Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello everyone. I am Kim Neely, and this is the Trauma Informed s l p. This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment. I can't say empowerment today. What the heck? And empowerment. And to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves. That is right. Okay. All right. So as long as my brain hangs in there and I'm able to pronounce words today, blur, uh, my, my mouth is not working super great. The connection from brain to mouth is not, uh, totally on point today. So I apologize if I trip over my words a little bit and if I trip over them to such an extent that I can't fix it in editing, I definitely apologize for that. But today we are talking about systemic social issues and becoming trauma sensitive per the Missouri model of trauma informed care. So if you remember, trauma sensitive is having some understanding of systemic policies and procedures in place that either help to mitigate the effects of trauma or unfortunately, uh, not propagate, what is it called?
Speaker 0 00:01:24 Or not really promote either, but essentially things that reinforce trauma. There we go. We'll just say, reinforce things that either mitigate or reinforce trauma in groups of people. Cuz we're talking systemic, right? We're talking organizational policies and procedures. We're talking, talking societal policies and procedures. We're talking governmental policies and procedures. We're talking the whole shebang here when it comes to really big picture, high level kind of somewhat abstract stuff, I guess somewhat abstract in the sense that it's not about an individual right now we're talking about the system. We're talking about groups, we're talking about like a net cumulative effect of things, right? So that is what we're talking about today. And this is not a topic I see very many trauma informed people hit on. And if they do touch on it, they don't stay on it for very long. And I think that's because it's an uncomfortable topic and it's a difficult topic, which is why I posted the regulation episode before this.
Speaker 0 00:02:33 So if you feel that you are starting to feel too tense, too stressed, too angry, too, uh, sad, whatever it is, if you're starting to become overwhelmed with some kind of discomfort from these topics, please do check out that episode and check out some strategies to help you cope with that because it's not trauma informed. If you're not treating yourself well, if you're just, um, trying to push through stress and discomfort, that's not very trauma inform right now for you. Okay? So I want you to be trauma-informed for yourself. If you feel yourself being triggered, if you feel yourself getting angry, whatever it is, I want you to pause this episode and I want you to go and figure out what you can do for yourself to help your body calm and to help process that emotion. Okay?
Speaker 0 00:03:23 So the reason I do wanna hit on this topic is because this is, I think, the really big piece that's missing a lot of the time when it comes to really considering ourselves trauma informed and also the big piece that we're missing in terms of how do we take in and integrate and apply cultural competency and cultural humility and intersectionality and all these things and like pronouns and genders and queer and whatever into our professional practice, right? There can be so much out there and the world is changing so fast, cuz now one good thing about the internet is everybody has a way to get their voice heard. So you have autistics out there advocating for what worked for them and what didn't work for them, right? You have adult autistics looking at young autistics and saying, please don't do this to them. That is traumatizing.
Speaker 0 00:04:16 It was traumatizing for us. I don't wanna see it happen to them, right? This is not something that the world had back, you know, in the early 20th century in the time of like lobotomies, right? It took decades, decades, decades for those kind of institutions and those kind of treatments to, to work their way out, right? Not that some people weren't horrified from them from, from the beginning, but that, you know, we didn't really hear from the people who went through it very much. Not unless somebody really sought out their voice, right? But now we've got social media, we've got the internet, we've got a huge influx of information that allows certain minority groups to have a voice and to get heard. We have hashtags where people can trend it, and it starts to get into the mainstream media and mainstream news. And like we have the Me Too movement, right?
Speaker 0 00:05:13 That happened with Hollywood and with all the sexual harassment that can happen there, and not a surprise to anyone in performance that like, not a surprise at all that that stuff happened at all. But what was surprising to me was the, uh, how big the message became and the fact that everybody started knowing about it and started hearing about it. And yes, people developed opinions about it and they were strong opinions against and strong opinions for, and people had all these different experiences and cancellation issues and da da da. I know we got all that stuff, but it was really kind of gratifying to me with the fact that, you know, people had tried to talk up against this, this kind of behavior for decades. Women and men who went through it had been trying to speak up, but nobody was paying attention until it became a huge hashtag movement.
Speaker 0 00:06:03 And then it became this flood of so many people talking about it and saying, me too, me too, me too. I have this experience too. And that I think is why the message got out there because we actually have some way to hear about this stuff, right? And it can be overwhelming. It can be a huge flood of new information, and it gives you these new insights into this dark underbelly of the world we live in, right? Like, suddenly you feel like your life has become a Martin Scorsese movie because you weren't aware of those things happening. You know, like maybe you weren't in a position where me too would ever happen to you. Um, maybe you're a cis male and you just have never had that occur. And so you were blind to it and you didn't re you knew about it, you knew it existed, but you didn't know the scale.
