In this three-part series, we will explore how healing-centered practices can be used as a complementary approach to trauma-informed practices. Often the story of New Orleans stops with our history of trauma. As we work to shift the narrative to healing, consider this series from the lens of New Orleans and how the information provided could be applied to our vibrant, authentic, and interconnected city. This series will encourage readers to think beyond deficits and begin to explore what strengths and assets our community already possesses. We’ll look at how trauma manifests and will also examine the structural causes of trauma that must be uprooted in order to create healing systems of care.
The report that follows, from The Praxis Project, is a resource from the Centering Community in Public Health - Learning Circle Brief Series.
Background
There has been increasing attention towards the need for interventions to address and mitigate the role of trauma in individual and community wellbeing. The list of trauma-informed services and interventions seems to grow by the day. While these service developments are a welcome change from previous methods to improve community health and wellbeing, discussions with base-building community partners in 2018 have uplifted community-centered healing practices that have helped our communities to endure and survive over time. In 2020, with the unveiling of inequities by COVID-19, continuation of Black Lives Matter protests, and ongoing trauma caused by systemic bias and racism, these community-centered findings need to be (re)introduced. The purpose of this brief is to showcase the importance of addressing community trauma through identifying and making space for healing-centered practices that communities have evolved over time, acknowledging and understanding the roots of trauma, and addressing the persistent, structural causes of trauma. From Praxis’ intentional dialogues with base-building and frontline community organizers, we describe how trauma shows up in our communities and institutions, how it can be addressed through community-centered healing, and the role that trusted partners can take in supporting community healing.
Understanding Trauma
As stated by Resmaa Menakem, “trauma is ancient.” Trauma has existed in society since the dawn of civilization, and is caused and perpetuated on a population level through oppression, enslavement, fear, and white supremacy. Community trauma is caused by people, entities, or systems in power with the ability to cause harm to others for their own gain. This cultivation of trauma harms everyone, not just those directly experiencing trauma through oppression. Trauma can be experienced physically in addition to emotionally. Thus, to heal from trauma requires more than facilitated training or discussion but deep, intentional work that integrates the body, mind, and greater environment.
The findings from in-depth discussions with base-building organizers are aligned with and support these four elements of healing-centered engagement as a complement to trauma-informed interventions and services.
Process
In May 2018, the Praxis Project convened 55 base-building community partners from across the United States to participate in a Learning Circle in Milwaukee, WI with the intention of understanding the role of healing and trauma in community led efforts to improve health justice and racial equity. The group discussion used a modified focus group process that incorporated Freirean popular education methods to develop shared understandings, explore meaning, and identify how community-centered healing practices relate to trauma-informed approaches designed to improve programs and services for community. While The Praxis Project and community organizers participated in this discussion in 2018, these findings are being released in 2020. Trauma and its perpetuating force of systemic oppression and racism have always existed; now there is a greater awareness and recognition among broader society. During this historical moment of global dialogue and reckoning, the following findings are relevant, timeless, and invaluable insights from our network.
Findings
Base-building community organizers and partners identified a range of definitions and manifestations of trauma, and strategies to support healing. These manifestations and strategies spanned from the individual to the community level. Further, participants made specific note that “trauma-informed” approaches are not the opposite of “healing-centered” practices, but that a healing-centered framework is often not valued in professional settings that also do not recognize the sometimes antiseptic and apolitical practices exhibited by the medical-industrial complex, the criminal-industrial complex, the process and impacts of colonization, and other sources of trauma in communities. An understanding of racism and other systemic oppressions is necessary to fully incorporate a healing-centered framework. Lastly, participants identified recommendations for community organizers, advocates, and those working in institutions to integrate community-centered healing practices.
Community Definitions of Trauma
During the learning circle, facilitators asked participants to shared the words that they and others use to describe trauma:
- During the learning circle, facilitators asked participants to shared the words that they and others use to describe trauma:
- Lack of words: No words to explain, silence
- Pain: Pain and struggle, sick, tired, depressed, heartbreak, anger, helplessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, fear and vulnerability, internalization
- Erasure, isolation and oppression: Being the only person of color, feeling voiceless, being shut down, controlled, loss of language, dismissal of culture and traditions, gentrification
- Betrayal by institutions: Police, government, school to prison to deportation pipeline, “being caught in the system,” “my child is in prison,” distrust, images in the media, false narratives Violence: Threat of violence, ingrained racism, colonization, assimilation, genocide, gentrification
This first-person lens to describe trauma is palpable. At the root of each definition is a version of some kind of pain and rendering of invisibility.
How Trauma, Healing, and Resistance Manifest
But we also know that healing work has been present in our communities since before the recognition of the role of trauma and adverse childhood experiences. The facilitators and participants discussed the concrete ways in which trauma, healing and resistance show up in their work at various levels, from the personal to societal. This shifts from the traditional approach of trauma-informed care to look beyond just individual experiences, but collective, shared trauma and healing. The concepts identified by the group spanned across the levels of the social ecological model (personal, family, community, and society), including sexual trauma, poverty, struggle, resistance, and liberation. Participants shared that talking about trauma at all levels can be both painful and healing.
Community Level
How Trauma Manifests
- Experiencing trauma while addressing trauma: how does a healer heal oneself?
- Burnout among organizers
- Alienation
- Internalized oppression at the community level
- Displacement
- Unemployment
- Survival interfering with being strategic
How Healing and Resistance Manifest
- Taking action
- Creating spaces where one can name and heal
- Resist is to heal
- Go into offense
- Boycotts
- Solidarity
- Spirituality and interconnection
- Being connected to ancestral knowledge/past
- Heal and resist through art, music and celebration
- Power and fortitude
- Demanding justice
- Engagement
- Expose the pain
- Sharing
- Regeneration
- Holding space
- Confronting
- Being raw and authentic
- Organizing to build community
The questions remain - Who are we? What is right with our community? How can we leverage these strengths to heal our children and youth? In the next part of this series, we will dive further into what it takes to resist trauma and heal. We encourage you to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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