Building Beloved Communities – Reflections on Trauma-Informed Communication and A Moment of Pause
Categories: School Crisis Recovery, School Crisis Renewal, Workplace
When you are in the presence of someone with strong emotional intelligence and interpersonal skill it is truly unmistakable.
You feel respected.
You feel valued.
You feel connected.
And within this heart-filled, supportive space, it becomes much easier to deal with difficult topics and challenging situations.
The A Moment of Pause training we developed at SCRR was designed to help develop the skills to do this.
How We Got Here
The A Moment of Pause: Time to Cultivate Trauma Informed Communication
training series sprang out of an earlier version of Trauma- Informed Communication that was developed in my organization Trauma Transformed. We expanded and further detailed that training specifically for SCRR in response to what school staff said they needed, holding this essential question at heart:
How might we increase our skills, knowledge, and communication abilities to help our people recover, process information, and navigate uncertainties?
Leading through a crisis requires that we communicate in ways that are clear, transparent and prioritize the health and well-being of the workforce. Trauma-informed communication during, through, and after a crisis acknowledges that how you frame and deliver information will influence how people will experience events and circumstances. Leaders must be highly attentive or they risk inadvertently exacerbating distress in how they communicate.
Under crisis, people have fewer resources and decreased capacity for processing difficult information. Unless we find better ways to communicate about difficult matters and process them adequately, we will constantly stay caught in the cycle of reliving and holding on to old injuries that prevent our healing.
A Moment of Pause focuses on trauma – informed communication after a big experience (e.g., crises). Throughout four facilitated sessions, we explore a combination of content learning, practice, and reflection:
- Setting up a good conversation
- Staying in positive relationship.
- Framing and nuancing communication and
- Mending and repairing when things go awry
Taking Moments of Pause: Trauma Informed Communication Are Essential Recovery & Renewal Ingredients
What I like about trauma-informed communication and why, for me, it is one of the most important skills to learn is that it is a skill that you can apply every day, all day long. It does not matter what your title is, or your role, or your span of control. All of us can use it. Sometimes what you can do professionally is constrained by the flexibility of the system you are in or is limited by your role within the system. Communication is one of the places in a person’s life, typically, where they have lots of leeway to do things their own way, where they can freely bring forth their own skill and embodiment. There are always opportunities to help support people to regulate, to metabolize, to feel connected to and understood. Without this often invisible base, a lot of stuff does not get done. It is an important part of our jobs.
This is even more critical in the face of school upheaval and restoration. After schools have been impacted by a crisis and desire to bridge towards recovery and renewal, how we communicate our forward movement and how we hold people in the months and years after the crisis is important.
To help us begin to utilize communication as a vehicle for recovery and renewal, let’s examine a few strategies.
Strategy 1: Know the Goal of Your Communication Intention and Impact
Imagine a parent comes into the school to complain about the suspension of their child. They are arguing with school staff about the unreasonableness of the suspension, and they do not want to hear any evidence or contradiction about their perception of their child. When you are confronting such a person, especially when you are being kind and generous of spirit, you would want your efforts to produce a type of softness and reasonableness from the parent. What happens when it doesn’t? When this does not happen, people can easily jump to the other side and want to use force or power or intimidation or manipulation.
I think sometimes when people think about trauma-informed communication, they assume that the other person will be responsive and grateful due to their effort to be kind and inclusive in navigating a difficult situation or crisis. That does happen often in fact. But the goal is much bigger than having a productive or pleasant conversation. One of the skills of the training is understanding how not to contribute toward harm.
One of the most impactful parts of the training, I think, is when people learn about abusive values and how these contribute to poor communication. These values are subtle, often implicit, and unconsciously filter into our views and attitudes about others. After experiencing a crisis and not being given space for reconnection (as happens in recovery) or provided the opportunity for meaning-making (as happens in renewal), this can increase the likelihood a person will turn to abusive values or interact with individuals through the lens of abusive values.
Someone speaking from a place of those abusive values might believe things like:
“If you don’t give me what I want, I will not speak to you or cooperate with you.”
OR
“If I believe you are of lower status than me, I do not have to value your perspective.”