Speaker 0 00:06:50 You didn't know the magnitude of the problem, right? And so it can become so overwhelming and so difficult. And when we're going into our professional settings and we're trying to do our best for our clients, how do we make the clients safe if we accidentally slip up and we say something or we do something that maybe is kind of a microaggression toward that person's minority group, you know what I mean? And it can be so hard and it can be so easy to accidentally slip up because there's so many things out there. So I think we're all just getting flooded with a ton of information. We are already dealing with so many things professionally that it's like, oh, here's another cultural thing I have to consider. Oh my gosh, when am I gonna have time to ever consider that stuff? Right? But trauma-informed care can become this big umbrella for you to put that under because trauma doesn't just affect individual people.
Speaker 0 00:07:45 Trauma affects society. And historically speaking, humans have a very long, long, long history of being really awful to each other. You know, at a pretty large scale we've got from the dawn of humanity, that's a little wink and nudge, nudge to like history professors. But essentially, you know, history is full of this tribe took over that tribe, or these people became enslaved to these people, or this, this group colonized this group and oppressed them and eradicated their culture and forced them to integrate into the, the major, the colonizer culture, right? Like history's full of it. Um, and it's horrible <laugh>. And guess what? All that horribleness that we've done to each other over history has been traumatic, has created a ongoing continuous cycle of trauma at the individual level, but also at the societal level. And we have to start building more awareness of what that means when we talk about group traumas and historical traumas and gener, which are also known as generational traumas and things like that. And what does that mean for the dosing of trauma for someone if they're part of a group that is just constantly going through some level of group historical generational trauma, right? Okay.
Speaker 0 00:09:16 So I kind of lied last, uh, episode bef two episodes ago when I talked about the types of trauma. I said that we pretty much covered them. I was wrong. We do need to cover a couple more types of trauma, which are, which are super critical when it comes to becoming trauma informed. So we've gotta talk about historical trauma and we gotta talk about system oriented traumas. Historical trauma, which is known as generational trauma. This is the definition from the tip 57 handy dandy. Tip 57 historical trauma refers to events that are so widespread as to affect an entire culture. These events also have effects that are intense enough to influence generations of the culture well beyond those who experience them directly. Okay? So some critical examples of that would be enslavement, the Holocaust, uh, relocation of indigenous people, eradicating cultures of indigenous people. Like these are all situations where the initial generation that's experiencing this, it is clearly very traumatic.
Speaker 0 00:10:24 The things that are going on in the Middle East right now with Iran and Afghanistan, traumatic, very, very traumatic, very hard for me to hear about, um, on the news. It's, it's very dysregulating to me because it makes me very upset. And really, honestly, in general oppression and adjustments, injustice just makes me very angry. So when I hear about it at a wide scale, it just makes me so incredibly angry that I get very dysregulated. So, uh, anyway, historical and generational trauma, those big events, those are those big historical events that happen to groups of people that affect the entire culture going from that, okay? And system oriented traumas, system oriented traumas are things that come from healthcare systems, law systems, systems of government, system oriented traumas or things that happen because the societal system that's been put into place, a healthcare system for example, or the education system, it's been built around this kind of hierarchical, some group is the group of power and is the example you should meet.
Speaker 0 00:11:33 And everybody else, if you don't meet that example, hmm, oh well, you just don't deserve good things, right? Like it becomes this kind of thing, right? So, um, systems just because they naturally come out of societies that have bias and that have oppression and that have a history of historical traumas and generational traumas amongst people, systems can be unknowingly set up to re-traumatize people just based off of the policies that they set or the way they treat people. Okay? There can be some kind of in inequity, some kind of inequality in how they treat certain groups of people based off of their policies, okay? And that's what we mean by like cultural humility and like cultural. This is sort of going into that cultural competency, world, cultural humility, all of that stuff where it's like sometimes the policy you set or sometimes the thing you say comes off in a completely different way if someone's from a different culture, right?
Speaker 0 00:12:31 And we know that and we know that about like bilinguals and the importance of understanding like home language and this kind of stuff. This is where that starts to overlap with trauma-informed care. Okay? Because re-traumatization can happen due to just the way an educational or health system is set up and the policies and procedures people adhere to, right? And re-traumatization is when the clients experience something that makes them feel as though they're undergoing another trauma, right? So from the tips of 57, it says, unfortunately treatment settings and clinicians can create re-traumatizing experiences often without being aware of it. And sometimes clients themselves are not consciously aware that a clinical situation has actually triggered a traumatic stress reaction continuing from the tip 57 remaining sensitive to the histories and needs of individuals who have undergone past trauma are likely to have more success in providing care, retaining clients and achieving positive outcomes, right?
Speaker 0 00:13:33 And an example of this is actually when I was just at Asha, I was speaking with, I went to, uh, a technical talk from a voice group and I was speaking with a graduate student, a current graduate student who wants to specialize in voice. And she said she had a transistor who's older, an adult transistor who recently came out and is in the process of transitioning. And this sister was discouraged by the trans community online from going to voice feminization therapy. There were a lot of people in the online space who were saying voice therapy is really traumatic. It's not culturally informed. They really don't understand, don't go to it. It's, it's, it's more, it does more harm than good, right? Kind of heartbreaking to hear as someone who's done trans therapy myself, trans voice therapy myself. But I understand, I get it cuz yeah, like if you're not aware of the potential hidden biases that sink in to how we think and feel about gender and femininity and identity and all this stuff, then I guarantee you those therapists that those people went to did not think they were actually retraumatizing them, but they accidentally were.
