In the years since STAR began our learning and teaching journey (in response to a call to respond to September 11, 2001 in the US), many more voices and programs have emerged to build awareness and action plans for building resilience and addressing trauma in individuals, organizations and communities.

Both clinical and cultural perspectives on trauma and resilience have begun to inform our lives in myriad ways. The impacts of trauma – from individual and collective experiences of violence, historical, systemic and structural harms, and environmental devastation – reverberate through families, communities and the world. More people are courageously acknowledging the need to address these impacts. Organizations working in the midst of structural and direct violence are exploring how to trauma-inform their efforts and create more trauma-informed work places. Trauma-informed school and community networks have begun to form. Resilience-based programming is not an uncommon concept whether in education, economic and social development, or peacebuilding. Trauma-sensitive yoga is taught in schools and prisons.

So, what does it mean to be trauma-informed and resilience-oriented?

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky describes a vision she calls “trauma stewardship,” which “calls us to engage oppression and trauma – whether through our careers or in our personal lives – by caring for, tending to, and responsibly guiding other beings who are struggling” (2009, p.11). She highlights and questions the common belief that “our commitment to our work may be measured by our willingness to martyr ourselves” (p. 12). Her work describes how trauma stewardship is required to address personal dynamics, organizational tendencies, and societal forces.

Shawn Ginwright sounds caution about resilience-building work: “The pursuit of wellness without fairness will not yield the outcomes individuals and communities need” (2013, p. 147). He shares the frustrated words of a colleague, “Imagine that someone has their foot on your neck and it is very difficult to stand up! Resilience is like saying to young people that I’m going to make your neck stronger, rather than focusing on how to get it off my neck in the first place!” (p. 54).

According to research by Barry Hart, Mikhala Lantz-Simmons, and Daria Nashat (2016), a trauma-informed organization:

• has staff that has received training in trauma and that knows how to identify signs of trauma. Staff incorporates a trauma-informed framework into their interactions with clients, meaning that they understand that people have stories and deserve to be treated with compassion and respect;
• creates structures so that staff can practice meaningful self-care;
• opens space for members of the organization, institution or business to speak about stress;
• fosters a sincerely relational environment where everyone’s dignity is respected; and
• provides resources for getting help for those that need it.

At STAR, each participant contributes something to our understanding of what it means to be trauma-informed. While the following list is by no means comprehensive, these are a few additional pieces of the puzzle that we might add around what it means to be trauma-informed and resilience-oriented:

• Acknowledgement of the historical and ongoing harms that are influencing the context: for example, legacies and aftermaths of slavery, apartheid, genocide and colonization. Naming these harms and actively identifying and enacting ways to disrupt and address the dynamics (implicit bias, power imbalances, over-representation of dominant groups, micro-aggressions, to name a few) are a key step to addressing historical trauma.
• Authentic inclusion: Making spaces for many bodies to play a role in leadership, decision-making, learning and action processes, with awareness of “who is not in the room” and how decisions and actions will impact people. This might range from considerations where to host an event (accessibility) to who leads activities (do they represent multiple experiential backgrounds, or is it one person from a dominant group?) to what content is included and excluded from the agenda.
• Prioritization of trust-building and decentralizing power: Centralization of too much responsibility and power with one individual – due to founder syndrome or perceived resource scarcity or lack of trust – can both burn out that individual and create organizational trauma. When trust-building happens regularly, more people hold power to respond to emerging issues, whether traumagenic events or other shifts.
• Adaptability around agenda, timeline, and budget: Because one cannot foresee what resources and possibilities and questions and challenges will emerge (whether during a week-long seminar or a multi-year program), finding ways to build in adaptability is foundational to reducing potential impacts of traumagenic events. Examples range from re-jigging a training schedule to accommodate for questions dear to participants’ experience (but not originally on the agenda), to finding ways to acknowledge and support an employee who is suffering from secondary trauma, to building budgets that acknowledge an HIV outreach program with displaced persons might also need to dedicate resources to activities beyond the scope of HIV awareness and treatment. Creating space to address emergent traumagenic events, when they happen, can make the difference between maintaining mobility and getting completely stuck.
• Creation of space for rest, digestion, and release: The dynamics of trauma can cultivate a profound sense of urgency and sharp need for control; these can be replicated in individual bodies, educational spaces, crisis response spaces and elsewhere. While the need to respond swiftly to crises is real, creating even small spaces for ourselves or our teams – to rest our bodies and minds, digest what is happening (alone and together), and release a tight controlling grip, stress, anger, frustration and grief – can make a difference in well-being and effectiveness. This can happen through creative work scheduling, or mindfully scheduling time each day for doing nothing or connecting in play or sport or music, or other means.

