Trauma Informed Coaching - CPD Certified and IPHM Accredited

This lecture introduces The Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Coaching—Safety, Empowerment, Trust, and Collaboration—as a framework for effectively supporting trauma survivors in a coaching setting. Each pillar is explored in depth, providing practical guidance, trauma-sensitive strategies, and evidence-based approaches to create a healing environment that honours the client’s autonomy while fostering meaningful transformation.

This lecture explores why trauma-informed coaches must understand the distinction between PTSD and Complex PTSD—and how this understanding directly informs when and how to collaborate with therapists. While coaching can be transformational, it is not a substitute for therapy, particularly when working with clients experiencing deep emotional dysregulation, relational trauma, or entrenched negative self-concepts—hallmarks of Complex PTSD.

This lecture provides coaches and therapists with practical insights into recognising and responding to hidden trauma in coaching sessions. It highlights how trauma can manifest subtly in everyday interactions and offers strategies to create safer and more effective coaching relationships while maintaining ethical boundaries.

This lecture explores the essential differences between trauma-informed coaching and therapy, offering clear guidance on maintaining ethical and professional boundaries. It equips coaches with the knowledge and discernment needed to work responsibly with clients who have experienced trauma, ensuring safe and effective practice within the scope of coaching.

This case study provides a real-world example of how trauma can manifest in a coaching setting and how trauma-informed principles can be applied to support a client effectively. It follows the journey of Samantha, a professional struggling with confidence and career progression, whose challenges are later recognised as trauma responses. The study demonstrates how coaching needs to adapt to trauma survivors, rather than using standard performance-focused approaches.

This lecture provides a deep dive into Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, and its crucial role in trauma-informed coaching. The theory explains how the autonomic nervous system responds to stress, safety, and social engagement and why a sense of safety is foundational for effective coaching and healing.

These reflective questions are designed to deepen your understanding of how stress affects the brain and body, while also encouraging self-awareness. By considering your own experiences alongside the scientific concepts covered, you will gain insight into your own stress responses, triggers, and coping mechanisms. The questions prompt you to explore both the physiological and emotional aspects of stress, helping you to identify patterns in your reactions and areas for growth. Additionally, they encourage you to think from a practitioner's perspective, developing your ability to educate and support others in managing stress effectively. Engaging with these reflections will enhance both your personal development and your ability to guide clients through their own healing journeys.

This lecture explores the critical role of language in trauma-informed coaching, highlighting how words can either create safety or trigger dysregulation. Language is a powerful tool that can empower clients, foster trust, and ensure emotional regulation, while the wrong language can inadvertently cause distress or re-traumatisation.

This lecture explores the core principles of trauma-informed coaching, focusing on how to create a safe, supportive space that facilitates healing while preventing re-traumatisation. It provides practical strategies for recognising trauma responses, avoiding harmful coaching practices, and fostering psychological safety in client interactions.

This lecture offers a practical and trauma-informed guide to understanding and working with nervous system dysregulation in coaching sessions. It equips coaches with the ability to recognise when a client is moving out of their window of tolerance and provides strategies to support them in returning to a state of regulation and safety.

This lecture provides a comprehensive exploration of triggers and their impact within the coaching relationship. It equips trauma-informed coaches with the knowledge, insight, and strategies needed to recognise, respond to, and support clients who become triggered during sessions. The lecture also includes essential guidance on creating a safe coaching environment and maintaining coach wellbeing.

This lecture equips coaches with practical tools and insights to help clients shift from disempowered trauma-based narratives to empowered, growth-oriented self-stories. It emphasises the critical role of language in shaping identity and outlines the progression from victim to survivor to thriver language. Coaches are guided on how to facilitate this transformation compassionately—beginning with trauma acknowledgement to ensure psychological safety.

This lecture explores the art of trauma-informed communication, focusing on how coaches can compassionately validate clients’ past experiences while still encouraging growth and transformation. It addresses the common challenge of finding the right balance—neither over-validating to the point of keeping clients stuck, nor under-validating and causing disconnection or shame.

This lecture introduces coaches to the profound role shadow work can play in trauma-informed practice. Drawing from Jungian psychology and modern trauma theory, it explains how disowned parts of the self—often formed through early trauma—can be compassionately explored and integrated to support healing and authenticity.

This foundational lecture explores the deep and complex relationship between trauma and the body, making the case for why trauma-informed coaching must go beyond traditional cognitive approaches. Drawing on the work of leading researchers such as Bessel van der Kolk and incorporating insights from neuroscience, this lecture explains how trauma is not just a psychological experience—it is a physiological one.

This lecture explores how trauma is stored and expressed in the body, offering a detailed, trauma-informed look at somatic memory, physiological responses to trauma, and bottom-up healing strategies. It equips coaches with an understanding of the body’s role in trauma and recovery, and highlights the importance of working with the nervous system to support safe, effective healing.

This lecture provides trauma-informed coaches with a foundational understanding of somatic awareness and introduces a rich toolkit of practical, body-based techniques to support client healing and regulation. Grounded in neurobiology and the principle that trauma is stored and expressed in the body, this session teaches coaches how to guide clients in gently reconnecting with their internal bodily experiences, often disrupted by trauma.