Speaker 0 00:14:46 Cuz they just, there were some nuances there, there was a complexity there that they were unaware of. Okay? So this is why it's so important for us to start having this kind of conversation and why it was so lovely. I mean, one of the things that was so gratifying at Asher for me this last time was that there were so many great talks on cultural humid humility and intersectionality and like making safe spaces for queer people, for people of color, for people of different gender identities. Like, it was so wonderful. And I, and I say queer as a queer person myself, by the way. I use queer as like an identity. And so it was just wonderful to see that there were so many people coming outta the woodwork. And there were people talking about cultural sensitivity for neurodivergent culture, which is so awesome that we're talking about that because neurodivergence do have a different culture.
Speaker 0 00:15:36 You put a bunch of neuro divergence in a room and a neurotypical person will probably feel like they don't quite fit in with whatever's happening there because there is kind of a culture that's built around the fact that our brains work different and the way we interact with each other is just different. There's complexities there, there's nuance there that I wouldn't expect a neurotypical to fully understand because I don't fully understand the neurotypical way I try to, but I don't fully get it back when I'm asked a lot. I really tried to get it, but I didn't always fully get it, which is what always made me stick out like a little weird sore thumb. Also, totally side note, I have reclaimed the term weird for myself because it was a slur used against me many times. And at this point I'm like, you know what? I am weird. That's right. I like it. I like the fact that I'm weird. You know, that's, so if you hear me call myself a weirdo or just a weird person, I'm actually doing it like affectionately toward myself. Just so you know. Just sign don't. Okay,
Speaker 0 00:16:33 So this all points to a really great, a couple of great quotes that I've seen. Um, the, I don't know if it's called Reese or Rice, I haven't heard this acronym pronounced r y s e center, uh, in 2016, they had this great, um, visual that came out and on it, the, the quote said, if it's not racially, just it's not trauma informed. And I love that. I just love that quote. If it's not racially, just it's not trauma informed. So stick that in your minds and I'll send, I'll put a link down to where I found that and, um, of course in, in the references to this episode, but there's also another quote that's similar to this as well. But I just, this quote you guys, it like blew my mind when I first heard it and I just have to share it all over the place because I love it so much.
Speaker 0 00:17:28 It was a podcast where Rema minium, who is a mental health professional and advocate for, um, intersectionality and racial understanding and bridging the racial tensions in our country. Uh, SMA minium had this eph, he was a guest on that podcast. And I'll put a link, link, I'll, I'll, it'll be in the references, uh, where I heard it if you wanna listen to it. But this quote, I just, you guys, I put it in all my presentations. I put it on my website. It's such an insightful quote and so critical for understanding, I think, um, trauma <laugh> and it's impacts. So this is the quote from resume minium, trauma deco, contextualized in a person looks like personality trauma, decontextualized in a family looks like family traits and trauma decontextualize in a people looks like culture. I love that quote so much because it gets at the core of the trauma informed care, uh, paradigm, which is what happened to you, right?
Speaker 0 00:18:40 What happened to you? What happened to them? What happened to this group of people, right? What happened to this individual? Because a hundred percent my traumatized self when I was in my twenties or so, or my teens, twenties, early thirties, all that stuff, all that trauma I was carrying around looked like my personality. You know what I mean? I'm sure there are aspects that were still me, that were still part of my other, my current personality, but I've changed because I've healed. You know what I mean? Who I am now feels way more like who I really am. I feel more true to myself because I've healed. I don't have to carry around all those characteristics from my trauma that honestly defined me for a long time. Trauma deco contextually is a family, looks like family traits. I mean, that's the cycle of trauma in families right there, right?
Speaker 0 00:19:34 It looks like a family trait. If one generation traumatizes the younger generation and then that generation grows up and traumatizes their kids and then they traumatize their kids and it keeps going and going and going, that looks like just that family. That's how that family interacts. That's just their trait. That's just how they do, right? That's just how their family is, right? It starts to look like that. And trauma decontextualizing a people looks like culture like that is how impactful trauma is to large groups of people in this world. Facing traumas together as a community is such an important part of rebuilding resiliency and trying to heal and trying to protect ourselves and trying to create safe spaces for ourselves, right? So that trauma, even when it comes to the community building part of that culture, trauma likely is what initiated all of that. You know what I mean?
Speaker 0 00:20:24 Trauma is one of the major driving forces for why people want to create safe communities. The shared trauma of, uh, L G B T Q A people being forced out of homes, being pushed outta their families is why in a lot of major cities, there are queer spaces, there are neighborhoods, community centers, all of these things grew up out of that queer culture developed because people were rejected. And then there's kind of this found family trope thing where it's like your family can be, you can choose your family and, and the people you meet later in life, the people who really accept you and help you feel safe can be your family, right? That's major in queer culture. And a lot of that is because the sheer trauma of that community for a very, very long time, and unfortunately, I know it still does happen to some people, but I think luckily it's starting to decrease.
