About our founder

Welcome! I’m Carolyn Yoder. If you’re visiting this page, it’s likely that trauma has affected you, your family, your community, or your country. Or you may be with an organization that works with trauma-impacted populations. Here is the story behind Peace Amid & After Trauma.

I'm an international trauma and resilience trainer and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). I help individuals and communities who’ve experienced trauma find ways to move toward healing, justice, and peace. Right now, I'm applying these skills to the climate emergency, a collective trauma that impacts us all.

A bit of history on what brought me to this point

I spent nearly three decades living and working around the world:

• Asia (Nepal and Bangladesh),
• The Middle East (Egypt and Jordan),
• Africa (Kenya and Swaziland),
• The Caucasus (Armenia) and
• At home in the United States.

The work was challenging and immensely rewarding.

But I kept running into questions I couldn't answer.

I could help the people who came for one-on-one sessions counseling in my safe, quiet consulting room. But the world outside was full of survivors of—or people still experiencing—torture, trafficking, war, occupation, natural disasters, systemic oppression, terrorism, and the generational effects of historical trauma.

I couldn’t ignore the questions that acknowledging their presence brought up for me:

• How many psychologists would it take to treat entire communities—or countries—that were impacted by horrific events? Did people even need a psychologist?
• What lasting good could focusing on a person’s symptoms (such as insomnia or rage) do if the underlying roots (poverty or structural violence) weren’t also addressed?
• If an entire community lived under constant threat, wouldn’t hyper-arousal or withdrawal be natural responses rather than signs of a “mental disorder”?
• What role did trauma play in the cycles of violence at personal or national levels? Would addressing the resulting trauma and the underlying causes contribute to building a more secure and peaceful world?

I started looking for answers as to how to work in communities and societies in the trauma literature, trying to understand the effects of trauma and violence on groups, and searching for tools to address it.

Then, 9/11 created an opportunity to put what I was finding into practice—and learn more.

After the 9/11 attacks, I became the director of a multi-disciplinary team at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. Our mandate was to develop a training program for community leaders in the US and internationally who were affected by the 9/11 attacks and the cycles of violence that ensued.

You can read more about the STAR approach in my book, "The LIttle Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security is Threatened" (Good Books, 2020)

The training program our team created is called STAR: Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience. We adapted and created frameworks drawing on neuroscience, psychology, restorative justice, conflict transformation, human security, and spirituality. We revised the content based on feedback from resilient workshop participants from around the world with deep knowledge of their communities and traditions.

Since 2002, hundreds of STAR evidence-based trainings have supported thousands of people and communities from six continents to become trauma-informed and interrupt cycles of violence against themselves or others. The framework and resources you’ll find on this website are based on what we learned.

Hurt people hurt. people. But transformed people transform people. The world urgently needs trauma-informed leaders in the home, community, and nation.

The resources on PeaceAmid&AfterTrauma help you---educators, business leaders, clergy, development workers, community organizers, and parents--- stay centered and resilient. We all need wisdom, vision, courage, and processes of trauma healing, justice, and conflict transformation in this time of upending and global crisis.