I was with my friend Abrigal Forrester the other day. We were talking about Trauma and he used the term Practice-based Evidence. I was so excited to hear that phrase for the first time. Too often front-line trauma workers feel burdened, stymied, and barricaded by the much bandied term Evidence-Based Practice. Evidence of what? Practice by whom? Sometimes they feel like the evidence gathering takes up all the room and the practice falls by the wayside. How do we know when something works?
Well certainly we all love the reduction of unwanted behaviors: truancy, drug-involvement, violence-aggression. Then again Freud says that clients reproduce memories through action as the only way they know how to remember things. So what do we do with that?
I apologize because I lost track of where I took these notes and will update this later. But here are a few trauma thoughts regarding trusting what we know as a way to be able to be the most hepful to traumatized individuals:
- We ask ourselves: What were they thinking? Which is Oh so much better than when we think we can decide what they were thinking as if we are mindreaders.
- But a trauma sensitive approach considers that it is a dissociative blockade that places the behavior out of the context of verbal and conscious control.
- Since words are not available to sufficiently explain the experience, thinking cannot really occur.
- Which leads an individual to helplessly re-expose themselves to trauma.
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