What is Trauma and what impact can it have?
Traumatic experiences vary from person to person even if we experience the same event. What might have a significant impact on one person, will often feel different for someone else. There are different types of trauma and it can come about from something that happens once like a car crash or an assault or events that take place regularly like physical or emotional abuse. It can threaten our sense of safety both physically and emotionally and be or feel, life threatening. Traumatic events can overwhelm our ability to cope with everyday life and make us feel frightened, anxious or sad, or all of these feelings.
Trauma is much more common than was once thought and have can have a long-lasting impact on individuals and communities Trauma can affect anyone, at any time, in our communities making it everyone’s business. Traumatic events can make it difficult for people to feel safe and make trusting relationships with others including partners and people in their networks like teachers. We know though that people can and do recover from trauma and public organisations are working to give people experiences that can help them recover.
What is Trauma informed practice
Trauma informed practice means working in ways that are different to what people have previously experienced. This means designing and developing services and buildings, places and spaces that understand and respond to trauma.
Promoting safe and empowering relationships and environments where there is choice, trust and collaborations are at the heart of our approach. This helps us to prevent re traumatisation and offers a different kind of relationship from those previously experienced. It means we work to build on strengths and promote resilience in individuals and communities.
We know from research that this way of working has improved outcomes across a wide range of social and health outcomes and shows improved staff satisfaction in their roles. A key part of how we do this is recognising the importance of staff wellbeing and promoting opportunities to support staff individually and in teams.
More information and guidance
- For information on the National Trauma Transformation Programme click here
- Read our leaflet about Understanding Trauma here
- Access trauma training on LearnNL
- Review the NLC Trauma Design Guidance if you’re involved in planning, designing or developing buildings, places and spaces. This can be accessed here
- Wellbeing support is available here
- For information about services contact Allison Lang, Senior Officer, Trauma Informed Practice langa@northlan.gov.uk