Hi. I’m Greg. I serve as an employment and educational coach for Autistic and neurodiverse individuals and am also a speech/language therapist. I learned, well into my 40s, that I am quite neurodiverse myself. We can discuss that later. For now, I’m most interested in illuminating my evidence-based praxis, that being the training, lived experience, research, and theories informing my everyday practice and interpersonal interactions. I’m interested in considering the impact that I, and any perceived expert, has on those I, and we, serve. Let’s call the people we, perceived experts, serve, “perceived novices.” Certainly I’ve been influenced by Carl Rogers and his, “person-centered” approach to counseling and pedagogy, or the ways that we teach and impart knowledge/wisdom to others. I have also come to understand that outward and measurable behaviors are driven by internalized and integrated social and emotional experiences, memories, emotions, and nervous system functioning. Therefore, it’s essential to frame any endeavors toward behavior change of perceived novices as socially and emotionally mediated. We must, I believe, understand the impact that we have in relationships with clear power dynamics AND ALSO remain aware that observed behaviors that we don’t like or prefer are the outward expression of internal experiences, memories, and emotions. So, how do we move about the world considering social and emotional contributions and also the impact of our therapeutic and/or pedagogical decisions.
At present, the most popularly utilized and studied technique that aligns with earnestly impact-regarding endeavors is “trauma-informed care.”
A simple internet search-engine dive, using the quoted words above, will yield articles, chapters, podcasts, TED talks and other recorded lectures from reputable and reliable sources. I will spend more time with trauma-informed care (TIC) in a moment, but would first like to illuminate a few of the foundational resources informing my impact-regarding praxis, the impact-regarding social-and-emotional (IRSE) pedagogy, and also the larger support framework[1] from which the IRSE and IDB spectrums emerge.
These resources include texts[2], praxis emanating from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) study from 1995 conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente[3], my experiences with neurodiversity, disability, developmental childhood and additional acute traumas, and over 20 years explicitly engaging in pediatric client-centered, inclusive and embedded speech, language, and social-emotional therapy while decoupling both behaviorist methodologies and the medical model of behavioral pathology.
It is important to note, particularly given the list of influential texts I’ve offered, that not everything informing my impact-regarding social-and-emotional praxis comes from scientists or credentialed and peer-reviewed practitioners of professionalized human services (e.g. social work, medicine, health-related sciences, psychology, education). There is a distinct Eastern (i.e. India, Tibet, China, Japan, and Vietnam) lean to the non-professional texts, which is both personal and essential to me. This is not to say that an efficacious impact-regarding endeavor must include THESE or even similar texts. Rather, my assertion is that an aspiring expert must, particularly in endeavoring towards more impact-regarding practices both professionally and otherwise, connect with philosophical, ethical, and non-scientific guiding texts and media in addition to traditional evidence-informed professional training and development. Furthermore, these connections must be pointed in the direction of self-regulation; of contending with one’s own traumas, emotions, experiences, and indoctrinated/learned ways of interacting in the world. That is, there is no way to engage in truly efficacious impact-regarding care unless that care is directed inward first, foremost, and in intimate collaboration with outward endeavors. Described differently once more, we, the perceived experts and more powerful/influential members of any relationship, cannot engage in authentically, efficacious, and fulfilling impact-regarding interactions without at least endeavoring to begin the process of turning inward to heal and understand ourselves. I will explore this critical endeavor of introspection and self-support in later chapters. For now, I would like to return to the discussion of impact-regarding praxis by illuminating the six guiding principles of trauma-informed care.
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The CDC’s Center for Preparedness and Response communicated six guiding principles in a trauma-informed approach and provided a simple infographic, linked here, and a related article, linked here. The principles are:
- Safety
- Trustworthiness & transparency
- Peer support
- Collaboration & mutuality
- Empowerment & choice
- Cultural, historical & gender issues
Duquesne University’s School of Nursing published an article in October, 2020, titled, “What Are the 6 Principles of Trauma-Informed Care?” in which the six principles are contextualized within the framework of nursing. It would be simple and appropriate to reframe these principles to any endeavor of human service, growth, and development including but not limited to health related sciences, professional mental health endeavors, medical professions, education, mentoring, coaching, social work, and caregiving. To that end, here I’ll link another article, from Psychology Today, dated November 26th, 2021, “What Does it Mean to Be Trauma-Informed?: Use these 6 core principles to be more trauma-informed in your life and work,” by Katherine King.
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In all relationships there exists power dynamics and differentials. This has been explored here, in a self-published piece on restraint collapse, and across all professionalized human-service endeavors. We can think about dyads including: doctor/patient, teacher/student, clinician/client, caregiver/child, coach/player, mentor/mentee, and guide/follower. For the sake of continued mutual understanding, we’ll deem the more powerful person/people in a relationship “expert” and the more vulnerable person/people in a relationship “novice.”
I will return to the six principals of trauma-informed care, now adding a uniquely IRSE contextualization.
- Safety – The expert endeavors, authentically, with empathy and unconditional positive regard for the novice, create a safe space for the novice. This, namely “safety,” is the foundation on which the entire impact-regarding relationship sits, and if the safety is not actually foundational, if the safety is conditional, or with strings attached as the common phrase communicates, or if the safety is an illusion created by the expert to more easily force the novice into compliance or assimilation to some hidden standard…then there exists no safety from an impact-regarding perspective.
- Trustworthiness & transparency – The expert endeavors to be honest, transparent, and consistent, thus creating an environment in which the novice is able to fully trust the expert and the relationship. This means, quite explicitly, that the expert, if they endeavor to enter into an impact-regarding relationship and exert positive, consensual influence, must be willing to reveal personal experiences, feelings, and realities which creates a vulnerable space where the novice understands that the safety they feel is reliable and real.
