Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hi, I'm Kim Neely and welcome to the trauma informed S L P. This is my introductory episode. I just wanted to give you a bit of a background on myself and what this podcast is really gonna be about because, you know, trauma, it's a pretty fun topic. Am I right? I mean, it's totally the thing you wanna learn about with all your free time as an SLP. <laugh> yeah, that's sarcasm. But actually since starting my journey to becoming trauma informed about three to four years ago, I have found that it's actually really empowering. It really helped with my imposter syndrome. You know, that voice in your head that tells you you're not good enough, that sense of guilt at feeling like you're not doing good enough or spending enough time. I found out a lot of great information and strategies that actually really helped with my burnout, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because you see becoming trauma informed means you developed these extra tools and this way of looking at things that helps you to promote resiliency in everybody, you interact with. You figure out how to create a safe space emotionally and physically for people and focus on empowering people that includes your clients, your colleagues, and even yourself. And I'm not perfect at it, like at all. And I'm still learning a lot, like all of the time, but I feel like what I've learned might actually help some other SLPs out there. So I wanted to bring you all in on my journey toward really understanding what trauma informed means and how to develop the perspective and the instinct to practice it.
Speaker 0 00:01:49 So, going forward on this episode, I'm going to go in a little bit about me and how I got to this point of starting this podcast. At this point, I'm on my seven. I think it might be going on my eighth year of being a licensed speech language pathologist, uh, prior to becoming an SLP, I was a mildly, really big emphasis on mildly successful opera singer and voice teacher. Um, I came into this field in my mid thirties and so far I've worked in most of the settings that we are able to work in quite frankly, pediatric clinics, skilled nursing facilities. I did a short stint in acute care. I've done a lot of school settings that ranged from pre-K all the way up through high school. So lot of placements outside of like NICU and home health, I've done the gamut pretty much. And I've had a lot of students essentially, especially in schools.
Speaker 0 00:02:52 And sometimes it comes up in skilled nursing as well. And, and in, um, TBI acute care, which is the short stint I did. I just had a lot of situations where like students, patients, clients end up telling me about things that are pretty tough to listen to pretty traumatic to hear. Right. And also like so many adults, I have had my own experience with trauma. Woohoo. Yeah. Like not to brag <laugh> I know I'm not gonna go into the details about it, but I do wanna mention it, um, as I will likely have some personal perspectives that come up from time to time when discussing certain topics. So I do have a history of developmental trauma, uh, and pretty significant depression and anxiety that actually runs in my family. It's, it's likely very genetic, especially on my mother's side. I actually started taking my own mental health very seriously in my mid thirties.
Speaker 0 00:03:45 Consequently, when I happened to be in graduate school for SLP shock. Ah, what I mean, grad school is just such a chill time for us. Ha. Yeah. Um, so I started seeing a counselor at the university that I went to university of Arizona and she was really fantastic. Um, and I saw her for a couple of years. I really made a whole lot of strides though. Once I started taking some medication for the depression anxiety about a year and a half after starting therapy, because medication is what actually helped my brain to listen to me, like I was actually able to redirect the thoughts, which is like the biggest part of what you're trying to do with counseling, but it was very difficult to do until I started taking medicine. Then it was like, oh, it's like, my mind is actually listening to this metacognitive higher level part of me that says, Hey, you can just calm down.
Speaker 0 00:04:38 And then it like does, it's kind of awesome. Okay. At least for my experience, it's not everybody's experience. But, um, another little thing about me, I'm also the ADHD flavor of neuro divergent. Uh, I was diagnosed very late in life, actually over the past, like really couple years as so many females are, this means I actually experienced a lot of the social isolation and the stigma that comes from ADHD. And I tried to keep up a really consistent like mask for people and then fail to mask, which I just wanted to bring up because it's kind of important, right? It's a perspective I'll probably bring into when talking about neuro divergency, that is all to say I'm well into my own personal mental health slash trauma healing journey. Uh, and now I can confidently say I am a recovering per separator of my failures and constantly apologizing for existing or, or I don't know.