There are cultural norms we all live in that are very self-righteous and very entitled, and these attitudes undermine or destroy empathy and connection. These are the remnants of colonial values and the outgrowth of structural supremacy. The challenge to that historical legacy and a necessary component of trauma-informed communication, is building empathy and connection. We like to think of ourselves as kind, generous people, especially those of us in the helping profession. But this vitriolic attitude affects all of us as well, and it takes actual discipline to undo the social and cultural training that would allow us to denigrate and dismiss other worthy human beings. What happens when you remove the option to think of another human being as undeserving of your complete respect at all times? It is a high bar.
Reflection Question: How do you know when someone is being empathetic toward you in an exchange? How do you let others know when you have empathy for them and what might you do to build connection through empathy?
Strategy 2: Get Curious
When we are in the stress of a crisis or the aftermath of a crisis, we frequently linger in a state of survival and self-preservation. A principle that might be helpful to remember in moments like confronting the angry parent above is to replace the question “What is wrong with you” with “What has happened to you?” What has happened in your background that has produced what I perceive to be a feisty, uncooperative spirit. This invites us into a larger field, a way to connect with greater compassion and curiosity. Often people who act in frustrating and unskillful ways are doing so as a result of past traumatic experiences. There is no other way for them to pass through this historical tragedy but to metabolize their ache and pain, and this only happens through the witness and support of others.
No one ‘gets their act together’ by themselves. No one heals alone. What that means, then, is that sometimes we as helpers or caregivers have to consume some measure of toxicity to support others’ healing. It is not fair. It is not pleasant. It should not be this way. It is a heavy burden on us, especially since we will probably not even benefit from the seeds of our labor. But that is the deepest aim of this trauma-informed practice, to contribute toward the healing of everyone around us. This relies heavily on attending to different layers of safety that surface in recovery practices, such as psychological safety and utilizing coping skills, as well as strategic meaning-making for that individual. How are they making sense of their experience and frustration? And how might your communication support them metabolizing their emotions and seeking solutions?
Reflection Question: What might it look like to stay curious, about what is underneath, or behind the communication of others? What questions might you ask yourself about what is underneath or behind my your communications?
Strategy 3: Attend to Experience
Communication is very seldom just about the words. Connected to the words is a whole experience people are having. From our point of view the goal of trauma-informed communication is to shape and influence that experience. A critical point to highlight when there are disagreements and misunderstandings is, instead of focusing our attention on clarifying our perspective and expectations, we spend more attention on preparing ourselves (and others) to be open to having a productive conversation and we focus our attention on the person and their response to us. In other words, we notice how our communication is being received. In short, we pay attention to experience, not just content.
Reflection Question: What conditions might you need to establish with your conversation partners to encourage a sense of openess? How might they be in alignment with what others need, how might they differ?
Strategy 4: Building Beloved Communities
Imagine a school system in which everyone, even complete strangers, were contributing to the growth and healing of the whole family. It was not just about pedagogy. It was not just about the children. It was not just about getting things to go more smoothly. It was actually about healing. Wouldn’t you want to be part of a context like that? And the only extra effort you had to make is to be more mindful of how you speak. That would be an incredible place indeed. But in order not to be reactive when confronted with challenge and unpleasantness, you would need to have some measure of autonomy and emotional independence to not need validation or responsiveness from the other side. If I were to think about what I would want as the next level of learning for people who are taking this training, it would be this emotional autonomy.
Reflection question: What do you need to know, do and who do you need to be, to be more emotionally autonomous? What might your community members need to be emotionally autonomous?
There has to be an additional measure beyond how others respond to us that we are able to rest in. Being able to not take things personally and sitting comfortably with the ambiguity of whether we are “doing it right” is not easy.
Engaging in these practices will be the seed of your own incredible growth and transformation. The miraculous potential of doing this work is that by attending to others’ healing, we actually find ways to more deeply heal ourselves.
About the Author
Antoine Moore, MA, MPP, Field Coach with SCRR and Trauma Transformed, is at heart a catalyst for learning and development, having done some form of individual or organizational capacity building for 20 years. In the past, he worked as a life coach, nonprofit consultant, facilitator, manager, and creative arts therapist. Antoine has great passion for helping others create trauma-informed systems and education settings. His perpetual question is how to set up creative, responsive contexts where people can bring forth their best thinking and being. Antoine loves language and culture and has a goal to become conversant in seven languages before he retires.
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