What is trauma-informed coaching? Resisting re-traumatization
This week concludes the series on trauma-informed coaching focusing on SAMHSA’s “four R’s” of trauma-informed practice. Previously, we talked about the importance of realizing how prevalent trauma is, recognizing the signs of trauma, and responding to trauma while staying grounded in curiosity, compassion, and connection with ourselves and others.
The fourth R, resisting re-traumatization, asks us to think more broadly and deeply about more systemic change. In other words, it’s one thing to know how to respond to someone whose life has been affected by trauma. It’s another thing altogether to work to change the conditions that continue to traumatize that person.
So if we’re serious about trauma, we need to be serious about resisting re-traumatization. And being serious about resisting re-traumatization means seeking new ways to lead, work, and live.
Before we start, please note that any discussion of trauma—even a discussion like this one that won’t dive into specifics—might raise something in you. If it does, be gentle with yourself and look for ways to support yourself if you need it.
“Resisting re-traumatization” has a deeply active and even reactive air to it. It’s something that we’re doing: pushing against, forcing back, standing up, telling off, getting angry. When we look around in everyday life, we see so much that seems to be crying out for these types of things: racial injustice, sexual violence, political oppression, and so on.
To be sure, we do need to stand up and push back when the moment demands it.
The question, though, is whether standing up and pushing is the right thing to do all the time. Or even when it is the right thing to do, we need to ask whether we’re standing up for or pushing against the right things in the right ways.
In Creative Ministry, the Dutch Catholic priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen highlights three temptations we can face when resisting injustice:
Concretism, or focusing on specific solutions or results without considering whether those goals are right or even attainable—and becoming cynical or angry when we can’t get what we want;
Power, or using social action to make us feel strong at the expense of the people we claim to be helping; and
Pride, or assuming we have all the answers without acknowledging our blind spots.
When we fall prey to these temptations, we’re not resisting retraumatization, even if our intentions are noble. In fact, we’re continuing the trauma cycle in ways that harm others and even ourselves.
For Nouwen, resisting re-traumatization isn’t just about doing. It’s even more so about being.
And so resisting the trauma around us means extensive inner work, not only alone but with others. In his book The Soul of Desire, Psychiatrist Curt Thompson suggests three practices as being essential to this inner work: dwelling, gazing, and inquiring. Each is essential in helping people process their trauma together and grow to create beauty in the world around them.
Resisting re-traumatization means we need to learn how to dwell with each other’s trauma. Many of us feel our trauma every time we look in the mirror, walk down the street, enter a classroom, or check our smartphones. It’s in the air we breathe. There’s no way to get away from it. We’re dwelling in our trauma whether we like it or not.
But how willing are we to step outside our pain to dwell with other people’s trauma? How willing are we to empathize with those who we think don’t have any trauma history at all? How willing are we to make sure others feel the same safety we want for ourselves?
These questions are vital for resistance because they create the conditions for the type of hope Nouwen believes we need to act well in the world. They break down our isolation, challenge us to realize the commonalities we share, and transform our image of what post-traumatic growth and healing look like.
Resisting re-traumatization means we need to have courage to gaze at each other’s shame with compassion. Some writers today use the word “gaze” as a synonym for power and domination, a stare that consumes whatever it sees. However, Thompson—echoing the German Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar—sees the word in the opposite sense, as a capacity “to be present and look upon [something] on its terms, not on our own.”
For Thompson, gazing isn’t a drive to control and consume but a gesture of vulnerability and receptivity. When we gaze at something, he says, we are calling it beautiful and worth our compassion, love, and care.
Thompson argues that gazing in this sense is absolutely necessary when working with trauma, because our default strategy for dealing with trauma is shaming ourselves. We cope with our pain by calling part—or even all—of ourselves ugly, weak, disgusting, or unworthy. Shaming ourselves in this way cuts us off from our capacity to create. We’re too bound to the belief in our own ugliness to see anything more.
For healing to occur, we need to recognize this shame for what it is and learn to appreciate the parts of ourselves our trauma has taught us to despise. But Thompson argues that it’s often difficult to do this on our own, especially if our self-shaming is so habitual we can’t see anything different.
We need to receive the loving gaze of others, and we need to give that gift to them, too. In the process, we learn to create beauty together.
Resisting re-traumatization means we need to inquire into the trauma we see. Thompson argues that when we recognize the signs of trauma, we need to become curious of ourselves and of others. Although our questions may take several forms, Thompson writes they all come back to four core things:
What do you want most for yourself?
Where “are” you today—emotionally, relationally, spiritually?
Where are you suffering?
Where are you feeling shame?
These questions can be profoundly healing. Asking them opens the door to a greater sense of compassion. We’re stepping outside of the cycle of blame, shame, and evasion to connect—first with ourselves and then with others—in new ways. And then, a whole new set of questions emerge:
What would it be like to live in a spirit of curiosity, compassion, and connection all the time?
How do we need to be with ourselves?
How do we need to be with each other?
How do we get there?
Once we start asking those questions, we’re laying the foundation for a different type of resistance to trauma, one that heals from within.
Want to explore these questions more? Contact me here.
