Previously on the blog, I’ve written about what I’ve called Trauma-Informed Living, the practice of implementing trauma-informed approaches in our everday lives. In this post, I interview Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW, a professor at PennWest Edinboro who specializes in trauma-informed pedagogy, to learn more about what it means to be trauma-informed, the impacts of trauma on society, and the implementation of trauma-informed policies. This interview was conducted on 29 March 2024.
Kelly: I want to kick this off by asking what does it mean to take a trauma-informed approach to behavioral health, child welfare, teaching?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: To be trauma-informed in any context means to understand the ways that various forms of trauma, various forms of violence and victimization might impact individuals, families, organizations, and culture and then to use that understanding in order to inform service delivery. Trauma-informed approaches look at how we can impact practices and policies in different types of institutions so that people have better access to services that they have a human right to. This includes education and other services that people need in order to thrive and survive. In the behavioral health field, this can include services that people need in order to heal such as mental health and physical health care. In education, this means having access to learning.
Many people think of being trauma-informed as trauma specific services or trauma specific treatments including individual level interventions designed to help individuals recover from traumatic experiences such as eMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. This is different from what I conceptualize this as, which is organizational change processes that are designed to change policy and procedures and culture.
Kelly: You mentioned increasing access to things that everyone has a human right to, like education, so that society becomes more equitable. Why else might it be important to be trauma-informed? And what are some of the benefits you’ve seen of practicing trauma-informed teaching on individuals or policies you’ve seen go in place that have had more of a societal impact?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: My focus has been on trauma-informed pedagogies and higher education so I’m going to speak mostly from that angle. Like you mentioned, one of the reasons that we implement trauma-informed practices is not only to help the individuals who are involved in those kinds of change initiatives or the people who benefit from them, like students or clients, but to increase equity. When we change the dynamics of those individual relationships and we change the dynamics within organizations, we change the entire culture of the institutions. We start in the classroom but that might expand to the program, the department, the university. If you’re thinking about other service sectors the impact may expand to the organization and then to the entire service sector. There have been trauma informed change initiatives nationwide and most states have some type of a trauma informed initiative. So this has gone from people wanting to do something within individual agencies to the policy level. We have the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 and the Center for Trauma Informed Practice and Policy (CTIPP) which looks at trauma-informed policy changes at state and federal level to get more legislation and funding. So implementing these practices even on a smaller scale, makes this ripple effect and it helps change our culture.
Kelly: Based on what you just said and as a professor who teaches classes about trauma-informed teaching, how do you also implement these practices into your own classroom? Could you give us a few examples of what that looks like in practice?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: A lot of times in what I’ve noticed is that K-12 education focuses a lot on social emotional learning. To understand what happens to people’s nervous systems and focus on how we can intervene with students in order to help them improve their social emotional learning skills. In higher ed, all of that information is still important. It is important to understand how people respond under stress and know that when people are under threat, they’re not primed for learning.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on intervening at the student level. Instead, we can think about how we change our intervention level to the level of policy and the level of practice. So at the classroom level, It means understanding that as part of being human, people have different intersecting identities. And there are lots of reasons why, in classrooms, instructors may also get triggered. So being trauma-informed means thinking about how to make a safe classroom environment in contrast to focusing on the student as the intervention level. And there’s different ways that we do that. This includes understanding my own nervous system and my own threat responses so that I can communicate effectively and cue safety. And then it’s also following trauma-informed principles which include things like safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment and paying attention to –as SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] describes it– cultural, gender and historical issues. Most of us now tend to talk about that more in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. That’s an important principle.
The next step is to think about how that plays out in the classroom. One example is the types of classroom policies around attendance. Do I have all or nothing policies that students get punished for not complying with a particular rule? One rule I encountered a lot when I first started teaching was that if students had more than six unexcused absences over the course of a semester, I was supposed to fail them, even if they had an A in the class. Well, that was a really difficult policy to enforce. So when I discovered that I did not have to enforce that policy and that as an individual instructor, I was permitted to change that, I stopped enforcing it. Not every instructor in college, and certainly not all teachers in K-12 schools, has that ability. So it’s figuring out what policies I could change so that I could convey a belief that students were capable of high standards and continuing to have high standards, but also having more flexibility in how students were able to meet them. And thinking about how through classroom policy and practices, I could be consistent and predictable to cue safety to students. This creates an environment that feels safe enough for students to take the risks that they need to make mistakes and to learn from them.
Kelly: Thank you, that was a great response. One of the key things you mentioned was being flexible but keeping high standards, could you please elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by that and what that might look like.
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: An example of this that I give when I do trainings is a student who really has a lot of anxiety around giving presentations. There are different responses that we could have if a student approached us with that and said something like, “I really don’t want to present. I’m really scared about doing this– would it be possible to have an alternative?” One option we could respond with would be to say “yeah, you don’t have to present.” But while allowing them to get out of this assignment, they might not be demonstrating the course objectives. How do you give them a good grade in a class when they’re not they’re not learning those skills? Additionally, you’re not really conveying a belief that they’re able to get past that anxiety to be able to do it. We want to convey the conviction that we really believe in students’ ability to learn these skills and then talk to students about what supports might be helpful in order for them to do that. Saying that no, you don’t have to do the presention would not be congruent with the trauma informed approach. That’s not conveying that belief that students can do things that they may be apprehensive about. On the opposite end of the spectrum, saying, “well, if you don’t do it then you’re going to fail” would not necessarily be trauma informed either, because you’re not really collaborating with the student to figure out how they might be able to meet this standard and being more flexible around it.
