The WAWI Trauma Response Service (TRS) was established in November 2001 to address the needs of the community following the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Acts of terrorism represent collective trauma – trauma that we experience together – with far reaching and long term effects for individuals, families and organizations. Today, the TRS focuses on incidents of shared trauma in the community.

A traumatic event is where one has an experience that…
• Shocks and overwhelms one’s capacity to process it
• Cannot be prepared for nor avoided
• Disrupts one’s ongoing sense of personal safety
• Is endured with little ability to be protected by others or to protect one’s self
• Disrupts one’s experience of daily life.

Responses to Traumatic Events
It is important to remember that initial responses are often normal reactions to an abnormal event that may help us get through the initial crisis. These reactions may be:

• Physiological
• Cognitive
• Emotional
• Behavioral

Problems arise when initial stress reactions persist after attempting to return to ordinary life. For the
individual, these may include:

• Changed expectations of self and others and an altered world view
• Re-experiencing the event intrusively, in the form of flashbacks and nightmares
• Avoidance of people, places and activities that trigger memories
• Persistent heightened arousal or feeling jumpy
• Feeling betrayed; reduced trust in others
• Sense of helplessness
• Unexplained feelings of shame and guilt; lowered self-esteem
• Feelings of numbness and unreality about the event.

The TRS Goal

The TRS offers a comprehensive approach to traumatic events recognizing that collective trauma simultaneously affects us at the levels of the individual, family and organization:

Individuals

• Learn which responses are considered normal reactions to an abnormal event
• Appreciate how personal history, social support systems, and prior experience with trauma provide a
context for the traumatic experience
• Explore how the meaning of an event affects our lives and how we respond emotionally to help heal
ourselves
• Regain a capacity to think and talk about what occurred, thus integrating and recovering from the
trauma.

Families and Children

• Understand age-appropriate responses
• Learn how children thrown off of their developmental path are helped to return to their appropriate
stage of development
• Learn about developing support structures within the family, school, and community
• Restore the family’s ability to cope and their belief in their own safety.

Organizations

• Learn to see themselves as composed of interpersonal relationships
• Reframe trauma to appreciate that what has happened to individuals has also happened to the organization
• Learn how the technical systems within an organization are also affected by traumatic events
• See trauma as disruptive to normal functioning and the effective completion of tasks.

 

TRS Services

The TRS offers three types of service to help individuals, families, organizations and communities prepare for and recover from trauma:

1. Educational Services. Tailored workshops and seminars addressing:

• Leadership challenges in managing effective trauma response
• Trauma preparedness and response planning
• Understanding and coping with the effects of trauma on various populations including older
adults, singles, children and families.

2. Consulting Services.

• Organizational Assessment and Development
• Critical Incident Review
• Individual and Team Development
• Leadership Coaching

3. Clinical Services.

• Individual Therapy for Children and Adults
• Family Therapy and Parental Guidance
• Group Therapy
• On-site Interventions for Schools and other Organizations.
• Medication Referrals
• Screening, Assessment and Referrals

 

The TRS Mission

The TRS addresses areas of collective trauma in the community for children, adults, couples, families and organizations. We offer a range of services — educational, consulting and clinical — targeted to help people prepare for and recover from traumatic events. We are informed by and build upon the Institute’s commitment to Interpersonal psychoanalysis in which the study of the depths of human experience is focused on the person as a social being and on human behavior as interpersonal communication.