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Mary McHenry, MSW
This edition of The Practitioner focuses on getting you to think about how you provide service to children and teens, whether or not you empower them to find their safe place and how we all continue to learn from our clients as we strive to ensure that they receive the best intervention possible. Safety and the therapeutic environment is the theme of Dr. Steele’s “What Makes Sense” commentary. It challenged me to reconsider the therapeutic milieu and what that really means for children and youth who have been traumatized. Our clients are the experts in their lives so why do we neglect to ask them where they feel safe before going on the journey into their trauma? They deserve a safe place to process and discover the resilience within, yet we invite them into “our space” and assume that since we are concerned for their safety and healing, that our space will be safe for them. Certainly we try to prove to the child that they are safe with us. We let them decide what questions they will answer. We let them sit where they want. We let them bring their favorite toy. But we don’t always open our minds to where and when our clients truly feel safe.
So, what is this safe place for treatment and healing all about? The answer is not in this edition. The answer is to be discovered from the client.
This edition will provide stories that will cause you to think about the power within the client to heal, the creative energy that they tap into and the simplicity of their strategies to feel better, whether it is consciously or not. If we are willing to encourage rather than lead, the clients we work with will find their safe place or “their stage” to tell their story. The power of theater, poetry and art are well documented but sadly, the “arts” is one area our schools are lacking. This void has taken the “safe stage” away from many of our children. A sad commentary on what we think is important.
I cannot help but recall the poetic writings of a young man who lost his father to suicide. His journey began with a trauma-informed therapist but continues today under the watchful eye of himself. He learned very early that writing poetry and reflective insights into his life were healing, empowering and helped him make sense of something that did not make sense. I would like to share one piece he wrote as a teen, when he experienced a break-up with a girl that was very special to him, he was about to journey off to post-secondary education, and his father was not around to talk to.
“How is it I ask the dead a question? If I could ask, would the answer fill the void? I look for closure but yet I reopen the wounds, those who share your blood may hold the answers, but their lips lie with no voice to speak with. I walk blindfolded only to not see the truth about myself in the mirror but even without the mirror I see the truth. Now is time to find a way to accept it. Time to open my heart and finish the puzzle I tore apart called my life.”
He told me he felt that writing helped him express himself. “I stopped for a long time, felt I had no reason, felt words had no meaning behind them, but now I can give them a story to help you see what my heart paints. I am no artist of pens and paints but my words hopefully create the picture.” So we can see that he writes when he needs a safe place to tell a story. “It helps,” he told me.
Writing is his stage where he tells his story, where he orchestrates his healing. I am a witness and that is all he needs. We are trained to listen. I guess we should revisit that skill and be patient with ourselves. We want to fix things yet it is the client who has the tools. We need to let them find their stage to play out their script for healing.
“Life is life. I blow puffs of smoke now it’s time to start blowing fire. It's my time to soar through the skies; I just gotta push myself. I just gotta take the jump, open my wings and stop dreaming. I gotta open my eyes to see this is reality. This is the beginning to my journey of life.”
Thanks to the anonymous young man who has taught me so much.
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New Online Courses
TLC continues to pursue the development of new online courses. Thanks to a partnership forged with the Virtual Center of Excellence (VCE) of Wayne County Community Mental Health of Michigan, TLC will bring you a series of new online courses that contain filmed presentations made to mental health workers throughout the country. A few of the presentations include :
- Trauma-Informed Assessment
- ADHD and Trauma
- Supporting Children with Special Needs Following Grief and Trauma
- What Parents Need To Know
- Compassion Fatigue and Self Care
Save the Date for the Summer Assembly
Hold July 10-13, 2012 on your calendar to attend our Annual Childhood Trauma Practitioner’s Assembly in Michigan. This is our 15th year presenting what was previously titled the TLC Summer Institute. Professionals from all over the world attend so the networking is wonderful as well as the workshops presented by and designed for practitioners. Many new workshops, which will be posted in the next few months, are being offered this summer, such as one focusing on paid deployment. Click for more information.
Paid Deployment
Recently TLC partnered with FEI Behavioral Health to certify attendees for paid deployment as family assistance representatives providing support services to survivors following catastrophic events throughout the world. Due to the overwhelming demand for this certification, we will provide an additional training at the Summer Assembly.
Call for Presenters
If you wish to present at the Summer Assembly, click here for more information. Be sure to email your application by January 5, 2012 or before, as the workshop slots fill up quickly.
