Integrative Trauma & Healing Framework

Authors: Teddy McGlynn-Wright, MSW and Leslie Briner, MSW (March 2021)

Introduction

Years ago, the authors were two of several brought into a local alternative school that had reached out in the wake of several suicides and homicides in their student body. The typical crisis response was to bring in mental health professionals and social workers and have them available to the students and faculty for grief counseling. After doing this half a dozen times and being only midway through the year, the principal reached out to a wider group, including pediatricians, activists, and educators.

A significant part of the framework that we are presenting to you is owed to that school, that principal, and those who came together over and over again to better understand what was killing our children.

In the years since sitting at student desks in a spare classroom in South Seattle, we have written, spoken, presented, reflected, and refined what we now call the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework. It is composed of the following statements.

We begin whole. Our birthright includes safety, agency, dignity, and belonging–fundamental needs of all beings.

We embody trauma and healing across 5 layers: individual, collective, systemic, intergenerational and historical.

Trauma interrupts. Trauma is the harmful interruption and disintegration of safety, agency, dignity, and belonging.

Trauma overwhelms. Trauma is experienced throughout the body-brain, overwhelming our ability to cope with and integrate thoughts, sensations, and emotions connected to an experience.

We can be whole again. Pathways to healing occur anytime we do anything that restores or promotes safety, agency, dignity, and belonging and moves bodies towards integration and wholeness.

On Wholeness

This concept of wholeness is the open and the close of the Framework very much on purpose. We start with beginning whole and end with the belief, premise, and promise that we can be whole again. This provides a guidepost toward what it means to be whole– that we can have our fundamentals, of safety, agency, dignity and belonging interrupted and restored.

When we say we begin whole, we also mean that we have access to a full range of emotions, sensations, experiences. Part of the response to trauma is a flattening of our emotions, sensations, and experiences so our range for what is possible becomes more narrow, constricted, and rigid.

This is a response to both ourselves repressing things internally, like numbing our feelings or blocking out a memory, as well as being repressed or threatened by other people or systems causing us harm. Humans are, by nature, emotional and expressive beings. So compressing those emotions and experiences must be really important for our survival in order for it to be something we do so regularly and automatically.

In doing work around trauma there is an emphasis on harm as the center of the story and within the framework we make sure that is not the whole story. There is a before and after. When we started on this project we called it the Integrative Trauma Framework but after a few years of working with it, we accepted that we needed to follow our own advice and center healing. So we began calling it the Integrative Trauma AND Healing Framework; with the realization that if we are going to talk about what happens after harm we also need to talk about before the harm.

Safety, Agency, Dignity, and Belonging

Much of the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework was seeded by practitioners and teachers of Generative Somatics, a group of politicized healers grown out of the Bay Area, California. What we discovered through engagement with social workers, public health professionals, teachers, students, and others was that clinical definitions of trauma were useful for diagnosing and treating trauma at a clinical (read: individual) level.

However, when describing trauma at the other layer of our experience, we needed a definition that could capture the vast ways in which people, groups, systems, and cultures experience harm. We needed framing that went beyond the realm of clinical impacts and actually describes what trauma is— a harmful interruption of safety, agency, dignity, or belonging.

Safety is defined as: a sense of being physically, psychologically, emotionally secure. Having all basic needs met in ways that don’t cause harm or exploitation. When talking about safety we acknowledge that this word means different things to different people. And we acknowledge there are different kinds of safety including physical, mental/emotional, financial, community, spiritual. In short, safety means different things to different people and yet, all of us need it.

Agency is our sense that we can act on our own behalf, make informed choices, and have some amount of influence over our conditions. We also think about agency as our ability to make a decision, experience reasonable consequences for that decision, and make another decision. If we don’t have all three of those components then our agency is compromised.

Dignity is defined as: our sense of power and worthiness that is not based on harm or dehumanization of others. It is our sense of intrinsic self-worth. Having dignity doesn’t equate to thinking we’re perfect or don’t have places to grow or that we’re better than. Quite the opposite, it shows us that we can be imperfect and make mistakes and still be worthy of love, belonging, and the care and protection of the collective. And it’s a birthright, not a thing we have to earn or acquire, it’s innate,

Belonging is defined as: being a full member of a group. Being in meaningful relationships with people, the planet, spirit, and/or other living beings. Belonging is the container for connection, relationships, and love. While we present these four fundamentals as a set of 4, our personal and professional observation is that belonging is perhaps the most fundamental. We cannot thrive without connection; we can’t mature into adult humans without the care of other humans for the first 5-10 years of our lives. We are hardwired to survive by belonging to a group.

The question is how insulated are our safety agency, dignity, and belonging from the traumatic conditions we’re moving and growing through? If we have robust belonging and firm safety, we may not feel the interruptions as intensely and we may recover from them (return to wholeness/wellness) more fluidly. By contrast, when we’re exposed to persistent traumatic conditions like poverty or chronic harm, then interruptions can be more intrusive and intense. When we’re less protected and insulated it lands differently.

What if we had a shared understanding of safety, agency, dignity and belonging and talking about them was part of our everyday experience? And when someone experienced something traumatic, we could talk about it in terms of losing access to these fundamentals, having them taken away, or having to hustle or trade one fundamental for another in order to survive? How can we think deeply about re-building those fundamentals across the five layers? What would it look like to increase safety, agency, dignity, and belonging within communities, systems, politics, or across entire cultures?

This is how we get whole again.