This month’s CTIPP CAN call focused on meeting the moment with trauma-informed advocacy: While trauma-informed efforts are necessary at several levels, trauma-informed advocates have an opportunity to help bring healing to the traumas our systems have and continue to experience.
We discussed how trauma is permeating our society and why being congruent with the trauma-informed model is critical as we promote systems transformation. This is the first CTIPP CAN of a four-month series focused on education, networking, and resource-sharing for the trauma-informed movement.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
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I'm just going to go the other way. Again, thank you all so much for being with us for this very exciting, uh, CTIPP CAN call. It is the first in a four part series. that will be gearing up advocates in a community of practice type of model in preparation to take independent and collective action that is working to advance the trauma informed movement in 2025 and beyond.
We invite you all to come with your own policies and practices that you want to advocate for if you have any, and if you don't, that's okay. One of two, and very potentially both, things can happen if you find yourself in that bucket. First, as we move through this series, it's our goal to create conditions of empowerment and safety that inspire you to perhaps research new ideas, and over the next few months, you may find something that inspires you to act on it.
Additionally, we at CTIPP lead federal advocacy around a few specific policies that we would be thrilled if you took as part of your key efforts. These four months will begin to pilot where we see a key part of CTIPP CAN, our community advocacy network, going in the future. At first, CTIPP CAN calls were small and brought together advocates to have open discussions about what was happening at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels.
across the country and connecting advocates to troubleshoot specific ideas. Then when COVID hit, numbers grew and they became more webinar like, where guest speakers would share how trauma informed policies and practices were being implemented in a variety of different contexts. And then, most recently, as CTIPP grew its staff, we presented on toolkits and resources that we were developing to support advocates in a variety of different contexts to advance trauma informed approaches.
Now, we're sort of bringing all of that together guided by our belief and understanding that we are as a movement as strong as our network is active. That with the resources developed over the past several years, we do not need to continue giving the same presentations, but rather using this knowledge to support the integration and mobilization at local, tribal, state, and federal levels.
And that what we crave at this point more than just knowledge is connection as we work to advance a relatively young and exceedingly critical movement aimed at making our world a better place. Before we get into the structure of the call and the content of this first call, I want to take some time for us to get to know each other.
I, as well as my colleagues, Antron and Laura, who will support elements of this series. We'll start. I'll lead, I'll be the lead for this series and Antron is going to be the lead for our youth advocacy series. We are building this new advocacy work for CTIPP with the communication support of our colleague, Laura, and from the work of our former colleague, Whitney Maris.
Many of you know me already, but for those of you who do not, my name is Jesse Kohler and I have the true privilege of getting to serve as CTIPP's executive director. Even those of you who know me well may not know that my official start with advocacy happened when I was 14 years old. I was on a robotics team that wound up winning a lot and we went to Tokyo, which is a great story, but not at all the purpose of this conversation.
It was about a year or so after the film An Inconvenient Truth came out. Which brought great anxiety to myself, as it did for many. And the first LEGO League, which was the name of the robotics league that I participated in, announced that the theme for that year was clean energy. We supported a local state representative to introduce Act 1 during a special session at Pennsylvania's state legislature, which provided for alternative sources of energy and established programs to support that end.
It did not pass, but the process of turning my anxiety into passion that fueled my advocacy is something that has stayed with me for my entire life and has informed the trajectory of my career. As is true for so many people in this movement, I have a trauma history with complex PTSD. Another truth in my story is that I had the great blessing of being raised in a family that was able to provide for me and loved me tremendously.
I tell people all the time that I am rooted in love, which helped me move through the adversities that I experienced. At Oberlin College, I saw how privilege had supported me through my life, including some of my most traumatic experiences, and volunteered thousands of hours as a public health advocate at Oberlin Community Services.
When my career began, I moved back in with my parents and worked in direct service non profits in Philadelphia for several years. I began to learn how disproportionately greater many people's and communities adversities were than what I had experienced, with far fewer resources and supports to help navigate difficult times.
And I knew how tough it was for me to move through my own traumatic experiences. For example, when I was working at the, at the public high school in Philadelphia, one student lost three friends to gun violence in that year alone. I lost my best friend in a tragic accident when I was in high school as well, and I couldn't imagine losing three of my close friends.
As experiences like these continue to build in my professional life, my passion for advocacy became greater and greater. I was an advocate for years before it was my job to be one. CTIPP, for me, was a vessel to advocate for trauma informed change that I felt was important. I was fortunate that in the process, CTIPP's founders, including Dan Press, Sandy Bloom, and Diane Wagenhals, among many others, saw something in me and championed me to be in the position that I'm in today.
While this position itself may not be scalable, it is my greatest hope that CTIPP serves as a platform to create conditions of empowerment for you and many others to advocate and advance meaningful change. The last thing that I will say is that in addition to serving as CTIPP executive director on loan and leading our legislative advocacy in DC around the Rise from Trauma Act, the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act, supporting the interagency task force on trauma informed care and other priorities at the federal level.
federal level. I also run another nonprofit called the change campaign in my role as president of the change campaign. I am leading an effort to introduce and hopefully see past the lowering overdose and violence epidemics or love act in the city of Philadelphia, which is a piece of model legislation that I wrote.
