Aroha in action hui: Trauma-informed practice

[Animated Graphic: Aroha in Action Family Start Hui 2023 graphic]

[Text on screen: Trauma-informed practice, Colin Gale]

[Text on screen: Colin Gale]

Colin Gale:

Mauri oho, mauri tū, mauri ora

Ki a tātou

Hui e, tāiki e

Tēnā koutou katoa. Ki te mana whenua o tēnei rohe me ngā iwi katoa o Aotearoa, tēnā koutou.

Ki te whakahaere tēnei hui ara ko Lyn, anei te mihi ki a koe. Ko wai au? Ko Gàidhealtachd ngā whenua o ōku tīpuna. Ko Gàidhlig, tōku iwi, ko Madadh-allaidh tōku teaghlach, ko Colin Gale tōku ingoa.

I whānau mai au ki Porirua, kei Otepoti e noho ana. Taku mahi ko National Training Lead, Oranga Tamariki.

Kia ora, welcome everyone. I’m Colin. I work for Oranga Tamariki as the National Training Lead in trauma section residents within community homes. I’m a social worker by trade and I’ve been working with young people with trauma for a number of years, for about 18 odd years, in various forms as the leader, trainer, development and practice in this space.

[Slide on screen: Working with Trauma AROHA IN ACTION]

Colin Gale:

We are going to look at working with trauma and we’ll look at it through a little bit of an aroha in action lens.

[Slide on screen: Learning Objectives]

Colin Gale:

Just an overview of what trauma is and then we’re going to think a little bit about oxytocin and aroha, and then we’ll take a look at Adverse Childhood Experiences, and then we’ll think a little bit about what inter-generational trauma and epigenetics is. Then we’ll think more about how we can support individuals and whānau who had trauma experiences.

[Slide on screen: Quote]

Colin Gale:

One of the things I like to do is to throw up a little bit of a quote from song lyrics because I listen to a lot of music. The reason I do that is because it broadens our mind to think that trauma is actually a quite broad social experience and you’ll find it in art, literature, music, poetry, expressions throughout and so on. One of today’s wee shares is a line from a song that Sinead O’Connor wrote about her experiences of reconciling childhood with an adverse childhood. Her childhood and being a parent at the same time, and the difficulties she had in her relationship. I really like the way she’s described that experience of, ‘Maybe I was mean, but I really don’t think so. You asked if I’m scared, and I said so.’

That just keys us into some of the confusion that people have experiencing trauma of trying to be honest but also trying to reconcile your feelings. Let’s have a little look at where that comes from.

[Slide on screen: Trauma – definitions]

Colin Gale:

There’s a lot of definitions around trauma but there’s broadly four that we can consider when thinking about trauma across various levels. The first is just that broad definition of trauma being an event, or events, or circumstances that are experienced as life-threatening causing fear and distress and overwhelming the ability to cope. It’s really those last two things to think about, is that it’s experienced as life-threatening, so it’s that level of emotional reaction and it’s that overwhelming impact and what that does to us from a psychological and developmental standpoint, and there’s lots of amazing things that have really heightened states. That’s kind of the things you really take out of that one.

Complex trauma is when we have multiple and enduring experiences that are life-threatening and cause harm to wellbeing. It can result from chronic exposure to violence, neglect, bias and discrimination, conflict and oppression. Also, it can arise from living in a society that’s post-colonial, it has the effects of colonisation, the loss of culture, the language, identity, land and collective wellbeing. It’s broader than just a personal experience, it’s also what occurs within an environment.

Historical trauma is kind of linked to that and it’s that complex, inflictive, former experience over time and across generations by a group of people who share identity, affiliation, or circumstance. So, again, it’s taking it wider and wider again so thinking about trauma at a different level across a whole cultural sub-set, which is something that we’re very familiar with in Aotearoa and indeed most of the post-colonial Western world.

