A Micro-History of Trauma Informed Care
If you spend any sort of time around the Lost Voices crew, you’re bound to hear the term “Trauma Informed Care.” When we’re feeling all official and governmental, we like to call it “TIC.” Either way, it’s one of the most basic principles behind what we do. The concept is that anyone who has experienced trauma is mentally and even physically changed by the experience, and there are very specific and beneficial ways to acknowledge and deal with that fact.
Lost Voices has been using the tools of Trauma Informed Care since our first session back in 2006. We nurtured a culture of non-judgmental freedom, a sort of semi-controlled chaos where the kids could say or do pretty much anything they felt. Our founder, Mike Ball, took this approach for no reason other than it seemed like the right thing to do.
The thing is, we had no idea that there was a name for what we were doing.
When we started working with young boys and girls in the juvenile justice system, we got remarkably good results. The kids responded and opened up to us almost immediately. They were willing to dig deep into their feelings to write songs with us. Therapists and staff at the facilities were surprised at the progress they made in our programs, and they even saw significant breakthroughs among the other kids in the facility, but who simply watched the concert performance by their peers.
In 2018 Mike was introduced to Dr. Michelle Munro-Kramer, a leader of the CASCAID Research Group at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. CASCAID is devoted to studying and implementing principles of Trauma Informed Care. In their first conversation, Dr. Munro-Kramer recognized that the process Mike and the team had been instinctively using with the kids for more than a decade was a nearly textbook example of TIC.
The ideas behind TIC have been evolving for decades. In the 1970s, doctors were dealing with mental and substance abuse disorders among many of the soldiers who had fought in Vietnam. They realized that these behaviors bore a direct relationship with terrifying events these men had experienced in combat, and began talking more about a thing called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
Over the years since then, researchers have ramped up their studies of all the ways trauma affects people. In the mid-1990s they defined Adverse Childhood Experiences, the idea that people who are subjected to abuse and neglect as children can suffer from a variety of problems in later life. According to the CDC, “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have a tremendous impact on future violence victimization and perpetration, and lifelong health and opportunity.”
Around 2001, therapists began to use the term Trauma Informed Care to mount a clinical attack on the relationship between past trauma and current behavior. In the years since then, the idea has been spreading through almost every level of patient care and therapy.
The obvious question is, how was Lost Voices able to embrace TIC so early on? The answer is – sheer luck.
For one thing, Mike received treatment many years ago for his own PTSD. This gave him a very direct understanding of the process of recognizing and healing from trauma. He also spent most of his life coaching people, ranging from working as a creative director in the advertising industry to head coach of a high school men’s ice hockey team. Any successful coach can tell you that the job boils down to helping every player find a way to maximize their individual potential.
All this adds up to the fact that Mike was not only able to see the ways trauma had shaped the lives of the Lost Voices kids, he had a natural instinct to approach them as a coach, rather than a teacher or disciplinarian. In future posts, we’ll talk a lot more about Trauma Informed Care and how it has shaped every aspect of our Lost Voices process.
