[Introduction] 

This podcast is brought to you by Researching in Practice. We support evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults to improve outcomes and enable people to live good lives. Wherever you're listening, we are delighted you're here. 

Georgina: My name is Georgina Chetwynd and I'm a Senior Research and Development Officer with Research in Practice. So this is the second series of podcasts in which we carry on the conversation exploring our new publication called Beyond the slogan: The reality of building trauma-informed social care organisations. I'm joined today by the publication's author, Doctor Sheena Webb and by Doctor Danny Taggart. Both are clinical psychologists and have led our work in exploring trauma-informed practice and the organisational and cultural changes needed to make this happen. It's good to be with you again Sheena and Danny. 

Sheena: Nice to be with you too. 

Danny: Hello.

Georgina: So in the first podcast series we explored the complexities in defining trauma, and actually, how diving into this can really expand our understanding of trauma and help us recognise that trauma and threat-related processes impact both on frontline practice but also on organisational functioning.

In this next series of podcasts we're going to be thinking about some of the barriers that organisations can face in implementing trauma informed practice and the way that exploring the mechanisms by which trauma operates, both on the frontline and within organisations can help throw light on some of these barriers.

There are as you say in your document Sheena, there's so many good intentions and so much investment into trauma-informed practice now across the sector, but the reality in implementing this can be really challenging. So perhaps we can start thinking about some of these barriers and how they can help us understand why there's often this gap between good intentions on the one hand and the outcomes that are experienced in practice on the other. Could you tell us a little bit more about this Sheena? 

Sheena: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean I think this is the sort of golden question isn't it and I'm not even sure it just applies to trauma-informed care. I think it applies to lots of other forms of practice where there's this really good intention, we absolutely know what we're hoping to achieve and what kinds of practice we're wanting to see on the front line, and we put all this money into sort of training and development and somehow it doesn't seem to translate into that. And I think what really emerged, I think, from a lot of the discussions during the change project was actually there are a lot of hidden barriers. And I think one of the things that we started to try and do was try and make some of those hidden barriers seen if you like.

And so for example things like, you know, people would talk about, well I want to be able to provide a really compassionate assessment but I've only got 3 weeks to do it and the person has missed the first two appointments and so I've only got one appointment left and I have to get all of the information, so I'm just going to have to go through it really, really quickly, you know? And that's a barrier that if you track it back, goes back to, you know, perhaps commissioning requirements, safeguarding requirements, which says, or certain things need to be completed within a certain time. So there's some kind of governance requirement that constrains the professional in the moment.

Other things might be to do with risk procedures that we've got certain standardised procedures that need to be followed, they're there for a reason. They're there to try and make sure that practitioners, you know, really are assessing risk properly. But of course what can often happen is that the rigid adherence to that might be, well, ‘I know that you don't want me to share this information, but I'm going to have to share this information and I'm going to have to share it with five different people and you don't have any choice and I don't have any choice about that.’ And when we actually explored it, there were lots of dimensions to this.

There's the way that money, you know, financial constraints might impact upon how people want to practice you know. Another example might be something like ‘I want to provide privacy and safety for the people I'm working with.’ But you know, I've worked with some practitioners who do in-reach into prisons. There just aren't the rooms available. So yes, I'd like to provide safety, but how do I do that when actually I have to have my conversation in a corridor of a wing?

So I think the first thing we have to do is be really upfront and honest about the fact that there are quite a lot of barriers. And those barriers that the practitioners are facing on the frontline are to do with things that they do not necessarily have control over. Practitioners arbitrarily decide when and when not to shift out of certain guidance or extend a timescale. They need the organisation to be able to flex when is needed to allow them to do that and that's why an organisational approach is so important. 

Georgina: Is there anything that you'd like to add Danny? 

Danny: I think based on what we were saying yesterday and earlier, I'm sort of struck by the mechanisms whereby these things become more challenging. So there are some that are very material resource-based, which Sheena’s talking about, that can be an absolutely legitimate and very important to acknowledge and recognise structural barrier.

There are others that feel more psychological or feel more relational and dynamic, and I think part of the organisational change is about identifying where there is room to make changes, where there is room for things to be different.

One of the things I was struck by in conversation with Sheena was the difference between trauma almost being like a mine - a concrete thing that is sort of static and can be pointed to in people's lives versus it being seen as a process, as something that happens in an ongoing experiential way that is complicated, and pick up on an example.

For me, in my experience clinically, social care services are very, very organised around abuse. They're committed and fully sort of motivated to try and prevent it from happening. Trying to protect children from it whenever it has happened. So there's actually quite… in comparison to say mental health services where there is a kind of dominant psychiatric biological model of mental illness. Actually, social care services are really good at thinking about trauma and abuse in one way, in the sense they recognise the impact that it has upon families, communities, children. But that isn't the same thing as being able to take account of the experience of being traumatised in an ongoing way in your life.

