Trauma Resilience Framework
From trauma informed to trauma resilient
Trauma shapes how we participate in community. Relational and developmental wounds come into the room with us. They show up in how we protect ourselves, relate to others, and navigate dominance culture.
Overwhelming experiences can trigger survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. When we cannot escape or protect ourselves, these responses can persist after the danger has passed, this can create trauma. Highly sensitive nervous systems can be especially vulnerable to these impacts.
Being trauma informed means recognizing these impacts. But recognition alone doesn’t give us the tools to grow through these experiences. Well-meaning spaces can inadvertently become trauma indulgent: amplifying our wounds without developing our capacity to navigate reality.
Tender Warrior is a relational training game. Our Trauma Resilience Framework is the foundation of that game. We focus on these six areas of impact and agreements to build strength, reduce shame, and stretch beyond conditioned reactions.
1) Context · Scout
We track and tend the field.
Orientation gives our nervous systems information: what’s happening, what’s acting on us, who is in the room with us? We check in to orient to one another’s nervous system experience and establish a shared reality for practice. We are all responsible for creating the conditions for safety. You’re experience is welcome, but it is your responsibility to share it openly rather than act it out.
2) Choice · Adept
We contribute from our experience and perspective.
Agency is our capacity to make choices free from coercion or manipulation. Practicing choice helps us build trust in our ability to act on our own behalf. We own our needs and limitations, ask for accommodations, and practice saying yes and no. Through conscious training we learn to interrupt our conditioned reactions and choose how we respond.
3) Regulation · Ranger
We move at the speed of trust.
Our window of tolerance is the range within which we can stay present and regulated. That window varies with our circumstances and capacity that day. We practice tracking our edge: noticing when we’re stretching, becoming overwhelmed, or shutting down. We communicate power levels, breathe together, and attune with each training partner. We meet one another where we are, while each taking responsibility for tracking and naming our own experience.
4) Feedback · Monk
We witness and support rather than fix, caretake, or judge.
The inner critic is the voice of internalized oppression, using shame and perfectionism to keep us safe by keeping us small. Gentle feedback grounded in observation and consistent standards cultivates an inner coach that supports our wholeness. We don’t use shame as a motivator. We honor one another’s innate dignity and capability without trying to change or control each other’s experience to soothe ourselves. How we coach one another strengthens how we coach ourselves.
5) Inquiry · Seeker
We practice gentle strength and fierce compassion.
Through training in community, we come into contact with our blind spots, our shadow, and our protective strategies. Inquiry is the practice of bringing curiosity and compassion to our own and one another’s experience. We build trust to take off our masks and explore what’s revealed, without needing to perform or have it all together. As we see our control strategies more clearly, we can choose new ways of relating that allow more of our true selves to be revealed and welcomed into community.
6) Integration · Mage
We embrace the discomfort of generative tension.
Tender Warrior is an emergent practice: who shows up and how we show up shapes each experience. The first five agreements prepare us to meet the tension between where we are and where we’re going. Conflict, challenge, and differing viewpoints bring us to the edges of familiar ways of relating. Staying with that tension unlocks new possibilities. Integration means bringing what we discover into our lives — practicing new ways of relating and allowing ourselves and one another to grow beyond old roles and conditioned responses.