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Human Communications Centre in FinlandGuest-lectures in Oulu Polytechnic
Coping with TraumaBackground
Overview of the trainingThe 3-day seminar “Coping with Trauma” from 24th to 26th of April in Oulu Polytechnic focussed on three important areas: Communicating with trauma victims; States in trauma work and Recovering from trauma. The training followed the structure of our CAPRI model i.e. Calibration, Assessment, Pacing, Rapport, Intervention. The first day was dedicated to preparatory work, training the participants in calibration. They were furthermore trained in assessment based on the typical symptoms of trauma victims, and finally in practical pacing of the trauma victims’ language patterns, non-verbal cues and body language in order to establish rapport, which is essential for any intervention. The second day was spent on training the participants in how to access an effective own state for trauma work and for detecting the state the clients may be in and connecting this with particular intervention strategies. We furthermore worked on how to protect oneself against transfer of negative experiences from the traumatised clients using both state awareness and a techniques for establishing clear boundaries. The third day was dedicated entirely to practical interventions to help trauma survivors shift the way they experience what has happened to them in the past and focus on enjoying the present and on creating a compelling future for themselves. What is trauma?
A famous example of an “objective” definition is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was established as a consequence of thousands of Vietnam War veterans suffering from similar symptoms. There was a need for clear, impartial criteria in order to determine e.g. whether a veteran would get social benefits and insurance compensation. Advocates of the “subjective” definition of trauma maintain that the individual’s subjective experience may be traumatic even in events that do not fulfil the “objective” criteria. We stand clearly on the “subjective” side, although we acknowledge that PTSD has sparked a lot of interest in trauma research and trauma work, which has been an advantage for the field irrespective of whether you prefer a “subjective” or an “objective” approach to trauma research. Approach and techniquesAll would probably agree that the most important issue is to provide practical help for trauma victims to help the recover and live a normal, happy life like everyone else. Acknowledging, on the one hand, that you cannot remove the traumatic event itself and, on the other hand, that some people cope extremely well with traumatic events while others suffer a lot due to different interpretations of the events, we focus on changing these interpretations in order to diminish the internally represented importance of the traumatic event and on changing the focus from the past to the present and the future. This can be done in a number of ways and the techniques we apply depend on the current state of the client: - If the client is in a phase of re-experiencing the trauma (e.g. having nightmares and flashbacks) and/or is having strong emotions related to the event (e.g. outbursts of anger, startle responses and panic attacks), we start out applying dissociation techniques. - If the client is in a phase of avoidance (e.g. avoiding places, people, objects reminding of the event, cannot remember aspects of the event, cannot feel anything, e.g. love), we first apply association techniques, where the clients are first trained in how to feel good, because they have effectively dissociated from all feelings in order not to feel bad. Once they are capable of having positive feelings again, we start dealing with the negative feelings in ways that may not even require that the client talks about the event. Issues around anger, fairness, justice and reluctance to forgiving are very common in trauma victims (and again in all of us). We have developed some very powerful techniques to deal with these issues.
TransferSimilar principles apply to the issue of transfer, which is very common among people, who work with trauma victims: they “take on” the trauma themselves. Ironically, the more devoted a worker is to the trauma work the more he/she tends to suffer. For this issue we have developed a series of techniques that will help the worker dissociate from the event, to ensure that the necessary empathy is kept on a level that protects him/her from taking on the suffering. It is extremely important to remember that it does not help the trauma victim that you get to feel as bad as he/she does. PrinciplesSpace will not permit us to go into details about our therapeutic work, but the fundamental difference between more conventional therapeutic methods and the techniques and models that we use is that we work in a “holistic” way, where the focus is on working with the unconscious mind. Working through the conscious mind is slow and inefficient. In our view the conscious mind has an extremely low capacity and is always “late”. Furthermore, if there is a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious mind, it will not be effective at all. Most of our methods are based on neurolinguistic programming and modelling of successful strategies. These techniques can be applied to a variety of fields - not just to recovering from trauma or coping with the challenges of working with trauma survivors. We successfully use similar techniques for issues such as allergies, eating disorders or stress. We also apply the same principles to other fields such as Communication skills, Creativity, Project management, Stress management, Youth work, etc. ResultWe both have many years of experience in training and therapy and we saw it as a tremendous challenge to teach a group of about 40 people how to integrate and apply principles and skills that we ourselves had spent years on learning. The decisive day for determining the success of the training was clearly day three, when the practical interventions were taking place. Based on our observations and the feedback from the participants the training had been very successful. We observed a quality of interaction, which was comparable to what we usually observe after two or more weeks of training and the feedback from the participants indicated that the interventions had been very successful. We heard comments such as “I have been working on forgiving for four years – today I finally succeeded”. © 2003 Kurt Andersen & Tatjana Dragovic For More Information Contact:
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Copyright © 2002
Human Communications Centre
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Finnish brochure (doc)![[Flag]](_borders/denmark.gif){kind=small}
Human
Communications Centre visited
The
current “Coping with trauma” project in Oulu Polytechnic came about when Kurt
Andersen from Human Communications Centre heard about the interesting research