Vicarious trauma is another consideration of this. This is when we experience the symptoms similar to those who directly experienced traumatic events. But we haven’t, but we are having a sympathetic reaction to it which is quite intense in itself, and it’s making us feel overwhelmed, it’s making us feel like we’re in a life-threatening situation. This comes about when we spend a lot of time witnessing or working with people who have experienced trauma, whether that be tamariki or whānau. It comes from doing lots of high, intense work and it’s something that does happen with people in the human services who are working in this space. So, put it in there to call out going, be aware that being around a lot of pain can start producing a pain response within yourselves, so, something to think about when you think about what your self-care is going to look like if you’re working in this field.

[Slide on screen: What this means]

Colin Gale:

Generally, what does trauma mean for an individual? What we know is that the experiences we have, particular during our first thousand days, influences the way we view the world, and that we are in. Our brains are incredible in the fact that they will adapt to whatever environment we are in to maximise our survival. If we spent our first thousand days in a warm, relational, safe world, that will become our expectation of the world around us. We’ll think that the world’s going to warm and safe, and relational, and that we’re important and that we have opportunity.

If we spend our first thousand days in a world of adversity, deprivation, fear and abuse, that will become our expectation of the world; but life is hard, life is tough, and I need to be as well in order to navigate this. You won’t be reliant upon others to the same degree. Reality, a lot of people are somewhere in-between, and they have some warm, relational experiences but they also have some experience of adversity and deprivation. And so, we want to be thinking about it as a sliding scale rather a this or that, as I say, if you’ve met one person with trauma, you’ve met one person with trauma no different] to the next person down the track, and they could be different to a sibling or somebody else within their family, even though the experiences were similar.

Experiences inform our expectations of the world, they really shape our paradigm, the way we view our environments, our relationships and our beliefs, and it also shapes how we respond to the world. 

[Slide on screen: A quick word on the love hormone]

Colin Gale:

I had a little quick yack about oxytocin. Oxytocin, or sometimes referred to as the love hormone, is a hormone that works as a neurotransmitter. If you fall in love with someone and that little gaga moment, ‘Huh, I really like you, I really like you,’ that’s oxytocin at work, flooding your system and that’s designed to make you key into somebody and that.

The other way of looking at it is, if you’ve been a parent and you’ve got your own kids, and you have that little moment, you look at your wee kid, and you go, ‘Ah, this is awesome. This is awesome.’ Again, that’s oxytocin. The other person who’s experiencing that, is also experiencing an oxytocin response and this is the way our brains work, and it enables us to experience love. It enables us to form bonds, build relationships, develop empathy and care for others, and it’s a real necessary element of human neurology because we are social beings. Without oxytocin, it’s very difficult for us to form functional social bonds.

Now the challenge comes that oxytocin is dependent upon environment, and so, if we’re in a high stress situation, our ability to produce oxytocin becomes compromised because the hypothalamus and the amygdala are actually focused upon other things. And so, this has quite a big impact upon the way we pre-regulate emotions and the way that we start to view relationships across the life course, particularly when this insult occurs during early life, life trauma, those first thousand days from inception through to two years of life.

It’s a really key thing to be thinking about because it’s a two-way thing. The experience a child’s having and their ability to express and receive love that comes from oxytocin is compromised by stress, but also the stress that’s sitting upon parents and those caring for the child. If they’re in a high stressed state, it’s difficult for them to have that same level of intense bonding and that can have really profound effects down the track we need to consider.

[Slide on screen: ARO]

Colin Gale:

Thinking about aroha, and I really like this concept of breaking down the compound of nature of the kupu and really looking at it. Thinking about ‘aro’ as a verb that means to pay attention to something, and ‘hā’ being the breath. One of the kaumātua I worked with described this really well, it’s when you meet that special person in your life, and they walk across a room and you’ve got your eyes on them the whole time. You forget to breathe, like literally take your breath away. And the same experience that we tend to have when we’re looking at our mokopuna or our children, and we kind of look at them, they literally take your breath away.