And if you're interested, you can see more about that in the recording from June CTIPP CAN call as well as working with a few States on statewide work. As we go through this series together, I will be, I will be going, uh, through the same process as we are encouraging all of you to champion trauma informed policies and practices in whatever place or places make the most sense for you and your issue or issues.
I just want to say right now how truly excited I am to learn alongside each of you. We will get into more about you and your policy priorities in a bit. But before we do that, I want for Antron and Laura to quickly introduce themselves to all of you as well. Uh, Antron. Hello, good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you, Jesse. That was a beautiful introduction that you just gave. And so now I have to follow up with that. Again, everyone, my name is Antron McCullough. And as Jesse spoke about a little bit earlier, currently I'm working on a youth advocacy series project. And what that does is it really allows for you to have a voice to advocate for themselves and others when they're facing challenges that can lead to trauma.
And so the big question is for me is why did I get into advocacy and why am I so passionate about the subject. So imagine working in a community or organization where you've identified systemic challenges that hinder effective support for at risk family and youth not having a voice on their own. For me, one of the things I focused on was improving outcomes in a system that had significant disparities.
And this became my initial steps towards advocacy. And so the creation involved being able to collaborate with youth who are in the system, young adults, caregivers, local court administrators, social workers, Congress, et cetera. And I saw an opportunity to really improve my work in the trauma informed spaces by being able to leverage collaboration and cross sectoral partnerships and really to streamline services and improve those outcomes.
The existing ways of having inclusion were outdated and they were siloed in different departments and the processes that really entered effective voices within those decision making that individuals were giving. And so for me, what I did was some of the work that I've done in the past has really helped to lead to policy change around advocacy here in my state, here in Florida, where state and county leaders Began to really express how strong that support was and how it aligned with even broader initiatives and committing resources to being able to facilitate different implementation.
And so that experience really highlighted the importance of youth voice and driving change and being able to foster that collaboration across diverse stakeholders. So that cost functional initiatives, those projects that I worked on, it really resulted in transfer transformative changes that improve youth and caregiver satisfaction.
It gave you the voice and it also increased a more inclusive and supportive work partnership between the youth and administrators. And so for me, my philosophy is. For centering youth voice and live this expertise is by taking a proactive approach to systems change on different topics such as trauma.
And we can yield positive outcomes through collaboration, through innovation, and really a focus on holistic solutions. And so each real world situation Although it does present a unique challenge and opportunity, the principles of cross sector partnership and creative problem solving can be adapted to really drive that impactful change that's needed.
And now I will pass it over to my colleague, Laura. Thanks Antron. Jesse, do you mind admitting folks while I talk? I got you. Thank you. Hi everybody I'm Laura Braden, and I'm so happy to be with you all today. I serve as Director of Communications for CTIPP I've been with the organization for a little over two years, and professionally I come to this work quite naturally.
I've been in communications and public affairs for the last 20 years. So everything from presidential campaigns to oil spills in the Gulf coast to NBA basketball teams and everything in between. And naturally, my career just sort of progressed into advocacy and issue based communications, where there's just a lot of storytelling and problem solving around really big, complex problems and challenges that our country faces.
And so. I met CTIPP at a very interesting intersection of my career where I was focusing a lot more on advocacy issues and also going through, um, some healing of my own. So, grappling with grief, um, I14 really close friends before I turned 40, everything from gun violence to cancer.
And so going through that at the same time as a divorce and having a young child with learning differences and who was on the spectrum, um, really applying a lot of these trauma informed concepts and principles to my own life and family, and then getting to be a part of CTIPP professionally and help apply them to systems and industries and sectors has just been a real, a real blessing and a real.
And really fun opportunity for me. And so, um, I come to this work with a lot of hope and a lot of, um, enthusiasm and, uh, there's a lot to do and it all needed to be done yesterday. And it's been really beautiful just to help connect and, uh, and bring, you know, resources together so that we can move the ball forward on a lot of this.
Um, so Jesse, I'll turn it back to you. Appreciate you both. And, uh, you know, on behalf of the three of us, we're just so thrilled. Like I said, uh, to be with all of you today. And as, as we move forward, uh, so before we get into some more of the content around this CTIPP CAN call, we would love for you to connect with others.
Um, who are going through this series with you? Uh, we're going to do small breakout groups. We're going to try to keep the rooms to about three people. Um, and this breakout is going to be very short. Uh, it's only going to be five minutes here, uh, where we just want for you to introduce yourselves. Share what you hope to gain from this series.
And if you are already advocating for or plan to advocate for something next year, please feel free to share that as well. Uh, this set of breakouts again is only going to be about five minutes, which I know is not a lot of time, but we are going to have many more opportunities to connect moving forward in this call as well as others.
Uh, this is just for a short hello to meet and hear. From other advocates around the country. And it is critical as we strengthen our advocacy network. Very quickly, we want to overview some community agreements just to ensure that we're creating conditions of safety and empowerment in our breakout rooms as well.
