9. Trauma-Informed Care

9. Trauma-Informed Care

Learning Outcomes

-       Understand impact of trauma on development
-       Apply principles of trauma-informed care
-       Promote health through trauma responsive techniques

Impact of Trauma

Events like sexual abuse, domestic violence exposure, attachments disruptions through bereavements and others often serve as roots of deeply personalised fear, recurring memories of helplessness and coping mechanisms that increasingly become maladaptive attempts to manage lingering distress.

Regressive behaviours like episodes of insularity, or bursts of disproportionate aggression need decoding rather than disciplining. Their episodic reappearances signal dependencies and sensory triggers which may risk reviving previous cycles of turbulence now lying dormant beneath consciousness, which should be appropriately handled as opposed to being dismissed as bygones.

Trauma-Informed Principles

Effective trauma responsive paradigms warrant relearning care delivery through three fundamental mindset shifts:

A)        Eliminate Restrictions Revoking Choices Agency

Well-meaning rule enforcements like mandatory counselling, without buy-in considerations or regimented scheduling, may inadvertently override an individual’s self-determination and replicate oppressive experiences inducing the denial of children’s identities – this may violate dignity for some already reconciled past exploitations.

B)        Rapport Before Rigor – Go Slow to Build Investment

The solutionist mentality risks creating methodically crafted interventions which, without child trust nurturing the idea that vulnerabilities are understood before prescribing approaches to overcome them. This demands meeting them in their framings of realities first.

C)         It's the System, Not Just the Symptoms

It is important to ensure that targeted trauma-informed approaches to care involves contextualising the healing journey, for example learning self-love countering years of self-hate.

Promoting Recovery

Emotional wellbeing can be assessed through markers spanning emotional regulation, social integration and the development of life skills. Positive reinforcement can promote trauma recovery.

It is important to manage expectations around non-linear progression, inevitable setbacks and exercising compassionate persistence to provide dependable emotional scaffoldings which moves traumatised children from stages of denial, anger, and depression on to ultimate acceptance and growth. The practice is to stand by them through the turbulence until they can fly solo awaiting destinies.