Speaker 0 00:21:21 Um, it's, it's becoming less frequent, less common, fortunately. But the amount of people in the past, the who got rejected and forced out of families and forced out of towns, forced out of entire cities, forced out of living in that area at all, was huge and monumental, right? So a culture was developed around that, that trauma drove the idea of becoming like the queer people becoming their own community and creating their own safe space, right? So we cannot say that we are trauma informed if we don't have a broader understanding of how cultural society and systemic policies and procedures either propagate or mitigate the effects of trauma. Okay? That's what I love about those quotes. That's the big picture there. All right?
Speaker 0 00:22:19 The thing about historical or generational traumas amongst minority groups, the way to contextualize this a bit is in a trauma informed sense is to think of it in terms of the dosing of trauma. You know, it's that characteristics of trauma. You think about kind of the order of magnitude of the trauma, right? You know, order of magnitude. How like a hundred is one order of magnitude smaller than 1000, right? You just take off a zero, right? So if you're dealing with, if someone's part of a minority group that is dealing with this systemic societal level adversity, um, and a generational adversity, multi-generations of, of just adversity handed to them by society and the way they're treating them, then people within that minority group are born into just having to find a way to live with a really high dose of chronic trauma. You know what I mean? They're going to be highly aware of the messaging in society that says they're not good enough or they're less than, or they're something they should be ashamed of, or they should feel guilty for who they are or whatever it is. Whatever the messaging is, that they're not worthy, right? They're just born into receiving those messages all the time.
Speaker 0 00:23:46 And that is a form of sustained chronic trauma that is a form of just being saturated with the message that something is inherently wrong with you and your people, such that you should feel ashamed for it or such that you shouldn't have the same rights as other people because something is so fundamentally wrong that is chronic trauma that is just constantly sitting in a pool of trauma, right? Just saturating. Okay? So in relation to that, when we think about that, when you think about generational and historical traumas for certain minority populations and the ongoing systemic and societal traumas, like the people with disabilities, for example, go through like we're talking any minority group, any group that doesn't hold the majority power of the particular situation you're talking about, right? Um, so when you're talking racial, you're talking white people have the position of power in the United States, they have the position of privilege and we gotta talk about privilege. We have to talk about that. P we're, I'm sorry, we gotta say it. We gotta talk about privilege. Oh boy. So here we go. Let's just get into that.
Speaker 0 00:25:05 We talked about the adverse childhood experience study, uh, two episodes ago, the ACE study with the C D C Kaiser study there. And you know, that study found there was a graded dose response relationship between ACEs and negative health and wellbeing outcomes, right? So the higher the number of ACEs, the risk for negative outcomes increases, right? And in 2017, Ellis and deets, I'm pretty sure it's deets, came up with a new image where they talked about adverse community environments as a different type of ace and added it to the adverse childhood experiences. And this image is often seen as a tree with, you can see the roots underneath it, you can see the trunk, and then you can see the leaves, right? And the adverse community environments are the roots. Those are the things that essentially you get kinda like born into in the sense of generational traumas.
Speaker 0 00:26:04 Community traumas, like things like discrimination, community disruption, poverty, like chronic poverty, poor housing, quality violence in the community, whatever it is, that's an adverse community environment, right? And it tends to affect minority groups that have gone through some level of impression and generational traumas and displacement or, um, perhaps oppression of culture or something like that, right? That's an adverse community environment. So from birth, and honestly like for the parents prior to birth of that person, they're gonna have to deal with those things. They're, they're gonna be born into that environment. And so their environment is automatically going to provide them a level of dosing of an ace of an adverse community environment. And then on top of that, the same person could have adverse childhood experiences. They could also have all of that like developmental trauma, the retraumatization, the interpersonal traumas, the, the emotional sexual abuse, domestic violence, homelessness, divorce, mental illness, these sort of things that can also happen, okay?
Speaker 0 00:27:10 Within the same person. So when we think about this pair of ACEs, right? When we think about adverse community environments and adverse childhood experiences, then we can start to understand privilege and what we mean by the word privilege, which is a very triggering word. I know you can go on any social media platform and look up hashtag privilege and see a whole lot of fighting <laugh> see a whole lot of negative things said about privilege. It's a very triggering word, but to be trauma informed and to be racially just, and to be truly trauma sensitive in understanding how trauma shapes the culture of people, right? How trauma shapes our cultures, how trauma shapes our systems and our policies. We have to de trigger that word. We have to remain calm when we hear the word privilege. We have to take it as a sign that someone is trying to tell us something about their experience in society that perhaps we don't experience. So it's actually time to listen. When someone says privilege, it's time to listen and think about it and stay in a parasympathetic dominant state so that we can think, so we can listen, we can learn, we can take abstraction, we can analyze and problem solve. Cuz you can't do that when you're triggered and in survival mode. You just can't do all that problem solving. Not to that level, not to that higher perspective taking kind of level, right?
