A short reading from Chapter 7 to whet your appetite! You can purchase your copy of "Weaving a Web of Belonging: Developing a Trauma Informed Culture for All Children" from HERE.
Poverty is a multifaceted issue with deep societal, cultural, and historical roots. It manifests in numerous ways, often affecting both the individual and community levels. Living in poverty means constantly worrying about basic needs like food and heating, causing stress that can dominate a person’s thoughts from morning until night. This cycle of deprivation can lead to feelings of isolation and despair, making it difficult to participate fully in society.
Poverty lacks a single, universally accepted definition, but it is generally understood through four key levels:
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) defines poverty as occurring when "your resources are well below your minimum needs."
Several systemic causes contribute to poverty in the UK:
In addition to these economic factors, poverty is also influenced by social aspects, such as:
Tackling poverty requires collaboration from multiple sectors, including government, businesses, communities, and individuals. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but a multi-pronged approach is necessary. Both the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) propose key strategies, including:
A trauma-informed approach can provide valuable insights into addressing poverty by focusing on safety, trust, transparency, collaboration, and empowerment. Relationships and community support are key protective factors that help individuals and families thrive despite the challenges of poverty.
Systemic Protective Factors:
Interpersonal Protective Factors:
By strengthening both systemic and interpersonal protective factors, we can develop personal protective factors such as:
Poverty is everyone’s concern because it affects all aspects of life and has lasting impacts across generations. A trauma-informed approach focuses on fostering relationships and building community resilience, which can help break the cycle of poverty. Prevention should be at the forefront, with a strong emphasis on supporting families and communities.
If you're interested in learning more or seeking training and consultancy on these topics, contact Lyndsay, our Working Together Lead, at hello@ticservicesltd.com for support on your journey.
Join Karen Treisman and Lisa Cherry in a conversation on 14th December at 7pm, recorded for the Podcast, on all things Trauma Informed Culture Change. Where do we go next? How do we get there? How do we layer the change that will see services and systems fit for 21st Century practice?
Back in the Summer of 2022, Lisa wrote a tweet highlighting an emerging finding in her doctoral research regarding relationships that ‘saved my life’ and were ‘a game-changer’. The response on Twitter was immediate and a subject that people really wanted to explore. A meeting was set up online out of which a Steering Group was created alongside a larger online group space. The Steering Group (Lisa Cherry, Danica Darley and Peter Blundell), started to gather and create content for a website, with a real vision for collective input, ownership and collaboration at the core.
The Context
Professional boundaries are there for the safety and security of those using services and professionals. However, there are factors that can increase professionals’ use of boundaries that can lead to defensive and distance-based practice rather than relational and effective practice. The best professional social care practice is relational, yet boundaries (if used ineffectively) can interfere rather than foster those relationships.
The Launch
Join the Steering Group for a webinar (recorded for the Podcast) on 30th November at 10am for our LAUNCH event of Breaking The Boundaries Website!
You may have noticed that I have a slight obsession with coffee and you wouldn’t be wrong. This can be a challenge as a UK resident as I often need to try a few cups in each area I am in before I find a good coffee blend, a machine that is cleaned properly every day and a barista that knows what they’re doing simultaneously. Incidentally, one of my faves in the UK is UE Roastery. Where they roast, they also have a cafe so it’s not in the best location (an industrial estate) but it is sooooo worth a drive in. They supply to plenty of places in the area but it’s not just about the coffee remember? In my limited experience in Victoria, Australia, you can order a coffee literally anywhere and it’s amazing. Whether you’re in Melbourne, Werribee, Castlemaine, Daylesford, Macedon and stops in between, the coffee is fantastic!
Staying with the food and drink theme, I was very blessed to try some Bush Tucker at the event that I was speaking at last night and my tastebuds have now been introduced to Wattleseed and dried Ooray, goodies provided by local catering company Murnong Mummas. All the food provided was nutritious, sourced from nature’s wisdom, delicious and wholesome and has been sustaining this land’s people for over 65,000 years.
I had a day at leisure today and after waking up to a beautiful sunrise overlooking Macedon Mountain (in the pic above) and the sound of birdsong, I drove to Daylesford and sat and wrote some of this post in Koukla, acompanied by yet another fabulous coffee.
In the afternoon I met a Twitter friend in The Trading Post, a stunning foodie heaven and post office rolled into one. I can’t remember the last time I arrived in a town anywhere in the world where I didn’t have a friend to meet that I hadn’t met yet. Twitter has been incredible for the traveller that I am; professional connections that morph into long lost friends. I love that! It’s relational connection on speed.
