(The following is an email I sent out to staff.)
So, in the work we do, what’s our fundamental challenge?
I think it has a lot to do with directing peoples’ attention.
In social work, we want people to make changes toward ensuring safety, relationship permanence, and well-being for themselves, and, in the case of Children and Youth Services, their children.
Our primary service recipients tend to come from lower income households, may have mental health issues, intellectual disabilities, substance abuse issues, and more than likely an ACE score of 4 or more. So, what does that do to their attention’?
A large part of achieving change is the ability to see that something CAN be changed. It’s not just a matter of effort (if they’d only try harder), it’s also a matter of imagination or belief that something CAN change, of ‘seeing’ that thing to be achieved and believing one has the power to do something toward getting there. For people who have grown up in a situation where survival is a focus (where there’s been abuse/neglect, poverty, prejudice, discrimination, etc.), it’s not a lack of hard work that’s the issue. For people that have survived their ACEs—that took hard work. What they didn’t have was the luxury of turning their attention toward something other than day-to-day survival.
So while it may seem that we’re asking folks to do something perfectly reasonable, if it doesn’t fit into their survival mode of thinking (or the "I’ll catch a moment to feel good while I can mode", which is a different way of expressing survival mode), to them it’s not perfectly reasonable. It may be seem impossible, unimaginable—or worse—it may be a threat to what’s gotten them this far.
Attached to this email is a quick guide to help you with YOUR attention to being trauma-informed when helping folks make effective changes toward safety, permanence and well-being. Please take a minute to look it over, or better yet, print it out and keep it somewhere you can check back with it. (It's an attachment to this post. Feel free to use it, edit it - etc.) If we’re practicing a trauma-informed approach, it makes a change in attention easier for the folks we’re serving.
When attention doesn't need to assess threat, it can turn towards opportunities, towards change, towards something beyond just survival.
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