The Experience Behind the Work
How personal loss and more than a decade in public health shaped Brent’s commitment to trauma-informed care.
Brent Anderson’s work in trauma-informed care is rooted in both personal experience and more than a decade spent helping Indiana organizations improve the way they care for people.
As a young adult, Brent lost his mother and grandmother in close succession. Like many people facing profound loss, he kept moving without fully understanding or processing its effects. Decades later, he experienced another devastating loss when his first wife died of breast cancer. Those experiences—combined with the pressures of a career spanning pharmaceutical and biotech sales, education, facilitation and health care practice transformation—eventually led him to explore how grief, trauma and chronic stress can affect the mind, body and long-term health.
That understanding deepened through his connection with the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. As Brent learned practices designed to support self-awareness, nervous-system regulation and healing, he also began to see their relevance to his work with the Indiana Department of Health.
For more than 10 years, Brent worked with the department as a practice transformation specialist and consultant. As lead facilitator for the Indiana Primary Care Learning Collaborative, he helped develop and deliver statewide training designed to strengthen Indiana’s health systems through a trauma-informed approach. Dr. Bruce Perry, a renowned expert in brain development and trauma, served as a key resource and expert content specialist for the collaborative, leading numerous trainings over several years and helping ground the initiative in research on how trauma affects the brain, behavior and health. Initially focused on health care providers receiving state funding, the core training launched shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the pandemic placed extraordinary pressure on nurses, physicians and support staff, the need for this work became even more urgent. Burnout, grief, exhaustion and secondary trauma were affecting not only patients, but also the people responsible for caring for them. Drawing on the foundation established through the collaborative, Brent and his colleagues continued expanding the work to help organizations recognize the effects of trauma, support their teams and create healthier environments for care.
Today, Brent works as an independent consultant, facilitator and practice coach. He provides training, technical assistance and hands-on support to federally qualified health centers, community health centers, rural health centers, hospitals and other community partners. His work has also expanded beyond health care to include professionals working in re-entry programs, correctional settings, youth services and other high-stress environments.
Brent is a faculty member of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and is certified in Mind-Body Medicine. He is also a certified Brief Action Planning Trainer, Adverse Childhood Experiences Master Trainer and Crisis Prevention Intervention Trainer. He earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from DePauw University.
Across every setting, Brent’s work is guided by a central belief: the people who help others deserve support themselves. By combining trauma-informed education with practical mind-body skills, he helps individuals and organizations build greater awareness, resilience and capacity for healing.
Outside of his work, Brent enjoys golfing, bicycling and hiking.
Dr. Bruce Perry, principal of the Neurosequential Network and co-author of What Happened to You?, joined Brent in training Indiana healthcare providers on the impact of trauma.
Brent joined other Center for Mind-Body Medicine facilitators in Las Vegas for a three-day Children’s Intensive Training.