So once that abuse happens, what are the ways that that plays out? And I think it's about helping organisations develop their good grounding in the social context of abusive experience and its impact upon traumatic injury in a way that can enable them to think reflexively about what are the organisational barriers that are limiting our ability to engage with the experience of trauma as it happens when people come into our services for help?

So for example, we might be very attuned to the abuse that a child is experiencing or is at risk of experiencing. But if we do that in a way that completely precludes any awareness of parental trauma history, or where we say that that isn't part of what we're there to do, then we're really limiting our capacity to be able to work in a way that will actually help protect that child. Because in order to protect the child, we have to understand the parents’ experience, even if we don't privilege their experience. And so I think finding ways to move out of that binary between, we're either focused on the parental need or we're focused on the child need. And to recognise that trauma as a process operates within that family system, and in the system that we work within, and in the space in between us. That to me requires a different type of thinking that I guess this project is partly sort of designed to encourage really, or to facilitate. 

Sheena: Yeah. And I was just thinking about that this applies also in other situations, any sort of serious incident, safeguarding risk situation that I think there's, and I think sometimes you get a kind of both a procedural and emotional thing happening at the same time with organisations, which is that we have these procedures in place to try and make things safer, but also because everybody is so horrified or activated or alarmed by the situation, there's almost this kind of rush to throw all these procedures in place because there's this feeling that it's going to make everything safe. And I think one example of this would be around disclosure - that when someone makes a disclosure, and I know you've done a lot of work on this, Danny, and I've certainly had survivors tell me this, that suddenly it's like from the disclosure, there's this whirlwind of process that happens that seems to throw things everything out, throw everything out of their hands. Does that make sense? As the professions, and I almost feel like the bigger the trauma the more horrifying. The more this happens, that professionals are so alarmed they find it difficult to slow down and hold onto and be with the person and the person's experience. Does that make sense? 

Danny: It makes a lot of sense, and I can think of so many examples from my own clinical work where this has been a real issue. And for me, it links to the idea around the domain of action versus the domain of reflection. And I think as a sort of psychological therapy professional, there are definitely times where I would be overly in the domain of reflection, where thinking about things can preclude the possibility of action.

Often, when I've been working closely with social care colleagues, they're in a different position because of the organisational demands upon them. And they are in the domain of action. And what Sheena is describing is that when we have a disclosure we're often activated to enact lots of procedures very, very quickly. And that is important from a statutory point of view and from a safeguarding point of view.

But if it precludes the possibility of any reflection in the midst of that, then that becomes another problem. And the problem that it often creates from an abuse survivor's point of view is that the experience of being in that dynamic is actually very alienating. It's very objectifying. They feel that their feelings and thoughts about it don't matter. Things often happen very quickly in a way that don't enable them to kind of keep part of it and feel like they've got any control or choice, even if those things have to happen, if those procedures have to be enacted.

Is there a way for the organisation to support practitioners to do that, with an awareness of the impact of that disclosure and how it's responded to, can be potentially as important as the abusive experience in itself in terms of determining what sort of outcomes that person's going to have. And I know that sounds like an overstatement, but it is grounded in what survivors say - that actually, sometimes the response to their disclosure of abuse from an organisation is as bad, or even worse, than the abusive experience itself. And that is something that people actually said to me when I was working at IICSA [Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse], when they came forward as an adult and disclosed to a local authority or a religious organisation or the Cub Scouts, that actually, the way that organisation responded or didn't respond made their trauma much, much worse. 

Sheena: And I just want to come back to the word that you used Danny around mechanisms, because I think this is a really key aspect of this piece of work in general is that whether we're talking about safeguarding, or we're talking about, you know, adult social care, understanding and get the mechanisms that stop practitioners from being able to hold this balance between action and reflection, I think is really important.

And I think in any one situation where a practitioner is maybe faced with a challenging situation there may be more than one mechanism at play, you know. So for example, the practitioner may be very activated emotionally by what they're hearing and experiencing in the moment so that is pushing their mind, their mind into more of a survival oriented reactive place.

They may also be feeling unsafe or fearful about their professionalism, about their job security, about being blamed, which is to do with the blame culture that we talked about yesterday, and they may also have a whole bunch of governance requirements and tasks that they need to perform, you know, that's adding another cognitive load because of the organisational system.

And all of those things are impacting on that practitioner's behaviour in that moment. And I think being able to get more granular about, rather than this vague idea about… yes, practitioners are pressured, it makes them hard, let's get under the skin of it. What's actually happening for this practitioner in my team whenever they have to go out and do a Mental Health Act assessment or whatever it is, what is going with them? What is going to be constraining them? How can we enable them? What barriers do we have to release in order to help them?

