More than a deep breath: Staff self-regulation to reduce burnout and amplify trauma-informed care

Course overview

Trainer/Presenter: Jess Linick, PhD, SEP, Director of Youth Services; Lionheart Foundation The importance of creating trauma-informed environments for youth in residential care has gained considerable attention from both the clinical and research communities over the last decade. Yet only recently have the unique psychosocial needs of direct care staff, as well as the self-regulatory skills required to effectively serve trauma-impacted youth, been critically examined. While there has been an emergence of efficacious trauma-informed interventions such as the Sanctuary Model (Bloom, 2017) and Trauma Systems Therapy (Saxe et al., 2015), most operate under the assumption that staff come to their positions already equipped with the requisite emotional regulation skills that serve as the platform for higher order trauma techniques. This assumption is often faulty and undermines the implementation of trauma-sensitive care as workers are left unequipped with the training and support necessary to effectively serve youth in their care. Not only is direct-care work challenging by its very nature, it is increasingly understood that many direct-care staff experience similar neurobiological reactions as trauma-impacted youth when faced with environmental and interpersonal stressors and need tools to manage their own emotional reactions effectively. Recent research suggests that roughly 70% of adults serving at-risk populations have experienced adverse childhood experiences themselves (Esaki & Holloway, 2013), potentially impacting their stress management capacities, relationship expectancies, and response tendencies to highly-charged emotional situations. Without the self-regulatory skills to manage their own reactions to high-intensity behavior patterns often demonstrated by trauma-exposed youth, potentially toxic interactions arise that perpetuate cycles of victimization and re-traumatization of youth (Pickens, 2016) and lead to staff secondary traumatic stress, burnout, and turn-over. Simply put: you cannot co-regulate without first being able to self-regulate.EQ2 is a bottom-up approach that aims to empower staff with a broad range of self- and co-regulation skills in order to work effectively in an emotion coaching role with trauma-impacted youth, thereby building more trauma-informed environments. Emotion Coaching (Gottman et al., 1996) is an approach in which adults use emotionally laden situations to expand youths' emotional awareness and regulation skills, which then serve as the building blocks for positive relationships and successful developmental outcomes. The emotion coaching perspective holds that staff with strong self-regulatory capacities are in a unique position to model and impart these adaptive social, emotional, and behavioral skills to youth and use the relationship as a platform to co-regulate. Given the amount of time direct care staff spend interacting with youth and the frequency with which emotionally-charged incidents arise, the potential impact of positive coaching relationships on youths' social and emotional growth is considerable. Seen through an emotion coaching lens, every interpersonal interaction that unfolds between staff and youth becomes an opportunity to promote healing and build resilience. The EQ2 emotion coaching approach incorporates principles of trauma-informed care, mindfulness practices, restorative justice and evidence-based cognitive-behavioral skills. Target outcomes include increasing staffs' capacity to regulate their responses to youth traumatic-stress reactions, building self-awareness of one's emotional state, identifying appropriate interpersonal boundaries, returning to emotional baseline: following triggers, and repairing relationships. The goal of EQ2 is to launch a positive upward spiral of trauma-informed care which benefits youth, staff, and the larger system.