The other thing to consider with that too, is again, we’re back to policy level because while it’s great to be able to meet individually with students to think about how you would extend that flexibility, you want to make sure that you’re extending that opportunity to all students and not just one student in the class. So, its important to consider what that would look like, not just on an interpersonal level with the student, but also on a policy level in your class. When I’ve had presentations as part of a required class, I’ve given opportunities for students to practice when they’re not graded. This allows them to come stand up in the front of the room just to see what that feels like because they may not have done that before. The ability to do this without thinking about how it might be graded reduces some of the threat around it so that students are still learning the skill. The learning is what’s important and sometimes the grade isn’t as important. It’s just about thinking about how we can be flexible within the constraints that we have to provide that learning experience.
Kelly: That’s great. I used to have a lot of anxiety around presenting things in school so I can very much relate to that example as well. One of the things that I’ve been considering as I’ve been reading a lot about trauma and exploring this topic, is how people could apply some of these principles to everyday life. Maybe you’re not a teacher or you don’t work in health care. Do you see any applications of this to how we interact with our friends, our colleagues, or even people we don’t know in our everyday lives?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: For me the principles apply everywhere in all aspects of our lives. How do we cue safety? How do we establish trustworthiness? How do we collaborate with others? How do we pay attention to issues of diversity and equity? All of those principles are principles about how to be human in any relationship. I’m not a couple’s counselor, but I do a lot of professional development in couples counseling. I read a lot about attachment theory. I do a lot of professional development around nonviolent communication because all of those skills– our ability to be empathic, our ability to still maintain effective and healthy boundaries– those apply in all relationships in all areas of our life.
Kelly: I was watching one of your lectures on YouTube, and you mentioned that on average, at least one student a semester is dealing with some sort of trauma or the instructor themselves is dealing with trauma. That made me think of how so many people we meet everyday could also be dealing with trauma even though we aren’t aware of it. Based on that, what would your one piece of advice for our readers be if you had to sum it up in a sentence.
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: Lead with empathy.
For others and also for ourselves. Like, wow, it seems like you’re having a really hard time right now. And then the three magic words I could add is “help me understand”. Help me understand what’s going on with you right now. Help me understand what you need. Help me understand what’s leading to this type of response. This relates back to that leading with empathy. Leading with empathy and compassion and self-compassion.
Kelly: Thank you. For anyone who wants to get involved in the advocacy or promotion of trauma informed policies, where would you recommend getting started?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: ctipp.org. CTIPP [Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice] is a group that was started by Sandy Bloom who started the sanctuary model. They are an advocacy group and they’re fantastic. They look at trauma-informed care at the different policy levels and across service sectors. You can sign up with them to learn how to become an advocate in your community around trauma-informed care. They also have a bunch of free webinars that you can hear about the work that other people are doing. And really, it’s becoming quite a movement.
Kelly: Speaking of CTIPP, I want to go back to our discussion about the policy level. I read a section of the book that you co-edited, Trauma and Human Rights: Integrating Approaches to Address Human Suffering. Could you talk a little bit about how trauma can have impacts on whole populations of people and not just individuals? I think a lot of the time when we think about trauma, we just think of it impacting one person instead of whole groups.
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: Yeah, we do. And I think as many of us have seen through the Covid pandemic. We see the impact of that around the world. In the United States, this can be seen around the impact of intergenerational trauma, with the impact of racism, the trauma of racism. We see all of these different impacts. And I’m glad that you noted, too, that one of the principles, again, is around diversity, equity and inclusion. And when you start to look at that, it’s not just the impact on individuals. When we look at institutional policies we look at policies that keep people from voting. We look at policies that kept people enslaved. We look at some of the protests around some of the recent court cases that have gone to the Supreme Court related to what humans have the right to do with their own bodies. That’s where we start to see that societal impact, it’s not just individuals that are impacted, but collective groups, collective identities that are threatened and collective rights that are impacted. So it is good to be able to look at it at those levels because the different levels always intersect.
Kelly: And where do you see the future of the intersection of psychology and policy? Do you see this as something that is gaining momentum, or is there still a lot of work needed to advocate for this?
Janice Carello, PhD, LMSW: It will always need work, right? I think we like to think that there’s some kind of an end point once we secure a particular right or a particular outcome or a particular change and that it will last forever. And again, as we’ve seen with some of the recent court cases, this isn’t the case. The one constant in life is change. And so in order to have the kind of worlds, communities, and cultures that we want to live in, we’re going to have to continue to advocate for these policy changes.
Janice Carello, Ph.D., LMSW, (she/her) is an Assistant Professor and MSW Program Director at PennWest Edinboro. She received her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo where she also earned her MSW degree and a Certificate in Trauma Counseling. Her scholarship focuses on retraumatization in educational settings and trauma-informed approaches in higher education. She co-edited two forthcoming books on trauma-informed teaching and learning: Lessons from the Pandemic: Trauma-Informed Approaches to College, Crisis, Change and Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education. She also co-edited Trauma and Human Rights: Integrating Approaches to Address Human Rights. Trauma-informed teaching and learning resources are available on her blog.
Download the file below to access a collection of further reading on this topic compiled by Janice Carello including web resources, books, and self care resources.