So for example, a really good example came up around some of the participants were saying ‘Well, I think social workers, maybe they sometimes need the freedom when there's a very complex situation. They need to be able to extend the assessment timescale to allow for a proper assessment to be done.’ Well, when we started to peel back, well, what's the barrier, they said ‘Well we've got these timescales’ and I said ‘Well what's the barrier to extending the timescales?’ ‘Oh well, I as the manager. I have to go to a monthly meeting where I then report to my managers about how many assessments have gone out of timescale and then that gets logged against us’ and so on and so forth.

So you have to work your way back to find the lever you need to pull that's going to actually allow for this to happen on the frontline. Does that make sense? And it kind of taps into something that comes up later in the document about, what we're not saying is get rid of all of the procedures because you need them. I need them you know? We need to have order. There needs to be accountability. We mentioned yesterday there need to be some checks and balances. We need that guide rail to make sure that we're doing our due diligence, because if we don't have that, it's just chaos, it's just a free for all. We've been there before years ago where everyone's just doing their own thing, it doesn't work.

But at the same time, if those things are applied very rigidly, then we can't do anything at all. We can't flex to the needs of the people into unusual or tricky situations. And so this is us, kind of drawing on what Dan Siegel says about, you know, the complex. And I think you get this from systems theory as well - that complex systems, complex organisms like the human mind have to have a balance between control and flexibility, and how do you manage that?

Well, you manage that by having really good feedback loops. You have to ensure that information, you know, travels through your system. You need to make sure your system is integrated and connected in order for the system to be able to sustain… kind of a balance between control and responsiveness. And I think that's where we get to a systemic view where we think well how connected are the systems that we're working in? 

Georgina: I think that's probably a good place for us to pause the conversation for now when we're thinking about the importance of feedback loops that can help organisations maintain a balance between control and chaos and also bring some of the hidden barriers that we've been talking about to light.

Thanks for such an interesting conversation Sheena and Danny. We'll be definitely coming back to some of these ideas in the next clip. In the meantime if you'd like to explore any of this further please do look at our briefing Beyond the Slogan, The Reality of Building Trauma Informed Social Care Organisations which is on the Research and Practice website. 

[Outro] 

You've been listening to a podcast from Research in Practice. We hope you enjoyed it. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their time and expertise. To explore more of our work, visit us at researchinpractice.org.uk or connect with us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Thank you for listening and until next time take care.

[Introduction] 

This podcast is brought to you by Research in Practice. We support evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults to improve outcomes and enable people to live good lives. Wherever you're listening we are delighted you're here. 

Georgina: My name's Georgina and this is the fifth clip in our series of podcasts exploring our publication Beyond the slogan: The reality of building trauma-informed social care organisations. In this clip we'll pick up some of the themes that we began to speak about in the previous clip about what impacts practitioners abilities to be trauma-informed in their day-to-day practice.

Danny said something in the last clip that I want to come back to. He said that we need to recognise that trauma as a process operates within the family system, in the system that practitioners work within, and in the space between them. So we're therefore thinking about all these different layers impacting on practitioners ability to respond in a trauma-informed way in practice settings. In the last clip, we focused thinking about organisational processes and how they can provide hidden barriers for practitioners in the moment. And in this clip, we'll start by thinking about what survivors have told us about what helps in the moment, and how understanding this can help us better resource practitioners. 
 
Danny: They want to feel validated and they want to feel that they can trust the person they're talking to to help them retain some control over what happens next. Well, I was thinking you're coming at it from the organisational perspective, so a sort of a top down, into the body and mind of the practitioner. And as you were talking about disclosure, I was thinking about the work that we have done to begin to pull together the literature around survivor perspectives upon disclosure, or how them talking about non-recent abuse can be handled in a way that is helpful, versus a way that is less helpful.

And I've said a little bit about what the consequences are whenever it's not managed well from a survivor perspective. But what fits very neatly with what you're saying Sheena, is that what survivors in the research literature say about disclosure is that they want to have an experience where they're believed, because that's often very different from what they experienced early in life whenever the abuse actually happened.

They want to feel validated and they want to feel that they can trust the person they're talking to to help them retain some control over what happens next. Now, all of that requires slowing down because you have to slow down to really empathise and connect with somebody when they're telling you about an awful experience that they had. Because as you say Sheena, what's going to happen when we hear horrible things is we're going to have a physiological and a psychological reaction to it, where we might even find ourselves closing our eyes and shaking our head. Or maybe even turning our head away and saying ‘Oh my goodness, that's awful.’ Survivors are really attuned to that and they're really attuned to the needs of the practitioner. They're used to the idea and the feeling that the abuse that they suffered is too much for other people to bear, because they've often been there before and that's why it's been shut down, marginalised, overshadowed or blatantly dismissed and not believed. They know what those shakes of the head, what those closed eyes, what those looks have discussed. They know them, they've seen them before.

