Becoming Trauma Informed

In case you didn’t know, I am currently earning a certification to become trauma informed in order to not only better serve you in my yoga classes, meditation class, and reiki sharing, but also for my high school students, and ultimately every human I have the privilege of connecting with. 

When working to become culturally responsive and trauma informed it can be useful, if not essential, to develop particular and on-going practices to support this path. A self-awareness practice is key for any personal growth journey and should be an encouraged practice for any human being. Additionally, humility is essential in creating relational safety as we recognize how our behaviors, learned through self-awareness can affect others in any given moment. A self-awareness practice will support in developing a greater sense of humility by increasing the capacity to hold the uncomfortable experience the feeling humility creates in the body.

Self-awareness is foundational for providing relational safety. Webster dictionary defines self-awareness as “conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires”. Our character, feelings, motives, and desires are fluid and shifting through every moment of our lives. Self-awareness supports us in becoming aware of these ever shifting narratives moving through our body and experience. 

I first discovered a true experience of self-awareness not when I began meditating as a solitary practice, but after I studied meditation and mindfulness in a graduate degree program with actual teachers. With guidance, my meditation practice was supported and directed with purpose from those who had a deeper experience with the practice. After I graduated with a certification in mindfulness I thought I was ‘finished’, that I would continue to sit and meditate and be ever more and more self-aware. However, it turns out that without having a teacher, a therapist, or someone to witness and mirror your blind spots, your meditation can actually support well grooved pathways of dissociation. This is experiential evidence that self-awareness is not a practice that leads you to a destination, but is the journey of a lifetime, it is the journey of living.  

Self-awareness is about learning the patterns that kept us safe as children but are now causing harm in the people around us as adults, including other children, continuing to reinforce the cycle. Self-awareness is a continued practice of coming back to yourself. I continue to practice meditation to develop self-awareness, along with journaling, but I also work with a nervous system regulation coach who shows me my blind spots, approves of my patterns, and lovingly redirects these patterns when my body is ready for the shift. Because of my work with her I am aware of how my body reacts to particular stimuli, how it thinks it is protecting me, and how it is holding me back from my potential. I will also begin working with a somatic therapist next week, whom I have chosen because I know she is capable of pointing out my blind spots to help me face and grow through them. 

The knowledge and language that I am learning through this certification is already supporting these already developed self-aware practices. And yet, I can still do harm. Each human is always capable of harm no matter how subtle it may be because we are always interacting and connecting with other nervous systems who have experienced traumas. Connection is a basic need. And because we can always do harm, no matter how hard we try, it is important to continue increasing self-awareness, in order to follow up our inadvertent harm with repair. “Although ruptures of various sorts may be unavoidable, being aware of them is essential before (one) can restore a collaborative, nurturing connection… Ruptures without repair lead to a deepening sense of disconnection” (Hartzel & Siegel, 2004, p. 213). In the coming months I will be adding a few practices as a result of continuing my education to be trauma informed. I would like to become intimate with the shifts my nervous system makes through a given day. It would be really interesting to witness this through the course of a year, knowing already that I run more sympathetic during the warmer months and more dorsal when it’s cold, but also witnessing the micro movements of my nervous system from morning to night and from various predicted and unpredicted stimuli. 

Additionally, my classroom, while already well-known as a calm space for my students, still feels a bit chaotic to my own nervous system at times, because it lacks a flow. I am very familiar that my nervous system needs a clean and organized space. Just the other day after a highly dysregulating day, I stayed late to clean my classroom and it felt better to my system than trying to rush out early. I have made this happen in my home and my whole house (sans my own childrens room) is a sanctuary to my nervous system. I plan to organize my classroom to simplify the space for my students so they know where to turn to regulate themselves and also know where I am, their teacher is, own her current pathway, modeling for my students that a calm regulated state, while a great goal, is not reality. I will not require my high school students to do anything more than to witness my own process, as with high schoolers, it is important to not require anything more than what they want to sign up for, especially when it comes to wanting to be self-aware of their states. They are wonderfully stubborn creatures, and I have full respect for it. Plus, they are always more open to learning when it is an option and when they see it modeled, as it always is for true integration.   

A modeled self-awareness practice out in front for the students to witness is also a lesson in humility. When a teacher can admit they are angry in a safe way that is not harmful to others, but who is also modeling how to regulate these states, shows the students they have permission to be angry, to be sad, to be on their own pathway, feeling whatever they are feeling. It models to students how one can feel the discomfort of a particular nervous system state without taking us under and how naming the discomfort can bring us to regulation even in the face of intense external stimuli such as facing authority or in differences among others. 

My experience of both self-awareness and humility grew tenfold when I read the book White Fragility by Robin Diangelo. The book, while designed of course to bring awareness to our unconscious race bias’, is almost a better lesson in holding the uncomfortable sensations of our debilitating nervous systems patterns. The entire book is a reminder “that we are capable of and guilty of perpetuating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjection of others” (Diangelo, 2018, p. 95) and that without self-awareness we are “unable to separate intentions from impact” (p. 105). This is of course true when we discuss race, but it is also true everywhere. When we as a society begin to practice humility and hold the discomfort associated with facing our implicit biases against minorities, we also grow our capacity to be humbled by anyone who benefits from their feelings being validated from our transgressions. Being witnessed in our pain allows for it to move through and be processed in our bodies so we are no longer holding on to it. When we hold onto it, when it is not safe to share we perpetuate it through our frustrations outwardly continuing the cycle. 

As with anything in life there will be challenges in implementing these new strategies. The number one challenge will always be my own old nervous system grooves. Whether this be from the personal experiences my nervous system went through as a child keeping me safe through habits of disassociation and freeze or falling into the trap of the traditional model of discipline and coercive regulation enforced through parent figures, my own teachers, and the teachers and administrators who modeled such practices early in my teaching career. Students will trigger me, colleagues will trigger me, administrators will trigger me, the system will trigger me, and I have my own invisible backpack I carry in with me everyday. Last year, I found that I had trouble finding compassion for students who reminded me of my soon-to-be ex husband. My son has had his own mental-health needs, not unsimilar to my students, and oftentimes I can fall into patterns of resentment, when I don’t feel seen in my own struggles. While I have worked through many of these struggles, through my own regulation and ownership practices and found compassion for the students, the fact is new triggers will always arise. My practice, in addition to incorporating the increased nervous system self-aware practices, will be to practice validating, authentically noticing, and providing space to the humans who trigger my nervous system and old patterns and to remembering that emotions are contagious, the good, the bad, and the ugly. (There are no “bad” emotions BTW). I will practice regulating myself before interacting with a known-to-my-system triggering person, but also model for them, that I get triggered too, that to be triggered is to be human, that these emotions make sense, but we must be aware how these responses can cause harm, so that we can either reframe from acting out on them or have the humility to be able to repair when we rupture a connection.

Resources:

DiAngelo, R., & Tatusian, A. (2016). White Fragility. Public Science.

Hartzell, M., & Siegel, D. (2004). Parenting from the inside out: How a deeper self-understanding can help you raise children who thrive. Penguin Publishing Group. 

**Adapted from my first paper from my trauma informed certification through Elizabethtown College.