- Peer support – Building on and making more explicit the second principle, while an expert enters the relationship with specialized knowledge and training, an impact-regarding dynamic is most likely and efficacious when the expert has similar experiences to the novice and can relate to the novice also as a peer with genuine empathy. Put another way and with contextual specificity, an efficacious impact-regarding dynamic is more likely when, given two otherwise equally qualified experts, the expert with aligning existential experiences to the novice engages with the novice.
- Collaboration & mutuality – The expert endeavors to partner with the novice, to collaborate and offer mutual human respect. We have now moved beyond breaking down the power-dynamic that traditionally exists between expert and novice to find the mutual humanity, understanding that ANY relationship, even that between surgeon and patient, is one, in part, of peer support, particularly as it relates to impact-regarding care. And now? We, the so-called experts, are collaborating with the so-called novices and supporting them in a mutually beneficial journey of healing, and/or understanding, and/or emotional regulation or existential homeostasis.
- Empowerment & choice – The so-called novice must feel empowered, as if their choices are actually choices and not expert-coerced compliance and assimilation endeavors. The only way to ensure that the so-called novice feels empowered? The only way to ensure that they feel that they have real, independent, self-loving and growth-inducing choices? Is to, as the so-called expert, actually and authentically relinquish power and the desire to shape or mold the so-called novice in front of us. That is real and authentic empowerment and choice and a critical manner to endeavor towards an efficacious impact-regarding relationship.
- Cultural, historical & gender issues – I am now going to drop even the pretense of expert and novice and illuminate this principle of trauma-informed care in as impact-regarding (and social-emotional) a manner as is possible for me. There comes a point in the lives of genuinely impact-regarding so-called experts where they realize a very important thing. The expert/novice framing, in and of itself, is an obstacle and falsehood that inevitably serves to maintain a power dynamic in which the so-called expert exerts influence in an eventually self-serving direction rather than the direction the so-called novice wants, wishes, or feels compelled to go. Furthermore, if the so-called expert is not actively engaged in a personal impact-regarding journey, they continue carrying unexplored and perhaps toxic or harmful attitudes, values, and various conceptions of “how this must be.” These attitudes arise naturally and humanly through upbringing, learning, lived experience and personal traumas. However, if a so-called expert genuinely cares to engage in efficacious, actually helpful impact-regarding endeavors? They must begin to at least inspect the underpinnings of THEIR behaviors. A reader may wonder, “How does this relate to the actual principle? The consideration of cultural, historical, and gender issues?” What an IRSE (Impact-Regarding Social-and-Emotional) pedagogy has taught me, fairly reliably, is this: If I can engage in as authentically and mindful an impact-regarding relationship, the endeavor of being culturally and existentially sensitive and safe is largely illuminated. Put another way, if I am entering a relationship with another person, family, or community who exist in a cultural environment different than mine, there is certainly value in researching generalities of the most salient aspects of what I can learn “on paper,” and so-called experts should always endeavor to be as well-informed as is possible within an impact-regarding framework. Foundationally, however, when I, being perceived as an expert, approach other humans, perceived as novices, in an authentically impact-regarding manner, as illuminated across these six principles and previously-described IRSE endeavors, I approach an important and reasonable assurance. Namely, I am most likely to be momentarily sensitive in manners that create a safe, transparent, trustworthy, welcoming, mutually-collaborative, empowering, culturally- and existentially-inclusive and THUS efficacious impact-regarding relationship.[4]
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I hope the reader will come away from this brief exploration of trauma-informed care (TIC) through an impact-regarding, social-and-emotional (IRSE) lens with an understanding of how truly revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, and critical these kinds of endeavors are. I sincerely desire to contribute to the creation of a just, humane, validating, inclusive, and trauma-informed world. Doing less harm, as praxis.
– Greg
[1] Further writings will extensively explore my proposed, “Impact-Centered Interpersonal-Influence Support-Framework.”
[2] Critical texts in my journey include: “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy,” by Carl Rogers, “The Body Keeps Score,” by Bessel Van Der Kolk, “Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive,” by Marc A. Brackett, “Living with Intensity,” edited by Susan Daniels, Ph.D. & Michael M. Piechowski, Ph.D., “Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger,” by Lama Rod Owens, “The Way of the Bodhisattva,” by Shantideva & Translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” by Thich Naht Hanh, “When the Body says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection,” by Gabor Maté, “The Prophet,” by Khalil Gibran, “How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service,” by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, and “Tao Te Ching,” as translated by the poet Stephen Mitchell and also illuminated in numerous archived lectures by Alan Watts.
[3] Three illuminating links follow: a. CDC link, b. Harvard Center On the Developing Child link, c. Nadine Burke Harris TED talk link)
[4] It’s important to illuminate, particularly in a conversation about cultural, historical, and gender considerations in trauma-informed care, that I am not only a perceived expert because of my individual achievements and experiences. In my case, I carry, in the United States at least, the automatic perceived expertise of existing at critical intersections of socially-dominant and historically-powerful demographic indicators. I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual, thin, Standard American English fluent and literate, Catholic-raised, intellectually-gifted, physically-able man with easily hidden/masked mental-health disabilities. These considerations matter because; without authentic, honest, earnest, and momentarily mindful IRSE practice; my impact and the impact of perceived experts like me on perceived novices existing at intersections of demographic powerlessness is considerably more likely to cause harm or trauma.
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