How can you ensure your work is sensitive to clients who have experienced trauma?

To ensure work sensitivity: 1. Be aware of triggers: Be aware of potential triggers for trauma survivors and take proactive steps to minimize their impact. 2. Use trauma-informed language: Be mindful of the language you use when communicating with trauma survivors 3. Respect autonomy and choice: Empower clients to make their own decisions and choices regarding their care and treatment whenever possible. 4. Create a safe environment: Establishing a safe and supportive environment is crucial for trauma survivors. 5. Educate yourself: Take the time to learn about the effects of trauma, common responses to trauma, and best practices for working with trauma survivors.

Trauma is not an event, but your reaction to the event. For someone who has grown up in an invalidating environment could find loud noises and accusatory tone traumatic. To you that may seem perfectly normal, but to another person that may dysregulate their nervous system and put them in a freeze state. Understand that trauma is then not marked by the severity of the event but an individual’s response to it. You can also look at it T and t. Capital T Trauma focuses on catastrophic events like abuse, disasters and war. Small t trauma focuses on conflict, dysfunction and neglect among others.

Enhancing engagement using participatory approaches will allow you to build trust among your target clients. Doing so, you will create community acceptance before implementing a specific intervention. Throughout the process, one needs to avoid sharing personal judgments, and merely focus on giving a sense of being heard to the target audience. It will make them feel their narratives are being taken into account, which will reinforce trust as well.

Trauma does not impact everyone the same way. Avoid adding your own labels or definitions to the client's trauma. It's important to let the client define their own experience, and slowly fit it into the larger symptomology of their trauma/illness/concern.

The key to trauma informed spaces is creating a safe environment. Ask, don’t assume. Learn from the people with lived experiences, what are ways through which they feel safe and heard.

Trauma informed spaces are not just ensured by an eggshell tip-toeing of a client's experience or a gentle tone of speech. Creating a basic safety net around the client's therapeutic environment with a sensitive holding of their experiences, helping them identify their patterns in a non-threatening way, and providing them a place to reflect without retraumatising them. Supporting them in feeling safe within their bodies- using somatic skills of coping, grounding and movement- all bound by the therapist's constant endeavour of learning and re-learning trauma informed ways of being a present facilitator for them in their safe space.

Traumatic event exposure, and symptoms of it vary from culture to culture. What someone from a certain culture considers traumatizing may not be what another considers traumatizing. It's important to set aside one's biases, books and assumptions, and focus on the client as the source of our information. How did this event impact your client? How do they feel about it? Do they want to seek support for it?

Read extensively about compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Stay in a peer space to ensure community support. Seek supervision regularly to maintain highest standard of care. And what has helped me is staying connected to my personal therapist: MHP during difficult days.

Trauma focused therapists often find themselves facing vicarious traumatization, compassion fatigue and burnout. Apart from the suggestions already provided, I think therapists also need to come to terms with their own triggers and realise whether or not they can help their client without harming themselves. This is a difficult discussion, and often requires you to set boundaries that may be uncomfortable, but are necessary for the therapeutic relationship.

As a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional I follow the 5R approach to working with a trauma survivor. 1. Realise: that need for sensitivity 2. Recognise: unique stressors of your client 3. Respond: affirmatively to their lived experience 4. Resist Re- traumatisation: limit need for elaboration 5. Refer: if you feel that the care you are providing is insufficient, refer to a specialist * bonus 6. Resources: help the survivor with required resources to report the trauma if they feel the need to. 7. Remember: agency always lies with the trauma survivor.