Responding to Community Violence and Community Trauma

This chapter addresses relationally based counseling interventions in communities following a collective crisis or trauma and some distinguishing features that characterize them. It emphasizes that community needs are distinctive across settings and require support individualized to the community. The chapter suggests that supporting communities in crisis begins with a sense of humility and a desire to listen, learn, and respond to community needs rather than assuming we know what they are. The ways in which people relate to one another throughout the course of coping with a community trauma will characterize how, and the degree to which, they heal. Healing following a communal trauma is complex and requires strength and courage far beyond what most individuals can imagine. Counseling communal trauma survivors requires clinical expertise in complex trauma, traumatic grief, and sound methods of caring for each other.