Debriefing Critical Incidents, Creating Healing Spaces

CRITICAL INCIDENTS ARE EVENTS OR CRISES, outside the range of usual experience, that have such significant stressful impact on a team that they overwhelm employees’ ability to cope and return to their baseline level of functioning. The impact can be devastating. Unaddressed, critical incidents disrupt individual work performance, constrain critical thinking, and devastate team morale, which leads to poor outcomes for clients.

Historical ideas about critical incident debriefing emphasized cognitively-based, protocol-driven models. New research on interpersonal neurobiology suggests that these carefully structured procedures can inadvertently create dynamics that re-traumatize and interfere with long-term integration, recovery, and healing.

This two-day workshop introduces an innovative, research-based model of critical incident debriefing. The model promotes the creation of healing spaces grounded in trust-building, physical and emotional self-regulation, and increased awareness of physiological responses to extreme stress. These interventions help people to move from the isolation and silence of the trauma into healing community. It is critical that agencies provide this specialized support soon after the critical incident.

BY THE END OF THIS WORKSHOP, participants will be able to:

1. Grasp the impact of a critical incident on the body, brain, and nervous system of all employees, as well as on team functioning and the group dynamic;
2. Describe a research-based model, grounded in interpersonal neurobiology, for engaging employees in healing community after a critical incident;
3. Clarify the role and skills of the facilitator in leading an effective, human-centered debriefing;
4. Utilize body-centered activities to help employees adapt in the aftermath; and
5. Facilitate a debriefing with reasonable confidence in the rightness of their decision-making and actions.

Approved for ten hours of continuing education through the National Association of Social Workers.

BIPOC REPARATIONS DISCOUNT: If you identify as a member of BIPOC communities, you are entitled to a 25% discount.

MILITARY DISCOUNT: If you served in the military, either currently or in the past, or you are a military spouse, there is a 25% discount.

GRADUATE STUDENT DISCOUNT: If you are currently in graduate school in a clinical discipline and wish to register, there is a 25% discount.

Contact the EVENT ORGANIZER at the bottom of the page for discount codes.

Andrew R. Laue, LCSW is passionate about creating sustainability for human service professionals through the process of identifying secondary trauma that occurs from the intensity of human service work. A psychotherapist in Missoula, Montana, he consults with many agencies about the delivery and complexity of mental health practice. In 2017, he won a National County Association award for his secondary trauma group work with the Missoula County Attorney’s office.

A leader in the LGBT community in Montana, Andrew has developed cutting-edge interventions for diverse groups including his HIV prevention work with the MSM and IDU population, for which he won the Governor’s Award for HIV Prevention in 2003. A decade ago he was part of the development of the award-winning documentary film, Red Without Blue (2007), which has become a founding document promoting the equitable treatment of transgender people. He resides on the Flathead Reservation in rural Montana and is passionate in his commitment to serve the Native American population in this region.

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