed practice means you have taken into consideration the ways a person with unsequenced trauma in their body might feel in your presence… And in that process, you have modified your behaviors, physical environments, your processes and protocols according to your findings and feedback.”
What Does It Mean To Be a Trauma-Informed Facilitator?
If you step up to facilitate groups, your practice must be informed as well.
As opposed to a methodology, trauma-informed facilitators embody an acute awareness of trauma’s impact on individuals within group settings. They recognize that trauma responses can be triggered by seemingly innocuous events, words, or actions. This awareness informs every aspect of their facilitation—from how they structure activities and discussions to how they respond to participants' needs.
Trauma-informed facilitators create conditions where participants can choose their level of engagement, opt-out without shame, and receive support when needed.
For example, if someone shares news of an accident that resulted in the passing of a loved one while on a virtual call with others, hearing that information could activate trauma responses in several members. Maybe someone had a serious accident themselves in the past and the trauma of the experience still lives in their body. Maybe someone just lost a family member and are deep in grief. It would be the facilitators role to track visible responses and even ask all members of the group to ask for consent from everyone on the call before sharing tragic details—as well as to be mindful about language and content.
Conscious facilitators are grounded, nuanced and compassionate. Those who are certified as trauma-informed trainers or facilitators:
are constantly cued into the subtle ways that traumatized bodies respond in group settings (i.e. bodily rigidity, an unconscious holding of one’s breath, glazed eyes, emotive, etc.);
use language that is person-centered, neutral (meaning less charged), nonjudgmental, empowering, and culturally sensitive;
stay current with trauma research and techniques to prevent re-traumatization; and are
supported by peer supervisors, mentors and/or elders.
Particularly, by using a lexicon that is trauma-informed (or trauma-aware at the very least), we can create more supportive growth environments for individuals who have experienced an inability of their nervous system to cope with a stressor.
Why This Is Important Now
With basic rights, historical accuracy and representative language currently being attacked, banned, or forbidden by the US government—including the word “trauma,” by the way—it’s critical that we bring even more awareness to the spaces we both hold and participate in.
While trauma-informed care originated in the healthcare sector in the 1970s to aid in the physical and mental experiences of Vietnam War veterans, its principles have evolved and expanded to address a broader understanding of trauma beyond PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The approach acknowledges that trauma isn't just about what happened to an individual, but also about the racial, social, political, cultural, systemic and historical contexts that shape our collective experiences.
Organizations across sectors use a trauma-informed approach to integrate awareness of individual, historical, racial, and systemic trauma into all aspects of functioning—that’s what provides a supportive growth environment.
Notice that I did not (and never will) use the word “safe.” Why is that? Because safety is subjective. Facilitators cannot create “safe spaces”; it is up to each participant in any group to determine whether or not they feel safe to express themselves, and to what extent.
Holding Space with Awareness and Intent
With crumbling government systems and escalating societal pressures creating new layers of collective trauma as we speak, trauma-informed facilitation has evolved from an optional approach to an essential foundation for meaningful group engagement.
Whether we're organizing for social justice, conducting a workshop, or creating healing spaces, understanding trauma's impact helps us build more resilient and inclusive communities.
If you’re still unsure what this means in practice, here are six suggestions or applications for your next communal meeting:
Opening and Check-ins: You want to know how your humans are arriving into the space so they feel seen, heard and witnessed. (By the way, checking in should always be optional.) You can gauge overall capacity to help you track the group throughout the session, and leverage a co-regulation practice if needed or if you’d like to create that as part of all of your openings.
Shared Agreements: Get buy-in from everyone on what is expected, what’s allowed and not allowed in the space while you gather—including in communications before, during and after gatherings.
Model Silence: For many, silence is a void too uncomfortable not to fill. But some people need more time to process emotions and/or find their words, so be patient and allow the power of silence to be another participant in your space. If you don’t rush to fill a silent space as the facilitator, it’s likely that others won’t either.
Take Breaks: Remember to pause for questions, comments, takeaways—and bio breaks, depending on the length of your gathering. If you break to go off-screen for any period of time, just be clear about exactly when folks should rejoin. Feel free to pause at any time, as you sense necessary, and leverage the techniques in #5.
Get Back in the Body: Understandably, many people will have feelings or responses to content, personal shares, and requests of the group from the facilitator. Before you end meetings or calls, be sure to leave enough time to properly close the space by helping participants get back in their bodies—be it through gentle or bigger movement, breathing exercises and/or vocalization. You are responsible for sending your people back out into the world, so make sure they are as regulated as possible before exiting the space you’ve curated.
Closing: Just like you invited everyone to check-in at the beginning of your gathering, ask them how they’re leaving the session. If you’re short on time, ask for one word or phrase and have them choose the next person—knowing that sharing is always optional. Closing with a gratitude practice or acknowledgement of the time, energy and presence that everyone brought to the group can be a grounded way to close the space with intentionality.
The responsibility of holding space requires continuous learning, deep self-awareness, and unwavering commitment to do no harm. By embracing trauma-informed practices, facilitators can help create environments where people feel acknowledged, respected, and empowered to engage authentically—even in challenging conversations. This isn't about avoiding difficult topics or walking on eggshells; it's about creating the conditions where transformation becomes possible, where healing can occur, and where collective power can emerge.
So, as we continue to gather in resistance and solidarity, let’s remember that how we hold space is as important as why we gather. The future of our movements depends not just on what we achieve, but on how we take care of each other along the way.
Share this post