Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Trauma Informed slp.
[00:00:05] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment and everyone we know, including ourselves.
[00:00:18] It's been a moment since I've actually done just a audio only recording.
[00:00:23] So. Hi. For anyone who's still out there and still downloading my episodes and listening. You guys are so amazing and it really means a lot to me.
[00:00:32] So I do have a little bit of housekeeping stuff to go over with you guys, just a little bit here and then we're going to get into the meat of this episode, which is the six pillars of trauma informed care. And honestly, why you don't really hear me talk about all six all that often. I mean, technically you do. I just don't label them as such as often. So I'm going to get into that and unpack that a little bit because I tend to wheedle it down into essentially two instead of six.
[00:01:01] So what have I been doing? What have I been up to lately? What's up, guys? Where have I been the last few months? I decided to really focus in on my YouTube channel and to start doing more video content there, mainly with the emphasis of it being more toward a general audience or at least like neurodivergent. Maybe audience might be more of the vibe, possibly just given who tends to. Who I tend to appeal to, I guess I would say. But my vision for this is, you know, on YouTube there's a lot of mental health practitioners out there that do like commentary and also educational videos for their followers. And I was like, you know, I might do more of that from a trauma informed perspective, but like focusing more on the communication side. And the reason I've really been focusing on this right now is because I started a series on there called for. It's, ooh, what did I call the playlist. Basically it's a series for late diagnosed neurodivergence. Because I keep seeing online there's, you know, not a whole lot of good information for late diagnosed neurodivergence. And I have my own little Venn diagram kind of model of how I think of neurodivergent affirming care. It's on my website under. I put it all under the education tab. Now it's under Free resources. You could totally go and download that Venn diagram which essentially looks at, you know, the self awareness and self acceptance that neurodivergence really need. At least if we're looking at increasing resiliency and then also the awareness of social things and of the society we live in essentially, you know, I think that's the bigger piece that often doesn't get addressed because it gets a lot stickier and more uncomfortable when we start talking about societal adversity and social oppression and that kind of stuff that always gets sticky and hard and it's tough to hear about. But I do think that's a really important piece, especially for at least for myself as in the United States, you know, if you're raised in like the white middle to upper class box in the United States, we don't really learn much about what it means to be marginalized in society and especially for late diagnosed neurodivergent. I mean, as soon as you, you know, realize that you are, your brain is different and that's why life has been more of a struggle. Like, yeah, you've just walked into essentially what it feels like to begin realizing essentially that you've probably faced some marginalization, some oppression, some discrimination, bias, stigma, that kind of stuff. So I'm going to be filming and wrapping up the self side of the Venn diagram. I've already done a video on like what regulation is and just, you know, informal sensory profiles in terms of thinking of likes and dislikes and how we manage our energy throughout our day, how to kind of conceptualize how we manage our energy. Just today I put out one on executive functions, executive skills, so cognitive functions for us all. And so if that interests you, I will link the playlist in the show notes below. But do go ahead and take a look at it. And part of my reasoning for putting this out here is because, well, I'm sure as most of the world now knows, the current situation in the States is not looking very good for, you know, health care and things, particularly access to socialized health care, Medicaid and Medicare and that kind of stuff. So I want to provide more of this content out there for free for access to people who need it. That's my intention with doing it on YouTube. Now if you're out there and you would really like to support me, I have some really awesome free ways to do it. One way would be head on over to my YouTube channel and just subscribe. Honestly, just click that subscribe button. Whether you watch my videos or not, that actually does make a difference. It's a slightly different vibe over there. So if it's not your cup of tea, that's totally fair and fine. You don't have to listen, you don't have to play the videos at all actually, honestly. But if you do want to play them just on mute if it's not your vibe, that's great, honestly, go, go right ahead. Also, if you have any ideas for topics for me to cover over there for like, general public. And also if you have any questions or any suggestions, honestly, for improving content, even if it comes down to the editing, that's essentially what I've been taking the last few months to figure out is video editing. Because, good lord, it is time consuming when you're trying to learn how to edit videos and make them, like, at least quality enough that people will hopefully want to watch them is sort of my goal here. You know, honestly, you guys, here's the deal. I don't necessarily want to be an influencer, honestly. I'm more of an anti influencer in that sense. I just want to be someone who hopefully is putting out good quality educational content and also bringing up discussions that are hard. Just ripping the band aid off and talking about stuff that's hard to talk about. That's kind of. That's been my vibe my whole life. So I figure, why not do it out here on the Internet for the whole world to access, I guess. And so I don't