Get Trauma-Informed Now:
For Coaches, Therapists and Healers
A 2-Hour Masterclass with David Bedrick
To be trauma-informed:
You must learn about is what trauma actually is and the impact it has on our development.
Trauma overwhelms the system, creating dissociation. Trauma freezes our psychological development, leaving parts of ourselves caught in earlier feelings, projections, and unmet needs.
To be trauma-informed, you need become aware of dissociative states and how to honor their dissociation’s organic function, otherwise you can easily shame your clients. AND, to be trauma-informed you need to understand how trauma freezes our psychological development, leaving parts of the self caught in earlier feelings, projections, and unmet needs.
You must learn how the etiology of trauma, how it is formed.
To be trauma-informed, you need to know how people and systems that deny, dismiss, neglect or gaslight a person’s story, turns an abusive experience into a traumatic experience.
To be trauma-informed, you need to know that the most powerful aspect of an abuse story is the perpetrator, but the most powerful aspect of healing the resulting trauma is directly related to how that story was witnessed. As a result, to be trauma informed you will need to know how to guide your client through a witness inquiry.
You must learn how trauma disconnects us from our power and our consent-making function. As a result, empowerment work and boundary work is an essential aspect of trauma healing.
You must learn about the role somatic experience plays in recounting a story in a way that brings healing. Because these feeling not only express themselves interoceptively or proprioceptively, you need to know about the importance of somatic experience that results in body moving and voice-making.
To be trauma-informed, you need to know how trauma perpetuates itself in the psyche by showing up as abusive inner criticism and internalized oppression. When this inner-criticism is unconscious and unwitnessed, it retraumatizes the person on a daily basis.
To be trauma-informed, you must learn how a client’s fawning, or inability to consciously consent to your guidance, play a critical role in your trauma ethics, awareness, and skills.
“Bedrick offers a deep, astute, accessible, & practice-based path to divesting from the most debilitating mind state - shame.”
—Gabor Maté, MD
In this seminar, you will understand these three issues and learn about why these particular skills are necessary part of trauma healing.
Caveat, you will not be able to learn and practice these skills, that’s something that would take months to actually learn and practice.
The goal of the seminar is to inform you about what trauma really is, where it comes from and the kind of skills you need if you want to be more than trauma-informed, but you actually want to be trauma-skilled.
Don't miss this profound training!
Here’s what students have said:
“David Bedrick has created THE most powerfully compassionate process. And he, himself, is a wizard.”
“This has been life changing! THANK YOU, DAVID!”
“David has a skill for sharing profound knowledge and making it digestible.”
“I had never heard someone talk about the impact of witnessing before!! It’s SO important and no one talks about it.”
Trauma freezes and inhibits one's capacity to honestly and directly consent or make boundaries.
That means recovering your client’s boundary-making freedom and capacity is a fundamental part of trauma work.
It also means noticing and honoring the ’minimal somatic expressions’ of consent, or the lack of it, is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to trauma ethics.
Unhealed early trauma lives in the ‘here and now’ by recreating the violence in the form of inner criticism and internalized oppression.
That means not automatically accepting a client’s judgments and beliefs about themselves, including what they believe they need to change in order to heal.
It also means knowing how to work with the abusive aspects of inner criticism and internalized oppression through parts work and somatic experience.
Trauma expresses itself in the body, the soma, but NOT ONLY in the feeling body, but also in the body’s impulse to move and make sound.
That means you must know how to work with the soma as it expresses itself in movement impulses and the voice. Working ONLY in the feeling body can re-traumatize a client by requiring the them not to move or make sound - a condition that may have been part of the initial traumatic experience.
Trauma freezes one's identity, locking the client's sense of self as being small, victimized, or relatively powerless. This disconnects the client from their power.
That means we must help our client’s recover their natural powers and help them integrate those powers into their current life if healing is to be sustainable.
Trauma is created from earlier abuse and violence when that violence is denied, dismissed, or gaslighted. That denial, dismissal and gaslighting gets internalized and profoundly impacts the client’s view of themselves and ALL of the future relationships.
That means we must make a deep inquiry into how our client’s story was witnessed by others who denied and gaslight them OR how it may have never been truly witnessed at all.
It also means that you must very particular and precise witnessing skills in order to bring healing to the traumatic wound.
Unhealed trauma creates projections. These projections can live in the therapeutic/ healing relationship.
This means the trauma-informed and skilled facilitator must be able to identity transferential and counter-transferential dynamics that exist with their clients.
WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO LEARN WHEN WORKING WITH TRAUMA?
Being aware of your client's moment-to-moment feedback.
This moment-to-moment feedback is communicated through their bodies, their eyes, their pauses, and their tone. It communicates whether they want to proceed in the direction that you're going as a facilitator, whether they need you to slow down, speed up, or stop and go in a different direction. Or whether the atmosphere and style of your facilitation is right for them at all.
This communication is NOT about their story or feelings; it’s about HOW you're proceeding and whether that's right for them.
Without such awareness, the likelihood of re-traumatization is high. It is the most important ethical consideration in being trauma informed and skilled.
Why is this so essential?
Because people, when traumatized, lose their capacity to consent.
They fawn; they lose touch with their inner authority; they lose their voice.
That means they no longer clearly and directly say yes, or no, or maybe, or slow down, or I need to go in another direction when their therapist or coach is asking questions, making suggestions or going in a certain direction.
However, communication signals of their needs in this regard are emanating from their bodies and tones. Without training in how to notice those signals, re-traumatization becomes much more likely.
This awareness is the essence of the ethics and skills required for being trauma-informed.
“David makes a safe space for a deep deep healing and expression.”
"David Bedrick is a gentle warrior. His methodology is phenomenal. The most kind, soft, powerful vehicle I’ve ever encountered to heal trauma and release shame.”
“David's work is the most profound healing work I have experienced in my long lifetime! His insights and deeply present and caring approach are a revelation. I am changed, in the best of ways.”
“I have learned SO much from today. This has helped me both personally and professionally.”
MASTERCLASS DETAILS
DATE:
TIME:
WHERE: on Zoom with recording available for all registrants.
COST: $33
MEET YOUR FACILITATOR:
David Bedrick, JD, Dipl. PW, is a teacher, counselor, and attorney. He was on the faculty for the University of Phoenix and the Process Work Institute in the U.S. and Poland and is the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-based Studies where he offers facilitation training to deepen the skills and awareness of healers as well as workshops for individuals to further their own personal development. David’s embodied way of teaching is far more than informational, students are often brought to tears and face to face with their beauty, power, life path and soul.
David’s passion for studying shame arose from his childhood, growing up with a father who used fists and belts to express his rage and a mother who coped by denying and gaslighting his experience. Over thirty years of research, teaching, and working with individuals awakened his heart and mind to how the dominant healing paradigm pathologizes people—seeing our sufferings and ills as something to fix and cure instead of messages to be understood and invitations to deepen our relationships with ourselves and the world around us. In this way, David understands our difficulties as “dreams”—invitations to insight, soul, and the divine unfolding of our lives.
David writes for Psychology Today and is the author of three books: Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology and Revisioning Activism: Bringing Depth, Dialogue, and Diversity to Individual and Social Change. His new book is You Can’t Judge a Body by Its Cover: 17 Women’s Stories of Hunger, Body Shame and Redemption.
His fourth book, The Unshaming Way, was published by North Atlantic Books in November 2024.