We share this to begin conversation and invite additional ideas. The journey of trauma-informing our work and life-spaces is ever unfolding.

References

Ginwright, S. (2016). Hope and healing in urban education: How urban activists and teachers are reclaiming matters of the heart. New York and London: Routledge.

Hart, B., Lantz-Simmons, M., & Nashat, D. (2016). Starting where we are: Trauma-informing SPI. /now/peacebuilder/2016/03/starting-where-we-are-trauma-informing-spi/

Lipsky, L.D. (2009). Trauma stewardship: an everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Thanks too to Talibah Aquil, Paul Ruot Bayoch, adrienne maree brown (in her book Emergent Strategy, 2017), and Trina Trotter Nussbaum, who helped shape the content of this beginning through conversations, research, and writing.

Copyright © 2019 91����Ƶ,

Harm is a word that can represent the impact of actions that create pain and stress. These actions may be intentional or unintentional. In some cases, the creator/originator of the harm is unaware of actions’ impact or unavailable to be accountable for the impact. Not all harms lead to a trauma response, though many harmful situations can contribute to daily stress. Many traumagenic[1] systems, situations and events are routinely minimized, though they generate frustration, pain and profound bodily impacts in everyday life – and affect different bodies in different ways. Below we name a few of these traumagenic – or potentially traumatic – systems, situations or events.

[1] Traumagenic: an adjective describing an event or situation that has the potential to generate a trauma response (in body, brains, beliefs, behaviors) in individuals and collectives.

Systemic/structural harm (“in the water” – invisible until it’s not)

Systems and structures (land, legal, health, housing, electoral and educational systems and organizational hierarchies, for example) disproportionately disadvantage, threaten or exclude one identity group (or multiple groups) and empower the dominant identity group(s), typically rooted in historical legacies of power and domination (colonization, enslavement, patriarchy, genocide, anthropocentrism).

• Racism
• Ableism
• Sexism
• Homophobia/trans-phobia
• Demeaning someone’s religious, national, or tribal identity
• Classism
• Environmental destruction/dismissal of environmental science

Inter-personal harm

Behaviors that sometimes happen as one-offs and often become patterns of interaction between particular individuals or within group culture.

*While these might happen between two individuals, they happen within the systems and structures listed above. When these permeate an organization, they become part of the structure/ecology.

• Dignity violations*
• Micro-aggressions*
• Bullying/abusive behavior*
• Harassment*
• Preferential treatment/exclusion*
• Gossip*

Institutional and organizational harms

Painful events or patterns unfolding in organizations or institutions that are often inadequately addressed by the organization, yet touch on some of our deepest human existential concerns.

• Institutional betrayal
• Silencing
• Lack of transparency
• Death or illness of colleagues
• Job uncertainty
• Leadership changes and gaps

While imaginations often go to extreme headline events (war, genocide, continuous physical violence) in conversations about trauma, even behaviors that might compare as everyday nuisances can add up to create the same physical and emotional impacts on bodies, brains, beliefs and behaviors. This build-up can create an environment of threat, disconnection, fragility, powerlessness and distrust. It can also lead to critical pauses, restoration and life-giving social change initiatives.

Conflict and harm

Conflict is an energy that can be expressed positively or destructively.

Conflict:

• can be a force to identify needs.
• can prompt our best creative and transformative actions.
• can drive life-giving change at multiple levels of the systems we inhabit.
• does not always mean someone experiences harm.

