How Do We Respond to Trauma in the Workplace? An Interview with Wilma Bass

Wilma Bass

Wilma Bass is the President of Trauma Outreach Associates, a Bay Area based company that provides crisis recovery services to business and organizations to help them “return to normalcy and productivity” after a trauma — like death, violence, or natural disaster — shakes up the security of their workplace.

When your business faces a workplace crisis you need help to recover. The team at Trauma Outreach Associates are licensed therapists with over thirty years of experience in mental health and trauma services who offer comprehensive workplace crisis treatment in and around the Bay Area. I talked with Wilma about the services they provide, and the importance of tending to not only practical but also psychological needs of a community after a crisis.

Dana: What kind of “ workplace crises” do you help companies address?

Wilma: We help companies address situations where there is a traumatic event — for example, if a CEO or a beloved worker suddenly dies. Or if there is a suicide of someone at the workplace on site or off site, or a shooting, or any kind of workplace violence.

Dana: How is a trauma response different for a team than for an individual?

Wilma: With a team, it’s a much more strategic response, much more comprehensive, kind of a wrap-around response. It means that we will start with an initial intake, and we will make inquiries around what happened, how many people are impacted, that kind of thing. Then we usually have a strategizing meeting or consultation with main players involved — the CEO, Executive Director, Human Resources director, department heads, etc. We work together to determine the best interventions to accommodate different people involved. Then we work to implement the plan. That kicks us into the response phase.

Dana: Do you help implement or just plan?

Wilma: Both. We’re very hands on, and we generally stay with a response from beginning to end and follow up.

Dana: How long will you typically work with a company?

Wilma: It can be as quick as going out to the site that day, providing intervention and follow-up after a week, or we can commit to something much more involved, where we would be on site up to a week — two, three, five days — or over several weeks. There are situations where we’re holding groups to accommodate interventions with several players; for example with a school, where we work with students, faculty, and parents. We could conclude a response — for example, with a big community meeting to pull together all the different interventions — to allow a closing, healing meeting after we’ve worked with the separate groups.

Dana: Do you work with individuals?

Wilma: Not really. A lot of our work is with groups. We might work with a classroom, or a group of, say, five students, but then we’ll also hold a full meeting with faculty.

Dana: Do you also encourage individual counseling to follow up on the group intervention you provide?

Wilma: Absolutely. For the major players, or those most closely involved, we might meet with them on site individually a couple of times, but would eventually refer them to individual trauma or grief counseling.

Dana: What’s the difference psychologically in what you provide to groups versus what people get from individual counseling?

Wilma: With individuals, you can focus more sharply into their unique history and experiences. For example, if we’re dealing with a suicide in the workplace, we’ve got a fairly large community of workers, and if one individual has dealt with a loved one committing suicde years ago, they’ll be impacted by what we call cumulative stress; this recent incident calls forth the emotions they experienced during that original loss. For that individual, if they have a personal traumatic history, they’ll be differently impacted from the others who don’t.

In a group environment, what’s most beneficial is this shared community, and how the experience impacts evreryone as a community. Grief happens at the workplace and effects the workplace — not just in the family. A lot of times people believe that work isn’t the place for these types of emotions. The reality is that it effects every person who’s working, and there’s a cost to businesses and organizations when there is a critical incident.

In the group format, you have an opportunity to share with your co-workers from this shared platform, and that’s a powerful experience, so you don’t have to feel like the only one affected. Get together in a group to make space to process and share feelings and reactions, and receive education about what are “normal reactions to an abnormal situation”.

In the group, we learn that the majority of people are having these reactions [similar to our own]. People can provide a lot of support going forward, after they’ve been able to share their experiences and learn about others. We also provide tools for coping and have people think about ways to take care of themselves and work on recovering. That’s the most important thing in a response, is to restore [productivity] to the organization.

Dana: How do you balance tending to practical needs of a company with the psychological needs of an individual?

Wilma: The old-fashioned way of it was to just move on without acknowledging or recognizing how people were impacted by a situation. Here’s an example of what we do:

There was a startup of about forty people where, suddenly the young, healthy CEO died in his office. The first thing we do is meet with the main administrative level people in the company, the people closest to him. They don’t know what to do. They’re all hurt, upset and traumatized.

Wilma (right) with Executive Vice President Vanessa Watt

From the beginning it’s more than a strategizing meeting. We have to tend to their individual needs, and help them figure out how to manage the personnel in this crisis. We take their hand from the beginning and walk through how to respond.

We decided to hold an all-company meeting where everybody could get together to explain who we were and take the pulse of where they were as a group. There were also several individuals across the range of positions in the company who told HR they wanted to speak to a counselor. We met individually with them and arranged tfor them to get individual counseling.

Then we set up a day to have several counselors on site, and each person in the company met individually with a counselor. This gave an opportunity for each to say what they needed, what they were feeling. Then at the end of the day, we brought everyone together for a closing meeting after those sessions.

We worked with each person in the company over the next several days. Then we had a follow up a couple weeks later to check in with individuals who needed extra attention to ensure they got the support they needed. We stay in contact with the HR director almost each month to check in on how everyone is doing. It’s a very comprehensive and creative process. Sometimes things will manifest for people a week, month, or year later — not just after the first several days! So we also check in on the one-year anniversary, because [psychologically] things will often stir up again.

Dana: So what you’re doing is tending to the people, more than just calming people to get back to work?

Wilma: Right — but it is both. People are what make up an organization, so if people are not doing well, you won’t have a running company. Expanding a response to the community level provides a more contained and grounding experience for everyone.

Dana: Is the work you do unique or can we find others around the country?

Wilma: Not necessarily one hundred percent unique, but I think we stand out in that we offer this comprehensive response. We also help companies plan for this, knowing when to call in outside help, etc.

Why we’re not unique is this: Most big insurance companies do have “crisis response”. What they do is contract with a business or organization to provide medical coverage including mental health coverage. If there’s an incident at a workplace, the insurance comapny will provide a thereapist as a crisis responder. The therapist is sent to the company for a set time to be available to talk with employees. The company feels good for having brought someone in, but there’s absolutely no thought or strategy given to what’s actually needed and how to implement it.

Dana: That is the sort of thing I picture when I think of “workplace crisis response”.

Wilma: Out of every single response I’ve made, there has never been a duplication. Each situation is completely unique, and our response is tailored.

Dana: Do you do anything to spread what your team does in other places?

Wilma: We try to do a lot of education. For example, in San Francisco, we work with the Office of Emergency Management, who prepares shelter and infrastructure support and services in the case of a major crisis like an earthquake, but do not have any ways to prepare people psychologically for dealing with a massive event. What I do is go to meetings with organizations like this, who are involved in planning for emergencies. I educate on disaster mental health, how a disaster effects businesses or a city or agencies within the city, etc. I show how we utilize those tools to tend to the community.

Dana: Are you welcomed by those organizations, who haven’t considered the psychological side of these traumatic events?

Wilma: Yes, more now than even five years ago. [The barrier is that] people don’t really recognize how devastating it can be when people aren’t able to function properly because they’re psychologically distraught.

Dana: What has changed in the last five years to make organizations more aware of that psychological impact?

Wilma: Thinking about more recent shooting incidents — Aurora and Newton, Connecticut — these events have continued to raise awareness that people have to start thinking about these [kinds of events]. Both of those [the theater and the school] are also workplaces. If people are not attended to properly, they become unable to come to work.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about this issue, Wilma!

For more on grief or trauma after crisis, see these stories:

• Trauma After the Aurora Theater Shooting
• What Are the Effects of Trauma?