This lecture explores resilience not merely as a way to "bounce back" from trauma but as a powerful catalyst for post-traumatic growth. Grounded in neuroscience and psychological theory, it reframes resilience as a dynamic, learnable process that empowers trauma survivors to move from helplessness to strength, from surviving to thriving.

This lecture introduces the concept of emotional agility, a transformative approach developed by psychologist Dr Susan David. It empowers clients to build a healthier, more flexible relationship with their emotions — particularly difficult ones — by recognising them as valuable data rather than threats to avoid or suppress.

This lecture offers a comprehensive exploration of how trauma-informed coaches can safely and effectively integrate breathwork and movement into their practice. Recognising that trauma is held in the body as well as the mind, the lecture presents evidence-based techniques and nervous system-informed strategies to support regulation, embodiment, and healing.

In this foundational lecture, we explore the deep disconnect between conventional goal-setting models and the lived experience of trauma survivors. Traditional approaches often emphasise discipline, motivation, and measurable outcomes—yet for those with trauma histories, these very expectations can become sources of shame, dysregulation, and retraumatisation.

This lecture explores the deep connection between trauma, fear, and resistance in the personal growth journey. While growth is often portrayed as a matter of mindset or motivation, for trauma survivors, even positive change can be interpreted by the nervous system as a threat. This results in powerful protective responses such as procrastination, avoidance, or self-sabotage—not as signs of failure, but as survival strategies rooted in past experience.

This lecture offers a trauma-informed framework for creating lasting, meaningful change in clients. Instead of pushing for quick fixes or rigid outcomes, we focus on sustainable transformation rooted in emotional safety, cyclical growth, and compassionate pacing.

This lecture equips coaches and practitioners with a trauma-informed understanding of why boundaries are often difficult for trauma survivors, and how to support the safe, gradual development of personal boundaries. We explore the neurobiological and psychological roots of boundary challenges, including hypervigilance, disrupted interoception, fear of abandonment, and survival adaptations like people-pleasing or emotional shutdown.

This lecture guides trauma-informed coaches in supporting clients to rebuild their ability to communicate clearly, calmly, and confidently after trauma. Many trauma survivors develop reactive, avoidant, or overly accommodating communication styles as protective responses to past harm. These patterns—such as people-pleasing, silence, defensiveness, or over-explaining—often persist into adult relationships, creating barriers to authentic connection and emotional safety.

This lecture introduces Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a structured and heart-centred model developed by Dr Marshall Rosenberg that transforms how individuals express themselves and listen to others. Rooted in empathy and emotional awareness, NVC supports deeper connection, conflict resolution, and authentic communication-making it especially effective for trauma-informed, empowerment-based, and holistic coaching.

This lecture explores Somatic Experiencing (SE), a trauma-healing framework developed by Dr Peter Levine, which emphasises the body’s role in processing and resolving trauma. Unlike cognitive or narrative-based approaches, SE focuses on how the nervous system holds and expresses trauma through physiological responses.

In this lecture, we explore the foundational trauma-informed practice of holding space—a core skill that allows coaches and practitioners to support clients with compassion, presence, and emotional safety. Rather than offering advice or fixing the problem, holding space is about being with someone in their emotional experience without judgement or agenda.

This lecture introduces Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or “tapping,” as a powerful and accessible mind-body tool that may support trauma recovery. Designed specifically for trauma-informed coaches, this session offers a comprehensive understanding of EFT’s origins, methodology, and its growing scientific evidence base—while reinforcing essential ethical boundaries for non-clinical practitioners.

This lecture explores Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a powerful and evidence-based method for processing trauma. Designed to inform trauma-informed coaches—not to train them in EMDR delivery—this session offers a comprehensive look at how EMDR works, who it helps, and how coaches can ethically support clients undergoing EMDR treatment.

This lecture equips trauma-informed coaches with the critical ability to recognise when a client’s presentation indicates dissociation or a trauma-related breakdown—states which fall outside the safe and ethical boundaries of coaching. While coaching can support personal growth and change, it is not designed to process deep trauma or manage acute mental health crises.

This lecture offers a practical guide for professionals across all sectors who want to bring trauma-informed values into their daily work — not just in theory but through concrete, sustainable action. It focuses on how individuals, regardless of their role or authority, can model trauma-informed principles to create safer, more compassionate, and more effective workplaces.

This lecture explores the vital shift from understanding trauma in theory to applying trauma-informed principles in everyday professional practice. Aimed at those working in sectors such as social work, education, and healthcare, it guides participants in recognising how trauma-informed care must move beyond awareness into meaningful action that avoids re-traumatisation, promotes safety, and supports recovery.

This lecture explores how education, health, and social care systems — often designed to support — can unintentionally replicate trauma and cause further harm. By examining the concept of systemic re-traumatisation, it offers trauma-informed practitioners a framework to work more ethically and compassionately within institutional settings.

This lecture delves into the foundational self-awareness required for truly trauma-informed practice. While policies, tools, and external techniques are valuable, they are not sufficient without the inner work needed to recognise and regulate our own responses, assumptions, and reactions. This session supports professionals in exploring how ego, unexamined beliefs, and discomfort with vulnerability can undermine trauma-informed care — even when well-intentioned.