Reflection

1. I was really touched and inspired by the resilience doctrine by Zoltan Grossman. I really appreciated it. It was fascinating to read about the studies done on disaster resistance and the effects of communities being involved in the planning and dealing with the actual effects of the disaster. I love how it's described as " a spontaneous form of social solidarity that emerges temporarily to enable people to put aside self-interest and come together in common effort." I feel like when the illusion of collective capitalism breaks down and you realize the government doesn't give a shit about you or your community is when it's sink or swim. You can either come together and save the ship or dive further into individualized self-care and hoarding of resources. Zoltan later describes the elements of dignity, participation, and respect that can arise during a crisis when a community is invested in itself.

2. I would really love some mixed media representation in this course. I would love to hear from people in these communities doing this work but not through the lens of academic journal articles. I want these narratives of community, trauma, healing, and resilience to come from the mouths of the people involved in these processes that haven't been filtered through a lens deemed fit by the White supremacist institutions of academia. Some of the material we are reading is made of that cloth but I wish there were more personal narratives and stories of the process.

3. Similiar to above, yes the information was useful, but i feel like this is a class that needs to be taken out of the mind and put more into the heart and body.

Toni Morrison wrote, “this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair. No place for self-pity. No need for silence. No room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

This quote came to mind when watching the lecture. Pervasive trauma impacts our society on multiple layers both historically and communally. It leaves us wanting to retreat and surrender. The esiliency within a community, like Morrison’s quote, gives us hope and offers another lens to consider—the strength of community.

I really enjoyed the “collective memory” piece of the lecture in regards to community resilience. Morrison identifies artists as healers who give voice and language to overcome despair and defeat. As a painter, I connect deeply with that. Painting is where I find healing, beauty, brilliance, power and hope. I worked on mural paintings in Philly and the themes involved the fabric of community; the strengths, the resilience, the healing and restoration. The murals bring together a broken community and can infuse hope and connection. As mentioned in the lecture; story-telling, memorializing, commemorative rituals, symbols are all ways and methods for communities to build, strengthen and heal. Rituals and storytelling give grief, pain and despair a voice and provides restoration.

I found identifying the resources where a community can pull from—human capital, social capital, natural capital, physical capital and financial capital a helpful way to organize and give language to aspects and strengths of community resources. As mentioned in Ungar’s article this identification of resources shifts a deficit-based perspective to the potential strength within the community.

This information did increase my knowledge on how to approach and engage with communities. Specifically, in the Goodkind and colleagues, article, “We are still in struggle” the approach of a family-based program in response to a 2003 violent event focused on revitalizing traditional cultural techniques, strengthening relationships within families, promoting positive parenting practices and social skill building for youth. These supports in the community proved to be effective and instrumental in promoting health, survival and resilience. It also recognizes that often it’s within the community where the healing and restoration are found.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
I appreciated the article on ontological security (Hawkins and Maurer, 2011). The type of coaching I am trained in is ontological coaching, which to me simply means that the ‘being’ is as important as the ‘doing’ in any endeavor. I agree and value the perspective that our sense of home and community impacts our sense of self and the “being” we can bring to any experience. This framework seems connected to the conversation about resilience. Allowing people the space and support to process intangible losses supports their resilience in that it allows them to bring their fuller selves to the healing and rebuilding process, and also can be a point of community connection.
2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
The examples of slavery and Native American decimation are very clear examples of collective, intergenerational, historical trauma. I am wondering about things like ubiquitous drug use in a community, or environmental issues that are causing widespread illness in a community, or gun violence. I am still unsure how to apply, or not, some of these terms to these unfortunately common chronic, toxic stressors that are often systemic in nature, but also internalized within the community. Depending on how you look at it, these issues all have aspects of impacting communities with shared identity in traumatic ways, and may be intergenerational, as well as maliciously intended in many cases.
3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?
As I was listening to the lecture and thinking about the readings, I started to organize my thoughts about “interventions” or best practices into two categories. The first is building collective, community capacity for protective resilience (which we know is a process that allows an adaptive response to trauma). The second category is how we support individuals (and communities, although that is not my focus) post-traumatic experience. The protective factors influence the healing response, but it helps me to think about these as separate, but inter-related categories of ways to alleviate traumatic experiences in the world. I am especially excited about the growth and empowerment that can happen when part of an individual’s healing involves connecting with, and adding their strength to, their community in some way. Common to both the protective and healing categories is the importance of trusting, caring relationships.