For us working in a trauma-informed way, we need to find ways of supporting practitioners to have a different kind of response as much as possible whenever these disclosures which often happen out of the blue or in a fairly garbled or indirect way because that's the nature of traumatic speech is that it's not clearly signposted, logical, rationally laid out. It often comes out in a garbled, indirect way or maybe a flood and so it's understandable that as human beings, practitioners are going to have a kind of fear response like Sheena's saying. But the organisation needs to build in some safety mechanisms to support practitioners to slow down at that point and to not then think that they have to enact a lot of things very, very quickly. To give them space to think and respond in a relational way to what the survivor’s telling them. It takes time for practitioners to feel supported to do that. It takes training, it takes practice, and it takes an organisational culture that can also be able to kind of deal with the shockwaves that these sorts of disclosures can have upon the systems. 

Sheena: Yes and I think this is a parallel process that we can track all the way through the system and in fact, when you were talking it reminded me of the sort of macro-level example and it's really nicely written about by I think it's Patricia Campling? Who talks about how… she's talking about health services but how, when there's a big incident, maybe you know, there's sort of terrible tragedies or serious practice concerns about a hospital, she describes this rush from the whole system to fix it. Right? That people can't cope with it. They want to make the badness go away. And so they rush into trying to put all these solutions in place before taking some time to slow down and understand what's actually going on.

And I think we see that happening all over the place, and I think we see that in terms of implementation of trauma-informed care as well. ‘Oh, we've got to deal with trauma, let's quickly put something in place’ rather than thinking ‘Implementing trauma-informed thinking is a longer-term journey.’

We have to understand and see and notice what's happening in our service and be responsive to it. And it's got an uncertain outcome you know? And it's got an uncertain process. And I think that is very, very difficult for organisations and practitioners. We love a solution, you know? We don't like to stay in the place of not knowing and feeling a bit, you know? Upset or like, something is difficult.

But I think, and so this is where I think this whole idea about spending time understanding mechanisms, understanding what's going on underneath. Whether that's with the person you're trying to help, whether that's with your practitioner if you're a manager, whether that's within the team or the organisation to spend a little bit more time trying to really understand what's getting in the way. And this is where potentially one needs to think about… Because in order to do that, you need a culture within the system where it's OK to say ‘I don't know’ or ‘I'm struggling.’ 

Danny: Or, it's going to take me some time to figure this out with you as a client who's come and told me this. And as much as possible, I'm going to try and work together with you on it. 

Sheena: Yeah and I don't know how far we're going to get. 

Danny: Yeah.

Sheena: Which is really tough. But the difficulty with just throwing solutions in without that is that we feel better because we think we've fixed it, but we haven't really fixed it. And so the problem comes around again. So it's only a short-term kind of solution.

Danny: I guess one example of that that relieves the immediate pressure, Sheena, is something that we've all done and we've all seen a lot, is you make a referral. I'm going to refer you to this service. I'm going to refer you to the service which gets rid of some of the tension that comes in as you hear this and also shift some responsibility or share some responsibility somewhere else.

But actually, what you might say to the person is ‘I'm going to refer you to this specialist service where they'll be able to better manage your disclosure.’ That specialist service might not really exist or it might exist a bit, but have a two year waiting list and so it does feel better to get rid of that immediate tension and pressure, but it doesn't actually serve the person.

Sheena: Yeah. I think that's an excellent example and I think it happens across our whole system. Signposting is like the thing that people find themselves doing. It's like I'm not sure what to do, this seems complicated, this seems… so I'll signpost and this is how people get lost, because some people, you know, the signposts are hard to follow or you know it's hard to kind of pick that up if you're the person that needs the help.

I was just thinking about what are the things that we feel are helpful, I guess. Would that be helpful to to think about a little bit? And I suppose what I'm saying is the first thing I think that is helpful is the converse of what we're saying. I think the first thing that is to be helpful is to slow things down and to acknowledge the barriers, and to really articulate them in a very specific way. If I am in a team where we've got a particular thing and we're seeing it happening over and over and over again, let’s stop and really start to understand the mechanisms as you were saying.

How are the mechanisms of threat and avoidance and safety seeking, kind of influencing what we're doing right now? And can we find another way to think about that? The other thing I would say is really useful is feedback and connectivity that, in the same way Danny that you were sort of you know, you're working with trying to enable feedback from survivors to be heard by the wider system. Don't tell us what you think we need. Listen to what we're telling you that we actually need. I think that feedback also needs to come from practitioners into the systems, you know? Don't implement a wellbeing programme that you think is going to make us feel better. Hear what we're saying about what's difficult so that we can work together to change things. Does that make sense? 