I think it’s a really good definition to consider because it talks about that biological response that we have to feeling that. It also widens us out to thinking that this is actually something a little bit broader than just saying aroha means love. It means a lot more than just love, it’s about a whole connection of things.

[Slide on screen: AROHA]

Colin Gale:

I really like Georgina Tuari Stewart’s definition of aroha literally meaning to follow the breath, which implies attentive care for self and other: to follow one’s heart, to go with the flow. So, it’s talking about our reaction and the love that we give rather than the love we receive. I think that’s, from my standpoint, it really highlights the difference between te ao Māori and Western ways of thinking because love is seen more transactional, whereas within te ao Māori it’s a much broader expression of ‘these are all things and it’s about what I give rather than what I expect to receive’. I think that, for me, it’s a really key thing when we think about working with trauma because it’s about what can you give that helps rather than what do you expect back.

[Slide on screen: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)]

Colin Gale:

Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, there’s a study that’s been around for a really long time  and it was done with the Centre of Disease Control was a part of it. It’s a medical model and what they were looking to do, is they were looking to look at experiences that children had from age 18 down, then they were looking for medical impacts. It’s quite an interesting scale. It measures, essentially, whether you’ve been exposed to physical, sexual, emotional neglect or abuse, the impact upon parental insults around mental illness, divorce, substance abuse within the household, and grief. Grief and divorce sit in the same thing, which is another interesting thing I find, because when you consider divorce is quite common, unfortunately in our world and relationship breakup is quite common. That is experienced for a child in the same way as somebody dying, it’s the same grief process, because it’s a profound loss of somebody important within their world. We don’t often think about that in the same way but it’s really quite up there in the thing.

What the ACEs study discovered was that these things that occur, particularly within the first thousand days of life, have a profound impact upon people’s wellbeing across their life course, and we’ll come to that shortly what that looks like. It’s really important to be thinking about what’s going on for people within their experiences. There are, however, a few limitations to this.

[Slide on screen: Aces high? Aces low? Some limitations to consider]

Colin Gale:

The first one is that there are many experiences that could be traumatic for children that the quiz doesn’t even cover, so things that are happening in the community - violence, racism, forms of discrimination, natural disasters, housing insecurity, a whole raft of things – are not counted by this. The second is, that this scale does not factor in resilience, and everybody responds to adverse experiences in a different way. We need to be thinking it’s really easy to look at scales like this and go, ‘Oh, well I’m an eight on the Aces scale.’ That’s doesn’t mean you’re comparable to another eight, or to a six or to a seven or to a ten, because the experiences you have don’t necessarily dictate the way that you manage the experience that you have.

When you come across, in your work, if somebody’s been through an adverse childhood experience of scale, and they’ve got a number, that just tells you that they’ve had some difficult times. It doesn’t predict who they are or how they’ll respond to that, it just keys you into the fact that there’s been adversity there. That’s useful to know but I caution people, and I’ve had chats around that, about taking that as a predictor of how they’ll respond, because it’s really a very poor predictor, it just says adversity was present during childhood.

[Slide on screen: ACES beyond the individual]

There’s a couple of other ways to be thinking about Aces beyond an individual and one is, Ellis & Dietz in 2017 considered, took the word Aces and expanded it to what the community environment is. That’s, kind of, one of the limitations in the CDC study. They started looking at some of the things around what children need and this kind of links into – you will be familiar with it – it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it does, but the village needs to be healthy as well and so the village needs to be a nurturing environment and we like to sometimes have a natural assumption that the village is heathier than the household; but that’s not always true.

We need to look at the environments that we’re in, is there a high level of domestic violence and family harm going on? Is there a prevalence of homelessness, is there poverty, is there discrimination, is there disruption within the community for whatever reason? Is there lack of opportunity, economic, mobile and social capital? Is there poor housing quality and affordability? Is there violence, is violence normalised within that society?