Speaker 0 00:28:46 So when I was preparing for my Asher presentations, I put this in there cuz it was something that really was so critical and so important I think for everybody to learn. But I spent a really long time coming up with some kind of analogy to explain privilege to people in a way that hopefully helps it become more clear and less of a trigger. Because ultimately privilege is what, when someone's talking about privilege, they're talking about systemic level stuff. They're talking about group level stuff. They're not talking about you as an individual, they're talking about systemic group experiences, right? We've moved up an order of magnitude in terms of the size of what we're talking about, the scope of it, right? It's a, it's a much larger scope than a single person when we're talking about privilege. Okay? So here's the analogy I came up with to understand privilege at an individual level, okay?
Speaker 0 00:29:38 Because I think that's where people get triggered by privilege, is they see it as if we start to think of it as just an individual's experience. We've missed the boat, we've missed the point. It's more about the systemic level of adverse community experiences and chronic experiences and chronic traumas experienced by some groups of people that are not experienced by other groups. Okay? That's what privilege is talking about. So it's not necessarily about your individual experience with adversity, okay? But here's how we can kind of shape that. All right? So I came up with a Sisyphus analogy. Sisyphus is that guy in the Greek myth who rolls a boulder uphill for eternity. Like as soon as it gets up to the top, it rolls back down and he goes back and rolls it again. And it's used a lot of times as an analogy for the human experience throughout a lifespan.
Speaker 0 00:30:30 It's just like, you know, constant challenges and constant moving boulders uphill. So I figured it could be used as a pretty good analogy for like the sedation of how much trauma someone who goes through and how much the resiliency might be worn down by that. So what's the dosage of trauma comparing like the types of trauma with the dosage of the trauma, how saturated someone in it and therefore how much the resiliency might be worn down. Okay, so in my slides I put up a little dude who says IFUs, right? And let's say, let's start with socially speaking in the United States, let's start with the most powerful group, which would be like a white, cis heterosexual male, okay? And let's say, you know, maybe this guy is born into a really wealthy family or whatever, he still has a boulder to roll. You know, he still has challenges to overcome, right?
Speaker 0 00:31:25 He still has some adverse experiences might happen. But let's say this white says heterosexual male. Let's just say he grew up in chronic poverty, which is an adverse, uh, community environment and he had emotional neglect and mental illness in the family, right? And so those are part of the extra weight he carries up that hill, right? So that white cis heterosexual male who's carrying the chronic poverty and the emotional neglect and the mental illness up that hill has more weight, has a bigger boulder to carry or to roll than the white cis heterosexual male who maybe was born into a lovely, a loving family, uh, with plenty of financial support and didn't have those, that adversity when they were younger. You know what I mean? Not that they won't have adversity later, but the one who's carrying more ACEs, their resiliency is likely to wear down more because they have a higher dose of trauma.
Speaker 0 00:32:19 Does that make sense? Okay. So now though, if we take that white cis heterosexual male and we look at a white cis heterosexual woman, we could look at a white cis heterosexual woman who has the same number of ACEs as the white cis heterosexual male. But then, then she also has to deal with systemic sex, sexism and misogyny, right? She has to deal with like the mansplaining being talked over in meetings, being looked over for, uh, promotions because she had a baby, you know, she took time off. She wasn't working because she, like, her body had to literally heal and she had to raise a human. You know, you know, and maybe she has to deal with, uh, additional traumas related to not feeling a right to bodily autonomy, not feeling like she can say no when she's on dates, you know, things like that, right?
Speaker 0 00:33:06 So like she has these other ACEs to carry up that hill with her. Now if we compare her load her, her bolder load up that hill with an African-American cis heterosexual woman, now all we've done is we've added on systemic racism in addition to the sexism as soine, right? So the African American cis heterosexual woman has even more. She has a heavier boulder or mo more boulders or whatever it is, however you wanna see it. She's care. She's rolling more up that hill, right? Okay. And the more you add on to a person when it comes to the minority group, the more they're carrying up that hill, right? So you could have a white cis gay male, you know, with like five plus ACEs. You could have an ar, African American SISs gay male who has like, like six ACEs at least because now they also have the racial in addition to the white cis gay male, right?
Speaker 0 00:34:07 And it can go on and on and on. You can add in trans people, you can add in disabled people, right? And the bolders get heavier and heavier. They're carrying more and more up there they are, they're saturating and more and more societal level oppression and discrimination. That means they are just experiencing more and more chronic trauma. You know what I mean? So when you're viewing it through this cultural awareness of these minority groups and the adversity, they might face the chronic adversity. The chronic trauma, the more someone's carrying up that hill, the more their resiliency is likely decreasing and their chronic stress is increasing, right? Cuz that's the relationship there. So if you're not carrying quite as much up the hill, if your boulderer is a bit lighter, you have some privilege. That's what it means. It doesn't mean you're not carrying a boulder, it doesn't mean you don't have any weight to carry.