Danny: Yeah, very much. And actually, my experience of being in some of the Change Project meetings with both adult social care and child and family teams was that there were lots of good examples of things that people were doing, and they absolutely understood it as a long term journey and process. And I think there's a lot of wisdom that has gone into that briefing that is based upon what they've already said. So that's a good place to start, I think. And I think getting into the specifics rather than generalities, and the specifics may be common across teams in different local authorities, but there will absolutely be particularities that people are challenged by and there may be particular solutions locally as well.

Sheena: Yes I think there are some really, there were some really great examples of people, I think, being brave enough to step outside of the status quo and the rule book a little bit and to go ‘We're going to do this differently.’ So I think the example you picked up on yesterday was that ‘OK ,let's actually not have the same person being in the supportive role and in the assessing role. Let's invest in splitting that role because that's not really working for that person.’ 

Georgina: I was thinking kind of in your example that you're talking about signposting and that kind of making a referral as an immediate response to trying to fix something, and I was thinking about we had quite a few conversations in the adult change project Sheena about resourcing social workers to be the resource - to see themselves as the resource. Kind of… the importance of that healing relationship. And you talk in the briefing about kind of, yeah the changes, kind of the organisational changes needed to resource practitioners to be able to work in this way. Yes I'm thinking from the participants, that there needed to be some fundamental changes within the organisation to help managers maintain this compassionate stance and really understand kind of the emotional processes going on. Is there anything else you'd like to say around that? 

Sheena: It often, I think one of the the narratives around trauma that is quite paralysing for the system is that it is this very specialist thing that me as a key worker, as a social worker, support worker, I am not qualified to deal with this. So I signpost that elsewhere and just carry on focused on my role, as if those two things are completely separate.

And I think that what we're not suggesting here is that we, you know, that support workers and social workers all start doing trauma therapy. We're not talking about that. We're talking about, there's a difference between specialist trauma therapy like EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing] or what have you that happens in a clinic room, and supporting holistic recovery from trauma. Or creating a context in which healing is more likely to happen, which is more our trauma-informed space.

And I think a very empowering message for practitioners is that phone call that you make to this person once every couple of weeks say, to check in. How are they doing? You know ask them a little bit about you know, their housing, their money, whatever it is that you're doing.

If you recognise how valuable that is, if you're able to provide that in that consistent relational way. If you're able to be attuned emotionally, you are also part of this person's recovery from trauma, because you are providing them a different experience of human beings, of other people. You are providing them a sense of safety. You are providing maybe consistency where there had never been any. You're helping them to feel seen where maybe they've never felt seen. And I think that's a very empowering message for practitioners, because they recognise ‘No I'm not doing trauma therapy but I am working in a way that is… what I'm doing isn't meaningless right?’ you know?

I hear people say ‘Oh well, it was just a check in.’ It was just this, it was just that. But actually, those things can be hugely valuable currency in someone's recovery. I heard an incredible story about some substance use practitioner who was working with a long-term prisoner who when they first started, would self harm in front of them you know? That was how the relationship started. But actually, they would, and it was very short check ins. Hello, you know this is not trauma therapy, this is just forming a relationship and being consistent. And over a course of admittedly years, this person really stabilised and really engaged.

Now, recovery from trauma can happen in lots of different ways. No, that isn't going to address maybe some of the traumatic memories and what have you, but what it is doing is maybe helping that person develop in terms of their ability to regulate their emotions, in their ability to form a trusting relationship. And so I think some of those areas I think are very much worth thinking about for the practitioners. Particularly those who are in longer term relationships with people.

But even short term, even if you are the person answering the phone on the call centre, you know? I had a lovely experience yesterday with a nurse practitioner, just a one off, but she checked with me about whether it was OK to lock the door. She checked with me about how I was feeling. I came out feeling really cared for and I think the more of those experiences that people have, the more we support healing and recovery holistically. 

Danny: And I think an example of that very short engagement that can be meaningful for people and can enable that micro-interaction to be part of their ongoing journey around recovery from trauma is about the things that are said immediately after someone discloses an aspect of their history.

And I think communicating belief, validation, care - those things, people remember them. They remember them amidst all of the poor experiences that they've had. The feelings of being shut down or not believed or invalidated or dismissed. People remember the times when somebody has been kind to them, when that part of their lives has become visible in some way. 

Sheena: And actually, I think that vignette that you provide there actually is a template for actually how we want interactions to be across the whole organisation including between professionals. You know, so if I've had a particularly tricky session you know? And I come in to my manager and I'm like up to here and I'm like ‘I can't believe it was just so awful.’ How my manager then responds, which is exactly the same thing that you know, validation, giving me space, being believed is really important in how I process and digest that experience and how safe I feel in the relationship with my manager. And I think that when everything gets very threat organised and task focused and panicked and rushed, we skip over that bit.

