Trauma-Informed Approach
A trauma-informed approach begins with understanding the physical, social, and emotional impact of trauma on the individual, as well as on the professionals who help them. This requires three elements:
- Realizing the prevalence of trauma.
- Recognizing how trauma affects all individuals.
- Putting this knowledge into practice.
6 Guiding Principles:
-
Safety: This includes creating spaces where people feel culturally, emotionally, and physically safe as well as an awareness of an individual’s discomfort or unease.
-
Trustworthiness & Transparency: This includes providing full and accurate information about what’s happening and what’s likely to happen next.
-
Collaboration & Mutuality: This includes the recognition that healing and success happens in relationships and partnerships with shared decision-making.
-
Peer Support: Peer support is a flexible approach to building healing relationships among equals. This includes using peers to serve as role models and sources of hope while strategies for overcoming challenges.
-
Empowerment & Choice: This includes the recognition of an individual’s strengths and inherent value. It requires a commitment to validation and building upon those strengths with an approach that honors the individual’s dignity.
-
Cultural, Historical and Gender Issues: This includes interaction with people with consideration of specific needs based on culture, exposure to historical trauma and gender.
Adopting a trauma-informed approach is not accomplished through any single particular technique or checklist. It requires constant attention, caring awareness, sensitivity, and possibly a cultural change at an organizational level. On-going internal organizational assessment and quality improvement, as well as engagement with community stakeholders, will help to embed this approach as you move toward organizational growth and practice improvement.
Original Text Sourced from the Snohomish County Children’s Wellness Coalition.
Content source: Center for Preparedness and Response , Centers for Disease Control and Buffalo Center for Social Research