When conflict plays out in destructive or violent ways, it can harm individuals, relationships, organizations and the wider system.

Forms of destructive conflict – violence – can range from harmful self-talk or self-harm to gossip and derogatory comments between individuals to yelling and bullying behaviors within groups to silencing, exclusion, disempowerment, displacement and threats that impact large numbers of people and the environment. Systemic or structural violence can be harder for people to see or identify, though it impacts individuals, relationships, organizations and the planet. Physical violence – including its more hidden forms in terms of intimate and domestic violence – is one of the most obvious forms of destructively expressed conflict.

General systems theory suggests every individual component of every system influences and is influenced by every other component. One way to visualize this is through a nested model.

What we do at the individual and relational level affects the whole system.

What happens at the macro or system level affects relationships and individuals.

Restorative justice practices offer ways to address harm and express conflict energy in ways that are not destructive – ways to protect, restore and enhance the system at multiple levels.

This model draws on Maire Dugan’s nested model of conflict that showed 4 levels (issue-specific, relational, structural-subsystem, structural-system), though we have used different language here. Dugan’s original article can be accessed at /cjp/docs/Dugan_Maire_Nested-Model-Original.pdf

Learn more about the STAR (Strategies for Trauma and Resilience) trainings through the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. We offer two levels of training as well as customized training for your organization or business.

Contact STAR today to see how we can help you understand trauma and find resilience personally and within your institution or organization.

~prepared by Katie Mansfield 2019, lead STAR trainer

1. Steve Haines’ (2016): This graphic illustration booklet explores the impacts of trauma on body and brain, drawing on much of the research we explore in the STAR curriculum (from Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Judith Herman, Stephen Porges, and Charles Figley, among others). Haines and illustrator Sophie Standing provide accessible, clear information as well as preliminary steps, anchored in the body, toward finding safety, reorienting, and improving well-being.
2. Nadine Burke-Harris’ (2014). “There are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high risk behavior… and that’s important to know. But it turns out that even if you DON’T engage in any high-risk behavior, you are still more likely to develop heart disease or cancer! The reason for this has to do with the hypo-thalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the brain’s and body’s stress response system that governs our fight or flight response.
3. (2015): This powerful documentary explores the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress on struggling teens. The film follows a year in the life of Lincoln High Alternative School in Walla Walla, Washington. After radically changing its approach to disciplining students, Lincoln High School saw a dramatic turnaround in everything from the number of fights to test scores to graduation rates. The school has become a promising model of how to break the cycles of poverty, violence and disease that affect families through the practice of trauma-informed educational strategies and is a testament to what the latest research on childhood adversity is proving: that one caring adult can change the trajectory of a young person’s life. Check out the trailer , or come view the film here at 91����Ƶ at the on June 27, 2016.
4. David Emerson’s (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). While many of us may never have practiced (or even intend to practice!) yoga, this book offers valuable lessons for anyone working with individuals and communities responding to trauma. Emerson unpacks how many of our attempts to work with trauma focus on the brain’s frontal lobe, which is where we make meaning, reflect on the past, or plan for the future. He emphasizes that while these cognitive strategies have a place, trauma lives in the lower brain and our bodies: “To be traumatized is to live in a body with which you have an unreliable and unpredictable relationship.” He discusses ways of engaging the body, and opening to the possibility of practicing feeling sensation in the body, as a key step toward survivors regaining power, sensation, and foundations for healthy choice and action. He stresses the importance of making all activities invitational, empowering people “to practice choice without external coercion or influence of any kind.”
5. Danielle Sered’s . A restorative justice practitioner based in New York, Sered speaks to a series of key topics ranging from mass incarceration to unequal treatment of blacks and whites in the US legal system to the value of circle processes for honoring victims. Note especially the story she shares at the end about a process where a victim of a violent theft agreed for his attacker to train him in self-defense – an incredible testimony to how training new patterns in the body-mind can foster new life possibilities. In fact, the whole series from The Atlantic is worth our time and attention, especially for those working in the US. Check it out .