really have a whole lot of interest in, like, as an SLP. I know fellow SLPs out there, fellow speech pathologist, speech therapist out there. You probably know there's lots of us influencers out there. I'm not that great at Instagram. I'm probably not going to be that big on Instagram. Okay. I'm not that great at it. And I don't want to make like constant infographics and I don't want to have people, like, come to a free training where I just like, want to sell you materials and so you don't really learn anything, you know? Right. It's like all just an advertisement for the materials so you'll, you'll buy them. That's not really my vibe. Honestly. It's not my vibe and it would take so much effort for me to do that because it's not my vibe, it's not my thing. I have no interest in that. And why force myself into some little influencer box that I just don't fit? So now that I've got a little more of a swing of things over on YouTube, now that I'm able to like, produce videos relatively regularly there, I'm. I want to swing back over to this podcast and instead of like turning videos into podcast episodes here, which I have done, I did that for a little bit, you guys probably noticed. And honestly, I wasn't super happy with that that wasn't the best, you know, I don't know, it's just not quite the same. Right. Like things don't really generalize that way. The thing about a podcast is you can keep it a lot more focused on professionals, on like teachers and other service providers and speech language pathologists. I can keep this a lot more focused there. Right. So what I want to hopefully do is to use this podcast to start doing more interviews, you know, talking about tough stuff, talking about systemic things, talking about organizational struggles and, and you know, people's struggles with burnout and stuff like that. Right. Getting a little more into the nitty gritty with some of that. Basically keeping things that kind of this meta, like the stuff that we struggle with that we don't learn about and that there is research for it. But it's not like, it's not like field specific. It's more like human stuff. Right. It's like research in the human realm of just what humans go through. So just talking about what it's like to be human, you know, just. Just chatting about what it's like to be a human is kind of what I'm thinking going forward for this. And I'm still definitely doing trainings. So if you're in an organization that would like any focused training, let me know. I would definitely love to come or to do online trainings. Would love that. But yeah, that's my plan going forward. And I know it's been a little bit since I've come on here and really just talked to you guys, so I just wanted to give you that update. Oh, also feel free, go ahead and check out my website. Under the education content, I'd have a few free handouts. And one of them is like the first little part of what I'm going to be talking about here. But then I'm also going to go a little deeper into a second handout I've been working on. So you can also let me know if you want that handout. That'd be great. You could send me an email, whatever. Be like, hey, yeah, second handout. That would be amazing. Just on the pillars of Trauma Informed care. So let's go ahead and get into that.
[00:08:57] If you've been to any trauma informed 101 or any intro to trauma informed Care or using Trauma Informed care with this population or that population with like swallow or pediatric or autistics or whoever. Okay. Any place you've gone to a training on that, you've probably heard people bring up these six. Well, they might say five, but five or six core principles of trauma informed care. Technically there are six, but in the really big tip 57, 1, I don't think think the sixth one, the cultural, historical and gender issues, was officially a principal there. I think they made it a principal a little later, or maybe it was in the 2014, but not in the 2012. I can't quite recall right now. I probably should have looked that up. But anyway, effectively, like the people who came up with Trauma informed care as a model, as a paradigm, they had five core principles for a while and then they added on the sixth one because I mean, to be fair, they kind of felt like it went without saying that yes, you do need to know about like social oppression and stuff and gender issues and cultural and historical issues among certain groups. Because like if you don't know that stuff, you're at a very high risk of unintentionally traumatizing or re traumatizing people you are trying to help by, you know, mimicking a microaggression you're unaware of or something like that. Right. But you know, as I believe current events have shown us, we do need to be a lot more explicit with telling people, yes, this is important stuff to know and it's important to learn about in order to be trauma informed. So we have the six core principles now and these six core principles, here they are. Okay, I'm just gonna walk you through them. Here we go. So first one is choice, which is essentially including clients, students, patients, whichever, whatever you call the population you work with, you want to include them in their treatment plans, right? So giving them choice, right? Giving them a choice of the matter, giving them some level of autonomy and some, some matter of say around what happens to them and like what kind of help they're going to be receiving from you. The second one is trustworthiness. So this is ensuring that the client, slash student understands the treatment and that you are able to follow through with the promises you make, right? Or the team itself is able to follow through with any kind of promises that are made. You got to prove that you're trustworthy. Then there's safety, which is taking into account the client or students physical, psychological and emotional safety, such that when they are in your treatment room or at your organization, if it is like a medical organization, doctor's office, school, wherever they are, you want them to feel safe.