These are things that we need to start thinking wider about because they have impacts as well. The other thing to be thinking about is the inter-generational nature of trauma. Because trauma becomes more amplified when there’s been a series of those across multi-generational, or trans-generation. So, if I’m born into a household where my parents struggled and their parents struggled, our way of being is around surviving, because that’s been the way of being, and that will key us for epigenetics into thinking, into being more predisposed to survival responses in a brain developed for survival responses, than a family group or a subset that haven’t had multi-generational impact so it has a bay across steps across.

That’s particularly relevant when you think about the multi-generational impacts from trauma and other large-scale social upheavals. 

[Slide on screen: Adverse Childhood Experiences]

Colin Gale:

To kind of bring all this into a picture for you. I’ve got another little wee graphic here. When we look adverse child experiences  it’s down too you have your mental illness in the whānau, verbal abuse, whānau being imprisoned is something that really has a big impact. Alcohol and addiction within the whānau, emotional neglect, physical, sexual abuse information for, divorce, death, witnessing family harm. And you don’t necessarily have to be a direct victim of family harm, you just have to be within that experience.

These things sit, the roots of the tree sit within the community in which they’re located, and so we need to be looking at things like discrimination around gender, class, ethnicity, how does our society think about things and how do these amplify or reduce the effects. What are the barriers to education? Is there education, do they enter childhood, did they not get early childhood? Is there even an early childhood within that community? Thinking about health care, is it adequate or not adequate? Is there access to it? We could sort of add to that in New Zealand and the most recent debate around dental care. Dental care is a pivotal part of public health, but it’s hard for many people to access. Colonisation sitting at the bottom because colonisation impacts upon all of these things. Poverty, unaffordable poor housing quality and that’s a big issue in New Zealand at the moment. Being raised both within insecure housing, within low-quality housing impacts upon all of the things that are likely to impact in childhood development. Insecure, low-wage work, not knowing where your income is coming from, standdown periods, transition from benefits off the benefits, partial benefits, all these things have big impacts upon all the things that can harm a child. Food insecurity, violence and offending. These are the things that are in our community.

One of the things that we really need to look when thinking about trauma and adverse childhood experiences, is that these community environment aspects and impact on it. These are socially constructed things, these are things that we can have a direct impact on, these aren’t natural, normal things. These are things that we create in our society, these are things that we can change. And so, being a social worker, I’ve got to throw the challenge out to the group of ‘Are we active in wanting to change them or do we just assume these things will be forever?’ It’s the old focus on ambulances or fences at the bottom of the cliff. We should get to talk about why the cliff is there and why we think that’s natural and normal, when in fact it is not. I’ll leave that thought hanging because I think that’s a good thing to be thinking about when you think about the work we do.

When we add in generational trauma, we’re just compounding it. We add all of these things, but the experience is being repeated. When we add multi-generational trauma, it starts to look like that, and it starts to get very, very complicated for the person experiencing those insults. It really just compounds and amplifies the effect.

[Slide on screen: An Ecological Perspective of Trauma]

Colin Gale:

So, moving onto a bit of an ecological perspective of trauma because I’m a social worker and it’s what we do.

[Laughter]

When we think about macro, macro is connected directly to individual experience of a trauma because macro is the political and economic system that we set up that either maintains an environment that will facilitate trauma, or it starts to disable and disrupts an environment that will do that. And it’s an election year at the moment, so I would encourage you if somebody works in this field and has lived experience of this, to look at critical policies as to whether it will increase or decrease the environments that will either enable or disable trauma within our future generations, a future focused approach.

Meso is the organisational, institutional levels. When we talk about that level, it’s like we need to start examining organisations that we work for, work with, and ask ourselves, if they in themselves are trauma-informed, if they in themselves are responding in a way that either eliminates conditions of impact trauma, or creates conditions that influence and create more trauma. Organisations have a big role to play in how these things play out in our communities.

