From time to time, researchers, policy makers, philanthropy and practitioners all join together in a coordinated response to the most pressing issues facing America’s youth. I’ve been involved with this process for long enough to have participated in each of these roles. I recall during the early 1990s experts promoted the term ‘resiliency‘ which is the capacity to adapt, navigate and bounce back from adverse and challenging life experiences. Researchers and practitioners alike clamored over strategies to build more resilient youth.
More recently, practitioners and policy stakeholders have recognized the impact of trauma on learning, and healthy development. The term ‘trauma-informed care’ has gained traction among schools, juvenile justice departments, mental health programs and youth development agencies around the country. Trauma-informed care broadly refers to a set of principles that guide and direct how we view the impact of severe harm on young people’s mental, physical and emotional health. Trauma-informed care encourages support and treatment of the whole person, rather than focus on only treating individual symptoms or specific behaviors.
What is needed is an approach that allows practitioners to approach trauma with a fresh lens which promotes a holistic view of healing from traumatic experiences and environments. One approach is called healing-centered, as opposed to trauma-informed. A healing-centered approach is holistic involving culture, spirituality, civic action and collective healing. A healing-centered approach views trauma not simply as an individual isolated experience, but rather highlights the ways in which trauma and healing are experienced collectively. The term healing-centered engagement expands how we think about responses to trauma and offers a more holistic approach to fostering well-being.
A healing-centered approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond ‘what happened to you’ to ‘what’s right with you’ and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events. Healing-centered engagement is akin to the South African term ‘Ubuntu‘ meaning that humanness is found through our interdependence, collective engagement and service to others. Additionally, healing-centered engagement offers an asset-driven approach aimed at the holistic restoration of young peoples’ well-being. The healing centered approach comes from the idea that people are not harmed in a vacuum, and well-being comes from participating in transforming the root causes of the harm within institutions. Healing-centered engagement also advances the move to ‘strengths-based’ care and away from the deficit based mental health models that drives therapeutic interventions. There are four key elements of healing-centered engagement that may at times overlap with current trauma-informed practices but offers several key distinctions. Healing-centered engagement is explicitly political, rather than clinical.
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