Speaker 0 00:35:03 It means you have a little less than somebody you have less to carry. You have a privilege of having a little less chronic stress, a little lower dose of chronic trauma. That's what that means, okay? It also means you are more prone to be culturally blind. Meaning, you know, if you're rolling that heavy boulder up the hill, you're just focused on keeping one's foot in front of the other, right? Like you've got a lot going on and especially if you're working at your, your emotional capacity, it's like you're just trying to get through every day. So it's easy to be so focused on your own survival essentially as an individual that you end up being blind to the weight other people are carrying, right? What's going on with those other people? How heavy are their boulders? That's not something we always pay attention to when we are just saturated with, um, with dealing with our own chronic stress, chronic trauma, right?
Speaker 0 00:36:12 Another thing I do wanna mention, which I didn't mention before, is, um, when it comes to this chronic trauma of being in an oppressed group of people is that, you know, especially if it's very visible, meaning it's seen in the color of your skin, for example, this is a lifelong thing. The system doesn't change that quickly. The system doesn't change within a single person's lifetime. So it is a lifelong chronic trauma that they just have to learn to cope with all the time, right? Cuz it comes from that systemic societal level in terms of how we make policies, procedures, laws that are passed or maybe laws that are overturned, do a change in power dynamics at the national political level. Daily microaggressions, right? This implicit bias, all these implicit discriminations that people face that are technically illegal but also very hard to prove if they're happening, right?
Speaker 0 00:37:13 So, you know, this is why the resiliency starts to wear down. This is where you get into that sticky area of they're never going to have that weight lifted, you know, unless there are actually broad sweeping societal systemic changes that actually does improve and lift the weight, right? So being privileged isn't really a bad thing. It doesn't mean you haven't faced adversity. That's not at all what someone is saying when they're saying you have privilege. You might have trauma responses, you might be dealing with P T S D and have a very dysregulated nervous system from your own trauma. But what they're saying if they're saying you're privilege is they're saying you had a slightly lower dose, right? So trauma's not about like who had more, it's not a competition. <laugh> for sure not. But there is a correlation between the dosing of trauma and the wearing down of resiliency in a single individual, in the, a group of people in cultures and communities, right?
Speaker 0 00:38:29 So having privilege in a trauma informed paradigm, if you are someone of a privileged group compared to someone you're working with or a colleague, if you're trauma informed with this privilege, what it means is, okay, if I can stay regulated, I can start to understand what happened to this group of people. So I can take their perspective, right? I can validate their experience, I can amplify their voices by advocating for change, using their voice, using their experiences as examples, quotes, and things like that. And I can help to empower people without the privilege that I have. I can help empower them to advocate for the rights or for access to the privilege that I have. You know what I mean? And ideally what I did on the slide anyway is is like sort of a cheeky, slightly tongue in cheek kind of thing, but I'm also in Colorado, so it did sort of relevant.
Speaker 0 00:39:26 But the idea is if we're trauma informed at the systemic level, then what we can do is promote healing at a broader societal level, right? Which means we're gonna just stick like some climbing harnesses on everybody and rope everybody up together so everybody can carry a much more equal weight up the hill. Like Newtonian physics wise. Maybe this analogy breaks down here, but you know what, just, we're just gonna pretend that doesn't happen. Um, <laugh>, you know, and so the person who's at the top of the hill, like the white, cis, heterosexual male at the top of that hill with like, he's still pushing a boulder, right? He might feel like it's pretty unfair that suddenly has to pull a little bit more weight, right? But he's being asked to do it because the people be with the heavier load further down the hill are struggling so much they don't even think they can get to the top, right?
Speaker 0 00:40:21 So they're crying out for help. Like, please help, help, help, help, help. I'm too exhausted, I'm about to pass out. Like, please help me up this hill. You know? And so what we're asking for is like a little bit of like a rescue to just help us get up there. Um, if you still have some energy left, you know, could you just help us a little bit, right? That's what it's saying. And when you're already dysregulated and you're already dealing with your own personal things, this is what I didn't understand when I was younger, right? When you're already disregulated and you're already dealing with all this personal stuff, maybe you're unaware of systemic stuff you're dealing with. Like, I didn't know I was neuro diversion at the time, although I probably should have guessed it. But, um, you know, not, not being aware of the systemic stuff as much and just taking it all internally and, and only looking at as in as a remark on who you are as an individual, right?
Speaker 0 00:41:11 You're taking it all that messaging of something's wrong with me and I'm, and I'm shameful and this and that, right? And what I didn't understand when I was younger is that when somebody with less privilege than me says, can you please acknowledge your privilege and help us? I was at capacity. I was like, man, I don't know, I'm about to pass out too. Like I can't keep going. My, I gotta take a break. My boulders are too heavy right now. Right? And what that really meant is I needed to do my own healing. I needed to do my own healing so that I could allow for more emotional space and more learning and more growth so that I could start to understand how to better support people and I can start to develop more tools to support other people and to support them more with the weight that they're carrying.
