There are many ways we can develop personal, professional and institutional practices that help as bring a “trauma informed” perspective to our leadership in organizations.
A PRIMARY PRACTICE we explore and learn about is group and self-regulation:
- With heart and head we will explore how we create reliable community rhythms for calming, breathing deeply and steadying ourselves and one another through song, prayer, times of silence, and play in worship, small groups, and fellowship.
- We also develop deeper understanding as to how we can create reliably, caring relationships through efforts to actively build and sustain trustworthy, hospitable, joyful, loving connection.
Our trauma informed tool-kit will also include strategies for learning about an array of communication practices.
These may range from policies that adhere to safety for all members and visitors to clearly covenanted opportunities to share freely what happened (including space to choose not to share). We will identify the value of physical, emotional, and spiritual developmental stages and how to avoid power and controlling dynamics while being strong and competent. Over time, we will expand our techniques to offer and receive compassionate curiosity within safe boundaries and create opportunities through small groups, worship, preaching, education, and fellowship events for truth-telling, while strictly avoiding gossip, backbiting, and slander.
As value-centered leaders, we will learn how to hold allegations of abuse as valuable as well as multiple strategies to keep the people we work with informed of opportunities within the community for qualified spiritual direction, counseling, and therapy. As we work on self compassion to stay interested and able to bear witness honestly to adverse experiences from the past that may be influencing present fears and defenses. With this in mind we will grow in our capacities to view forms of “acting out” as new opportunities for building trust and safe relationships.
Adapted from The Institute for Trauma Informed Congregations
Every day, there are decisions to be made. When? How? With whom? To what end? Decisions about what to do first, or last. Decisions about how to spend time, money, or precious energy. I’m mindful that any one choice can hinge upon others. Impact and intention, not withstanding.
Each month, I put together a little lesson for participants in 
My three readers probably noticed this Tuesday post didn’t get posted Tuesday. All praise imperfection! I practice messing up with GUSTO and appreciate the chance to acknowledge that usually, it’s a chance for me to keep a healthy and robust sense of myself as a merely mortal learner in a world of high expectations and absurd standards.
It would seem impossible to forget, and yet.