The micro is the stuff we’ve looked at before. That’s the individual and whānau experiences of adverse childhood experiences and adverse community experiences. This is the part where we’re, kind of, managing as best we can in the environments we’re in. But actually, it’s the part that’s probably got the least control and agency over the situation versus the meso and macro. And then there’s that inter-generational epigenetics and social conditions that influence upon where we are. It’s not a static now thing but we need to look at the historical situation that everybody’s been through.

[Slide on screen: Trauma, Development and the Life Course]

Colin Gale:

You think about all of those things. What is the expression of it, what does this do? Traumatic experiences for an individual impact upon your human development and also the life cycle. Within our human development aspect, we have impacts upon our early relationships, the little wee bonds. This is where the oxytocin is a key player here. The strength of bonding and the sort of attachments we form is directly related to the amount of stress that’s within the relationship and within the household, and so stress is a very toxic sort of neurobiological experience, whereas oxytocin is a very positive one. We want way more oxytocin moments than stress moments, and that’s sort of how it plays out in a relationship. It impacts upon our health as we develop. If we have access to everything we need, we develop a nice, full, healthy potential way. If there’s limitation on resources, that impacts upon how we develop as a child.

Our sensory integration is directly impacted by our childhood experience. If we are focused upon protecting ourselves, we are not focused upon exploring our environments. If we’re focused on having to manage our emotional reaction to harm, we’re not focused on building relationships and managing our senses in a healthy way. It really keys our brain into thinking about things in a way that is very survival focused and orientated. That has a direct relationship on how we behave, because if we’re in a survival position, we’ll behave in a survival position and our senses will be keyed into that and our responses will be keyed into that.

Which in turn, has a big impact upon the way we cognitively view the world. Intelligence is not a fixed stated, it is a state that is in response to the environment that we’re in. So, our cognition will be keyed into the environment that we’re in. If our environment is survival orientated, that’s how we’re going to view and think and analyse the world. That ultimately has a big impact onto how we learn, and what we learn, and what we put focus on learning about. If you’re focused on survival, you will focus on learning on new and better ways to survive. If you’re not focused on survival, you can do some higher order functions and start thinking about what’s it all about and get all those higher concepts that are really vital in working within our information technology-based world.

Each of these aspects then phase down into the life cycle. Our early relationships have a big input on the way we view intimacy as adults, that ultimately, if this is where a lot of your multi-generational comes through. If you distrust intimacy as a child, you’ll have difficulties with it as an adult and then you’ll have difficulties with it when you have your own children – Sinead O’Connor. You know How those toxic experiences that impact on our early health in our early years shorten the lifespan. We know that people with high levels of trauma over a subset or group, die earlier, because of the types of disorders and diseases that come from that high level stress throughout.

Addiction is connected to our sensory integration because when our senses are less regulated, we find other things to help regulate them and there’s a raft of chemicals available that can either speed you up or slow you down or make you feel better, but most of them also come with dependencies, and dependencies is where addictions can form. So, there’s an enormous amount of self-medication that goes on around sensory disintegration and people’s inability to manage emotions. We live in a society where you can pop down to the supermarket and buy that in a bottle, it’s really easy to access. Really easy to access.

Normalisation is our behaviour switch. In New Zealand we have this interesting position where at 14 you’re suddenly responsible for your emotional responses, whereas your emotional brain won’t develop until you’re 25. We criminalise a lot of trauma type behaviours very early and then this leads us down a pathway where we no longer consider ourselves to be coping, we consider ourselves to be bad or a subset of society and that has some deep profound impacts on people’s lives. Mental health is kind of connected to that in a cognition aspect. High levels of stress really will impact upon the way we view ourselves both as a heightened level of anxiety but also within depressive elements, so that depressive, anxious cycle over a long time and repeated, really impacts upon our mental health and wellbeing. 