Speaker 0 00:41:58 You know what I mean? Compared to me. So I think a lot of times with the arguments online from a trauma informed perspective, when I look at, you know, people having those horrible arguments about privilege and you're not really privileged and I experience, I don't experience privilege as a white male because I also have adverse stuff going on, you know, and you see that sort of defensiveness that gets flared up. What I see is individuals who have their own trauma that they're carrying and that are at capacity, their, their muscles can't handle more, they can't take more weight, right? They're saying, I don't know what to do with I what, with what I already have, I can't take on more, right? And then the person without their privilege is looking up at them with an even heavier load and saying, seriously, dude, like look at me though.
Speaker 0 00:42:45 Like you, you, I can't give you help. Like look at this, I got way too much. Like I'm way past, you know, maybe your muscles are shaky but my muscles are like way past shaky. You know what I mean? They're about to give or something. So I might be losing the analogy a little bit here, but that's the idea is that, uh, from a trauma-informed perspective, the person with the greater privilege who's a little triggered by it and who feels defensive about it, I'm thinking, okay, I think they've confounded thinking of privilege as an individual thing rather than a systemic thing, right? So the scale of the effect upon which we're talking the scale of how much organizations and policies cater to you versus don't versus do not help and make things a lot harder for you, right? Is different. And so confounding that for an individual experience is very triggering and very difficult.
Speaker 0 00:43:44 And then also I think there's just a lot of people who have not given, been provided the tools to heal and been taught how to process that uncomfortable emotion to allow space for that to heal from their own adversity. You know what I mean? But I think if we all start to become more aware of it and we all start to see it as that and we start to try to parse out, okay, that's individual adversity versus systemic like group level community adversity. If we start to think of things more in those categories, then we might start to understand better how can we promote healing in a group of people? And also how can we promote healing in individuals, right? Cuz the individual healing happens through relationship, individual relationship one-on-one time, regulation, processing, safe spaces, all of that, right? Community healing happens through that as, but also it happens by helping to decrease and hopefully eventually eliminate the barriers that they face that create that chronic trauma state, right?
Speaker 0 00:44:57 Um, and the other thing that this analogy kind of works well for is the idea of pushing for social justice and pushing for equity, right? Um, meaning Accor access to resources for oppressed groups, for minority groups such that they can catch up, right? Cause when you think about it, I don't know how many of you have ever tried to do a hike that's like going up the hill constantly for like a mile or two, but um, I live in the foothills of the Rockies. So all the hikes here pretty much start at the bottom of what effectively is a hill, uh, or at least a good number of them do. And you know, the more you're carrying, the more weight you have, the more exhausted you're gonna get. You need more food, you need more protein for your muscles, you need more water, right? To stay hydrated on your way up there, right?
Speaker 0 00:45:49 So that's the idea of social equity instead of just equality, right? Because yeah, we could equalize the weight, which is amazing, but if their muscles are still incredibly fatigued, meaning if their emotional system is still incredibly dysregulated and they're still trying to cope with this extreme, um, the, these long-term results of this chronic trauma, they do need to pres be provided with more resources to heal and to catch up, right? So that's the idea of equity versus equality. Does that make sense? So equality is equalizing the weight equity would be you, like maybe after you equalize the weight, you also offer more water, more snacks, your your power bar. You know, you offer more things to help those people get up, right? And I'm using this analogy because, you know, when you apply it to like outdoorsy hiking stuff like this stuff happens a lot on trails.
Speaker 0 00:46:49 People tend to get like, you know, somebody runs into someone who looks like they're struggling a little bit cuz maybe they didn't bring enough of something, right? Um, and oftentimes people stop and ask like, you need some extra, I have extras, here you go, right? Like, people help each other out. And so it would just be really lovely if we could broaden that to life at the systemic level. It would just be lovely if we could start thinking more in those terms of I have a lot, what can I offer other people to help? Or what, what groups, what uh, organizations are actually doing the work to really make those systemic changes and, and can I donate to them or something? Right? So cuz it all gets very complex. You get to the systemic level, everything gets get really complex. Just like, you know, if you go from that like learning the solar system level to like learning about the vastness of the galaxy in the universe, like every time you go up an order of magnitude, things get a lot more muddy and complex.
Speaker 0 00:47:48 But this is just, you know, a nice little analogy to try to simplify it a little bit and just to give that nice big picture of that's what we're really trying to do is essentially being trauma sensitive, is building cultural humility and cultural awareness and, and being dedicated to continuing to educate yourself as much as you can while also checking in with the individuals who are part of that group if you happen to be working with them, if they're colleagues, if they're clients, and just checking in and making sure that what you have researched aligns with their identity within that group, right? And making sure you're not saying or doing something that is potentially, um, re-traumatizing for them, right? So that's what it means by being racially just that's what it means by being just in general toward minority groups. It means if they're saying, if you hear a group say this is traumatizing to us, then as a trauma informed individual, you want to listen, you want to calm yourself and go, oh my gosh, teach me, tell me whatever you're comfortable telling me about that.