What was most impactful for me in readings this week was considering the different ways that factors were described for healing and resilience for different communities who have experienced collective traumas.

In the articles that discussed AINA communities by Evans-Campbell and the article by Goodkind that discussed the Dine Navajo community, we saw much more focus on healing. In these, I was noticing the way that these Indigenous communities drew on prayer, access to traditional medicine and other cultural practices, community, ceremony, connection to church, family closeness.

In the Hawkins article, I really appreciated the discussion about restoring ontological security to promote resiliency. I noticed that, while this is a very "heady" term to consider, it is essentially very much related to what some of the Native communities value in their healing. The psychological comfort of familiarity and relational security of community and sense of "home" contributes to sense of self-concept and identity feels very much like culture, so to have this disrupted by way of natural disaster, the extreme grief of loss experienced by this community is immense. It makes sense that there would be similarities in collective healing.

The Unger article was the most academic article and the one that felt most systematic, Macro and impersonal. Here, the discussion about achieving resilience in communities was more about the physical and service structure of communities rather than the people who make up these communities. It seemed like they were promoting funded formal services as a way of "caring" for vulnerable people. A passage that stuck out to me here was "the formal system is a weak substitute for a well-resourced community with the social capital and collective commons to look after itself," --- I took this to mean that the formal, structured, funded system of services available to communities with the intention of prevention, rehabilitation, treatment, etc., is often a poor substitute for communal and collective natural relational healing that we have seen in communities that take care of each other in more traditional ways. It takes the heart and soul out of the healing for wounded communities, and in this way, is true "resilience" happening?


2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
I appreciated the Unger article about social/physical capital, however, I also am not a big fan of systematizing and putting structure to healing. I see the value of looking at this through a macro lens, this article just seemed a little disconnected from some of the very relational elements that we see in the Hawkins, Evans-Campbell articles, which I personally felt more aligned with.


3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?

Yes, the information increased my knowledge. I appreciated all of the readings, from all perspectives. It is helpful to see the differences between approaches from a western lens as well as traditional perspectives.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
I really appreciate the phrase that resilience is a process, not an outcome. This was highlighted in the lecture, but I'm sure also in one of the readings. The Ungar 2011 article also focused on the importance of community resilience to an individuals resilience, and this is a concept I am only just beginning to think more about. I touched on this in my diatribe about "self-care" needing to be conceptualized in a larger and more universal format, and this article describes what makes most sense to me. It also highlights to me the importance of social workers being able to think in both macro AND micro contexts, which is something I have appreciated most about this course.

2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
Describing the crucial ideas, skills, and resources communities need as "capital". I'm so sick of people and their worth being reduced down to "capital" that connotes monetary wealth and assets. However, I understand the importance of "investing" in one's community, and that money is a critical and inevitable part of that. And in order to have our work be considered important by this society, we must be able to speak that language.

3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?

In some ways, yes. But similarly to Rivercat I find that I'm having difficulty translating this work into practice and into my body. I appreciate the knowledge I am gaining, and perhaps if I was in the field I would have opportunities to begin to incorporate this trauma work into practice.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

I appreciated Ungar's definition of resilience as the ability to access resources. It's an ecological way of thinking about community resilience, getting at the heart of social inequity rather than the individualized idea of resilience that floats around. Thinking about the Hawkins article as well, regarding New Orleans after Katrina, the city's ability to access resources needed to rebuild was severely curtailed by the inadequate FEMA response. I'm also taking in both the idea from the Goodkind article that forgetting can be an active social process, as with the Dine families that were interviewed, and the Hawkins discussion of nostalgia as a positive adaptive strategy for grief.

2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

Sometimes I receive the classifications and models in a way that feels dry. It is important information, and it takes a little while to internalize such that I don't simply have a diagram in my head so much as a working model for how to engage relationally.

3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?

As someone who has always preferred one-on-one helping relationships, both as giver and receiver of help, I think a major takeaway for me from this week and from the class in general is how that's only one piece of a much, much larger puzzle. Individuals do need space to process their feelings, but as Ungar mentioned regarding families after 9/11 - the peer support aspect can be what people really prefer. Certainly doing what we can as social workers to support the social fabric is always crucial, not just in the wake of disaster.

