Trauma-informed practice: overarching themes and patterns in becoming trauma-informed

Services can do undue harm to clients when there is a lack of understanding of the effects of trauma from various adverse life events on an individual’s functioning. A trauma-informed organization provides care, compassion, and respect toward clients and staff with the understanding that each individual may have experienced trauma in their lifetime. The goal of a trauma-informed organization is to meet clients who have lived through trauma where they are at in their healing journey and prevent re-traumatization. My project focused on elucidating the main themes that are pertinent for an organization to become trauma-informed. I utilized content analysis to examine five traumainformed organizations’ guidebooks from health, child-welfare, education, counselling, and community housing service sectors and created a trauma-informed guidebook. My guidebook outlines eight trauma-informed themes – safety, trust, collaboration, choice, culture, staff, listening, and resiliency – and examples of these themes in practice from the aforementioned service contexts.