We want to ensure that nobody is forced to share anything that they don't want to, while also having space for everyone to share their thoughts. We want to demonstrate respect for others and engage in curiosity around others perspectives rather than judgment. Be inclusive and make space for others.
Speak from your own experiences as best as possible. And in this call and after we encourage everyone to engage in ongoing self reflection and doing what you need to take care of yourselves. If you need anything, we will be in this main room and you can reach us here at any time. If you're in a room where others are not present, please let us know.
We're going to keep an eye to make sure that nobody's in a room by themselves. But we're not going to be able to tell if folks are signed in and not at their computer or having other sorts of AV issues. So we'll be here in the main room if you need anything, but we'll go ahead and open the breakout rooms for five minutes.
Um, right now, Antron, I think that you posted the, did you post the pieces in the, uh, the prompts in the chat? Yes. All right. So the prompts should be in the chat and we will go ahead and open up. Hold on, I'm not seeing those here. Sorry if I'm double dipping, but as Antron opens up the breakout rooms, I'm just gonna, or hopefully the breakout rooms are opened up, otherwise we're having a mass exodus of people, uh, leaving the call come back together here in a few minutes.
I hope that it was nice to, um, meet with some other folks. I, I, I know that for some we're working through some tech difficulties. Um, and so apologize for that if that was true in your room, but hope that it was nice to connect and meet with others who are passionate about advocacy. Uh, we know it was quick.
And that you made some, uh, we, we hope that you made some new connections or perhaps strengthened already existing ones. Um, we are going to have another breakout session soon. Many of you will be in the same exact group. Um, but for now we're going to move forward to discuss an overview for this series and get into today's content before we do that, just as an overview, the next.
Four months will take the following structure. Today's session will orient us to why trauma informed approaches to advocacy are as important as the trauma informed policies and practices that we are advocating for as we meet this moment in time that we are living in and work to nurture our systems toward a better outcomes.
Next month, we're going to focus on developing our advocacy agendas. As discussed, we encourage people to come with their own priorities, as many of us have different passion areas that bring together our combined passion of trauma informed care, and work is needed across the entire lifespan in every system.
If you don't have your own agenda, we will be glad to share ours with you to work from. In November, we will work toward building power through storytelling and movement building and helping to shape our advocacy on the agendas that we began working on the month prior. And finally, in December, we will make a plan of action for 2025.
Each of these calls will be on the third Wednesday of the month and on the first Wednesday of each month moving forward from here. We will have office hours, which are optional so that we will have time to work on and through specific problems, answer particular questions, and engage in ongoing conversation.
As we move through the series together, please know that what we learned from this series will inform how we continue to support, nurture, and develop this movement of trauma informed advocates moving forward. Your feedback is appreciated and we will ask for it after each session as well as at the end of the four months.
It is our greatest hope that everyone will be able to attend all of these sessions and that we will stay connected into next year and beyond as we work to build a community of advocates. You can register for all of these sessions and office hours you would like to join on our website. I believe that that is either being dropped in the chat now or already has been, and know that we will use the same zoom link for every call.
Without any more background, let's go ahead and get started. The golden circle is a concept that I learned from a business strategist named Simon Sinek that tells us to lead with why he has a very famous Ted talk on the golden circle, including a short five minute version. If any of you are interested in learning more so frequently, we talk about what something is and how it works before we actually get to why it matters in the first place.
The most effective messaging is to lead with our why. This is how I advocate, and this is how we will begin this advocacy community of practice. First of all, why advocate in the first place? There are lots of good reasons to advocate, but I will focus on two primary ones that have fueled the advocacy work I have done in my life and I know is true for many others that align with trauma informed approaches.
First of all, advocacy can give us both a felt and real sense of having some sense of influence over the world around us. We should not lie to ourselves and say that we can control everything that happens, but the opportunity to influence and help to shape the world around us can be empowering. Second, good advocacy, as we will get into later in this series, relies on us sharing our story, or at least parts of it that we are comfortable sharing, forming a coherent narrative, and working to place it in the context of a coherent worldview that resonates with others.
The process of storytelling itself can be therapeutic, helping to make sense of things that have harmed and or helped us in the past, and making meaning of those experiences while trying to help others either not have to experience preventable harms like we did or, or receive the support that helped us in our lives.
For the sake of time, I am going to make the assumption that everyone on the line understands why trauma informed approaches are critical, so I'm not going to go deeply into that. If you would like to hear more about this case, please feel free to watch last month's CTIPP CAN Call or any others if there is a topic area that interests you more than community led and trauma informed approaches.
But where I will start is in why our modeling a trauma informed approach as we advocate for and practice trauma informed approaches is critical. Much more is communicated non verbally than it is verbally. We can say words, but that doesn't mean that people will believe them. As the saying goes, people will forget what you said, what you wore, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Trauma informed approaches, in addition to the myriad other words besides trauma informed, such as healing centered, that are discussing the same or very similar things, is about, at some level, us being more human with one another. To note, and we will talk about this a lot through the series, this includes ourselves.
A core principle of a trauma informed approach is empowerment, voice, and choice. This means that a trauma informed advocate does not hope or try to force people to think a certain way. We work to present irrefutable information. Of course, we are working to make positive change happen in the world around us.