[00:11:41] The fourth one is empowerment. So this means taking a strength based approach and encouraging things like self advocacy.
[00:11:50] It kind of falls out of choice, right? Like once people understand what their choices are, they're empowered. They are given skills and they have a choice now they're empowered to follow through on the choices they make, right? They can advocate for themselves. The fifth one is collaboration. So this is communication and consistency between staff, maybe between other service providers, between the families and between the clients, slash, students themselves, right? Making sure everybody's on the team and everybody's chatting and is aware of what's going on at all times, ideally. And then like I said, the sixth one is the cultural, historical and gender issues. So this is really making a effort or how do I want to say this? So the six pillar, like, if you really want to practice that sixth principle, you have to dedicate yourself to continuing education, ongoing continuing education in diversity, equity, inclusion and cultural humility and everything that that entails, right? So it's this ongoing process of unlearning implicit biases you might have inherited and learning how to deconstruct those biases and then, you know, shifting your perspective so that you can act on more trauma, inform values, right?
[00:13:05] Now here's the thing about this. I don't know about you, but listen, if I'm actually at a job, right, If I'm working in a school, if I'm working with students, if I'm working with clients, whether I'm at a private practice or not, I already have a lot of stuff going on in my head during any kind of therapy session or like meeting, like any sort of treatment meeting or anything like that. Like individualized education plans here in the United States, IEP meetings for special education and things like that, right? Like, I got. I got a lot I'm focusing on, right? Like, I have my theoretical knowledge from like graduate school and from ongoing study. I have my evidence base from that theoretical knowledge. I have my own, like, past history with people that's also part of evidence based. I'm sitting there thinking about, like, what kind of feedback do I need to give? What's the timing on this feedback? How many prompts have I given, right? Like, I'm keeping track of my data and counting out my little expectant delay time for processing needs or for responding on that AC system, right?
[00:14:03] So yeah, there's like pretty.
[00:14:06] There's a lot going on there, right? And then of course, on top of that, if you're in a school, you can be interrupted at any time with anybody knocking on your door to be like, I just wanted to let you know, blah, blah, blah, real quick, right? So you have this little shifting attention thing going on. Like so many things could be going on, right? Because I have so much going on in my head. Six different like principles. Do I keep those in my head 100% of the time at all times? No, I do not.
[00:14:31] You know, I've got enough. My working memory is full. I'm good. I've got enough going on in there. Okay. My little, my little mental capacity is done. So what I have done and the reason my whole like little business motto is promoting safety and empowerment for all is I've essentially compressed these six principles down to what I personally feel are the two most critical ones, the ones that I feel like at least for my type of work, for service provider, for teacher type work. These are the two, I think that the other principles kind of fall out of. Does that make sense or make up essentially these two core ones, which is safety and empowerment?
[00:15:08] Really quickly, I just wanted to go on this caveat though, really quickly that if you're not someone who spends a lot of time in this power differential sitting with a client or students or patients and like talking to them or educating them, like you're not spending this extended period of time with them, like, say maybe you are more administrative staff, maybe you do more of the scheduling.
