What are the core principles of trauma-informed care in counseling?

• A. Detachment, objectivity, distance, and minimal contact.
• B. Efficiency, productivity, standardization, control, and rapid discharge.
• C. Access, affordability, anonymity, and disempowerment.
• D. Safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and minimizing retraumatization.

Answer: (D)

Trauma-informed care in counseling centers on creating safety and meaningful partnership with clients who have experienced trauma. Safety means ensuring a physical and emotional environment where clients feel protected, with clear boundaries and predictable routines. Trustworthiness and transparency involve being honest about what to expect, keeping commitments, and communicating openly. Choice emphasizes respecting client autonomy, offering options, and obtaining ongoing consent. Collaboration and empowerment treat clients as active partners, validating their experiences, building their skills, and increasing their sense of control over change. Minimizing retraumatization focuses on avoiding practices that could trigger past trauma, using non-coercive language, and ensuring ongoing, informed consent.

The listed principles align with this approach, highlighting safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and minimizing retraumatization. Detachment, speed-focused or standardized care, and disempowerment, as suggested by the other options, do not fit trauma-informed practice because they undermine safety, collaboration, and client autonomy.