And of course, learning and our inability, our focus on survival and some of the impacts upon learning in a qualification-based society has a massive impact upon our economic impacts, as in to how much we can learn, what sort of jobs we can have and what opportunities we get, which impact, plays up on everything else. It’s very inter-connected experience.

[Slide on screen: Trauma/ Survival Responses]

Colin Gale:

What does it look like behaviour wise? There are essentially four sub-sets of trauma behaviours that you’re likely to see in somebody who’s had trauma and survival experiences. The classic is the fight response that most people are kind of aware of. It’s often that angry and explosive stuff you’ll hear people describe it as zero to a hundred K in zero seconds. Truth is they were cruising about 80K anyway, they were just masking it really well, they’re already cranked up. It can sometimes express itself into what we see as controlling and narcissistic behaviours. People are often described as being a bully or violent. And so, we kind of place a lot of onus that people need to make better choices around managing their fight response but actually, your fight response is directed into the way that they view trauma and their need to survive.

That’s the real difficult part about trauma is that your need to survive becomes hard to distinguish, like you’ve hit certain situations, and you start viewing things that are normal to most people as survival situations and so you respond as survival situation. That’s where people sit there and go, ‘Hey, what’s going on here? What’s this about, it seems a bit weird.’

Flight is another common one where people avoid, and there’s a lot of anxiety and fear, a lot of chronic worry, rumination, thinking about things over, over and over. Sometimes flight presents itself as the people who are always on the go, always busy, always taking on too much. Flight can often present as not being able to set limits and take on more work than you need to because it’s a way of extracting yourself from a survival situation into something else.

Perfectionism is a classic sign of somebody in flight mode, because you spend so much time ruminating again and thinking about getting it just right so that it’s perfect, and so it can lead to overthinking. And panic responses of suddenly somebody’s just not there, they’ve removed themselves from normal situations.

The thing I find interesting about flight is that I see that a lot in professionals I work with, so something to be thinking about around ourselves. This isn’t just families we work with, you’ll see this in other adults around you.

Freeze has got a function of survival, of making yourself become invisible in a circumstance. It’s old classic play dead while the bear’s attacking you. It won’t actually help much if a bear’s attacking you. Has to be said, you’re already in a lot of trouble. But that’s the kind of idea of becoming small, becoming unnoticeable, becoming not the centre of focus for whatever the danger is. That plays out into responses and patterns of behaviour that look like expressions of shame, of sitting in the corner feeling that it’s your fault. We become, quite often, a centre of depression. Depression that we’re not worthy because we’ve frozen and isolated ourselves from things. We become stuck in the situation because we’re feeling frozen. It can become very difficult for somebody in a freeze state to make a decision, and the more pressure you put on somebody who’s finding it hard to make a decision, the more likely they are to remain in a freeze state.

Disassociation, which is when somebody’s almost in a fugue state where, actually, they’re there but they seem cognitively not there at all and actually feeling numbness within the body. Losing sensation in parts of the body. What’s happening from a biological standpoint there is, literally, because the body feels its in a survival situation, it’s pooling all the blood around the organs because it feels like it’s going to physically die. The impact that has upon your extremities and your mind is you have less blood there and you experience that as sensation of numbness.

Fawn is another form of survival, and the function of fawn behaviours is to please everybody, to be the liked one because the liked one’s less likely to be harmed or hurt. You put others first all the time, you put your own feelings and needs to one side and you’re always helping others, you’re a people pleaser. You form co-dependencies with others, particularly those who appear strong. You have loose boundaries around your needs because you’re so focused on meeting the needs of others. You find it very hard to say no because you don’t want to say no, because no might increase your need to survive, and it’s often these identity issues we focus so much on being something for someone else we forget who we are.