[00:15:31] Maybe safety and empowerment aren't the two core principles for those type of positions. Right. Trauma informed care was developed for everybody. It was developed for organizations ideally. It was developed for like anyone who works at a trauma informed organization to be trained in this area so that there could be consistency and trustworthiness and collaboration across everywhere that people go in that practice. Right. With that said, depending on the role you're playing, right? If you're more of administrative role, if you're front desk staff, wherever you're working, maybe instead of like empowerment, safety is still very important. I think safety is like the pillar upon which it's all built. Quite frankly, I feel like that's the one. If you're going to focus on one, it's going to be safety, in my opinion. But maybe empowerment isn't the second most important one. If you're not working on communication skills, if you have a different focus there, right, like maybe then your second one would be the collaboration. Maybe it would be the trustworthiness, right. Maybe it'd be the choice part. Depending on where you are on that staff, like what kind of job you're, you're bringing to, to the forefront. So just wanted to say that I say safety and empowerment for like, honestly, I think service professions where we do a lot of interaction with clients or patients or students, if we're the ones who are mainly Doing a lot of the educating. Right. We're educating them on it. We're providing strategies and skills and doing that kind of stuff. And there's a little bit of that power differential because we're still like the professional they're coming to for the service. Right. So essentially, if you're the kind of person who feels this, if you feel the weight of the responsibility of having this person under your care, then yeah, I think safety and empowerment are probably the two really big ones to focus on.
[00:17:09] What I'm going to focus the most on right now is safety, because this really is the pillar. Okay. Safety is the biggest one in terms of being trauma informed. I think this is like the foundation. This is really the cornerstone, in my opinion. Here's the deal, the sixth one, the cultural, historical and gender issues, that one folds into all of them. That stuff is so critical to learn about and to understand that, like you just, just. That's not skippable. That's just. Yeah. Like, if you don't know about that stuff, you can't have safety, therefore you can't have the big cornerstone, the big foundation, therefore the whole thing crumbles. Yeah. That gets unfolded in that when it comes to trustworthiness and collaboration. Right. The trustworthiness of following through with your promises, the collaboration, like the consistency across people in the organization, those two things, I feel are also very critical for safety. Right.
[00:17:58] 100% critical. I mean, if you think about it, if you think about it, if you're around someone you don't really trust, do you really feel safe with them? Right. Is that someone you would spend a lot of time around or is that just kind of like a. Okay, I guess I'll just like smile a nod and kind of get through my interaction here and just move on. And same thing with consistency in terms of collaboration across staff. You know, like at the high school I worked at, for example, there were plenty of staff there where, like, students didn't feel safe with those staff because maybe they weren't as trustworthy and they didn't really vibe with the. The culture of some of the other, you know, teachers and service providers. And so they flocked to those of us who they did feel safe with right now. For choice, for autonomy, essentially, for feeling like clients or yourself as a patient, if you think of yourself as a patient, because we all are at some point in our lives. If you feel like you don't really have a choice, if you feel like they don't really care about your input, like you don't really feel empowered to tell them anything. Right. It's like, why am I gonna bother?
[00:18:57] Empowerment also involves collaboration in the sense of making sure that the student or patient or client has the information they need. Right. In order to make those choices, they have to. You have to make sure you're giving them all the options, all the right information. Right. So that also goes under empowerment. And like I said, that sixth principle, the DEI principle, essentially, that really is more of a core foundation of being trauma informed, period.
[00:19:25] You really cannot develop any of those five principles without cultural humility and some kind of active commitment to justice and equity and understanding diversity and inclusion and all of that. Our approaches, our values, our beliefs, our behaviors, they have to be consistent with that. Yeah. This is because it's really a fact that a lot of marginalized people have to go through their day navigating unsafe environments and unsafe people.
[00:19:53] Right? They have to navigate explicit stigma and discrimination, but they also have to navigate all the implicit stuff, right? All the little snide remarks and the stares and being followed in stores or whatever it may be, they have to navigate that stuff. That stuff becomes just a part of any marginalized person's day. That's kind of the. At the core of being marginalized is having to deal with this constant feeling of being under a microscope, being watched, being unsafe out in society in general, if we don't start to cultivate a habit of continuing to educate ourselves on, you know, adversity that certain groups face and deconstructing that inherited biases, particularly the implicit ones, the ones we're not that consciously aware of because that's the water we're swimming in. Right. It's this like, constant hierarchical, who's better than the other person kind of society, especially in the United States. Right.
