Trauma-Informed Care is a framework for how mental health therapists can work to reduce the likelihood of retraumatization. The five Guiding Principles are: safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment.

Trauma-informed care acknowledges the need to understand a person’s life experiences in order to deliver effective care. Trauma is a unique experience that “results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” SAMHSA, 2014.