There was a time when I used to have a serious axe to grind with health and wellness professionals. That is, until my entrenched point of view was completely upended.
Intuitively, we can understand the need to transform ‘resilience’ from buzzword into concrete skills – especially during a pandemic. Resilience are all the factors that help us cope through and bounce back from adversity. Personally, I’ve taken a meandering path into resilience work. Sometimes our biggest triggers are our greatest breakthroughs.
It was circa 2016. I was midway through my graduate research about e-mental health for rural PTSD patients. I was sitting across the table from two psychiatrists and a social worker in a grassroots mental health advocacy meeting. I had a burning desire to grill them about the lack of understanding in healthcare about the impacts of adversity and psychological trauma (trauma) on health. As you may already know, this body of research is often referred to as trauma-informed care or approaches.
As you may know, Trauma-informed approaches are about understanding the impacts of adversity, adopting resilient ways of thinking towards patients and providers, and evidence-based therapeutic treatments. Adversity and trauma impacts all dimensions of health. This is powerfully illustrated in the longitudinal Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. The more adverse experiences we have, the more likely we are to deal with addiction, mental and physical health issues. The gift that comes from this is understanding that our bodies predictably respond to adversity. It is a normal response to abnormal and highly stressful situations. We can transform the judgement connected to saying “what’s wrong with you?” to a compassionate view by instead saying “what happened to you?” Not only is this perspective more compassionate, it also encourages more resilience for ourselves and others.
Evidence-based trauma therapy treatments have been widely studied, are highly effective but only accessible by those who can pay out of pocket. Most people don’t know what help is evidenced-based and are unable to pay for it. Instead, they often leave their GP’s office with prescriptions for pharmaceuticals. It stands to reason, pharmaceuticals alone aren’t going to help you process and heal from life’s adverse experiences and trauma.
I passionately made my case while these women kindly listened. I explained the terrible impacts this knowledge gap had on my family and I – not to mention untold others. I wanted to know why decades of research in this area seemed completely unknown by most healthcare professionals. With compassion, they listened to my trembling voice. The miracle happened when they shared what it was like for them to work in the healthcare system. Now it was my turn to listen.
What they shared was deeply illuminating. They began to tell me about the adversity they were facing in the healthcare system. With curiosity, I began asking them about how they have experienced the defining features of adversity and trauma – loss of choice, control and helplessness. They had a lot to say. How could you make any real progress when your practice was mandated solely by budget constraints – three 15 minute consults per patient? How could you innovate while working in a toxic environment that impacted your own well being? How could you cope with so much need and too few resources? The system wasn’t trauma-informed for providers or their patients and clients.
I instantly realized I had no axe to grind with health and wellness professionals. I had an axe to grind with a system that didn’t know how to support staff in coping through the inherent burden of helping. We can call that burden ‘the cost of caring’. If the system couldn’t support staff with a trauma-informed lens of compassion, it certainly couldn’t support patients with a trauma-informed lens either. Exposure to the difficult experiences of others and working in toxic conditions with too few resources creates compassion fatigue, burnout and vicarious trauma. A trauma-informed lens allows us to know we are not broken when we experience adversity and trauma. Our body responds in predictable ways. We can heal, recover and build more resilience through the process.
Bridging my lived experience to the experience of professionals working in health and wellness changed the trajectory of my life. It transformed my personal struggles to have meaning and purpose. This change in perspective has been fertile soil for my resilience work to grow out of.
Resilience is about how individuals and organizations can cope through and bounce back from adversity and trauma. My work shifted from sharing the impacts of adversity and trauma to also sharing resilience practices with health and wellness professionals. This work is a deep synthesis of decades of lived experience, advocacy, professional experience, growth and research. I didn’t choose resilience work, it chose me.
It is my firm belief that empowering health and wellness professionals with this knowledge will in turn translate to how they help others. Building resilience through trauma-informed practice supports professionals and the people they help. It’s time for each of us to look at resilience and determine how to meaningfully bring it into our lives in ways that make sense to us.
If you or your team would like to learn more about resilience, you can join our free “Building Resilience Through Trauma-Informed Practice” online workshop.
LEARN MORE: https://pages.upliftlearningonline.ca/buildingresilienceworkshop