The way these things are taught, right, is that you’re fight, flight, freeze or fawn. We often like to think of them as a set of behaviours that exist in nice boundaries. Well, I can tell you after 13 years of working with this, and 50 odd years of living around this, that in fact in reality this is what it looks like, and it’s very hard to pick exactly what we’re working with. What you can see when you see these behaviours and all their various combinations occurring is that somebody’s in pain and feeling a need to survive. That’s really the thing to focus on around these behaviours is there an expression of needing to survive, and if we’re needing to survive, we need someone to make it easier or help us to survive, we need the assistance of another.

[Slide on screen: How do we support someone with Trauma Experiences?]

Colin Gale:

So, what do we do? How do we support somebody who’s in this space, who’s operating in a survival mode? Chuck up another wee lyric.

[Slide on screen: Quote]

Colin Gale:

I particularly like this one. For all of those who are fans of superhero movies, this became quite famous with the Suicide Squad. But I really like the line, ‘Please don’t make any sudden moves, you don’t know half of the abuse”. Working around people with traumatic experiences you need to be really mindful of how you approach them, how you behave around them, and you have to be also really mindful of you literally do not know the half of it, you will only be seeing a really small tip of the iceberg. If you’re privileged enough with someone to share their pain with you in its full extent, you’ll be surprised exactly what’s walking around you.

[Slide on screen: Organisational Principals of Trauma informed Practice]

Colin Gale:

Responding to trauma. The first and foremost is I am going to go back to the Meso we talked about earlier and pull out that organisations themselves need to be trauma informed in the way that they enable practice. It’s not enough to have trauma informed practitioners, you need to have trauma informed organisations, so organisations need to be behaving in a safe way, so they need to be providing safety at every level across the organisation, so it’s safe for staff and it’s safe for service users.

There needs to be an approach to the work that is about peer support and mutual self-help. This means the services we’re offering is based around helping people to help themselves, rather than doing on or to. The rationale for that is if that’s not existing through every level of the organisation, it’s not going to be existing in a meaningful way through the client experience.

Our interventions need to be built around the idea of empowerment, voice and choice. One of the most powerful things when working with people with trauma experiences is to be able to provide them choice, genuine choice. While I’m not talking about how we often like to say in society is, ‘Oh, everyone’s got a choice.’ Yeah, everyone’s got a choice, but the choice is not the same. Genuine choice is a combination of actual achievable options, and the ability, the empowerment and the support to the agency to see and take and use those options, and we always forget the second part about that agency and the ability to take those choices.

Organisations need to operate in a trustworthy and transparent way at every level. That means that they’re open to critique about who they are, they’re open to changing about who they are, and nothing is hidden, everything is open. I do realise the irony of saying that with where I work but that is something we’re having to work on in a big way in my space. Collaboration and mutuality is a key about it and this comes back to being able to enable empowerment and mutual self-help and being able to do that. You can’t do that unless your whole organisations geared towards the idea of collaboration as the form of intervention.

In an organisation lastly, but most importantly, must be completely aware of those social subsets that are informing and either enabling or disabling trauma to continue to occur, and so there has to be a commitment from the organisation to do something about that. Organisations can’t sit as bystanders. That’s the platform on which your practice needs to sit, right?

[Slide on screen: The Oranga Tamariki Promoting Resilience Practice Approach]

Colin Gale:

At Oranga Tamariki we have a four-staged approach to manage working with trauma and I think it’s a pretty good one. It was developed by Trish Glettal, along with the team of people working with her. It uses a four R approach which is quite common in this area, but it’s about promoting resilience. It’s a social model. This isn’t a treatment model, it’s a social model. This is about recognising that trauma is unique, that we recognise it in that way, that your experience of trauma and my experience of trauma, while similar, is unique and what we need is therefore unique as well. It’s about responding by being calm and being self-aware of your own emotions and responses to stress and taking time to connect and build safety through relationship, and that’s really the key, is to have the time to build safety in relationship and that takes a lot of time. We’ll come to what that looks like in a minute.