Speaker 0 00:05:37 I don't really know a better way to put that, but you know what I mean? And this personal journey of mine, like timing wise, it just kind of dovetailed right into my journey to discovering what trauma-informed means. Ah, see, I didn't actually lose the thread this time. I circled back around you guys, ADHD magic. So when I first heard about trauma informed care, I started the way most people would. I Googled it. You know, I found a lot of websites and a lot of them gave a really broad general definition of it like websites that would basically say like our office staff will treat you with respect because we use trauma informed care. But my neuro divergent brain is like really not content with just a fuzzy general grasp of a concept. So I started going even deeper and I looked into Google scholar and I looked up a lot of.org and.gov websites and ended up finding a whole lot of in-depth info on trauma informed care.
Speaker 0 00:06:35 But the majority of the in depth things I found were written specifically for mental health providers providing direct trauma treatment of which, although I went through my own direct treatment, I am not someone who wants to provide that direct treatment. It is not in my scope of practice. And I really like staying within my scope of practice. Thank you very, very much. So the issue I was having as I was looking into all of this on my own, is that, uh, general non mental health professional descriptions. It doesn't really help me when I spend, you know, an hour a week, maybe 30 minutes a week or so with clients and students, patients, right? And our sessions are all about communication and training communication. So outside of mental health professionals, SLP probably spend like the most one to one time just communicating and training communication with our clients.
Speaker 0 00:07:36 You know, so things come up for the clients who have a effective communication modality. They come up, they're big things. They have big things that occur in their life. They have big changes, they have big events that happen, um, and they wanna tell somebody about it. So it makes sense that they tell us, right. It makes sense that if my high school students trust me, I'd be the first person they tell about traumatic events. So trigger warning here. But you know, in high school, like having, having some of my CIS girls tell me about sexual assault and things that do happen right. And getting them plugged into the mental health people of course on campus. But I felt like as an SLP, I just needed to know where those professional boundaries are when I'm in those moments, when you're having those discussions, when the person is in your office and they're crying and maybe they're triggering because they're reliving their memories or whatever it is.
Speaker 0 00:08:33 I just wanted to know how can I help my clients the most effectively in these situations, without stepping outside of my boundaries and, or saying something that might actually be more psychologically, like harmful than helpful, right? And then given the fruitless, Google searching, I just, I needed more, quite frankly, I had to go even deeper. Like I had to like ramp up my hyper fixation superpower and just dive into some educational courses, basically <laugh> on trauma-informed care. So I did take a few short online workshops, uh, during the initial COVID 19 shutdown, but they weren't quite as deep as I wanted. And they were still very much geared toward mental health professionals. So I ended up taking a graduate level course at Colorado state university. Um, it's called trauma informed care. It was mainly designed for working mental health professionals. So like counselors and social workers and like graduate students in a mental health program.
Speaker 0 00:09:31 But I took it and I was the only SLP. So like represent SLP. Yeah. Pretty much. And that actually helped a lot because there was a section in the course where they started talking more about direct trauma treatment for mental health professionals, which it's a funky thing about my ADHD brain. I it's like, I need the entire thing mapped out so that I know where I don't want to go, if that makes sense. Right. Like <laugh> like, I need to know where the scary forest is because that's where I don't want to go. So I do want to know about the scary forest. I wanna hear about the scary forest. I wanna like watch somebody else's exploration into the scary forest, but I don't wanna go in there myself. And that's pretty much what like direct trauma treatment is to me, it's like scary forest.
Speaker 0 00:10:13 So just don't go there. But at least I know something of it now, so yay. Help me figure out the boundary. Right. Where does that scary force start essentially? I hope that makes sense. So that's why I actually really enjoyed that course and then like a good little neuro divergent on a really deep dive. I ended up taking another set of online courses through the Arizona trauma Institute. I am not promoting or like I don't receive any financial compensation or anything from them. I just found them to be really useful. I end up taking all their courses, the ones that you need to become a certified trauma support specialist. So somebody who supports people, who've had trauma. I'm not someone who treats the trauma, which is great. Um, and I'm still honestly taking some of their other web based courses because I just think they've just been really useful and helpful and, and I've really enjoyed their content.
