About Shona
Shona Sim is a Wollongong based registered Psychologist of 26 years and has worked in a variety of disciplines such as post separation, domestic violence, drug and alcohol, child protection, Family Law, child and family therapy, school counselling, group work, residential rehabilitation and youth accommodation.
She is an accredited Clinical EFT practitioner (tapping) and an accredited trauma informed yoga teacher and is a consultant to a number of government and non-government agencies providing individual and group supervision as well a tailored training packages and conference presentations.
Shona currently provides supervision to groups and individuals who work in child and family therapy, school counselling, supervised contact centres, group work, social housing and redress work.
She also provides individual and group supervision to staff from a variety of University Institutions who work in student advocacy, sexual assault and generalist counselling.
Shona also provides supervision to supervisors and is passionate about providing trauma informed supervision and uses the current research to inform what interventions are most appropriate in order to best support practitioners and clients.
Clinical Supervision
Clinical supervision is a one-on-one meeting between a supervisor and a supervisee where the supervisee can critically reflect on their work. It’s a professional arrangement that helps professionals develop their skills and professional practice and can help them cope with the demands of their job. The focus is on developing the supervisee’s conceptualizations, skills and knowledge to enhance service delivery.
Clinical supervision is different from performance management or line management as it focusses on the clinical aspects of the work as opposed to operational processes. It is intended to: ensure quality client care, support the professional development of clinical staff, promote staff wellbeing and resilience and help practitioners improve their self-awareness and responsibility
Individual
Shona provides individual supervision aimed at providing a compassionate, non judgmental space where supervises can feel safe to disclose whatever might be happening with a case or within them in relation to a case.
Supervision is tailored to meet the specific needs of the individual drawing on a variety of supervision models and can be offered face to face or online. Shona has provided individual clinical supervision for 15years and brings a Family Systems lens to all her supervision as well as incorporating Evidence Based Emotional Freedom Technique (EBEFT) into her supervision. Being an accredited yoga teacher Shona also offers trauma informed yoga based interventions to support the management of stress, burnout, empathic strain and vicarious trauma.
Group
Shona provides group supervision to a variety of organisations encompassing a diverse rage of roles and qualifications. Shona is passionate about writing and running face to face and online groups to ensure staff are provided with a confidential space to discuss cases, learn a variety of practical strategies and to engage in reflective practice.
Training & Workshops
Shona has provided training packages to numerous organisations in the areas of child protection, Family Law and post separation work as well as prevention of psychological injury to staff in the areas of stress, burnout, empathic strain and vicarious trauma.
She also runs tailored trauma informed care and practice (TICP) training for staff with a variety of qualifications from a range of organisations.
Trauma Informed Care & Practice Workshop
The Trauma Informed Care & Practice workshopaims to provide an understanding of what trauma is and how it presents as well as the foundations of trauma informed care to assist organisations to become a trauma informed service. A trauma informed service is one which commits to and acts upon the five core trauma informed principles of safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment and works to prevent re traumatization.
Trauma informed services are those that are aware of and are sensitive to the dynamics of trauma, including its effects on people’s lives, health, and engagement with services. A trauma-informed approach is strengths-based and responsive to the impacts of trauma, emphasising physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both service providers and survivors.
This workshop can be facilitated face to face or online and is tailored to the specific needs and service setting of the organisation. It is experiential in that participants are provided the opportunity to discuss case scenarios and to practice strategies that may support those clients experiencing a trauma response as well as understanding the research that underpins the various strategies.
When Helping Hurts Workshop
When helping hurts is a trauma informed workshop that discusses the latest research and relationship between stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, empathic strain and vicarious trauma.
It involves the provision of evidence-based strategies to manage these phenomena in the workplace that work with the nervous system and is experiential in that it allows participants to practice the psycho educational strategies that they have learnt and workshop. It can be facilitated face to face or online and the workshop is tailored to the specific organisational needs.
Conferences
Shona has presented her workshop titled “When Helping Hurts” to the Annual Student Experience Network Conference in order to support University staff from across Australia with staying well in the workplace.
She has also been a guest speaker at the Legal Aid NSW Family Law Care & Protection Conference discussing the impact of complex trauma such as family violence and inter parental conflict on children and how lawyers can deliver difficult news in a trauma informed manner.
“I would like to provide some feedback given that it is still very fresh.
As you are aware, I have due to various roles and educative background, attended countless workshops, presentations, webinars around TIP. The presentation yesterday stands out as one of the better I have attended, judged by leaving the training with refreshed old knowledge and a few new perspectives.
This is mostly due to the presentation of the content and engagement with participants by Shona. You would know material can be amazing, the information within can be incredibly important but, if the presenter is not knowledgeable, engaging, passionate and inclusive, no matter how good the info, the presentation will suffer, and participants will get less out of it.
What occurred yesterday was engaging, entertaining and incredibly informative. Additionally, Shona’s method of engaging all participants and presenting in a fashion that was not too academically heavy was top notch. I would encourage this training to any of my peers working with students, I would go so far as saying training like this should be included in orientation pieces. I also feel as if the presentation could have layers added to it specific for roles to assist other managers/Senior Managers/AD’s in gaining a better knowledge of managing not only individuals experiencing trauma, but the staff responding to said individuals.
Thank you for putting this training forward, Shona was a pleasure to watch work, I look forward to more of this type of engaging and informative training.”
Jason