Trauma-Informed Assessment Specialist Certification
Why pursue this certification? Click here to view a video by Dr. Steele describing the need for and the value of even minimal assessment within a trauma-informed context. If interested, click here for details of the Certification being presented February 24-26, 2012 in San Antonio.
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The Power and Plasticity of a Safe Environment: "Setting the Stage" to Flourish
At the most recent Alliance for Children and Families Conference in Washington, DC, a teen performed spoken word poetry about pain, survival and hope. What she said speaks to the power the environment plays in helping children flourish, “Don’t ask me to talk about this when I leave the stage, it is the poetry and stage that allow me to stand tall and be clear. I may be exposed to you, but to me, I am safe on this stage behind my words.” (Click here for Focus issues.)
This youngster was in an environment where she felt safe, safe enough to express herself. It certainly makes perfect sense that we all work hard to create and provide environments were children flourish.
The power of the environment is its ability to change people. The science of epigenetics, for example, has demonstrated that the experiences within the environment can actually change the genetic expression within families and transgenerationally influence changes in offspring. We have to conclude that if the environment can alter our biology, it certainly can alter our thoughts, actions and feelings.
As I wrote in previous issues, I certainly did not flourish at home. I was a poor learner, socially inadequate, running scared from others and myself. The seminary in later years presented a different environment. It had consistently predictable daily routines, clear expectations, a belief in our ability to learn, the resources and support to learn how to learn, and numerous opportunities to discover in what kind of environment I felt the safest and performed the best. In that environment I flourished because I was given the opportunity to find “my own stage.”
What our young poet was reminding us of is the first and foremost core element of trauma-informed care - safety. Certainly her words ought to remind us of two critical questions to always ask traumatized youngsters: “what environment or part of this environment allows you to feel the safest emotionally and physically, and, what is it that you do that allows you to feel the most safe in this environment?” If we provide that safe environment and the opportunity for children to find the medium(s) to safely express themselves, they will flourish.
This raises the question of what determines or what makes an environment safe? From a trauma-informed perspective, the child does. The child is the best expert as to what feels safe. What might be safe for you and I may not be at all safe for that child. What makes sense is children need to be able to choose the medium and environment that allows them to express themselves safely. I am sure our young poet was empowered to “set her own stage” by selecting the medium she felt most comfortable to express her pain, and her experiences with hope and survival. This is how she began to flourish.
This is why we developed a TLC intervention process that presents traumatized children a variety of ways to “tell their story,” to bring us into their world as witnesses, much like the audience at the Alliance conference. But let us not forget her words, “I feel safe on this stage.”
Having given thousands of trainings over the past 25 years, there are still situations and environments that make me uneasy before presenting. Through the years I’ve learned to step back for a moment and remind myself that I also have the power to “set my stage.” I do this by rehearsing multiple times the first 5 minutes of my presentation to guarantee a good start, a comfortable start, a safe start. I make sure I have the script down, that I am not selecting words or terms I might stumble over. Sometimes I begin with a story I have told many times over. I practice until I feel safe with those first few minutes, which then allows me to feel safe entering that environment. I “set the stage.”
What makes sense is that we all need to be in an environment where others can provide us the opportunity to find and design our stage. Someone had to certainly present that opportunity to our poet; someone who understood that traumatized children simply cannot flourish from treatment alone.
This now takes us to one final question, "how much influence do we have in changing our environment?” Asked a bit differently, “Is there a plasticity within environments that allows one person to change that environment?” The best answer to this question is the YouTube segment, Guy Starts Dancing, presented in the Flash Point? section. This was one person who felt safe enough to “do his thing” and in so doing influenced others in that environment to follow him and in so doing changed that environment.
What makes sense is we are all agents of change. We all have the ability to influence others. Once I witnessed the tremendous value of the structured sensory approach that I developed and practiced in early 1990s, I realized that if this valued intervention was going to be a benefit to the thousands of traumatized children that needed a more trauma-focused approached, I was going to have to multiply myself and so I started teaching others. Frankly, I just let my passion take over and presented to anyone who would listen. Eventually, five professionals became 50, those 50 became 500 and they began teaching others. Today, the thousands of TLC Certified Trauma Specialists across the country are the dancers in their own environment, providing children like our poet the opportunity to flourish.
What makes sense is that environments have the power to change and be changed; there is a dancer, a poet, a person of influence in every child. We all need a safe environment to dance our dance but to do so we must be in an environment that presents us that opportunity. In our efforts to help traumatized children, we bring the stage to them just as so many did for me.
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