Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak further address the importance of having a trauma-informed framework in organizations, agencies, and even in communities. Asking different questions that are trauma-sensitive can allow you to better interpret behaviors and empower individuals.
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Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, this is episode number 204, Is Your Organization Trauma-Informed and Why Should It Be?
Production Credits [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.
Sandie [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan.
Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in human trafficking. Sandie, we’ve certainly mentioned the word trauma on the show before. Today we’re going to dive in a lot more on what it means to be trauma-informed and why organizations should care about that. This is something that you’ve done a lot of thinking on yourself and then also with the partners, we’ve worked with, right?
Sandie [00:01:03] Yes. And over the last well since the semester ended, I’ve been to New York City, to the U.K. – five cities there, Washington D.C., and then took a team to Obera, Argentina. I had so many conversations with leaders, with organization leaders, government folks, and just sitting on the airplane talking to people, or in the airport waiting for your delayed flight to re-board. And over and over again trauma came up. It’s a word that people are talking about. We’ve talked in the past about adverse childhood experiences, which are part of the trauma that informs how a child develops. So, I thought let’s talk about it from more of a systems level. What about organizations and how they address preparing their staff to deal with people who have a past of trauma.
Dave [00:02:07] And I’m really curious of the folks you mentioned, where you’ve had those conversations on travel and with other partners and organizational leaders. What context is the word trauma coming up for them? What are you hearing?
Sandie [00:02:22] Well, a lot of frustration was what I was hearing. We rescue people and you know from previous podcasts I really try not to use the word rescue because you can recover someone and then it’s a long healing process. And so many of my conversations were around “we rescued them and now you know they’re not making the progress we thought”. Or and I know that this probably doesn’t sound very nice but sometimes people in the service industry and in the nonprofit world they get tired, they become disillusioned and they begin to question well if they don’t want to change, I guess I can’t do anything about that. So, they take a rather fatalistic approach, they may even begin to blame the victim. By that I mean, “well if they’re not going to do what we told them to do, then we can’t help it if we’re not getting the results.” And so, they want to know what we should do because we’re not making the progress that we wanted to make.
Dave [00:03:37] You mentioned the distinction between the word rescue and recovery, and we’ve talked about this on the podcast before that the language we use is really important as far as our mindset. When you think about language and just what we mean by trauma, there are things that come up for me when I think of the word trauma but I’m guessing that’s limited in comparison to the things that we really should be thinking about with trauma.
Sandie [00:04:05] Well and I want to distinguish between PTSD and just generalized trauma. And PTSD, we’ve talked about in the previous podcast that can be part of the trauma response that we may have. But I just want to focus on basic general trauma and how to be trauma-informed. And so in this definition, which is from the SAMHSA website, which is our Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, and they have great resources I’ll put some links in the show notes, but they identify trauma as resulting from an event, a series of events, or set of circumstances experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. So, we’re not talking just about physical abuse or just about psychological abuse, it could be anything, but if it causes a lasting effect on that person’s sense of well-being then it’s defined as trauma. And we have a significant ability to remember the feelings that we had and not necessarily remember the circumstances.
Dave [00:05:40] When trauma shows up, what does it look like?
Sandie [00:05:43] Well, and this is what becomes very frustrating for people who are working in difficult circumstances as a service provider, a law enforcement officer, a teacher, even a university teacher. It looks like difficulty following through on commitments, or avoiding meetings and other isolating behaviors, and engaging in a lot of interpersonal conflict, being really easily agitated and becoming aggressive, and often demonstrating the lack of trust and even kind of a conspiracy thing everybody’s against me- they’ve all targeted me. And then it just doesn’t make sense, but they end up in those same kinds of abusive relationships and often to completely escape that, they start using substances.