Finally, Australia is really the best country I have visited (and I’ve been to a few!) in exploring belonging, intergenerational trauma and collective trauma. As a country, Australia is leaning into taking responsibility for the impact of the European invasion and the destruction that was created that continues to reverberate in every aspect of Indigenous life here. With taking responsibility comes the responsibility of repair; the hardest part of rupture(s) whether on a macro (country) level or on a micro level in our day to day relationships. Courage, curiosity and connection are the building blocks. So I say leaning into because there is still resistance to this repair work that I have picked up from watching the news. I am working with services here where intergenerational trauma is very much understood so the news provides a different view that I wouldn’t have picked up in the spaces I’m in. I see the fear of power sharing and a mentality of scarcity and repair begins with centralising lived experiences which will be a confronting concept to many. However, I challenge anyone to compare where Australia is at with the UK or the US. There is simply no comparison. The UK and the US are not even close. There is some serious global healing that needs to take place if we are ever to move forward from environmental and cultural harm (violence) and Indigenous people understand that in ways that we have to learn from. The time is now. It always is.
It’s Tuesday at the Australian Childhood Foundation Trauma Conference 2022 and it’s been yet another full day! There were several speakers that I had the pleasure of listening to today but I’m going to share the learnings from Louis Cozolino and Judy Atkinson as their work resonates with me the most (for very different reasons)!
Louis Cozolino, focuses on interpersonal neurobiology and the interface of mind, body, brain and relationships.
He asks us to reconsider how we understand executive functioning and how it connects with lived experience. The standard dogma is that executive functioning is located in the prefrontal cortex. However, the brain he argues, is more like a govt of systems; complicated, doesn’t work very easily together and doesn’t always get things right.
Why is executive functioning so vulnerable? It exists in our body, in our relationships. It’s not just a brain function: it’s a social and community function. We can only go so far if we don’t have the ability to connect and empathise along with the ability to self-regulate, it doesn’t matter how clever we are!
He prefers to refer to it as The Executive Suite rather than executive functioning. There is not one CEO but rather:
The Primitive Executive – amygdala centric. The job is to keep us alive. Mechanisms and systems help us to stay calm, to be our own amygdala whisperer. Amygdala system is anti-correlational to other two execs and has the most power. It’s the hub, designed to keep us safe but it’s not necessarily that intelligent, eg. doesn’t always know the difference between actual threat, perceived threat or an old threat.
The Task Executive – links goals to planning and execution. Links our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. This gives us a model to understand how somatic therapies might work. An Integration of mind and body – Cognition/relationship/emotion. It is focused on planning, goal setting and oversight.
The Social Executive – the default mode network (DMN) is active when we become involved in tasks involving self-awareness, understanding others, imagination and memory. Self-awareness – conscious awareness, self-reflection, auto memory. Social awareness – processing relationships, social rules. Perception and cognition – time travel, anticipation, imagination, create goals, environmental navigation, memory scene construction. In therapy we have to be the amygdala whisperer but also quiet down and inhibit the 2nd and 3rd execs.
Optimal executive functioning requires:
Judy Atkinson then takes us on a journey about the different forms of listening, how feeling comes before thinking. Thinking is last. I think this is something that most systems and services get very wrong because culturally there is a real terror about ‘feeling,’ a theme which is situated in my research about the kind of relationships that make a real difference for those with relational poverty
Judy, with emotional clarity, tells the room that the oldest living culture carries historic and collective trauma in the form of massacre sites, invasions, the killing times and fields. Indigenous healing practices are our gift of courage and hope to an oppressive world she tells us.
Hope comes through the communal storying, redefining our common humanity. When the unspeakable is spoken and heard, where there are no words, they are simply acted out. (The acting out is then punished I think to myself).
Healing:
Whole community crisis intervention:
We must create culturally safe spaces that allow us to
find and tell our stories, make sense of our stories, name and own our feelings and move through layers and loss
Tomorrow I’m delivering two sessions, one on my research about care experience, school exclusion and belonging and one on the trauma-informed education research insight undertaken in West Yorkshire. Luckily, there are a couple of keynotes I am attending first so I will still have a post for you tomorrow with lots of nuggets!
A gentle start to a week long conference designed to create a somewhat calmer space for 3000 people to register across a Sunday afternoon, opens with a conversation and you know how much I love conversations! I’m going to share the wisdom from the first conversation with you which was facilitated by the very lovely Janise Mitchell of the Australian Childhood Foundation interviewing who I have affectionately come to call The Boys; Jon Baylin and Dan Hughes.
I always love listening to Jon and Dan because they demonstrate the beautiful practice of ‘always learning.’ I get frustrated and also sad in equal measure when people tell me they’ve ‘done trauma’ which unfortunately means that they haven’t even begun to understand the work. I’m going to take a guess that these accomplished men are in their 80’s and they continue to talk about what needs exploring next, shifting the paradigms, unlearning and developing the collective wisdom of all the different lenses we apply to this work across many disciplines.
