Using Strengths to Support Trauma Recovery

This article explores how strengths-based reflection can support trauma work by helping clients reconnect with confidence, coping, authenticity, and personal capacity.

When clients have experienced trauma or significant life challenges, they may readily describe “the stuff that’s gone wrong.” As Dr. Farah Jindani explains, trauma support can also invite different questions: What’s going right with you? What’s good about you? What strengths do you bring?

These questions may be difficult to answer when past experiences have affected confidence, autonomy, identity, or the ability to recognize one’s own strengths. Working with strengths involves holding the various polarities—recognizing the challenges a person has experienced while also supporting them in seeing the goodness, capacities, and strengths they bring.

Drawing from Dr. Jindani’s Healing Trauma with Integrative Approaches course, this article explores how recognizing strengths can support confidence, coping, and reconnection with one’s authentic self, along with a brief reflection practice for bringing a strengths-based perspective into trauma support.

Contents:

1. When It Is Easier to See What Is Wrong
2. What are character strengths
3. A Reflecting on Strengths Practice
4. Working With Strengths in Trauma Support
5. Learn More: Healing Trauma with Integrative Approaches

When It Is Easier to See What Is Wrong

Following trauma or significant life challenges, clients may find it easier to identify what is wrong than what is going well. As Dr. Jindani explains, feeling controlled by external circumstances can make it difficult to recognize qualities within oneself that feel valuable or strong.

Questions such as What would you like to change? or What are you struggling with? may come naturally. Asking What is good about you? What do you contribute? What strengths do you bring? can open a different conversation.

This does not mean overlooking areas for growth. Dr. Jindani notes that alongside what we may want to improve, there are also the core aspects of who we are as people. Strengths work brings those aspects into the conversation as well.

What Are Character Strengths?

Dr. Jindani describes character strengths as qualities connected to our personality, authenticity, and sense of who we are. They can include compassion, patience, perseverance, honesty, courage, creativity, curiosity, teamwork, open-mindedness, and perspective-taking.

Some strengths may already feel familiar, while others may be harder to recognize. Character strengths inventories can support this exploration by validating qualities someone already sees in themselves or bringing forward strengths they had not previously considered.

Reflecting on character strengths can bring forward qualities someone had not previously considered or validate strengths they already recognize. These qualities can also be cultivated and enhanced over time.

A Reflecting on Strengths Practice

When people have experienced significant life challenges, they may feel that they have less autonomy or control. Dr. Jindani describes how recognizing and cultivating strengths can support greater confidence and a movement from powerlessness toward a greater sense of personal power.

This may also support a shift toward “I can deal with this. This is manageable,” strengthening coping while helping people reconnect with their authentic self, identity, and sense of who they are.

In the Reflecting on Strengths practice, Dr. Jindani invites participants to explore their own character strengths before considering how this approach might support others. The full guided practice is included in the Healing Trauma with Integrative Approaches course.

1. Identify Three Strengths

Consider:

What are your top three strengths?

Begin with what comes to mind without spending too much time analyzing or defining each one.

2. Write Them Down

Putting the strengths on paper can help “externalize them” and make them real—they are part of who you are. 

3. Reflect on Where They Have Shown Up

Consider:

When have you used these strengths before?
What memories come to mind?
Have your strengths shifted or evolved over time?

Notice how these qualities have appeared across different experiences and stages of life.

4. Notice What Emerges

Pay attention to anything surprising, including strengths you may not have previously recognized. People close to us can sometimes help identify qualities that are difficult to see in ourselves.

These reflections do not need to be completed all at once. They can be returned to over time to continue cultivating awareness of one’s strengths.

Bringing Strengths into Trauma Support

Dr. Jindani describes strengths reflection as an additional form of support that can be incorporated into work already being done with clients. This may involve helping someone recognize strengths they already bring, reflect on how those strengths have shown up over time, or see aspects of themselves in a new light.

Strengths can also be considered in everyday life—for example, how someone might shape their day or rhythms around qualities they want to cultivate and use more fully. In groups or teams, different strengths may overlap or complement one another.

The aim is to hold both the challenges a person has experienced and the strengths they bring, supporting greater awareness of who they are as people.

Learn More: Healing Trauma with Integrative Approaches

Interested in learning more? In Healing Trauma with Integrative Approaches, Dr. Farah Jindani combines learning, guided practices, and practical strategies that helping professionals can adapt to support clients.

The course introduces integrative approaches for redefining healing, cultivating strengths and inner resources, building compassionate and authentic connection, and remaining grounded, flexible, and attuned during times of stress and trauma.

10 CE hours · 4 self-paced modules · 15+ guided practices · Lifetime access

Learn More About the Course

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Farah Jindani, Ph.D., is a clinician, educator, and researcher. She's renowned for her groundbreaking work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and with Harvard University in integrative treatments, particularly using Kundalini yoga to address post-traumatic stress.

Sarah Kraftchuk, MSc, RP (qualifying), is Head of Learning at the Mindful Institute. She is a licensed clinician, certified mindfulness facilitator, art therapist, and children’s book author. 

Michael Apollo, MHSc, RP, is a licensed clinician, mindfulness educator, and Founder of the Mindful Institute. With over 15 years of experience, he specializes in practical, evidence-based mindfulness training for helping professionals. Formerly Director of Mindfulness Programs at the University of Toronto, Michael has collaborated with organizations like the World Health Organization, the UK NHS, and the Canadian Parliament to support mental well-being and resilience in diverse settings.

Disclaimer

The content in our blog articles is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your health provider with any questions you may have regarding your mental health.