Toward a trauma-informed Port Phillip
A trauma-informed approach understands trauma, puts people's safety, growth and healing first, and takes measures to recognise and avoid triggering and re-traumatisation. Understanding trauma means understanding everyone's behaviour is shaped by their environment. It means understanding that to create safer spaces, we need to create supportive and empathetic environments for everybody.
A trauma-informed approach makes people feel in control and empowered. This means adopting a strengths-based approach that is nonjudgemental, noncoercive, and honest. Understanding that we are the changemakers of our own lives, we recognise that collaborating with each other is more effective than caregiving.
Healing Journey by Thelma Beeton
A trauma-informed approach understands we need to feel safe to be present, to be ourselves and to think about others. This means physically safe but also safe to express our unique identities: our different cultures, genders, sexualities, abilities, neurodiversity. This also means understanding that safety can look different for different people or communities. For First Peoples, safety for an individual can include their family, community, country, spirit, ancestors, culture and language.
Trauma-Aware Port Phillip values
These values reflect the heart of Trauma-Aware Port Phillip and the community we are building. They were developed collaboratively within the TAPP working group members and will develop as we do as a trauma-aware community. They are a guide to how we want to relate to each other and deliver services, and the kinds of environments we want to build.
Trauma-informed levels
Trauma-aware
Becoming trauma-aware is the first step to becoming trauma-informed. In this step we are trying to understand trauma. We want to understand how trauma happens, how often, and what it might look and feel like. As well as how it might impact us, our loved ones and our community. Being trauma-aware means our information is current and evidenced-informed. This means being open to learning new things as well as unlearning things we thought were true. This is a process that continues even when we progress through the other trauma-informed steps.
Trauma-sensitive
Becoming trauma-sensitive means that we are beginning to understand different approaches. We are looking at our current approach to understand how they might have made things worse for people who have experienced trauma. We are beginning to recognise what we could do differently centring TAPP values. This is a process. To ensure our approaches are effective, we need to continue to reflect on our approach and learn new evidence-informed approaches.
Trauma-responsive
Becoming trauma-responsive means we are beginning to understand how we will become trauma-informed. We are thinking about what knowledge and what techniques we will put into practice. We are thinking about how we will put them into practice and how they will look and feel.
For organisations this means reviewing policies, procedures, structures, and systems to align with our understanding of trauma-aware and trauma-sensitive practices.
Trauma-informed
Being trauma-informed means we are living what we have learnt. That we reflect on our approach to ourselves and others and remember TAPP values. We are receptive and responsive to new evidence and feedback from others to help our approach and understanding of trauma.
Being trauma-informed can be broken down into 4 Rs:
For organisations this means implementing changes across the whole organisation to align with your understanding of trauma, trauma-informed and TAPP values.
Delivering trauma-informed care means we:
- Assume that trauma is the norm, not the exception.
- Shift our lens from “what’s wrong?” to “what happened?”
- Recognise our community and every individual within it has the capacity to grow and heal.
- Focus on resilience, strengths, building skills, and facilitating choice.
- Respond to people’s behaviour with curiosity and compassion, not judgment.
- Recognise the importance of culturally safe spaces where people can be themselves without fear of stigma or discrimination.
- Adapt our approaches based on individual needs and preferences.
- Recognise the way we speak matters, that empathy, clarity, and dignity should be at the core of all communication.
- Use supportive, respectful, and non-stigmatising language.
- Create environments that are emotionally and physically safe.
- Understand entering into new relationships can feel unsafe and takes time and patience.
- Don’t ask to recognise that trauma may be present.
