PESD for every employee
The six protective principles and the practiced protective response, with scenarios drawn from work and from life.
PESD · Proactive Emotional Self-Defense · Workplace training by CEAPs
Empowered people build healthier workplaces.
Workplace toxicity doesn’t just hurt morale. It is linked to depression, anxiety and substance use, and it follows people home. PESD, our signature program, gives every employee the skills to recognize the early warning signs of toxicity — at work and in their personal lives — and to act on them with a practiced plan. Stop toxicity early, and you protect your people and your workplace from what comes next.
- Free 10-minute consultation
- 20+ years of clinical experience
- Live, virtual nationwide or on-site in DFW
Our approach
Healthy cultures are built one person at a time
Policies and reporting lines matter, but they only work when people can tell something is wrong and feel able to act. Many workplace trainings focus on what to do after harm has already happened. Even organizations that value being proactive often struggle to find a practical plan or framework for it. PESD starts where every culture starts: with the individual.
1
Empower the individual
Each employee learns to notice their own signals, trust their read of a situation and respond with a plan they have practiced, instead of freezing, deferring or absorbing it.
2
Strengthen the team
When people can name what is happening and set clear, professional limits, problems surface sooner and conversations get more honest.
3
Support a healthier culture
Leaders and HR learn to respond well when someone speaks up, so recognition turns into action instead of silence.
The ripple effect
Toxicity rarely stays a “culture problem”
Left unaddressed, it becomes a health problem, and then a business problem. Research on workplace bullying and harassment traces the same path again and again:
- Toxic dynamicsbelittling, pressure, exclusion, boundary violations
- Chronic stresspeople stay on guard, sleep worse and second-guess themselves
- Depression & anxietyconsistently linked to bullying, including over time
- Substance useharassment is linked to problem drinking, through distress
- Business impactabsence, mistakes, safety incidents and turnover
Address it upstream, where it starts
The World Health Organization recommends reducing psychosocial risks like bullying and building people’s skills to manage them. That is exactly where PESD works. The goal is simple: help every employee recognize toxicity early and respond with confidence, so fewer situations escalate into the distress that fuels depression, anxiety and unhealthy coping. Our clinicians are substance abuse and mental health specialists. We see where this chain ends in our clinical work, and we built PESD to interrupt it at the beginning.
Why it matters
What toxicity costs
Toxicity is expensive. It shows up as turnover, absence and lost productivity, and as depression, anxiety and substance use that your benefits plan, your EAP and your safety record end up absorbing.
$223Bestimated cost of U.S. turnover driven by workplace culture over five years
½–2×an employee’s annual salary: the typical cost of replacing them
3×as likely to report harm to their mental health when the workplace is toxic
Our signature program
PESD: Proactive Emotional Self-Defense
PESD builds six protective capacities that make early warning signs easier to notice and trust, and pairs them with a five-step response people rehearse before they need it: Pause, Name, Check, Choose, Review.
- For every employee, not just managers
- Covers toxicity at work and in personal relationships, because each spills into the other
- Trauma-informed and never victim-blaming: recognition is not responsibility
Training that starts with the person
Every program centers on personal and workplace toxicity: how to recognize it, how to respond to it and how to help others do the same. Live and interactive, for organizations of every size.
For leaders & HR
Psychological safety, responding well when someone speaks up, and recognizing and preventing a toxic workplace.
Well-being & support
Stress and burnout, a drug-free workplace, suicide prevention awareness and critical incident response.
Why Certified Employee Assistance Professionals
The CEAP is the credential for professionals who specialize in people, performance and the workplace. Our team brings 20+ years in counseling, employee assistance and substance abuse evaluation, so our training is grounded in what actually happens to people at work, and what they carry in with them.
We work with private, public, nonprofit and government employers, from small businesses to large enterprises.
Equip your people. Strengthen your workplace.
Tell us what you’re seeing and what you’d like to change. Your first 10-minute consultation is free, and we reply within one business day.