So the practitioner comes in up to here and the manager with the best of intentions is like ‘Right, OK, well what we're going to do is we're going to arrange a meeting with so and so and I'm going to send an email’ and we just jumped over the part where I said are you OK? You know, tell me what happened. 

Georgina: And that's a really nice place to finish this podcast with a reminder of the power and the value of kindness. Of validating emotions and experiences, and both for people accessing services, but also for practitioners. And the importance of slowing down has also really resonated with me. Just the act of noticing and being aware of my temptations to rush towards a solution rather than taking some time to pause and reflect. I found that really helpful. In the next clip, we'll be speaking in more detail about an underlying theme that's come up tangentially in the conversations, but we'll think about in more detail, and that's the role and importance of emotions. 
 
[Outro] 

You've been listening to a podcast from Research in Practice. We hope you enjoyed it. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their time and expertise. To explore more of our work visit us at researchinpractice.org.uk or connect with us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Thank you for listening and until next time take care. 

[Introduction] 

This podcast is brought to you by Research in Practice. We support evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults to improve outcomes and enable people to live good lives. Wherever you're listening we are delighted you're here. 

Georgina: In the last clip we talked about the importance of slowing down and the value of consistent relationships where people experience kindness and validation and belief. And that this is really important for people in their healing journey from trauma, but also to help practitioners process their work and the impact that it might be having on them. In this podcast, we think more about the role of emotion - how feeling emotions is a normal and natural response to working with trauma. And we go on to think about how the emotional climate of an organisation can impact on practitioners abilities to process their emotions and experience, to maintain resilience and to practice in a trauma-informed way.  

So Danny you were saying that emotions can be naturally elicited when we do slow down and show empathy and validation. Can you talk a little bit more about this? 

Danny: And I think that one of the ways we can notice when that is happening, when that momentary slow down and a step back and a checking in with how the person is, or a curiosity about some of the detail of what has happened, and a communication of empathy, belief, validation. One of the ways that we can notice that between practitioners and in organisations is the expression of affect. So we're not trying to elicit tears or upset, but if they can be expressed and be talked through, even if the person is very apologetic for crying at work which for some reason, we think we shouldn't do. If that's happening, it's probably a good sign, because it shows that there are things that can be expressed. That it is possible for things to slow down enough for something to be felt, even if that feeling is a bit challenging and difficult. Yeah. 

Sheena: One of the struggles there though is, and this is where again the organisational culture is important. And I think this is where things like how you set up supervision, what your emotional climate is like, is that some practitioners will say I can't afford to get emotional. There isn't the space, it feels too unsafe, I can't carry on doing this.  

So it's about, you know, and of course we're not saying that practitioners will walk around crying all day long or managers will. And actually the further up the chain you get in my experience, the more pressure there is to be even more contained with your emotions and not to show them. And of course what we're modelling is, don't be vulnerable across the board. So then nobody else feels that they've got permission to do that. 

So I think there's a kind of real culture shift around emotion in general, around, you know… I often in my training will ask professionals ‘Do you believe that it's useful, helpful for your clients to be more self-compassionate and connected to their emotions?’ And everybody says ‘Yes’ and then I say ‘And how easy is it for you to be self-compassionate and connected to your emotion?’ Everyone's going ‘Oh my God, it's a nightmare’ you know? So we're almost expecting something of the people we're working with that we struggle to do ourselves. And I struggle to do that - I'm not naturally you know… it's not an easy thing to do, particularly when you're under fire.  

But I think all of the evidence suggests that having, processing and connecting with your emotions in a safe way is probably the most healthy and adaptive way to deal with very difficult things. And it's much more likely to keep you in balance than shutting them down. It's back to what we said about Judith Herman and constriction - it just doesn't work. It works in the short term, but not in the long term. 

Danny: And that has all sorts of implications for organisational functioning around staff retention, sickness levels, burnout. I mean, it feels like a very immediate relational context, and it feels even difficult to talk about the emotionality, because it is so counter to how lots of organisations work, or what professionalism is supposed to look like.  

And it is important that it's contained and managed, and that it's not coming out all over the place. But it has repercussions all the way through the organisation. And I agree with you Sheena, I think that the role specificity becomes more rigid sometimes the further up the organisational chain you get.  

And there is an expectation that people in very senior positions will be emotionally detached because they're so removed from the front line work that they have. But I don't think that that's actually what's happening for people. I think it's something that is an organisational defence that is required of them. But it has enormous implications for the emotional kind of milieu all the way through the organisation, because the trauma is happening. The trauma is in the system and it's knocking off the walls, and it's in the case reports and it's on people's computer screens, and it's coming down the phone at them, and it's coming through the front door at them. It's there. Like, if you try to pretend it's not by maintaining a very stiff upper lip, it just doesn't work. But yet we can understand how we've got ourselves into this predicament. 

Sheena: Absolutely. 