Speaker 0 00:48:59 But I need to learn now what that thing is, what was traumatizing about it because I need to avoid it and I also need to tell other people to not do it. I need to share this information on a wide scale and I need to make some kind of, you know, do my part to make the shifts that I need to make so I can support your people in not experiencing that. That's what it means. So like when we think of the neurodivergent movement as an example, and I'm gonna use this example because I myself am neuro divergent, so I understand it a little bit more in terms of the experiences. There's a huge movement now saying, hey, this type of like compliance-based training just for the sake of compliance is traumatizing, right? And there's people who push back against that and say, but you need it.
Speaker 0 00:49:48 You need it and you know, you gotta be functional and you need this, right? And from a trauma-informed perspective, the thing is if a neurodivergent group, if adult autistics say this is traumatizing, I need to listen to that. I need to listen to that and make sure I'm not doing things that re-traumatize and that promote more trauma, right? I wanna mitigate, I wanna help heal from that. I wanna help build resiliency against it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I wanna be part of the solution, right? I wanna make that choice. And so I have to learn something more about what was traumatizing and what was was the result and what was the thing so I know to avoid it, right? Where is that forest? I don't wanna go into right <laugh>, where's the danger? So I don't go into it and I stay away from it, right?
Speaker 0 00:50:39 And so I don't know who the next neurodivergent movement is gonna be in our field. I don't know if 10 years from now kids who went through like our therapy is gonna come out and say, well that was pretty traumatizing for us. I don't know. There are people who stutter who say it's traumatizing if you're only focusing on fluency, which I totally get, right? You're you're setting them up to fail, you're encouraging, you're only really praising them when they're doing the thing that is desirable but not something they can do all the time, right? So that's just setting them up to fail and feel shame. A hundred percent. That sounds traumatizing. That sounds like that's, that's the whole point with neurodivergent masking too, right? It's, it's traumatizing because it's saying like you are wrong and you need to behave as a completely different person and ideally become a completely different person so that you can be accepted because other than that you don't exert deserve acceptance.
Speaker 0 00:51:30 If you can't do that, you don't deserve to be accepted. And it's like, wow, that does not feel good, right? That's the overarching message you've receive. And I'm speaking for myself as well in addition to clients I've worked with. So I don't know, I don't know who the next group would be that would be like, you know what, when therapists say this, it's traumatizing to us, but in a trauma informed sense, whoever that group is, whatever that future is, right? I wanna go, oh here's a potential systemic level, a system oriented trauma likely based in societal normalization of what is expected and what is not acceptable, right? It's likely based at that more societal level where biases can just sink in and you just are completely unaware of them. So if it's a group I'm not part of, I'm thinking uhoh, okay, I need to listen to this group.
Speaker 0 00:52:25 Now they're saying something was traumatizing, I need to listen to them, I need to follow along and I need to consider what am I gonna do differently and what is the message I'm gonna send out that's different because I can guarantee you at some point there's going to be a new neurodiversity movement in our field, there's going to be another group of clients and patients who come out and say these things in therapy are traumatizing and we need to listen and we need to be able to adjust and be flexible because that's what it actually means to be trauma informed and that's what it actually means to be safe in a treatment setting. And so we have to start to be able to look at things as, oh that's a bigger societal issue and I've internalized the wrong message from society and I need to change that message inside myself. I need to change my perspective of that situation inside myself so that I can now be part of the healing cycle. You know what I mean? That I can shift over to more of a healing paradigm and think of other ways I can support that are not re-traumatizing. Okay?
Speaker 0 00:53:35 That's the big picture today. That's the big takeaway. I went on a few soap boxes, but that's how it works. Ah, crap. I didn't even get to the sys historical trauma stuff. Okay? I have more things to talk about when it comes to historical trauma <laugh>, I have more things to share, but I think we're just gonna save that for next time. So I hope you guys have a great couple of weeks. Please join me again next time. We're gonna go into the stages of historical trauma, uh, structural racism, white cultural characteristics, and then I wanna tie this into something called dehumanization and just the signs of what that is. And that's going to lead into more episodes on dehumanization in terms of microaggressions and then also dehumanize and also dehumanization in terms of medical dehumanization, cuz that is a really big area that I think we need to start talking about.
Speaker 0 00:54:34 Um, it's basically where does objectivity and science break down? That's what we're gonna get to with dehumanization and medicine. Okay? There's a lot of research I did on that. That did, I did not have time for it, Asha. So this will include some new things. Um, so that's what's coming up. We're just gonna keep going with describing a little bit more into detail what historical and generational trauma is and, um, particularly with racial differences and the characteristics of white culture that have been sort of forced upon minority groups. Okay? So that's what's coming up next. I hope you guys all have a great couple of weeks and please do join me again as we all learn what it means to be trauma informed SLPs.
