Resource Category: Trauma

Set within and around the campus of Lincoln Alternative High School in the rural community of Walla Walla, Washington, Paper Tigers asks the following questions: What does it mean to be a trauma-informed school? And how do you educate teens whose childhood experiences have left them with a brain and body ill-suited to learn?

TREM is a fully manualized 24- to 29-session group intervention for survivors of trauma who have substance use and/or mental health conditions. This model draws on cognitive–behavioral, skills training, and psychoeducational techniques to address recovery and healing from sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. TREM consists of three major parts. The first section, on empowerment, helps group members learn strategies for self-comfort and accurate self-monitoring as well as ways to establish safe physical and emotional boundaries. The second component of TREM focuses more directly on trauma experience and its consequences. In the third section, focus shifts explicitly to skills building. These sessions include emphases on communication style, decision-making, regulating overwhelming feelings, and establishing safer, more reciprocal relationships.

TARGET is a strengths-based approach to education and therapy for survivors of physical, sexual, psychological, and emotional trauma. TARGET teaches a set of seven skills (summarized by the acronym FREEDOM (Focus, Recognize triggers, Emotion self-check, Evaluate thoughts, Define goals, Options, and Make a contribution) that can be used by trauma survivors to regulate extreme emotional states, manage intrusive trauma memories, promote self-efficacy, and achieve lasting recovery from trauma.

TAMAR was developed in the late 1990s as part of a federally funded, gender-specific program for incarcerated women in Maryland. It has since been implemented in multiple justice and behavioral health systems across the country. The original TAMAR intervention was customized for NYS DOCCS to create a clinical intervention that combines psychoeducation about trauma and its impact with concrete techniques designed to help participants of any gender identify their triggers and learn and practice skills for self-regulating trauma symptoms.

Seeking Safety is an evidence-based, present-focused counseling model to help people attain safety from trauma and/or substance abuse. It can be conducted in group (any size) and/or individual modality. It is an extremely safe model as it directly addresses both trauma and addiction, but without requiring clients to delve into the trauma narrative (the detailed account of disturbing trauma memories), thus making it relevant to a very broad range of clients and easy to implement. Any provider can conduct it even without training; however, there are also many options for training. It has also been delivered successfully by peers in addition to professionals of all kinds and in all settings. It can be conducted over any number of sessions available although the more the better when possible.

Risking Connection® teaches a relational framework and skills for working with survivors of traumatic experiences. The focus is on relationship as healing, and on self-care for service providers.

This manual offers trauma survivors a way to explore their experiences, receive support, and work through the stigma often associated with needing help to heal.

Provides a blend of psychoeducation, process, and expressive activities, all of which are structured to address key issues linked to the experience of both trauma and addiction. The mind-body-spirit approach offers interventions to address these three dimensions of recovery in an integrated program of healing and empowerment.

SAMHSA’s National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative (NCTSI) improves treatment and services for children, adolescents, and families who have experienced traumatic events.