[00:20:51] So we have to deconstruct that stuff or else we really can't really call ourselves trauma informed because we're likely going to be unintentionally creating that systemic trauma or the re. Traumatization for the very people that we're really trying to help. Right. And the thing about unlearning these implicit biases is that it really has to be a consistent habit. We all have blind spots. One single person's not going to know all the, like, you know, offensive terms for literally every group out there in the world, Right. We're not going to know, like, all of them per se, I guess, unless it's like your special interest or you're. You're a PhD student studying this stuff, Maybe you will. But like, most of us aren't Going to know all of them all the time. Okay. And so if we're not a part of certain groups, we don't really know all the adversity they face. Right? That's just a natural limitation of being an individual in the world. So it does have to be just a habit because we will be continually confronted with things we just weren't aware of.
[00:21:51] And we just have to learn how to calm ourselves and, you know, process through that and, and change our perspective, allow it to change us. Right. And it does get easier with time, but it is a tricky little habit to get it first.
[00:22:09] Now let's focus on safety a bit at this core. Let's really focus on this because this really is the core, the foundation, the whole shebang, really, of being trauma informed. Okay? Okay. The reason safety is so important is because humans are communal animals. We form communities with each other and that develops us some level of safety to allow us to thrive. Right. We have archeological evidence of communal living that's around 2, 6 to 1.8 million years old. Okay. So that's like before Homo sapiens showed up. Okay. It is that core to who we are, the, the community. It's such an essential thing for humans to have. So there are three core areas to consider when we're considering safety, which is the physical safety, it's kind of a more concrete one, right. Being free and present from any sort of threats or danger to our physical body. Our psychological safety, which is feeling safe and protected from threats, and emotional safety, which is feeling safe to be yourself, express your emotions, express your needs, needs. Feeling accepted, feeling loved, all of that stuff comes that, that allows us to feel emotionally safe with someone, right? So now as a clinician, when I'm working with a student or a client, let's say I'm working with someone who gets very aggressive when they have meltdowns and they start to throw things or hit people or kick when it's like that. My trauma informed way of looking at it is physical safety always comes first. That is always the priority. And physical safety is a priority for everyone, right? Not just for the kid having the belt down. It is a priority for all the other students in the classroom, all the other staff that are present. It needs to be the priority for all of that. Anytime there's a threat to physical safety, you're pretty much guaranteed to go into some sort of survival mode, right? And we know survival modes without unpacking and regaining a sense of safety, that's what tends to lead to trauma responses, right?
[00:24:11] So anytime you have Your physical safety violated, you are gonna be sent into a survival mode. That's just how that goes. And if you don't have a sense of physical safety, you are really not gonna gain that emotional psychological safety either. Physical safety comes first before we can feel safe in those other areas.
[00:24:27] Quite frankly, if you're in the presence of a threat, you're not gonna feel very empowered to advocate for yourself. You're just gonna be going into fight, flight or freeze, right? Like you're just gonna be, you might be fighting, but that's not necessarily like empowering advocacy. Right? It's, it's just, you're, you're just surviving the situation.