Unapologetically so, but we also have to respect that others have the right to voice choice and empowerment as well. We understand that everyone has their own sets of environments, experiences, and interpretations that shape the lenses through which they see themselves and the world around them. And we approach that with genuine curiosity and compassion rather than judgment and shame.
In a field that is fundamentally oriented around the importance of relationships, we understand that we are working to develop healthy relationships with a wide audience of people. And showing this curiosity and respect is a critical element in developing those relationships. Modeling this, in addition to discussing it in our advocacy, increases the long term prospects of how the paradigm is applied across settings.
In order to do this, we must be aware of and process our own biases, understand how our own experiences may show up and impact our ability to really be present and accepting of others. And while the expectation is never to be perfect in this approach, as we recognize that being trauma informed requires a commitment to an ongoing process of learning and growth, we must be willing to critically examine our own tendencies to make space that creates conditions of empowerment and self discipline.
safety, which is another principle of being trauma informed so that others are able to do the same. This movement is not only for some people or some communities. This movement is for everyone. It has the power to bring people who are currently unable to converse together through a new paradigm that allows us to see that we have faith.
far more in common than we do different, which is not just critical for addressing the problems that we care dearly about, but also so many others that require us to be able to come together to implement solutions. I know this may be difficult to envision in today's world, but we will get to the roots of what is driving this division in a bit.
The power of focusing on the method and approach to advocacy in addition to the policies and practices we advocate for is perhaps best illustrated. I believe by looking at the civil rights movement. Advocacy institutes were set up and people were trained not just in specific issues, but famously in non violent communication as a method of advocacy.
Difficult simulations were conducted to train people to remain calm in the face of abuse and other torturous circumstances to advance the causes that they believed in. This brought about a network that made strategic advocacy possible, and there are many examples of this kind of success throughout the movement that led to landmark legislation and the fights to continue advancing civil rights have continued ever since.
Using a very different political movement as another example, a well known quote from Lewis Powell's memo to the Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970s that fueled a movement to advance free enterprise and business interests implies a similar approach to a coordinated method of advocacy. Quote, strength lies in organization, in careful long range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
This is the type of coordination that we are aiming to bring to the trauma informed movement, both through the federal policies we champion that we hope you and others will champion to your elected officials, as well as those other areas that you are leading in, as we work toward coordinated action that builds a movement beyond any one single policy.
Our world is in desperate need of trauma informed advocacy, as we can see by the current state of affairs. Why are we in the position that has moved us so far from being able to communicate with our neighbors, family members, and others that we share a community with? Through a trauma informed lens, we want to view trauma not just at an individual level, but also across the social ecological framework.
We are about to dive into a few terms that will help us answer the question, not what is wrong with our society, But rather what has happened to it. We argue that many of the problems that we observe in our society, particularly when discussing political turbulence, we are experiencing are the result of collective trauma, traumatic reenactment.
We are not trying to blame or shame any single person or group of people. but rather share accountability and responsibility across false binaries that permeate our social world so that we can move beyond the forces that perpetuate our society toward downfall. The goal is to promote unity in order to best confront the challenges we face, from the micro to the macro.
Whether at an individual level or looking at our society as a whole, trauma can lead to fragmentation. We see that all around us. An example is that I will never forget the hoops that constituents had to jump through at the community center that I worked at to just receive basic services because different parts of our government didn't communicate with one another.
Trauma, as it takes us out of our cortex, whether individually or collectively, can create false binaries, black and white options, when usually there's a full spectrum, as well as a lack of forward vision, something we love our prefrontal cortices for and difficulty trusting. We need transformation because of the impacts of trauma across all levels.
So let's develop some common definitions that can help us understand this better. The first will be collective trauma, and we will use Erickson's framework with this term. The extremism and hardening notions of the other across ideological lines can be the result of collective trauma. The multidimensional nature of such extremism is indicative of more than one collective trauma that influences these reinforcing barriers, prohibiting the development of a cooperative society.
Collective trauma may be the result of a single event, the blow to the basic tissue of social life, in Erickson's definition. But it's often the chronic stress that while gathering force slowly and insidiously generates a gradual realization that the community no longer exists, as an effective source of support.
As Erickson goes on to describe, when collective trauma occurs and is unresolved, often I continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. You continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But we no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.
Of course, we have seen that when collective trauma occurs, when the right supports to process the experience or experiences and our grief are in place, the collective post traumatic growth and post traumatic wisdom can bring people and communities closer together. But far too frequently, we know that this is not the case.
Cultural trauma is different, though they can be related. And to help us understand cultural trauma, we're going to work off of Smelser et al. 's framework. Smelser's definition of cultural trauma, or as culture as a system, necessitates the linkage among those whom it is comprised of. So Erickson's definition about the impact of collective trauma, at least when it is unresolved, can deteriorate culture itself.
Unlike the insidiousness of collective trauma, a cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine and overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole. Three things that occur in qualifying as a cultural trauma are It must be remembered or made to be remembered.