Danny: Because the alternative, which is what Sheena was talking about in relation to Dan Siegel's work - if we're too responsive to emotionality in a very traumatised system, we get completely overwhelmed, and we're sort of flattened by it, and we're not able to do anything. So it is about balance. And it's about noticing when we're becoming overly responsive to traumatic material in a way that actually might be leading to a collapse, and an overly effective way of responding, versus this maybe more common response, which is organisational rigidity. It's about trying, in quite a sort of bumpy set of winds, and kind of choppy waters, to navigate a path that veers from one side to the other, but is more or less trying to go down the middle most of the time. 

Sheena: And it's interesting isn't it? Because this, all of this mirrors the dialectic around trauma. Either I shut it down, or it's overwhelming. Like the middle path - it's this middle path that's so difficult to traverse. But I absolutely agree, and I was just thinking that there's this kind of parallel you know? You were talking about trauma is this thing that's located here in this person. I was thinking, when we… you start to talk about staff needs, you get words like burnout, vicarious trauma. And again, these are things that are sort of located within the professional, right? You are burnt out, rather than recognising that that feeling of burnout, that feeling of feeling unsafe is actually the product of the way that that person feels within the organisation as well. It's not just located within that person. And the solution therefore isn't just located within that person, because otherwise what you're doing is you just have this same thing where staff leave. 

As you say this is, you see it and a lot of the literature coming out now is linking things like self-compassion to staff retention, that these things, it's not just a kind of airy-fairy, you know? And I think you've written about this before, but it's not just about being nice to people who have been through trauma. This is about understanding the mechanisms of threat, how the mechanisms of emotion. Emotion is often seen as this airy-fairy thing that we can kind of ignore if we're strong enough, rather than recognising that emotion is an absolutely fundamental organising process within our minds and our bodies, and we need to understand it if we're going to be able to work with it effectively. But we do have a culture of seeing it as a bit kind of, weak, you know.  

Danny: And I think that there's a recognition in teams that some attention to emotionality is important. But again, that tends to be located in one person. So maybe you have a reflective practice facilitator, or maybe you have a therapist or a psychologist or a social worker with a propensity, and some training, and some skill in that area. And that can work very well, but it also then splits off that part, locates it in one person and whenever the system becomes pressured there will be a push to ignore and marginalise, which actually does nobody a service because what is needed is for everybody to carry a part of that for themselves, as well as all of the other functions that they need to have. 

Sheena: And actually, in my experience, what you can get is a kind of splitting where the reflective practitioner is the good parent, the good one and the organisation is the baddie. And people end up going to the goody to kind of tell on how awful it is in the organisation, and then they go back into the organisation and they don't feel happy. That's not a healthy… I mean obviously ,I'm not saying reflective supervision isn't healthy, it absolutely is, but you can end up with this impact. And I think it has a role, but it's probably better if it has a role that is connected to the organisation as a whole, and in which the organisation also makes efforts to create that sense of safety, you know? 

Danny: I think that probably the best, one of the best experiences of those settings that I've had was group supervision once a month with a whole child protection social work team, and it took time, but we owned it together. We did genograms, we thought about positions, we thought about trauma - we did it together. And what I really valued was over time, I actually had to say less and less, because I could see that people were taking up aspects of that way of thinking, that way of being. And maybe it didn't translate into the rest of the team culture beyond the time that that was able to operate. But it really, really helped something different happen.  

And what I noticed was a sort of initial reluctance to attend because they were seen as being other priorities, but with support from the manager, which was really, really important in terms of leadership messaging. Actually in time, people kind of looked forward to it, and so did I. And even though we were talking about incredibly difficult things, often with no easy solution to do with families who had experienced multiple generations of trauma, and there was risk within the family system as well. So really, really complex cases. I think people responded to the respect that they were given to think about the case in a different way over a period of time, and to share ideas and to share thinking. 

But what was interesting for me coming in as somebody who's very used to reflecting on my own response to my work, is the bit that they were able to do last was the self-reflection about the impact it had upon them. If I'd come in and asked them ‘How does this make you feel?’ it would have put up barriers. They could do that, but first of all they had to feel like competent and skilled thinkers about a family first, and then they could do the next bit. So for me, the sequencing of how that happened was quite important and quite instructive for me. 

Sheena: That's interesting. And I agree with you about this thing about whole teams doing these things together. I mean, I have some group supervisions which are sort of case formulation but where, if they can, the whole team come. And I feel like not only does learning transmit really quickly, people pick things up. There's a lot of modelling that then means that they do more and more themselves. But there's a kind of a cohesiveness. I think it keeps teams connected to each other. And I think one of the impacts of course of teams being under pressure and busy is that the temptation is to divide and conquer. And increasingly, I notice how many practitioners work alone, even including quite newly qualified junior practitioners going out on their own, doing quite difficult things because necessity says we should do it alone. And I'm wondering if in the long term that's a false economy? Because it means that people a) don't learn as quickly from each other, but also they are more likely to burn out more quickly. There's a lot of research for example from the combat sector about the cohesiveness of fighting units being actively protective against developing post-traumatic stress disorder, you know? And that's a long-standing finding. 

