Speaker: Helena Vissing, PsyD
Helena Vissing, PsyD: It's important to distinguish between trauma-informed and trauma-responsive because being trauma-informed a lot of people are very trauma- informed today, meaning we know a lot about what trauma is. We have a lot of basic concrete understanding of how trauma is something that impacts our mental health, what different types of experiences that can constitute trauma. The problem is that just talking about it is not enough and just naming it in and of itself is not enough. Actually, sometimes talking about it without adequate sense of safety can actually be triggering and overwhelming for some people. So the difference between being trauma-informed and trauma-responsive is that being trauma-responsive means that we are sensitive to what happens in all kinds of care encounters, therapeutic encounters, or other encounters within systems of care. We were sensitive to the way that just that interaction can be overwhelming. So being trauma-responsive is, for example, not just to say we're going to screen for trauma, but it's going to be, we're going to make sure that when we screen for trauma, we're going to do it in a way that is sensitive, that's not causing unnecessary overwhelm. That could be, for example, being very mindful, having some very intentional choices about when to do screeners. Maybe it's going to be in a conversation instead of just giving a questionnaire and being very mindful of when the clients are being presented with these screeners. That would be the difference between just being trauma-informed, knowing that we must screen for trauma, versus being trauma-responsive and implementing the screening in a very sensitive and careful way.
