Trauma Informed Approaches: Balance & Self-Care Strategies
Posted by anne.grey
Presenters: Lisa Aasheim, Emily Somervell, and Sofia Khan.
Summary
This presentation offers a trauma-informed approach to self-care for faculty and staff who support students while managing the demands of work, relationships, and everyday life. Presenters examine how chronic stress and trauma can affect the body and contribute to activated or dysregulated states, including fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. Recognizing these responses can help educators understand when they need to pause, regulate, and respond more intentionally.
The session introduces practical strategies for returning to a more regulated state, including movement, breathing, sensory activities, mindfulness, and the RAIN framework: recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. Presenters also emphasize the importance of boundaries as a form of self-care. Participants consider how clear communication, knowing personal limits, saying no, and following through on boundaries can protect emotional and physical energy.
The presentation also examines burnout and compassion fatigue, including signs such as exhaustion, irritability, difficulty concentrating, feeling overwhelmed, and losing interest in work. Participants are encouraged to think about self-care across physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, professional, and social areas of life. The session concludes with reflection activities that help participants create a realistic self-care plan, identify supportive relationships, and commit to specific practices that can help them remain grounded while supporting others.
Presentation Slides: Trauma Informed Approaches: Balance & Self-Care Strategies Presentation Slides
Presentation Outcomes
- Recognize how trauma and chronic stress can affect the body and contribute to fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses.
- Identify personal signs of activation, burnout, and compassion fatigue and consider when additional regulation or self-care may be needed.
- Apply trauma-informed regulation strategies, including mindfulness, movement, sensory approaches, self-compassion, and the RAIN framework.
- Distinguish healthy boundaries from rules, expectations, and standards, and practice communicating personal limits clearly and consistently.
- Identify physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, professional, and social practices that can support ongoing well-being.
- Create a realistic self-care plan that includes coping strategies, supportive relationships, workplace allies, and specific actions to practice during the term.
Post generated by CTLE Web Designer Gem on 08/16/2026