The ’conversation’ format is informal but even in that context there were many nuggets that I can share with you. There was much exploration about blocked care which refers to the experiences of carers struggling to care for a child who has blocked trust. The acknowledgment being one of compassion which understands is that it is very hard to care for children who don’t want to be cared for. It is vital that this isn’t pathologised as it is when we talk about disorders but rather, that it is noticed and that the child is not lost in this ‘perfect storm.’
Jon talked about the power of being prepared to be moved (I love that so much) and how that has required ‘unlearning’ much of what is taught in some therapy spaces and developing a deep understanding that if we don’t feel ‘it’ we can’t help ‘it’. This sits very closely within my own emerging research findings which highlight the depth a relationship needs to go to in order to have the impact that we so often desire.
Dan went on to provide what could be described of as a model for relational practice; centralise safety, co-regulate and then co-create meaning. This is very much how emotion coaching and restorative practice work. The co-creation of sense making, of developing a language, a narrative, by which to understand something troubling, is a key part of healing. It helps us to share stories.
Janise had opened up this conversation to share the sad passing of Archie Roach this weekend who said that it is the sharing of stories that helps us survive. A child of the Stolen Generations, he was forcibly removed from the age of two years old by the Government and placed in an orphanage. He was a musician and a campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and I am going to make a point of listening to his song, to his melody, to his ‘tune’, to the journey of healing after experiencing such a violent assault in his childhood along with so many others.
I could write so much more, but for now let me leave you with thoughts of story telling, of song and of being prepared to be moved by sitting alongside that which can often feel too much, overwhelming, even unbearable. It is in these spaces that healing resides…
During a time, not that long ago, way before ‘trauma informed’ fully entered (almost) the mainstream lexicon for schools, services and systems in the UK, I had a dream. Before Brexit, Johnson and the biggest onslaught on our preventative services otherwise known as the ‘the violence of austerity’ (Whyte and Cooper, 2017), I was on a mission. It’s a mission that I am still on which is to be part of the collective energy and pursuit of shifting how we approach distress away from the ‘mad, bad or sad’ narrative to understanding distress for what it is; distress.
Already making my way around the UK to any setting that would listen to me talk about the impact of trauma and adversity, I came across a conference in Melbourne Australia. It was 2015 and I spotted the conference by accident while doing some research for a training event I was delivering. The conference was going to be taking place the following year and as I read through the speakers, I was absolutely desperate to go. I knew that the content was a game changer for my work and would enhance what I could bring into my writing, training and speaking.
Affording the ticket, the flight and the accommodation seemed out of reach so I focused on nothing else for weeks. I made the conference website page my screen saver, created a vision board full of ‘all things Australia’ and simultaneously asked the Universe to send me some money! I kid you not, but unbeknown to me, I had made an overpayment of £1500 on loan repayments 7 years earlier and a cheque for the said amount dropped through my letterbox. I was so excited and took this as a sign that the Australia Childhood Foundation was calling me! It would cover a significant amount of the trip and focusing on nothing else other than getting there paid off.
The conference was, as I predicted, a game-changer. I threw myself into it; networking, extensively using the conference app, sharing widely on social media, attending absolutely everything on offer through jetlag, exhaustion all while feeling a little trauma drenched (a week on trauma is intense). The richness of learning on so many levels was beyond what I could have hoped for. A bi-annual conference, I returned again in 2018 and again. Covid changed just about everything so a live conference in 2020 wasn’t possible and now in 2022, I’m in Melbourne again. This time though, I’m also presenting and sitting on a panel with many incredible women and the speakers I have chosen to listen to are not the big names but rather those who can really push my thinking in different directions.
As always, I want you to join me on this journey so I will post the highlights from every day for you so you can feel like you’re here with me. I know many of you will have read the posts of 2016 and 2018 and have therefore been on this particular bit of my journey with me. Right now, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude that I am here again and that I can share this experience with you as best as I can. May the conference commence!
In this short series of exploring trauma informed ways of being, we are being invited to think about developing what it is that sits behind was has been termed Trauma Informed Practice (TIP).
#1 started us off with sitting in a place of love and curiosity, not fear and judgement
#2 helped us think more about awareness
#3 asked us to think about the dance between reflection and action
Setting the scene in thinking about TIP, each post in this series will remind us what the 6 guiding trauma informed principles are that have been developed by the CDC and SAMSHA. These are:
Safety
Trustworthiness & transparency
Peer support
Collaboration & mutuality
Empowerment & choice
Cultural, historical & gender issues
For #4 I’m going to invite empathy into the room.
What is it? Empathy is often described of as the ability to stand in the shoes of another while trying to imagine what it is they are feeling or experiencing. It involves standing alongside another with compassion and ‘being with’ them wherever they are at. It is not about fixing, controlling, silencing or cajoling and it is not always easy.
