Read on Twitter
So for me, "trauma-informed" means getting past "what& #39;s wrong with you" --but not to "what happened to you", because maybe it& #39;ll never be any of my business what happened. /1
Trauma-informed = recognizing that some people have been made to feel powerless and are wary about bad things being done to them. And that means it& #39;s our job to help people find their power (+ be honest + transparent + predictable about where and why we will exercise ours)./2
I want to understand the state of post-traumatic existence as a problem not simply of fear--or as a form of "anxiety disorder"--but also as a problem of how to relate to power. This moves "trauma-informed" from a project of elaborate niceness, to more transformative practice. /3
The problem with seeing PTSD simply as a disorder is that then it remains our patients& #39; problem. For people with chronic trauma that is created by or interwoven with inequity, injustice, and oppression--i.e., most people with chronic trauma--the trauma is all of our problem. /4
Not only is it all of our problem, but we can see that when we enact systems of power--and what is medicine if not a system of power?--we are almost _inherently_ traumatizing, if we understand trauma as a problem of power. A problem of having one& #39;s power taken away./5
This reminds us that being "trauma-informed" means not going to "what happened to _you_", but "how do _I_ re-enact traumatizing relationships" as the key challenge to practice, and a standard that we (or at least I) fail to accomplish on a regular basis. /6
"Trauma-informed" can become yet another humanistic badge we wear to congratulate ourselves for what good people we are, when in fact it should be a regular challenge to ourselves about how we enact damage just by ... being us. By being doctors. By holding power. /7
This paradox--power being traumatizing but people needing our power--is not easily resolved, and so should never be viewed as a problem that we solve only with furrowed-brow lists of clinic guidelines (though that& #39;s a start). Indeed it requires a process of re-imagining power. /8
I feel that I am only in the beginning of this process, but I am sure of one thing: any process that mainly serves to simply divide up providers as "meets standards" or "needs improvement" avoids any talk of systemic change or self-interrogation by people who "meet standards"./9
Therefore being "trauma-informed" can only be viewed as a stopgap measure; a minimum; part of a path that we are all still trying to define; but never an end destination. /fin
