Trauma-Informed Care
From SAMHSA.gov
What is trauma?
Trauma happens after an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that someone experiences as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening. It can have a negative effect on a person’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. Entire generations, communities, or cultures can experience trauma collectively.
What is trauma-informed care?
Trauma-informed care is a way to create safer environments for people who have experienced trauma. Programs and organizations that use trauma-informed care:
- Realize how trauma affects people and understand potential paths for recovery and healing
- Recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, and staff
- Respond by creating policies, procedures, and practices that reflect knowledge about trauma
- Resist or avoid retraumatization
What is a Trauma-Informed Approach?
A program, organization, or system that is trauma-informed realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; and responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices, while seeking to actively resist retraumatization.
Trauma-informed approaches recognize and intentionally respond to the lasting adverse effects of experiencing traumatic events, through several principles:
- Safety: participants and staff feel physically and psychologically safe.
- Peer support: peer support and mutual self-help are key as vehicles for establishing safety and hope, building trust, enhancing collaboration, and utilizing their lived experience to promote recovery and healing.
- Trustworthiness and Transparency: Organizational decisions are conducted with the goal of building and maintaining trust with participants and staff.
- Collaboration and Mutuality: importance is placed on partnering and leveling power differences between staff and service participants.
- Empowerment, Voice and Choice: organizations foster a belief in the primacy of the people who are served to heal and promote recovery from trauma.
