I just completed mandated-reporter training to maintain my Pennsylvania license to practice speech and language pathology. Mandated-reporter meaning, I am legally obligated to either call or submit an online report if at any point I have even reasonable cause to suspect child abuse including physical, psychological, sexual, and/or neglect. The training, when it discussed the definitions, impacts, and full contextualization of child abuse, highlighted and spent quite some time on the importance of “trauma” and “trauma-informed care.”
Before I continue, there is an ENTIRE discussion to be had about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s (Pa) Department of Human Service’s (DHS) Department of Child Welfare (DCW) as well as the affiliated and administered county mechanisms for supporting the process of child welfare. I mean, the fact that DHS wholesale endorses and reimburses ONLY applied behavior analysis for providing intensive services to all children who do not comply and assimilate readily could be an entire conversation. In fact, I have researched and, with evidence, begun that conversation in a separate post (linked here: No2ABA). However, the reason I’m prompted to write today? Is a single slide. It was number 181 of version 7.1.6_T of the Pa Child Welfare Resource Center at the University of Pittsburgh’s training titled, “Recognizing and Reporting Child Abuse: Mandated and Permissive Reporting In Pennsylvania.” In discussing the effects of child abuse, and trauma in particular, the slide offers this initial sentence in definition, “Trauma occurs when a child experiences an intense event that threatens or causes harm to their emotional or physical well-being.”
And the word that my brain could not leave, was, “experiences.”
Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh were telling me and all mandated reporters required to have the training, that trauma is a child’s, or victim’s, experience. Experience, being the practical contact or encounter with an intense event that threatens or causes harm to their emotional or physical well-being. To reiterate, the training acknowledged and, with the use of several instructional videos, emphasized that the brain and body of the child/victim…regardless of the intentions of the traumatizer/perpetrator…experiences the trauma.
It’s very important to understand that point. Centering the perspective of the human experiencing trauma and NOT the perspective of the human causing the trauma.
I thought, then, to see what the American Psychological Association (APA) had to say about trauma. From their website, “Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster.” You see what they did there? They did the thing that, in my experience, most people in positions of power do, and often. They first tell us something that Pitt and Pennsylvania, presumably approaching trauma from an educational/social perspective, did not. Beyond, “experience,” trauma is, “an emotional response to a terrible event.” It’s not a behavioral response. (Though MANY reliable and observable behaviors, as well as body indicators that can be validly measured by wearable technology like that available in Fitbits and smart watches, occur along with and because of the emotional response.) But go back with me. The APA then dictates the definition by claiming, “…like an accident, rape, or natural disaster.”
I consistently encounter professionals, people with power charged with educating and influencing families and caregivers and educators, who define “trauma” only within the context of predefined “horrific” circumstances…which, of course, are always traumatizing.
However.
The experience of trauma…of the emotional response to intense perceived events that threaten or cause harm to a child’s emotional and/or physical well-being? Is only knowable and definable from the perspective…the lived experience…of the traumatized. The child, in this case. Or, in other cases, the student, the Autistic person, the neurodivergent person, the disabled person, the Black person, the Native person, the fat person, the queer person, the woman or femme, the person who does not or can not assimilate and comply or at the very least mask and hold it all in for the allotted and necessary timeframe. The trauma…is the experience…of the traumatized. It is not defined by standardized, mainstream, or otherwise powerful entities.
We absolutely know this. We train people to be mandated reporters in Pennsylvania to also know this…while simultaneously promoting and funding methodologies and interaction styles that reliably traumatize the very groups of children and humans targeted for support.
Trauma is experienced, not defined.
The intentions of perceived experts and existentially powerful people do not, AT ALL, imply the impacts upon, or the experiences of, perceived novices and those existentially less powerful.
What the APA does? Is open the door to gaslighting. When a person experiencing post-trauma and toxic stress contributions struggles and requires care? WE, with power, can minimize whatever happened to YOU, without power…if it does not meet the definition of what WE say is a traumatic event. The gaslight comes in the fact that WE start…by acknowledging the trauma is YOUR experience and emotional response, but then tell YOU, “Oh, no…THAT, was not a traumatic event.” WE play the perspective game. WE minimize the lived experiences of those who experience abuse, trauma, and toxic stress; YOU. And WE then have the audacity to call THAT…trauma-informed care. Which it both definitionally and functionally is not.
See…if we, as a society premised on and dictated by dominant white cultural forces, 1. acknowledge the extent, or actual prevalence of complex and developmental post-traumatic stress disorder, and then 2. accept the increasingly obvious fact that the mental-health, emotional-health, Autism-cure industrial complexes; the school-to-privatized-institutional pipelines; and entire insurance industry remain very wealthy and powerful only if, 3. children and other vulnerable people are traumatized and gaslit along the way…well then, 4. we also have to inspect ourselves. And, 5. we also have to inspect our families, communities, schools, faith organizations, and everything. And if we’re honest? 6. It all has to change.
Trauma, which occurs because of abuse, is the experience of the traumatized. The abused. It is not the definition of those who wield power and influence. And thusly, the amount of “reasonable cause to suspect abuse” with which I travel the earth…is absolutely overwhelming. I want us to do better for ourselves. I want us to do better for our children. I want us to do better for our most vulnerable. I want us to do better for each other. I want us ALL…to be better.
-G
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