Trauma-informed care and trauma-responsive care are two closely related but distinct concepts. While they share a common goal of promoting healing and well-being, they approach the implementation of that goal in different ways.

Trauma-Informed Care

Trauma-informed care creates an environment that understands trauma and promotes a universally safe, supportive environment that is sensitive to the needs of persons (i.e. students, clients, children, staff) who may have experienced trauma.  Staff and teachers are trained to recognize signs of trauma and to provide a supportive and predictable environment, with a focus on safety, trust, and positive relationships.

Trauma-Responsive Care

Trauma-responsive care focuses on the unique needs, behaviors, triggers of those persons who have experienced and are affected by trauma.  Here customized interventions like calming techniques, co-regulation, support, de-escalation strategies, trauma-focused therapy and individual educational or behavioral plans are used.

How Many Students Are Affected by Trauma?

Research suggests that one in four children experiences some form of trauma before the age of 18.  According to studies such as the National Survey of Children’s Health, it is estimated that over 60% of children have experienced at least one type of traumatic event, with many students enduring multiple adverse experiences. Trauma may include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, bullying, community violence, and more.

Trauma Care Best Practices

Trauma-informed care is based on six core principles namely: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment and responsiveness.

Safety Comes First

People who have experienced trauma often have difficulty feeling safe or trusting their environment or other people. Those who have experienced a traumatic event often feel less safe than others. HWC understands the impact of trauma on the entire human organism, which is why safety (creating a safe physical and emotional space) is our number one priority.  By creating a physically and emotionally safe environment, organizations and schools can offer their clients and students a foundation from which they can begin developing resilience and a secure sense of self and the world around them.  There are two components to safety:

• • Physical safety: Ensuring clients and students have a secure physical environment (e.g., no bullying, no violence, a safe space with no triggers).
  • Emotional safety: Encouraging supportive interactions, allowing for emotional expression, development of self and resiliency and minimizing or providing an environment that minimizes retraumatizing experiences.

The critical questions every client and student wants to know, “am I safe, do you care, will you help me, can I trust you”?

Connection: Strong, supportive relationships help to rebuild trust and promote positive behaviors. HWC’s Solid Object Relationship Model (SORM) teaches that the most effective way to de-escalate a situation is to be the person the client or student can trust and feel safe with.

SORM is a relationship-centered approach that teaches staff how to behave in a manner that provides clients with the emotional and environmental support needed to convey trust, security and safety. Clients and students test the emotional solidity of the people (i.e. staff) around them by attempting to activate a response. HWC teaches staff how to recognize the purpose of the ‘test’ and appeal to the healthy components of the client’s personality, which seeks stability or homeostasis, to form an alliance.

Strategies include

• Being Affect Neutral
• Being empathetic
• Being trustworthy
• Providing support
• Giving choices and strategies to assist the client or student to calm down (breathing, slowing down, coping strategies, redirection)
• Providing a safe space
• Staying regulated (a dysregulated staff person will never be able to manage a dysregulated client or student).

As it relates to HWC’s SORM, the more positive the staff’s relationship with the student or client, the more likely they will allow you to support them during a time of dysregulation.

Some Of The Benefits of a Trauma-informed Organization or School 

Improved Emotional and Psychological Well-being

• Reduced Stress: Trauma-informed practices help create environments that minimize stressors and triggers for people who have experienced trauma. This can lead to decreased anxiety, depression, and emotional dysregulation.
• Increased Resilience: By fostering physical and emotional safety and supportive relationships, trauma-informed organizations and organizations help clients and students build resilience and better cope with challenges.

Enhanced Academic and Behavioral Outcomes

• Better Focus and Engagement: Students in a trauma-informed school are more likely to feel physically and emotionally safe, which can improve their concentration, participation, and academic performance.
• Reduced Behavioral Issues: Trauma-informed approaches emphasize understanding the root causes of behaviors. This can lead to a pro-active approach to eliminate triggers (i.e. bright lights, loud noises, raised voices, finger pointing) and put into place customized education or behavioral intervention plans that address the underlying trauma.

Take-away

HWC’s program is easily adaptable to the spectrum of trauma and neurodiverse clients and students.

HWC’s program focuses on interventions that have flexibility so that the intervenor can intervene in a way that works with and maximizes the strengths of the person.  The goal is to empower the client or student and give him/her/they tools to manage their own behavior.

To have a trauma-informed or trauma-responsive organization or school, safety comes first. Traumatized clients and students must learn that not all emotionally charged situations end badly, and that they can trust staff to protect them from the emotional and physical consequences of their and others behavior.

Handle With Care.  Everyone Deserves To Be Safe.