Danny: Yeah, and that's really interesting and it triggered something in my mind about my own practice and how it's changed. And so I quite often get asked to go and speak to conferences, professional groups, various sort of large scale speaking events about the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse or other research around adult survivors of child sexual abuse. And the experiences that they have, and the impacts that it has upon them.  

I have learnt the kind of hard way that the impact of me doing those sorts of talks and receiving the sorts of ambivalent responses from audience members, as you would expect with the topic as socially taboo and uncomfortable is it, is to not do that on my own. Is to make sure I have somebody with me, if not in-person then at least in the material that I present. To have spoken about it with somebody before, to have spoken about with them after. So even though that's further removed from front line work, the principle is still the same.  

Trauma pushes us into a state of isolation. One of the solutions to traumatic injury within the individual, but also within teams and organisations is coming back into collectivity. Coming back into connection, coming back into relationship, and we have to keep reminding ourselves because it will pull us. And the organisation might push us to work in a more atomised way, and that absolutely has to be resisted. 

Sheena: Yeah I completely agree. And it's interesting actually, because one of the things I've kind of… Doing more training these days, one of the things I've started to notice is that when I go to meet a new group that I'm maybe doing a day or two's training with, they all seem braced for something bad. It's like I get a lot of, you know, suspicious looks, folded arms. And I want, to some extent, I think the workforce feels a little bit worn out by being told what they should be doing better.  

So they kind of expect… It feels like they're kind of expecting me to come along with another whole set of things. ‘Here's what you need to do.’ And I found myself more and more, you know, I think giving more time for people to tell me what's not OK, before I try and make any suggestion about what we might do.  

A bit like you were saying, you've got to sequence your process in the right way - you've got to meet people where they're at, allow them to voice what they need to voice before you start coming in and adding other things.  

But one of the things I think you know, the biggest benefit of a lot of training is much more the time that they spend with each other. You start to hear conversations happening and you think these conversations haven't happened before between these people necessarily. They're not getting to speak to each other very much, because everybody's so busy, particularly at the senior leadership level. 

Danny: And I think that just one thing maybe as a concluding idea for me to add to that is I absolutely agree on the value of meeting people where they are, enabling time and space for them to talk about the challenges that they face before offering them a set of solutions. And that really mirrors what it's like for a survivor to come in and to be given lots of tips too quickly before they've had a proper chance to talk through their experience and the impact it's having upon them.  

But the other thing that I've learnt from working with survivor groups, abuse survivor groups, is the importance of creativity and beauty. And one of the ideas is that trauma can shut down reverie, it can shut down playfulness. It can shut down creativity and imagination in childhood if it happens in childhood, and that attack on reverie is a kind of core idea within traumatic injury. Therefore one of the antidotes from organisations like Survivors Voices and other survivor groups like Trauma Escapes is… make things beautiful and creative as much as you can, whenever you're thinking about and working with these incredibly dark and difficult and overshadowed kind of areas of social life. And we can bring that in even in the use of a genogram with the social work team. There was a creativity. People brought the markers and were doing the thing and arguing about what kind of boxes were supposed to be used. I mean, it was a creative act that was generative. And that's very different from the way that conversations about traumatic injury often happen, which can often feel very intellectual and cognitive as a way to protect against the feeling. I think things that are generative, expressive and creative, even within the confines of everyday practice are really important.  

And so one of the things that I've tried to do when I'm doing training and teaching is as much as possible to bring in some of that survivor art form, survivor words. The kind of, the use of images from survivors as a way to sort of, generate some light amidst the sort of darkness. And I really recognise Sheena, that that feeling that when you walk into a room to talk to people they look at you with a mixed, a mixture of mistrust and sort of fear because they think ‘Oh my God, what's this person going to tell me?’ and ‘What are they going to talk about?’ and sort of try and counteract the feeling that talking about trauma will inevitably end up with this feeling depressed, is utilising appropriately ideas, creativity, art - beauty that can counteract some of the deadening impact that trauma has upon all of us really. 

Georgina: Kind of despite the overwhelming challenges and responsibilities and darkness as you said, Danny, like to be able to hold on to relationship and connection and joy and beauty. Yeah, hopefully that's a good place to end. Thank you both very much. 

Sheena: Thank you.  

Danny: Thanks Georgina. 

[Outro] 

You've been listening to a podcast from Research in Practice. We hope you enjoyed it. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their time and expertise. To explore more of our work, visit us at researchinpractice.org.uk, or connect with us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Thank you for listening and until next time take care.