The memory must be made culturally relevant, that is, represented as obliterating, damaging, or rendering problematic something sacred, usually a value or outlook felt to be essential for the integrity of the affected society. And the memory must be associated with a strong negative affect, such as disgust or shame.
Three examples of cultural trauma in the United States history listed by Smelser are the institution of slavery and its memory, the seizure of Native American lands and the partial extermination of their populations and the Great Depression and its many consequences. There are obviously many more examples of cultural trauma that exists.
This information was published in 2004, so there are many others in the last 20 years of memory that continue to pile on to the unresolved nature of the existing traumas. I won't go into more examples. I am confident that all of us can think of many. Smelser explains that the important defining characteristic of cultural trauma is that the affected arenas are society's social structures.
A claim of traumatic cultural damage must be established by deliberate efforts on part of cultural carriers. Political influence in cultural traumas cannot be overstated. Politics often has influence over the creation of cultural trauma, and can also continue to leverage the allegiance and or paralysis that the cultural trauma elicits, and are in many ways responsible for the trauma vortex that perpetuates.
It is nearly impossible to talk about collective and cultural trauma without talking about historical trauma as well, for which we will use Yellow Horse Bravehearts definition. Historical trauma is a cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations emanating from massive group trauma.
Historical unresolved grief accompanies that trauma. The historical trauma response is a constellation of features in reaction to massive group traumas. This historical unresolved grief and the historical trauma response perpetuates, divides, and creates an us versus them mentality which makes it difficult to move toward a better future collectively.
We need to work in the efforts of creating a sense of belonging for everyone to see and hear people really trying to understand their perspective and views on the world in order to remand how our society has frayed so we can move forward together. We live in such a litigious society that we oftentimes wind up working harder to minimize our own responsibility for problems than taking accountability for what we can really help to improve, which leads to our conversation about collective denial, for which we will use Alexander et al.
's framework. Alexander and co authors understand that social groups can and often do refuse to recognize the existence of others trauma, and because of their failure, they cannot achieve a moral stance. For All sides tend to deflect responsibility of the issue to the other and fail to recognize or address their perpetuation of the collective and cultural traumas that we are experiencing as a society.
Perhaps we are experiencing them through different lenses, but we are all experiencing them nonetheless. This collective denial leads social groups to restrict solidarity, leaving others to suffer alone. In complex groups, we are all someone else's other, so we all wind up at some level suffering alone and isolating.
If we take this definition and combine it back with Erickson's definition of collective trauma, where we no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body, we can see how this creates a vicious cycle. The last definitional term that I will speak to, at least for the time being, is collective disturbance, which comes from Bloom.
When we can't, or at least don't, sufficiently acknowledge these broad social issues that influence us all, collective disturbances can emerge. A collective disturbance can be defined as a situation where a strong emotion becomes disconnected from its original source and becomes attached to unrelated events or interactions.
Our society as a result of the multitude of unresolved collective and cultural traumas, which are exacerbated and perpetuated by collective denial and disturbances, becomes trapped. We not only punish ourselves, but as our ancestors did to us, we promote the same punishment upon future generations. In fairness to past generations, The language that has evolved in the recent past to help us more fully understand what is happening to us as a society creates incredible power in being able to do something about what it is that we can actually do.
Being able to name what lies beneath the surface is a powerful and a necessary step in healing collective disturbances. We can be the generation that truly begins the process of deep healing that will help bring about collective post traumatic growth and post traumatic wisdom that are only possible by developing an honest narrative about what has happened that is shared broadly and working to integrate better ways of thinking, being, doing, knowing, and relating that accept responsibility for at least some part of what has happened.
We are going to now put in the chat a recent piece that we published that goes deeper into these forces that we just described, outlining why we need a trauma informed approach.
This is where the power of trauma informed approaches across the social ecological framework are so important. We certainly need to be able to meet individuals and groups of people where they are at.
But if we fail to see how systems that influence all of us have been impacted by trauma, then we will continue to be unable to truly address the root causes of what is driving cascading dysfunction across individual, community, and systems levels, which will bear the burden of continuously crumbling systems and structures that threaten the livelihoods and well being of the people in our society as a whole on them alone to fix.
We can see with the chasming reality of American politics that we are dealing with deep issues that affect all of us. Based on the lenses we view the world through, the networks that we're engaged in, the media that we consume, and a myriad of other factors, most of us view these issues from one side of a binary or the other.
And increasing animosity makes it harder to communicate and build coalition to address the areas that impact all of us. Based on a variety of factors, so much time, money, and energy is spent on issues that heighten our divide, and the space between us has made it more difficult to talk about the issues that most of us actually agree on.
This shines a light on Smelser's discussion of the influence politics has in perpetuating cultural trauma. The good news Is that we know the methods that can help us take a powerful step forward together, which will help us uncover new horizons to work toward that we are currently unable to see from the place our collective and cultural traumas have kept us stuck in.
If we are going to move beyond these traumas toward a better direction, might I add that we are not just talking about a better direction for some, but rather for all of us, we must be able to integrate our experiences into coherent narratives at a collective and individual level. Unlike much of the dominant dialogue that pervades our politics and our society today, there is a truth that informs our collective experiences.