[00:24:43] So we really want physical safety to be at the core. Cuz once you're in a survival mode, the main thing you will be learning. But the main thing you're learning is how to survive. That's pretty much it. Second the brain goes into survival mode, all the learning done is around how did, how am I going to survive this? And then all the reinforcing of how I did survive it. That's what we learn. And I remember this being a question now, back when I took a graduate course on trauma informed care, that was for social workers, but I represented speech pathology. Woohoo. Speech pathologist, taken that course. I remember there being a question of like, oh, you know, what about if people are giving cpr, for example, if they're first responder giving CPR and they're cracking somebody's ribs, is that trauma informed or not? Right. And here's how I thought about it, okay? Breaking the ribs during CPR is trauma informed because the reason you're doing CPR is that person's heart has stopped, their heart is no longer beating, they are no longer breathing. If you can't get that heart to restart and you can't give them oxygen, they are now no longer going to be alive on this earth. Right. So while cracking ribs during CPR is technically causing physical harm, it is physical harm that can be mitigated and dealt with after hopefully their heart restarts. Right. Does that make sense? And same thing with like emergency room. What if somebody's unconscious and they get pulled into the emergency room and they get rushed to emergency surgery? They didn't have a chance to advocate or have a choice in the matter. Nobody woke them up or waited for them to become conscious in order to do that surgery. Well, it was a threat to their physical safety, Right? It was a threat to their life. So doing that emergency surgery to maintain their life. Yes, that is physical safety. At its very core, right?
[00:26:25] So that's why physical safety, in my mind, that is so important. It's critical for survival. This is also another thing about hygiene as well. When it comes to like changing diapers or ensuring someone, maybe, maybe an autistic out there who really doesn't like, you know, wiping or getting a bath or a shower, maybe they really hate it. But look, hygiene is really important. If you've ever worked in a hospital, you know, skin integrity and hygiene are very critical because the chance of infection is really high. If you aren't cleaning certain areas of our body, chance of infection, chance of open sores, this stuff all just can. Can really spiral into a really bad medical situation. Really. That is physical safety. Hygiene is physical safety, right? Making sure somebody can eat safely is physical safety. So that's why physical safety, first thing I think of as a clinician, make sure everybody feels physically safe, right? In any space I'm treating. And if there's a meltdown happening, we have to ensure the physical safety of.
[00:27:25] We have to have a plan in place. We have to figure out a way to make sure everybody stays safe, as safe as possible in that situation.
[00:27:35] Now, when we get to psychological and emotional safety, why are those big deals, especially as kids, right? How often as kids do we not feel very, like, safe to just say whatever we want or to feel however we feel?
[00:27:46] You know, that happens a lot, especially when we're little kids and such. Right. But the truth is that psychological and emotional safety are both really intertwined with, with our concept of physical safety when it comes to being in community with others. Okay. So when we feel like someone, like our emotional state doesn't matter to someone or doesn't matter to the larger community, that kind of translates in our brain as, I'm not so sure these people are going to keep me safe. If, you know, the lion or something is starting to come into our settlement, you know, thinking of like way back in the day, okay. We're thinking ancient, like pre agricultural times, okay.
[00:28:26] If people aren't, you know, if they seem to not really take your thoughts into consideration or take your emotions into consideration ever in that kind of like tribal, small community kind of environment, you don't know, like, are you going to be the person they throw to the wolves or are you going to be someone they. They save from the wolves, Right. So it really is really intertwined with that sense of physical safety. However, the big issue here is that ensuring that psychological, emotional safety, this is where everything gets really tricky because so many of us have these Histories have these experience experiences where our psychological and or emotional safety gets violated by like the words people say to us or passive aggressiveness, some sort of subconscious action that somebody else took and it told you that they were implicitly biased toward the group that you belong to. Right. Or maybe you worked for a really micromanagy boss who like, you know, just constantly was. Was on you and really criticizing constantly. And it's like that you're not going to feel very safe under that. Right. Like, you don't feel like you're free to with your boss, how you're feeling and like advocate for mental health breaks from work or something. Like you're not gonna feel safe to do that. Right. So we all have that. This is where the safety gets really, really sticky. This is where it gets really complicated. And this is why I still say it is really the like, core foundation, because this is also where the cultural awareness, the dei, the cultural humility definitely comes in because psychological and emotional safety is what gets violated the most in those situations.