Speaker 0 00:11:04 So I can send a, I can put a link in the show notes to that website for you guys, but, um, I'm not really necessarily promoting it. I just, I just found it really useful. Uh, so in this whole, like going deep thing, what I discovered is that trauma informed care is just really huge. Um, it's a lot bigger, it's a lot broader of a topic and a concept than what I've seen discussed in the SLP world thus far. I know there's an national leader, uh, dedicated to it. I I've read those articles. I know that some other SLP podcasts mention it. I know that you see it in reference to the neuro divergency movement a lot. Right. Um, but it's actually really huge because it is an entire framework of how to interact in a supportive way and how to promote resiliency in like every single human you interact with, which is pretty big, right.
Speaker 0 00:11:55 It's pretty broad. So it does encompass things like the neurodiversity movement and presuming competence, but it also encompasses things like cultural competency when working with certain minority groups, toxic work environments, um, and what organizational structures lead to a toxic work environment. Uh, professional burnout is a huge one secondary trauma response, which can basically be part of the aspect of professional burnout. That's a huge thing, right? So it's all really super important stuff that all falls under this umbrella of trauma informed care. And I really found that having this big picture paradigm, having a way to look at all these really what seemed to be unconnected topics and placing them under a single like conceptual umbrella was really helpful to me. It helps me understand things. It gave me a great way to integrate new perspectives and it helped me really just navigate all these different areas, you know, and just generally feel a little less scared quite frankly, about applying things like cultural competency and <laugh> things like that, you know, and presuming competence.
Speaker 0 00:13:09 Um, so I really think every S L P would benefit from knowing about trauma informed care and, and knowing about the big picture of it and how to implement it in our practice. Um, regardless of whatever specialty area we're in, because it really does have to do with interacting with people in general. So it, it can be in medical, it can be in schools, it can be with little kids, it can be with adults, it can be within every everybody, but like, it's kind of a big ask to have working SLP, try to look this up themselves. Right. <laugh> I mean, SLP are kind of busy, right? You guys are a little busy out there, so it would be silly to expect SLP to take all this time that I took. Right. So the good news for you guys, I guess, is that I don't just have the ADHD superpower of hyper fixation.
Speaker 0 00:13:56 I also have a real love for info dumping for dumping out this information I learn and teaching people and, and instructing people, and also just discussing things with people. I just get so intellectually curious about so many things. So that brings me to starting up this podcast. I decided on a podcast because I personally listened to podcasts a lot. I did it a lot, like, especially in schools, what I had to do, those really repetitive things about billing or spreadsheets, like something really like, Ugh, that my ADHD brain was like, oh no, this is too repetitive. So I would listen to podcast. I love listening to them on like commutes and things like that. Right. Or maybe when you're doing chores that you don't wanna do. So it's a format you can just sit back and just listen and let it wash over you. I will put links to references and things in the show notes, if you wish to go deeper, but you don't have to, you can just sit back.
Speaker 0 00:14:48 And I guess, I mean, enjoy, I guess as much as you can, because really we're just trying to learn how to build resiliency in people and, uh, what it means to encourage emotional and physical safety in the people we interact with, including in ourselves, you know, so I hope you end up enjoying it. I hope to, uh, to publish an episode biweekly at minimum, possibly once a week, depending on how good I get at editing <laugh>. So this is all very new to me, but my first round of episodes are going to be really informational ones where I give the foundational information. Most of that foundational information that I learned in that graduate course, and also on the, um, the courses I took to be a certified trauma support specialist. I just wanna go over some of those things in this type of format where you can just listen and, and just take in things at your own time and at your own pace.
Speaker 0 00:15:49 This is a very long introductory episode. I'm so sorry about that. But, uh, felt like I had a lot to say, so join me for those. And then eventually I'm hoping this will become less of a solo podcast and more of a open discussion with co-hosts and perhaps interviews with certain specialists in our field and things like that. And just getting that broader perspective of what other people see, um, and what they experience and how they perceive trauma informed care and how it can help improve all of our, uh, outcomes and therapy and services, and also just emotional health and mental health in the long run. I hope you all have a wonderful week or two, and please join me back. As we all take this journey together on how to become trauma informed LP.