Understanding the importance of predictability and structure when it comes to regulations, emotional regulation. So behaving in ways that are calm, respectful, predictable and reliable, even when there is uncertainty and that’s been a foundation stone of my work working with a lot of people with high levels of trauma, is to always be calm and predictable and that the one thing they can be certain of is the responses they will have from me, even when everything else is up. That takes a lot of focus and intentional effort and it’s not a natural state of being. We look to restore. That’s through the promotion of healing, enhancing mana in every action we take. It’s about sharing power, focusing on strengths and providing resources but also the duty and responsibility to prevent further trauma from occurring. So, when something’s not right, doing something about it, making sure that our actions aren’t contributing to future trauma occurring.

It’s quite a big thing to do, but the thing around restoration is it’s not us healing people, it’s creating situations in which people can seek their own healing, and that’s really that important part of empowerment and choice.

[Slide on screen: In Practice]

Colin Gale:

So, in practice, this sits out like this. From a recognition standpoint we look at those trauma responses of those behaviours I talked about before and how they will be all muddled up. But we recognise them when we see them for what they are, a response to a need to survive. We’re always thinking as practitioners about what we don’t know, being naïve inquirers who really don’t approach this style of work. There’ll be a lot you don’t know, there’ll be a lot that’s hard for people to articulate, so don’t ever assume you’ve got it down pat.

We think about implicit biases, and a lot of the time being self-aware, we know what they are, and we park them because actually they’re our biases and they’re not helpful in this situation. We constantly remind ourselves that every situation and experience is unique, which is where that constant approach to life of being inquisitive and curious is really, really important.

We respond by understanding that relationship is about respect and respect is linked through understanding and building relationship. We recognise that trust is hard to earn and very, very easy to lose. The bottom one is like my key behaviour that I expect from professionals working this one: don’t promise and fail to deliver. False promises are one of the worse things you can do when working to support people with trauma experiences. It will not only inhibit your relationship with them but make it less likely for them to seek help from agencies in the future because they will remember that experience and it will resonate for a long period of time.

Regulation is about being in the right emotional space to do the work and so being inquiring around, what does make people feel better, where do they feel better? Try and figure that out before you engage with somebody who’s got trauma experiences. What is the most comfortable place for this whānau or this individual to meet you, where do they feel safe, what does that look like? A key one really is, always arrive on time. That’s really important when we’ve got somebody who’s got an anxious view of the world particularly. It’s nothing worse than, are they coming, are they not coming? What time are they coming, why aren’t they here? Don’t they like me? It’s a terrible place to place somebody who’s in a survival space. Get there on time, be there on time or a little bit early, but not too early,most are going to be turning up surprised. Actually, make sure you’re where you need to be before you need to be so that you get there in time.

The other real thing that we forget to do in our business is, some days you just can’t do it. From a regulation where am I at today. There are days that it’s just whatever work might have been planned to happen, isn’t going to happen. Respect those days for what they are. It’s not about being people being lazy or making excuses, they just can’t do it today, and that’s okay. Do something else and wait for another day when you can do it. That’s the reality of living with trauma, some days you just can’t, some days you just can’t. We don’t have a lot of sympathy for that in our society, but we really need to have more.

And restore. This is about building up the people, Whakamana Tangata. Building it up, both at an individual and community, whānau, hapū and iwi level. We want to build up communities and that comes through providing resources and access to resources at the lowest level and the easiest way for people to access it. It’s kind of that take home thought of what I pointed out before about society and trauma, is we need to prevent further trauma from happening at every level. When we think politically at an organisational level, at a personal level and an inter-generational level, what can we do today that makes it less likely that childhood trauma will happen today and tomorrow? What actions can we take from a social justice standpoint that make the experience of human development more optimal, make it better for people? Every small change can make a big difference.

If we do these four things well, if we recognise, respond, regulate and restore in our actions as professionals, then that’s what aroha in action starts to look like. That’s that whole exposure of actually helping others and providing what we can and do, looks like in actual practice.

[Animated Graphic: Aroha in Action Family Start Hui 2023 graphic]

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