The efforts by political leaders to suggest that very real experiences are fake, or to try to sugarcoat past harms, fits well within the cultural carrier's role that Smelser's definition, uh, holds. If we are to heal, we must be able to come together to discuss the truths of our society and our world. Now leaning into bell curve theory, we don't need 100 percent of people today to believe us or agree.
So I encourage us to not feel the pressure to convince people who do not want to change their mind right now. We can leave space for them to change their minds in the future and be curious about what happened, that they cannot or will not engage with a story of our reality that does not fit within the rigid structures of the stories that they tell themselves, as Brene Brown says.
But it is not our role as truly trauma informed advocates to force others to change their minds. It is our role to hold our truth strongly, to advocate for a better world, while remaining flexible to learn from others as we build healthy relationships that promote healing and change. I can say with confidence that when we meet with people without judgment and talk human to human, most people agree on a variety of really important issues.
We want to ensure that families have the opportunity to be raised in safe and healthy environments, that our children have good schools that promote an excitement for learning so they can lead successful lives, that our systems make wise investments so that future generations can afford to do this for those who are yet to come.
And the principles of trauma informed movement underlie all of this. If we think about our systems through a neurological perspective, which might seem silly, though, I'd encourage us to remember that our systems are operated by humans at the end of the day. When we fall into deeper brain states, our thinking becomes less logical, more reactionary, and less able to envision and stick to long term strategies.
We have entered into such crises, whether that be the national debt, the partisan gridlock, or a multitude of other issues that can be inserted here that we have wound up fighting ourselves, propelling a lack of trust that makes the implementation of even the best policies incredibly difficult, if not at times impossible.
Our systems are inefficient in a time in which we need to be working toward transformation. We need to be transformative to address the histories of trauma that exist at individual, family, community, and broader levels. We need to be transformative to address the ecosystem, climate, biodiversity, catastrophe.
We need to be transformative to truly address the deaths of despair that end hundreds of thousands of lives and cost our country trillions of dollars every single year. We can celebrate the fact that the opioid and gun related deaths have fallen since their peaks a few years ago, while also recognizing that these rates were up since before COVID.
So if we take away the anomaly of the stress of the pandemic, these rates are still rising over the past five years. While we are trending better in some domains, what I'm trying to say is that it is clear that there is still so much work to be done. That is where all of us, And the millions of other concerned U.S. Citizens and billions of global citizens who want to make our world a better place. Come in. We're going to do another breakout room, which I believe Antron is going to put the prompts for in the chat now. So we all have them. Um, and we're going to be in the same groups as before. If someone dropped off the call, there might be a little bit of maneuvering, but largely we want to keep the same breakouts.
We will discuss how we see collective and cultural trauma, as well as collective denial and disturbance play out in our lives, where we, where we see opportunities for being trauma informed agents of change. And for many of you who are already doing this, how we are already being trauma informed agents of change.
When we come back, we will go deeper into trauma informed advocacy principles. Please keep in mind the same community agreements as before, and we'll go ahead and open the breakout rooms now. We'll see you back here in about eight minutes.
All right. So I hope it was a good time connecting with your group. Again, we know how important relationships are. And so we look forward to using this series to promote healthy relationships along, um, The along, uh, the like minded advocates, uh, doing similar work. If there were any profound discussions or high level points that were discussed in your breakout rooms, please feel free to share them in the chat.
If there are questions that emerged, please share those as well in the chat. And we will work to address those either at the end of this call, if there's time, or if we can't get to them, they can inform our office hour conversations. While folks put things in the chat, we will continue this session to begin our discussions around trauma informed advocacy.
Now that we have established why it is so critical, let's talk about recognizing stress and responding skillfully to it for ourselves and in support of others. Advocacy is going to be stressful at times. Systems tend not to change easily and this can create stressful situations for us. We may face times where people do not support issues we are passionate about, or worse, are just downright rude to us.
I want to mention here that while I believe everything that I've said up to this point, there is an important nuance that just because we are working to be trauma informed does not mean that we open ourselves up to being taken advantage of by others. There are times that we need to be in tough conversations where we may not get the respect we are giving to others.
Know in these moments that there is a community of support here for you. Not that it'll make those moments easier, but we're here to support you as you continue moving forward. The first thing we are going to discuss is being trauma informed advocates is actually giving ourselves the love and care that we work to provide for others.
We are in the early stages of a movement that is working to transform change or toward transformative change, and it is going to take time. So we need to care for ourselves throughout this process to reduce the likelihood of burnout, both for ourselves and others. The first activity we are going to do, which has been an important tool used by many is developing a safety plan.
We will go over this pretty quickly. So I encourage you to also check out the video that Antron's going to put in the chat, which Sandy blue made talking about developing a safety plan. In addition to the video that will walk you through creating your own safety plan, Impact Services in Philadelphia uses the safety plan that we are putting in the chat here, and we will use to quickly go through at least the beginnings of the exercise, which is actually derived from the safety plans that Sandy developed from her work as a medical doctor.
jotting down ideas, but the video is, uh, eight minutes long and goes deeper than what is on the card. But what we're going to do here is a good place to start. We will write one thing that we can do on our own or think about one thing that we can do on our own that can help us regulate ourselves. Mine is what I call wave breathing, where I imagine myself breathing along a wave curve for as long as I need up to infinity, though, as you can tell, I've never actually gotten that far and it helps me feel centered and connected to nature.
