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Signed, Your Staff. P.S., We miss you.

From Christy da Rosa, MSW, LICSW, Professor of Practice, Trauma Informed Oregon

Dear Leader,

You said yes to an enthusiastic group of staff. Or maybe one enthusiastic staff member. They delivered a very nice, very professional presentation that they practiced for weeks, with prep, with thought, with trepidation. You were curious about trauma informed care. You were familiar with that term. Quite familiar in fact; trauma informed care is all over the place. It’s about time we hopped on board, you thought.

So you said yes. That yes was an opportunity. A door that opened. A garden plot you donated to the cause. You figure this is something important. Some money to a training is easy. It’ll help morale. And then you can go back to keeping the organization running.

This is the first chapter. It can be the only chapter.

Chapter One

You approve the training. Maybe it’s a big one: the whole staff crammed into a room they don’t usually get to sit in together, a little awkward, a little excited. Maybe you are convinced to go a little further than that. A series, spread across a few months. Maybe someone even goes far enough to carry the momentum to a Train the Trainer series, something with good return on investment. This will make it sustainable. The staff getting trained promise not to inconvenience anyone else.

You clap at the end. You mean it, too. You say something about how proud you are, how important this work is, how glad you are that your staff care this much. And then you go back to networking, back to the budget, back to the board, back to the grant report due Friday, because someone has to. It was all great stuff. You really support your staff to do this work.

That thought is the foreshadowing to the end of the story. It was decided. Trauma informed care was quietly defined as a thing staff do. A skill. A moment of compassion they take with a client who’s had a hard morning. Something to add to a grant, maybe even the website, that the organization is trauma informed now. And the staff return to do what they always do. (You have wonderful, passionate staff after all.)

How did it shrink into something so small? The way things do – when the people with decision-making power aren’t in the room.

You missed your call. Trauma informed care asked that you notice the signs of trauma in your staff, and in yourself, in the anxious feeling you get before a board meeting because they’ve gone so wrong before and you have a family member in the hospital and you are the only one in the family who shows up for them.

You missed the call for the organization to overturn its earth. To dig deep under the organization’s own policies, intake processes, feedback processes, notes compliance, the pipe in the ceiling of the lobby that keeps leaking that might be the thing flipping people’s lids – not just staff not being nice enough. You missed how staff feel tangled up with everything the organization already believes about who deserves patience and who doesn’t, and that untangling it means looking at systems a lot bigger than your own.

The chapter concludes with your staff. They answered the call. They always answer the call.

They start noticing things. The moment in the intake process where someone’s whole body changes. The policy that makes complete sense on paper and makes no sense to a person sitting across from a stranger. They started identifying hot spots, these places where how they do their work is re-traumatizing. I called three times, talked to three different people, got three different appointments, and they were all cancelled because none of the three people had the protocol to change that email address. It is intended to extract, extract, and deplete the soil.

And then they notice they couldn’t fix it. They know how. They have many, many, many ideas on how. But they don’t. They don’t have a way. They don’t have a shovel, a spade, a garden hose. They tend to your donated, tiny garden plot only when they have the time during the hottest, hottest days during wildfire season. Until they become so sweaty and tired that they show up less and less. And swallow that guilt until they quit.

That’s usually the end of the chapter. The last chapter until a passionate staff member re-reads the story.

But you may be lucky. The garden may still be cultivating. Your staff may have turned to one another. They may have found their pockets of power, their moments of change. They took over their locus of control. They may teach differently. They may prefill forms. They may start being clever about how they are covering each other’s shifts.

There are whispers. Little whispers. Preparing an irrigation system for when the rain falls.

Chapter Two

We don’t see chapter two happen often. But it has been written. It is ready to be written.

You go to the garden. The director goes to the garden. HR goes to the garden. The board goes to the garden. And you dig.

Organizational commitment is not a bigger training. It is not a better slideshow, or surprise doughnuts after a hard day. (That does help.) It is the unglamorous, unphotogenic work of accountability.

It means a budget line, written into the fiscal year on purpose. You have plans for this garden. You want to nurture it.

Your budget goes to gardeners. Not a volunteer, not whoever has the time, not whoever is the most passionate and will do it anyway and answer email at eleven at night. A staff member, or a piece of one, or many of one, whose job description says trauma informed implementation and whose authority matches it.

It means protected time and resources. It means the spade, the shovel, the rake, the water, the basket.

It means you tend to the people doing the work when the work gets uncomfortable (which it will), and you invite your fellow leaders to it too, so it isn’t just one person out in the field alone being watched by everyone else indoors saying oh my, oh my, look how it pours.

It means you actually till the policy. Let “this is how we’ve always done it” get turned over and composted.

It means you keep checking the soil. You notice when the nitrogen levels are low. You notice where you started. You notice when you fall back. You notice when the flowers bloom.

It means you protect the garden itself, sometimes, when others show up trying to seize the water rights this whole garden depends on, or try to force you to plant something that poisons the ground you stand on.

Chapter Three and Beyond

The lovely thing about gardens is that they don’t end. There is no final harvest, no last basket carried in, no season where you say, well that sure was fun. The perennials keep growing. The rain keeps falling. Something is always going to seed while something else is going to rot.

You will not see the whole harvest. Some of what you till this season feeds people who haven’t walked through your doors yet, staff who haven’t been hired yet, a version of your organization you won’t be around to see in full bloom. But you plant anyway.

Your staff have been out in that field for a long time now, in the hottest part of the day, with tools they weren’t given, growing something in spite of everything. Imagine what they can grow with you.

Come outside. Bring your tools. There are weeds to pull.

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