Here are two fundamental paradigms of healing that might be helpful for you as we move through our discussions over the rest of the semester.
Trauma and Healing
The first comes from Judith Lewis Herman, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective. She has done extensive work with war veterans and victims of child abuse and incest in developing her framework. In Herman’s book Trauma and Healing she outlines a three-stage process of healing:
Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.
So three stages:
- Safety
- Truth
- Community
In her subsequent book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, she adds a fourth stage:
- Justice
Trauma-Informed Care
The second paradigm is not drawn from a specific researcher nor is it a framework for treating specific individuals who have experienced trauma. Instead, it’s a method of approaching interactions with people that recognizes that many people have experienced trauma in their lives, it’s not always apparent who has or what kind of trauma they are carrying. Trauma-Informed Care is a more generalized way of delivering care that integrates knowledge about trauma into policies, practices, and procedures, with the aim of creating environments that are safe, supportive, and empowering for everyone.
There are six principles of Trauma-Informed Care:
- Safety: Ensuring physical and emotional safety for everyone involved.
- Trustworthiness and transparency: Building trust through clear communication and consistency.
- Peer support: Encouraging shared experiences to build community and support.
- Collaboration and mutuality: Emphasizing partnership and minimizing power dynamics by sharing decision-making and responsibility.
- Empowerment and choice: Prioritizing individual strengths and offering choices in decision-making processes to encourage active participation in achieving one’s own goals.
- Cultural, historical, and gender awareness: Acknowledging and addressing the cultural and societal contexts that influence a person’s experience of trauma.
These are paradigms from caring disciplines, not frameworks for understanding texts; however, do they help you to notice patterns withing the texts we are reading, which are all representations of trauma and recovery? Do these two paradigms bring up questions for you about the texts we are reading?