This is something that I can resource from within myself. There are other breathing and regulation exercises we can do on our own or other practices that you may prefer, but make a note of something that you can come back to when you start to feel activated. And next we will put two things that require another person, place, or thing to accomplish.
For me, the first thing that I do, which has always been a great presencing exercise for me is carrying a baseball. And I go through different pitch grips and it helps to calm me down. The second thing I love to do is spend time with or call a loved one. And it's even better if I can do this while going for a walk.
Again, reflect and jot down at least two things that work for you to help you regulate when you need. Advocacy itself can be a therapeutic activity, making meaning of our past experiences, whether directly experiences or injustices that we've observed, by working to create healthier systems and supporting people living better lives.
As well as finding our voice can be healing experiences that help to promote post traumatic growth and post traumatic wisdom. But we must remember that healing happens in the context of healthy relationships over time. I have seen so many wonderful advocates do incredible advocacy by themselves and recognize that sometimes this is necessary.
It is our goal in doing this, that we create a community of support for folks doing this work. So moving forward, you know that there will always be a community of advocates across the country to come back to and process with, even if you are mobilizing in your community on your own at any given time.
We do encourage you as you are able to find others who are passionate about the same issues as you are and advocate together. You may need to take the lead and support others in doing this, but it can be very helpful to keep us in it and accountable in addition to our own stress and recognizing that we need to take care of ourselves as we work toward transformative change, which will inherently take time as trauma informed advocates.
We must also recognizing the stress, recognize the stresses of those we are advocating to generally for legislative staff. As an example, we would be meeting with people with a tremendous amount of legislative activity. And who may have a dozen and sometimes more meetings in a single day. While trauma informed policies are becoming more prevalent, there is still a reality that it may not be the priority, at least not yet for many staffers.
While we often feel and rightfully should as the passion we feel can fuel momentum toward our goals, a tremendous amount of urgency around the issues we advocate for. We must be mindful to meet people where they are at. While we should want things to happen as soon as possible, I know that I do, we must recognize that it might take several meetings for people to fully grasp the work that we are asking of them, alongside follow up.
Because we know that relationships are so critical in this work, we must never forget that those who are we are advocating to deserve the same relationships we know are transformative for others. Being thoughtful and kind, ensuring that we are prepared and respectful to their time and their needs can be really important as we bridge divides where they exist if needed and work to achieve our goals.
As we work to operationalize the six principles of a trauma informed approach, we must consider setting and maintaining boundaries for ourselves to ensure we are creating conditions of safety as we move forward, as well as creating conditions of safety for others.
To open up and ask questions to process their own experiences that can bubble up as we discuss the impacts trauma has on us as individuals and on our society and systems at large to provide us with their honest feedback and thoughts that can be so valuable as we move forward.
Advocacy is an incredible opportunity to operationalize voice choice and empowerment as we discussed earlier and it can be important to consider how we are creating the same opportunities for others. Sometimes it can be valuable to bring other voices into the conversation. In addition to the relationships that I brought up earlier as so important to our advocacy over the long term, other perspectives can also enhance our advocacy efforts by creating a more complete picture of the issues that we are discussing.
This can promote peer support as well. As we work as a group and can also fit into operationalizing cultural, gender, and historical issues. As we may recognize that we cannot speak to all of the ways that trauma permeates our society as well as others can. Creating a diverse array of perspectives and voices can enhance our advocacy and, when we do it thoughtfully, can enhance how we are promoting trauma informed principles in a number of ways.
This is one of the reasons in addition to this advocacy series that we're doing here that you are all a part of. We are promoting youth advocacy as well, like Antron talked about earlier, to uplift their wisdom, voices, and perspectives into this work over time and create a multi generational movement.
Operationalizing trustworthiness and transparency is critical. We want to be honest to those we advocate to. If we do not know something, it is always better to say that you will look it up and get back to them than to make something up. This also means that we are open about what we think needs to happen, which can put us in a powerful position as advocates.
Finally, operationalizing collaboration and mutuality is crucial as we collaborate with others we are advocating alongside, as well as collaborating with those we are advocating to. I will get into more stories about the power of collaboration like this as we move forward in the series. In addition to these six principles from SAMHSA's framework, we encourage you to incorporate other principles that help you operationalize a trauma informed approach.
Different communities and organizations have different principles and values that they may bring into this work. One more principle that we always encourage at CTIPP is an ongoing commitment to learning and growth. We can always learn something new and work to get better. And this is an especially important frame during advocacy.
It is critical in policy and practice to do what we believe is best, while having the curiosity and critical thought to consider what is working well, what can use improvement, and adjust accordingly. Practicing trauma informed approaches in our advocacy is so important because we need to be congruent with the model that we are promoting.
We are called to be the change we want to see in the world, so we must work to be trauma informed ourselves. Seeing the humanity in each other helps to build relationships that lead to change, and as well as break through the divides that cause gridlock that can make implementing new policy or practice difficult in some circumstances.
