Trauma-Informed Community

Trauma can impact everyone’s life and how they are able to function with day-to-day tasks. This can be physical, mental, behavioral, social, or spiritual. Trauma is treatable and making changes in the community can help build resilience. As mentioned above resilience is someone’s ability to push through traumatic incidents/events, here we will be looking at community-level resilience.

Community-Level Resilience

Recognizing symptoms of trauma in the community is key to healing individuals and how you may fit into their process of recovery. Anguish within the community can happen suddenly and without warning, leaving the community members shocked. Some community members may feel a heightened sense of fear, that harm can happen at any time, the world is unsafe, and they cannot trust anyone. This can be caused by continuous shootings, robberies, etc. Other community members may feel that they cannot put their guard down, began worrying about friends and family members’ safety or completely withdrawing from social interactions and friends. When a person is always worried about their safety and family how can that affect their day to day and work-life? Community trauma may lead to someone not being able to have healthy work habits, healthy relationships, or being able to carry out the regular daily task.  This is because their mind is always on alert on what will happen next.

How to build resiliency within your community

Luckily, there are approaches you can put in place to help heal and build resiliency within the community. Trauma-informed training can be done to raise awareness and provide options on how to respond. Here are some small things that can be done in different areas of the community:

  • Businesses can administer paid mental health days, breaks, supportive reflective supervision, and encouragement of movement or meditation throughout the day. This will help employees feel supported and feel that they have a safe place to go to.

  • Schools can implement a safe environment, instill changes to help avoid triggers with youth, provide transparency, peer support, and referrals to professional guidance. This includes tips mentioned regarding trauma-informed classrooms. But it doesn’t stop there, teachers need to be aware of their own trauma and being mindful of the support they may need.

  • Families can increase positive communication, provide a healthy emotional support system, maintain predictable routines, help build coping skills, and use behavioral management strategies. This feeds off the above information on trauma-informed parenting.

These small changes can make positive impacts within the community and may help to prevent re-traumatization. You can also see how each of the parts above fits into the bigger puzzle of becoming a trauma-informed community. It doesn’t just take one person or one school, it takes a community to come together as a whole to make a change for the better.