We all have tendencies towards behaving in ways that can make empathy a challenge. I for one can be very practical and set about the business of sorting things out. I have definitely improved over the years but the tendency to ‘fix’, having written a long list about what needs to be done, is never far. What about you? What tendencies do you have that need keeping an eye on when you are being called to stand ‘with’ someone in pain?
Empathy is often mistaken for sympathy. Brene Brown’s video helps unpick this.
Here’s the messy stuff. Empathy is not about collusion, having blurred boundaries or preventing someone from benefitting from the learning that is available to them. Empathy is connection in the moment which opens the door for what many refer to as co-regulation, which then leads the way to any difficult conversations that need to be had. I prefer to think of empathy as making a space for deep resonance; that beautiful moment when you both hit the same note at the same moment and have that deep understanding that in that moment, there is no judgement, no fear and no them and us. We are just humans together, doing our best with what we have and where we are.
Why is empathy so crucial in trauma informed ways of being that sit behind trauma informed practice? Because where there has been trauma, there can be behaviours that we can find challenging. Bringing empathy into that sentence would be to change the word behaviours to adaptations. Surviving trauma requires adaptations that support surviving trauma, yet often those adaptations do not work so well when in other situations. Empathy helps us to not take another person’s behaviour/adaptations, personally.
Empathy helps me know where I end and you begin.
As always, these ideas are not exhaustive, rather they are support to stimulate thinking. Why not take the idea of empathy into your team meeting or supervision and discuss what it means to be empathic towards yourself. I often find that those working in the helping professions have a lot of empathy towards others and yet struggle to have empathy towards themselves. Think about why this might be problematic and how better self-empathy can be created. Another reflection might be to think about what gets in the way of empathy towards others. What biases are held that bring judgement to the fore rather than empathy? Does naming it tame it?
*Before any discussion that explores these areas, focus on safety. We will look at creating safety in more detail for #5 in this series. If we don’t feel safe, we can’t explore these things deeply as they require vulnerability.
This journey of understanding supports us in how we can respond better to the legacy of trauma. We are always aiming rather than arriving!
In this short series of exploring trauma informed ways of being, we are being invited to think about developing what it is that sits behind was has been termed Trauma Informed Practice (TIP). #1 started us off with sitting in a place of love and curiosity, not fear and judgement.
Setting the scene in thinking about TIP, each post in this series will remind us what the 6 guiding trauma informed principles are that have been developed by the CDC and SAMSHA. These are:
Safety
Trustworthiness & transparency
Peer support
Collaboration & mutuality
Empowerment & choice
Cultural, historical & gender issues
The #2 area that I am going to look at is awareness. Developing awareness of who we are, what we bring and how we impact others takes decisive action that involves learning the art of ‘noticing’ where we are in the moment. How can we know what we bring if we don’t ever stop to notice who we are?
The research completed by Dr Tasha Eurich (2018) helps us to understand awareness and support a deeper understanding as to where work might need doing in this regard. Can you see yourself in any of the self-awareness archetypes below?
The attraction of mindfulness and yoga really come into their own in developing awareness as they invite us to harness the skill of stopping and in us starting to become aware of (a) the internal chatter, (b) where we are holding tension in our bodies and (c) developing a connection with our breath. In teams that have worked on safety, starting the day or starting a team meeting taking 3 deep breaths will bring deep rewards. But a word of caution, many people have never consciously taken this moment of stillness before so anything that raises awareness of self needs to be gentle and with the caveat of it being done only if it feels safe to that person to do so. This can be modeled by those who do feel safe enough.
Alongside developing self awareness comes an awareness of others too and should enhance curiosity about the ways in which people behave through their adaptations to the experiences that they have had.
What does this look like?
Unawareness looks like:
1. Judgment
2. Defensiveness
3. Arrogance
4. Self as a yardstick for understanding all
5. Neglect
Awareness looks like:
1. Curiosity
2. Compassion
3. Boundaries
4. Perception
5. Self regulation
As always, these are not exhaustive lists, rather they are support to stimulate thinking. Why not take the concept of awareness into your team meeting and discuss what it means to each person, introduce the idea of taking 3 breaths at the beginning of a meeting or invite a Yogi or mindfulness practitioner to come and talk about developing awareness for self-regulation. When you work with trauma every day, this investment in the self, with the space created by the organisational leadership, is an investment in every single person you come into contact with.
*Before any discussion that explores these areas, focus on safety. We will look at creating safety in more detail another time, but if we don’t feel safe, we can’t explore these things deeply as they require vulnerability.
Next time I’ll look at another trauma informed way of being that supports us ‘leaning in’ on this journey of understanding how we can respond better to the legacy of trauma. We are always aiming rather than arriving!