Seeing the humanity in others can help them see the humanity in us. And it is critical having our trauma informed lenses to be able to better analyze, if not sometimes understand, what is driving the issues that we are working to address. As I mentioned earlier, it can be so helpful to look at our society and ask what has happened rather than what is wrong with it.
This paradigm shift we work to nurture can lead to new ideas about how to address what is driving dysfunction. It is critical. That we show people why a new way is better as we work toward how and what needs to be done to make that happen, which brings us back to the golden circle that we discussed earlier.
As we move forward forward in this series, we will work on effective storytelling for advocacy, which will, which can be a great way to actualize and operationalize the golden circle. I saw some love for Simon Sinek in the chat earlier. I love it. But we will get to that more during the third session of this series, as well as developing our agenda, which we will get to during next month's call.
There are two more principles that I want to share with you all now, as we work to meet the moment we are in before we get into our last breakout rooms of the day to discuss how we see the application of trauma informed principles in our own advocacy efforts that have carried me through my advocacy to date.
The first, as I have brought up a number of times, is the golden circle. We can look at leading with why in our own advocacy pitches. This is a very effective way to reach people's hearts and minds as we advocate for change. The brilliance of the golden circle, which we can apply our understanding of neuroscience to appreciate, is that people often do not make decisions simply from a logical perspective.
If we as humans made decisions this way, our society would look far worse. fundamentally different. We often make decisions because of a feeling we have. It is an emotional pull toward what feels right or wrong that we then use the information we know logically to then justify. So when we lead with why we reach people's hearts and minds that we then explain the logic that supports in terms of the process and the result behind why something should be done.
In addition to how this fits into our advocacy in a meeting or interaction, the golden circle is also important in keeping us grounded in why we are advocating in the first place. As we have discussed, advocacy can be a long and tiring process at times, though we know that it can also lead to times when it is absolutely elating to know that we have made lasting change in the world around us, which is what keeps us going.
So being grounded in our why can be so important during the journey we are embarking on. From the why we go to the how, which is advocating in a trauma informed way, as we are modeling the model in our pursuit of building this wonderful movement, and the what is the trauma informed policy or practice that we are actually advocating for.
In addition to using the golden circle in our pitch, the golden circle also underlies our approach as a whole. I know for me. When things get hard, my why is the love that I will always have for my childhood best friend Doug and the loss that I experienced that will never be filled, as well as the love my family and my community provided to help me work through that tragedy and feeling called to ensure that others have the support that I was lucky enough to receive, as well as not having to go through the pain that I did if they do not need to.
It should not take luck. To have the resources and supports that are necessary to thrive. It should be a human right. I encourage you, if you haven't already done so, to reflect on your why as you move forward. It will serve as a helpful compass and anchor moving forward in this journey. The other principle, principle, which this supports is what I call the champion mindset.
This is something that I was raised on. My dad was my baseball coach during my, uh, well, We now, we now coach together, so still kind of, uh, and he focused on the process and journey rather than just the destination. Of course, we wanted to win and we did win a lot, but so much of the outcome of any given game or season or play is out of our control.
So he really encouraged us to focus on executing what we could control, preparing as best as we could, and being willing to learn and grow as we try new things. Following up thoughtfully, speaking to what we know and working to find answers to that that we do not, and living into our values are all things that we can control whether we get the outcome we are looking for in a given situation or not.
Like we talked about earlier, this work is going to take a very long time. No one policy by itself will create the transformation our society needs by itself. Our focus, at least in part, must be to build a movement. As I learned growing up and has been confirmed throughout my life, when we go about the process in the right way, we achieve the outcomes we are striving for more than we otherwise would.
It's funny. I don't know how much sense that actually makes. Certainly the champion mindset. I hope it resonates. Uh, if it doesn't, please feel free to move past it. Uh, I know it's a good talking point when I coach baseball and I figured that I try it out here as well, but I encourage you to reflect on your why.
And if it resonates with you, what it means for you to advocate like a champion. I know that I'm going over this again as review, but next month we are going to focus on developing our agendas and the following month we will focus on building power through storytelling and building power and momentum.
Then we will wrap it up in December by bringing all of this together to set out a plan to take us into 2025. Each session will be on the third Wednesday of the month from 2 to 3 30 p. m. Eastern time using this same zoom link every time and we will also offer office hours on the first Wednesday of each month at the same time.
If there are things that you want to work through or discuss in between meetings and of course you can reach out to our team as well. I mentioned this a number of times because again we want for you to be a part of this for this series through the end of the year and into next year. And beyond. In addition to these calls, we have an asynchronous advocacy series that is a great way to compliment what we are learning in these sessions, which I'll put in the link before the end of the call.
And we are also putting the final touches on an advocacy ebook that we will publish soon. We hope that you will use these as we prepare for the year ahead and that you will give us feedback as we continue to work and to improve our work. I appreciate all of your patience today, and I wanted to say all of that before we go into the final breakout session of the call, and we're going to take about 10 minutes for the last breakout session here, and then we will do a larger final group discussion for the remainder of our time together.