By Jennifer Flemming, RMT
When I first began my trauma-informed journey I was fired up about the challenges many people living with trauma faced when going to see a massage therapist. As a person affected by trauma, I fully related as I faced the same challenges, too. I was focused on making myself a better therapist and worked hard to convince my colleagues they needed to consider the problem of trauma, too. Part way through my training, in a workshop about trauma-informed care systems, the instructor said “the people who operate the system may also have trauma and are often drawn into this work out of a shared sense of struggle. Your system must include consideration for trauma in the service provider.” This idea reverberated in my head for weeks; every space I walk into, trauma will be there because I carry trauma. I am a traumatized person. And if my work is hurting me, perpetuating my struggle and actively inhibiting my recovery, I am not being trauma-informed.
Care for the carer is a necessity of any care work performed by any person simply because when you are not at your best your work will suffer. Your patients depend on you to provide consistent care that meets their needs and gets them to their goals. For those of us who are traumatized, this is a non-negotiable. Why? Because trauma makes us more vulnerable and increases our risk of making choices that negatively impact ourselves and potentially our patients.
My study was put on pause because my work WAS inhibiting my recovery. I was not making enough money and hadn’t been for a long time, I wasn’t working in a way I enjoyed, and I wasn’t connected to other professionals who were interested in the same things as me. I felt siloed and like I was drowning where no one could see me and if anyone did see me, that would be worse than drowning alone. The conditioning of my traumas kept me in this place trying to appease other people at the cost of my health, pretending everything was fine, plodding along without asking for help because I couldn’t articulate my own needs.
Realizing this forced me to take stock of my life and recognize what was actively working against me. I saw that the primary assumptions and principles of trauma-informed care could be applied to my own life. I could realize trauma was impacting me and the kinds of decisions I was making, I could recognize when I was thinking and living in “trauma brain,” and I could respond by keeping commitments that were important to my own good health and happiness in order to resist my trauma. The principles of TIC are 1) safety, 2) trustworthiness and transparency, 3) collaboration and mutuality, 4) empowerment, voice and choice, 5) peer support, and 6) social intersections and history. Cultivating these principles in my life made the choices I needed to make for my own good obvious.
Care for the carer is a necessity of any care work performed by any personsimply because when you are not at your best your work will suffer..
So how does one do this? How do we apply these principles to ourselves? I think for a lot of trauma survivors, especially those recovering from toxic relationship dynamics, there can be a tendency to assume your role is to support others. I saw a meme recently that talked about the “parentified child to helping professional pipeline is a straight line” and I had to laugh because it’s probably true. The hyperfocus on bettering myself for others, on bettering the profession for others, is a clear example of the internal pressure to appease or satisfy the faceless masses of people no matter the cost to me. Recognizing that I needed me meant decentering others and allowing myself to matter to me.
I took stock of things I knew helped me feel more connected to myself and practiced them more. I assessed the relationships I had in my life – were they supportive or were they draining? I allowed myself to be declarative about what I wanted for my life and committed myself to making the changes needed to build the life I wanted. I did a LOT of therapy. I spent time identifying my feelings, learning about my triggers, and making space for glimmers (those things that zing you with joy). I consistently reminded myself I was allowed to claim my life as mine and remove that which did not support me, even if it meant causing someone pain or disappointment. I unlearned beliefs about my value as a person and my role in the relationships I built. For years I had remained connected to people in ways that caused me pain and disappointment and remained in relationships that failed to support me. I didn’t owe that to anyone. I learned how to identify where I needed to say no, and I learned how to be brave enough to say yes to that which would set me free.
Viewed through the TIC lens, the command “heal thyself” becomes very practical. Yes, the experiences we’ve had, are having, give us insight into some of our patients, enabling us to connect with them in meaningful ways. It also asks us to see ourselves the same way, to recognize our own needs and limits and treat them as priorities in our personal care plans. We, too, are vulnerable. Vulnerable to breaking our own boundaries, making agreements that are not good for us to “keep the peace,” or mismanaging our resources. We are vulnerable to resentment and shame, compassion fatigue and burnout. When we are carrying our own pain without attending to it, we deny our own healing and undermine the quality care we want to give.
I officially began my trauma-informed care journey in 2017 but it is only now, in 2024, that I feel like I have done enough of the heavy lifting for myself that I can confidently claim this title. As my journey has unfolded, my work has emerged from that firm ground of scar tissue and I can speak from a place both of professional knowledge and personal experience. It is not just my knowledge, about the process of being wounded that makes me a trauma-informed practitioner; my knowledge of recovery makes me trauma-informed. For, if we are to ever meet the demand of truly resisting trauma and re-traumatization in the world, we must place priority on recovery. Recovery is our resistance.
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