Staying Grounded in Groups

Learning from Trauma-Informed Practice

“And then it happened to me.”

Silence. Nobody knows how to respond. Some people smile. Others look down. Half the room has their cameras off so I cannot tell what they are doing with it. For me the ground opens and I fall through. Disappear. Gone. For what feels like half an hour, though it might have been ten seconds.

“I’m sorry you went through that,” someone types in the chat, and I’m back.

“Let’s pause here.”

It’s too late. The discussion has gone somewhere deeply troubling and there is no easy way back. The impact is severe. What is now in the air does not simply dissolve when the host moves on to the next agenda item. Some people will carry it home.

Trauma-informed practice is a framework for understanding exactly this. Developed from the foundational work of Judith Herman, it recognises that many people carry the effects of past trauma into everyday life, and that groups, meetings, and shared spaces can unknowingly reactivate those effects. At its core, trauma-informed practice is about taking impact seriously before anything goes wrong.

It Started with Research

Since the pandemic, trauma-informed practice has gained significant traction in UK central government, particularly as researchers found themselves increasingly face to face with the weight of what survivors carry. Designing services that do not inadvertently cause harm became an urgent conversation, and rightly so.

As a trauma therapist and researcher, I found myself frustrated by the lack of practical, accessible resources for people doing that work. So I wrote A Practical Guide to Trauma Sensitive Research, hoping to give researchers something concrete to hold onto. But somewhere in the process of writing it, something else became clear to me. Trauma-informed principles do not only belong in clinical or research settings. They belong anywhere people gather, because in any group a significant number carry trauma in their bodies, whether or not it is ever named.

Community groups, meetups, online spaces, the kind of informal collectives that many of us rely on, are not neutral. They can be sources of real connection and support. They can also, without anyone intending it, become spaces where people are pushed beyond what they can hold.

What Trauma-Informed Therapists Learn First

One of the first things a trauma therapist learns, across almost every major trauma therapy model, is to interrupt the trauma narrative. Not because the story does not matter, but because of what happens when it spills out uncontained. Vicarious trauma, sometimes called secondary traumatic stress, is the cumulative impact of being exposed to another person’s traumatic material. In a therapeutic context this is a known occupational hazard. Trauma therapists train for it, have supervision because of it, and build their own self-care practices around it. The client, before any of this work begins, has usually given explicit consent to be interrupted if the therapist feels the narrative is moving into territory that could cause a nervous system activation.

Even then, being interrupted can sting. It can feel like rejection, like being silenced, like the therapist does not want to hear it. This is what therapists call a rupture, a moment where the relational bond between therapist and client is strained. The work that follows is repair, the deliberate process of acknowledging what happened, understanding each person’s experience of it, and restoring trust. Rupture and repair as a formal concept is most associated with the relational psychotherapy tradition, building on Edward Bordin’s foundational work on the therapeutic alliance, and developed significantly by Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran through the 1990s and into the 2000s, who argued that these moments of strain, handled well, could actually deepen the therapeutic relationship rather than damage it.

The criticism of the model is fair: repair requires a level of relational safety and skill that is not always present, and in some therapeutic relationships the rupture may be too significant or too frequent to fully repair. You cannot repair without accountability, and even therapists and clients find themselves unable to take responsibility for their mistakes.

In Groups, It Gets More Complex

Groups are not one relationship, they are many, overlapping and shifting in real time. Tuckman’s model of group development, forming, storming, norming and performing, gives us a useful map of how groups move through predictable stages from polite uncertainty to productive collaboration. It helps facilitators understand that conflict is not a sign of failure but a normal part of a group finding its shape. The limitation, as with any model, is that it is a framework rather than a law. Not every group moves through the stages in order. Some groups never leave storming. Some skip it entirely depending on the people involved, the context, and the power dynamics at play. It is a lens, not a guarantee.

What group theory does not fully account for is shame. In a one to one setting, interrupting a trauma narrative is already delicate. In a group, the stakes are higher. To be interrupted in front of others, mid-disclosure, can feel profoundly exposing. Shame thrives in exactly that moment, the sense of having said too much, having misjudged the room, having been too much. And when shame enters the space it does not just affect the person who was interrupted. It ripples. Others become more guarded, less willing to speak, more uncertain about what is safe to share. And this is where I run out of easy answers.

Come Figure It Out With Me

Trauma-informed practice has clear principles for one to one work, but how we translate those into group settings, informal ones, community ones, the kind that do not have a trained facilitator at the helm, is still an open question for me.

This is why I proposed a collaborative room for the Thriving Autistic monthly meetup in March. Many trauma-informed principles already run through how the Thriving Autistic community operates, which makes it a natural place to explore how we might build on that together and deepen our shared understanding of what truly matters in groups.

If we can co-create better groups, ones where people can speak freely and safely, where there is shared understanding rather than crossed wires, where nobody has to carry home something they were not prepared for, that feels worth working out together. If this resonates, join the meetup in March. Bring your questions. I will bring mine.