Storying Trauma trauma & narrative

Professional Development

• Training & Education
• Mental Health Counseling Clinical Supervision
• Professional Mentorship
• Events
• Programming Creators

Storying Trauma across training, clinical supervision, mentorship, and events will all engage with the content below. Clicking on an item from the directory above will take you to pricing details of that category.

"There is no life without trauma. There is no history without trauma...Trauma as a mode of being violently halts the flow of time, fractures the self, and punctures memory and language." Gabriele M. Schwab (2010)

"...communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized..." Bessel van der Kolk (2014)

Professional and Person

Interpersonal neurobiology (Siegel) teaches us that the old-school style of "don't bring yourself" into the room as a professional is outdated due to the impossibility of that premise. You, as a professional AND person are being perceived by others (including clients, patients, students, customers) and you are also being neurocepted (Porges) by their nervous system. Increasing awareness of our somatic stories (e.g., posture, gestures, prosody) and their relational influence fosters increased emotional intelligence, allowing us to engaging deeper connections in our personal and professional lives.

How do you negotiate when professional and personal become contradictory? What happens to your body when a system imposes nonhumanistic directives?

How will the contradiction and your negotiation of it inform both your body and the broader socioecological collective?

The Nature of Trauma

How do you engage, both professionally and personally, with the understanding that trauma exists foundationally in both an individual's and the collective experience?

When we hear the word "trauma", we automatically retrieve a mental construct of what we understand "trauma" to be." This understanding often has developed across time, with input coming from media, pop culture, time-limited educational trainings, personal experience, or some other conglomeration of events that informed us. This constructed understanding makes us feel comfortable, more settled, more certain in a given moment of conversation as a professional, as a person. We think, "Trauma, yeah, I know what you mean."

In that certainty; however, comes a lack of awareness that there is an other's understanding, that differs from ours. Their body and their collective experiences will be different from ours, sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small. It is communication that allows us to be present in the movement between the differing understandings that evolves more collective meaning making. A lack of a professional's ability to query difference can be neurocepted as relational or professional dismissal by bodies holding chronic trauma.

How can you engage understanding of trauma as a dynamic process for both individuals and the socioecological collective in your practice?

A Co-Participatory Ground

Co-creation finds communicative effectiveness when we work with Narrative Theory as our guide through an ever-evolving understanding of individual and collective trauma. Narrative allows us to story alongside co-participants in our world, as we move through each other's lives across differing roles and types of relationships. Storytelling with frameworks of understanding that allow for differences across contexts encourage a deeper consideration of our personal and professional ethics, which ideally continually evolve to inform our practice of good.

How will you co-create meaning with coworkers? with clients? across hierarchical positions of power?

Moving Forward More Collectively

How do I currently engage wellbeing across personal and professional?

Witnessing and responding communicatively works against further fragilizing a trauma wound or avoiding it altogether. While in a professional role we may experience comfort with the queries and conversations we avoid, our personal self and our body is for sure keeping that score. We are also serving to silence what another person need to be present in the space. Learning to engage with communicative effectiveness allows a practitioner to developing process that helps to maximimize a professional's goal while minimizing somatic and emotional reactions for their clients.

How will I participate as a professional to build a more resilient community in which to practice

Training & Education

Mental Health Counseling Clinical Supervision

Professional Mentorship

Events

Coming Soon!

Programming Creators