
Trauma-Informed Facilitation: For Trainers, Group Facilitators, Coaches & Teachers
with Liz Scarfe
Four Live Sessions & connect with community
Exclusively For Members

Trauma-Informed Facilitation
Do you know how to provide the best care if someone gets "triggered" or "flips out"?
You will LEARn
- Understand trauma culturally, psychologically & physiologically
- Core trauma theory for facilitating
- How to create safer spaces
- How roles in trauma manifest in groups & facilitators
- Ethical facilitation & professional boundaries

TAKE AWAYS
What You'll Learn
- Understand trauma as a subjective, culture-bound construction.
- And, understand trauma as a physiological and psychological experience.
- Core trauma and triggering theory relevant to facilitating groups.
- Ethical facilitation and professional boundaries of competence.
- Explore the underlying role theory of trauma and how it manifests in facilitators and groups.
- How to design safer-spaces that reduce the risk of triggering and re-traumatisation.
- How to promote and communicate groups/events, the agenda and space design, and follow up strategies.
- How to notice when someone is triggered and respond in a helpful way that also tends to the group.
- Follow-up and aftercare.
- Facilitator boundaries and self-care.
A lot of people have experienced significant trauma of one kind or another in their lives, often more than once.
As a facilitator or presenter working with groups, you can assume there WILL people in your groups who has experienced trauma: someone being “triggered” in your group is more a matter of WHEN, not IF.
Discussion
The workshop is specifically for people who work with groups, in either a paid or volunteer capacity, and are committed to working ethically.
Whether you call yourself a facilitator, trainer, presenter, host, convenor, chairperson, educator, cat-herder, whatever! If you take some kind of leadership or guidance position with groups of people and have some implied duty of care for them, then this workshop is relevant to you.
For many people who’ve experienced trauma, group environments can be particularly challenging and make them more at risk of being triggered. And if the nature of your group/topic is at all taboo, sensitive, controversial, conflictual, or intended to take people out of their comfort zone, the risks of participants being triggered is higher again.
We’ll cover:
- What is trauma?
- What is “triggering”? What causes it? How to notice it?
- How to promote/advertise your group in a trauma-informed way.
- How to screen potential participants.
- How to structure safety in a group.
- Ethical facilitation and professional boundaries of competence.
- What to do when someone gets triggered.
- Follow-up and aftercare.
- Facilitator and presenter self-care, and business protection.
- Open floor discussion for the “what if…” and the “what could I have done when…”
Liz has lead this workshop many times over the past five years. Comments from past participants:
This has been a really well-considered workshop and one that will greatly improve the way I see my work.
I really enjoyed the simplified language, application, and scenarios of the workshop. It is often easy to feel overwhelmed in this space, but to resonate on so many points of discussion was really helpful – and encouraging.
I feel more confident to address situations when they arise knowing I don’t need to have all the answers, or that there is not just one right way. I feel ready to support.
This gives me a toolkit to build more emotional intelligence into my work.
I feel more equipped to respond in a safe manner when things do arise and people are triggered, but more importantly I can be more thoughtful and considered before engaging in the first place.
This has improved my confidence to sit with discomfort and recognise the subtle cues and how to observe feedback when helping people who are triggered.
Safety and Well-being
The nature of this workshop (talking about trauma and its impacts) means that it is not a safe-enough space for everyone.
If you have trouble caring for yourself in groups or setting and sticking to your own boundaries regarding participation (what you will and won’t do), or you experience distressing dissociation, psychosis, or extreme mood states, then this workshop is not suitable for you at this time. It might be more appropriate to watch the course recording, or the Introduction to Trauma & Facilitation seminar.
This workshop will fill up, don’t miss your opportunity to take this course live! Members sign up here. If you’re not a member yet, join now and sign up.
WATCH LIZ ON TRAUMA FACILITATION
Liz talks about what you'll learn

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What is Included in Membership?
- Registration to EVERY SINGLE live course.
- Participation in our monthly Practice Lab to apply skills.
- Community Meet-up to build international relationships.
- Full access to our semester and course library,
- Deepwell Innerwork Meditation Group
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About Your Teacher
Liz Scarfe
Process-oriented Psychotherapist, Trainer, Supervisor & Facilitator
Liz is a Process Work Diplomate living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people in Melbourne, Australia. She works as a psychotherapist specialising in working with people with complex trauma and with people from socially marginalised/oppressed groups including: people in non-monogamous relationship structures; people with diverse gender and sexual identities; people with kink interests, and people in marginalised occupations (i.e. sex workers).
Liz has been facilitating groups since the late 1990s, in a wide range of contexts, including large (100+ people) social action groups, human rights defenders in undeclared civil wars, community engagement processes, workplace conflicts, and strategic planning processes. Liz was also a facilitating staff member at the Greece Worldwork Forum in 2017 and the Warsaw Worldwork Forum in 2014.
She has also been designing and delivering personal and professional development programs since this time and is now a faculty member and the Executive Director of Australia New Zealand Process-Oriented Psychology (where she studied Process Work), as well as a faculty member with the Process Work Institute India.
Liz integrates her current studies in critical medical anthropology into the workshop through framing how experiences that are called ‘trauma’ by Western psychology, are differently experienced and explained in different cultures, despite the colonial imposition of Western psychological ideas (and the foregrounding of Western trauma) across the world.
areas of expertise
- Complex Trauma & Post-Traumatic Growth
- Facilitator Training
- Medical Anthropology (trauma and settler-colonialism)

Sign up for this Online Course!
This is a live course taught by Liz Scarfe.
Included are four classes of 2 hours each.
It’s highly participatory, learn and practice new skills!
