What Does It Mean for Your Work to be Trauma-Informed?
It’s no secret that your hosts are history and pop culture nerds, not mental health professionals. In our latest episode, we read chapters 31-35 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of trauma, using the principles of trauma-informed care to guide our reading. Because we used the work and research of many other people to figure out what on earth it means to be trauma-informed, we wanted to take a moment to give a brief primer on what that research is.
In short — don’t take our word for it, listen to the experts!
Origins of Trauma-Informed Care
The idea of trauma-informed care actually goes back to the 1970s, when veterans of the Vietnam War began returning home. The soldiers needed care for both the physical and mental traumas they had experienced. While physical traumas like injuries and missing limbs were easy to see and diagnose, the language around mental trauma was still developing.
There was no name for PTSD yet. Soldiers who had come home traumatized from earlier wars were told they had “shellshock,” “neurosis,” or just not treated or diagnosed at all. The care that veterans received in the 70s led directly to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder being added to the DSM-III in 1980.
Slowly, our understanding of trauma expanded to women and children. Five years after PTSD was officially recognized, the International Society for Traumatic Stress was founded in the United States. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) sponsored a study on the trauma experienced by women, and it was 2001 when they worked with Congress to establish the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative.
The research of the nineties and early 2000s gave us a better understanding of how childhood trauma in particular can affect our physical and mental health decades down the line, and trauma-informed care has been developed in response.
What Is It?
Here’s the Spark Notes version, so to speak — trauma-informed care, or a trauma-informed approach, recognizes that you need to have the full picture of a person’s life in order to get them the care that they need. It means you recognize the impact of trauma, can identify the signs, and use that knowledge to form guiding policies, procedures, and practices.
Here are the core principles, according to SAMHSA:
Safety
Trustworthiness & Transparency
Peer Support
Collaboration
Empowerment, Voice & Choice
Cultural Context
Where Trauma-Informed Care Is Used
You’ll mostly find people putting this into practice (or using the term at all) in healthcare. It helps patients identify and address trauma, build more trusting relationships with their healthcare providers, and improve their long-term health outcomes.
However, it’s not just in the medical field. Trauma-informed care shows up in all human services — social work and education especially.
In education, for example, a trauma-informed approach might look like a district creating additional programs and resources for children who are acting out, instead of punishing them. In social work, it helps ensure that someone seeking out services isn’t retraumatized.
How Do I Read Through a Lens of Trauma?
However you want to! There is no right or wrong way to read or analyze a book. The way we went about it was by applying the core idea of trauma-informed care — asking what happened to someone instead of what’s wrong with someone — to how we understood the characters in Sense and Sensibility.
Instead of asking what’s wrong with Lucy Steele, for example, we asked ourselves what might have happened in her past to make her constantly seek validation or envy from other people. And when we discussed the reveal of Colonel Brandon’s story, we took into account how the trauma in his past affected his personality as shown in the novel.
You might go about it totally differently — and if you do, please tell us how! Drop us a comment below, or listen to us perform our own reading.