[00:29:57] Oh. In order to ensure some level of emotional, psychological safety, yes. We have to, you know, have that cultural awareness and humility. We have to take the strengths based approach. We have to do those sort of things. But the other thing, I think as a service provider, the other really critical part I think is having the tools and being very willing to apologize when we get things wrong, to do some kind of relationship repair, share with our clients or students. Right. If we do happen to break a promise, we have to apologize for that. Right. We have to realize that that apology doesn't mean they automatically trust us again. We have to realize that regaining their trust takes time. Even if we're talking like preschoolers. Preschoolers will forgive and forget a lot more readily than adults will, but it's still going to take a little time. You're going to have to, like, follow through with like three promises to make up for the one that was broken. Broken. For example, this might seem like a really small thing to someone out there, but this was a big deal to the student. And so this was something I'd apologize for. I had a student at the high school for whom my sessions were like, highlight of the week. The student constantly asked, when are you seeing me this week? When are you seeing me this week? Right. And would like really remember when I said I was seeing them this that week and there was a week where it's like, I'm taking you this afternoon. We're gonna hang out like, yep, your session is this afternoon, 100%.
[00:31:16] And then a Tornado warning happened. So I was stuck in a completely opposite side of the building for the tornado warning. And by the time the warning was over, I had like 10 minutes left in the day, so no time to see that student. So on my to do list before I left at the end of the day, at the top of my to do list for the very next morning, I said, find, you know, the student, find so and so and apologize for not being able to see them yesterday because of the tornado warning and rearrange my schedule so that I could see them that day to make up for that, that broken promise. And everyone might see that as a small thing, but that was a big deal to the student because this student had a long history of having their safety violated by adults. So it was actually a very important thing for me to apologize for breaking that promise. That was a big piece of trust, and it was a really critical part of maintaining that student feeling psychologically and emotionally safe with me.
[00:32:17] That's the reason why you hear me talk about safety so much and empowerment. Empowerment, especially from a communication standpoint, you know, speech language pathologist, empowerment's kind of our jam, right? We love advocacy. Yeah. We want our students, our clients, our patients to be able to advocate for themselves. 100. Because communication is a huge part of advocacy. See, Right? So like I said, maybe empowerment's not the top pillar for what you happen to do. Perhaps. But, you know, for all of us, I think focusing on that physical, emotional, and psychological safety is really enough to really propel our trauma informed practice a lot more forward, you know, to go deeper with our practice of being trauma informed and to help us, you know, continue along our journey toward that maybe just as a one way to deepen your trauma informed practice for this next week or so, just. Just keep thinking and noticing places where you feel safe. Notice and think about what people say or do that helps you to feel safe and then use those things as models, right? Within reason, taking into consideration that maybe not everybody wants that, right? Like, maybe you really like a hug to feel safe, but not everybody's gonna wanna hug, right? So we wanna definitely, you know, honor people's bodily autonomy, honor their needs. But maybe just notice, or maybe even if you're just watching like a Netflix show show, right? Be like, wow, that person did a really great apology in that show. That was a really effective repair of that relationship. As rare as it is to see in some sort of fictional show, right? Because oftentimes miscommunications and communication breakdowns are like one of the biggest plot devices used. But maybe you see it sometimes. Maybe you'll see like a really good, a really well written, like relationship repair type of situation and be like, wow, what a great example of maintaining that, that psychological and emotional safety right there, you know? Right. Maybe. Hopefully that helps a little bit. And it is tough right now. Everyone, please do your best to take care of yourselves, reach out to people.
[00:34:13] Community is the way we get through these times, honestly. Let's build safer communities for each other. Let's look after each other a lot more. Let's really take into consideration our. All of our safety as much as we can, as much as within our power. And I hope you all have an improving at least next couple of weeks. And yeah, go check out my YouTube, like comment, subscribe, do that kind of stuff and send me ideas also and let me know what you think about this particular podcast becoming a little bit more of a. Let's go for that deeper discussion of things that are just tough. You know, let's get into it. Let's get into the messy and just unpack some of that mess. Yes. Maybe we'll all feel a little less alone if we do that. Maybe we can build a slightly safer community amongst each other. That would be lovely. All right, I hope you guys have a great week or two, wherever you are.
[00:35:08] I feel like there was a way I used to sign off on this audio only stuff and maybe I didn't. Maybe I just said until next time. All right, bye, guys.
[00:35:20] Sam.