In regards of what was the most helpful/impactful for me in regards to the readings and lecture, were the different descriptions of the types of community resources that can be tapped for community resilience which will buffer against trauma. The amount of human, social, natural, physical, and financial capital are important aspects of communities to keep in mind as we as social workers assess these communities. I would also potentially add in there spiritual capital as that has healing powers as well that benefit communities. Thinking about collective community healing, and the importance of it also made me a little discouraged considering how individualistic the United States can be. I also appreciated storytelling and collective memory as a way to make sense of trauma too. We live in a society that likes to document everything, and these forms of knowledge are not as valued as they are in indigenous and ethnic communities.

In terms of what I do not like, or find helpful, sometimes I struggle with the academic nature all of this. The desire to have a name for everything so that it might fit in neat little boxes feels incredibly reductionary at times. While I like graphs and images, I do not like that flow chart/graph from Norris because of this reason.

Overall, I appreciate giving more thought to the types of resources available in communities in order to be able to better engage and serve with them to help build resilience within communities, and heal from trauma.

I would just like to add I didn’t directly respond to prompt #2–the least impactful based on readings/lecture. I didn’t have any specific points in response.
Only thing I will add is that sometimes trauma concepts seem to be repetitive. It seems like the interventions/assistance to individuals and communities is lacking. We have a lot of fancy language to describe all the forces of trauma but not a lot of action to decrease those exposed and how to help those who have experienced trauma.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

I found the reading on the historical trauma in American Indian/Native Alaskan communities to be the most impactful. The crux of the author’s thesis, that historical trauma is best understood as having impacts at three levels (all interrelated) - the individual, the family, and the community; was particularly meaningful due to its clarity. I appreciated how the author utilized/assessed other forms of historical trauma and used this to generate their own idea of how to assess historical trauma in a AINA communities. This made me curious if this research and production of a new framework can now be applied to other communities and the traumas they experience. For example, my family is from South Asia which experienced a traumatic partition at the end of British rule in 1947. The partition caused widespread interpersonal and communal violence, while leaving about 15 million displaced and between and estimated one to two million people dead. Post-partition these communities continued to experience various forms of trauma due to resettlement, violence, oppression, genocide, land disputes, religious conflict, and various other traumatic events and processes. All of this happened during my grandparents’ life which they experienced directly and were old enough to remember. It would be interesting to apply so much of the author’s framework of understanding trauma in the AINA community to this community to see if we can further our understanding.

2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

I found the part in the lecture about activism and engagement for social justice to be the least impactful to me. I am very curious about how much can activism and social justice reach to heal trauma. It seems they are always bound to and/or hijacked by corporate, financial, and/or political motives which interfere in allowing for any fruitful discourse or growth in the area. This is not to downplay its crucial role and importance; just to questions if we as a society, community, and as individuals are on the right track.

3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?

I think the information from the articles gave me a lot of knowledge on how to approach, understand, and think about communities that are impacted by trauma. I think working directly with communities will require a greater level understanding of community interventions that have been researched and historically worked in the past. Additionally, it would require through extensive research, creation of novel interventions which fit our ongoing understanding of historical trauma.

One thing that struck me when doing these readings and watching the video last week is how little this atrocity is discussed on a daily basis in this country and how horrific it is that this country was stolen from it’s rightful owners. I am embarrassed by my lack of in-depth knowledge and am grateful to be reading and learning about it now and find myself googling and researching to learn more.

I really appreciated the article by Goodkind et al. and found it insightful in many ways. One aspect of the article I found interesting that when interviewed, people middle age and older spoke of how traditionally healing in some tribes was not to dwell or revisit the past, it is in the past. And how in many cases it’s not discussed. And the younger generations don’t always see a connection between the suffering and issues facing their community currently and how they may have stemmed from years of intergenerational trauma. In some instances, the lack of communication between generations has led to a disconnect but the trauma that created this disconnect came directly from the atrocities that have been afflicted upon their communities for generations.

Many in older generations didn’t deal with the trauma, may not have had an outlet or didn’t communicate for fear of traumatizing the younger generations. They may have masked their pain with alcohol or were not as present with their children, maybe the younger generation does not recognize how they are connected.

I also appreciated the point that was made that treating this trauma as a medical issue is a very western idea and in many ways the trauma shouldn’t be treated as a medical issue but as a political one. While healing needs to occur collectively as a community it should be repaired politically by acknowledging the wrongs that were done to the population by reparations in many ways.

All of the articles offered insightful ways to view how oppressive policies, systems and events have affected various populations and how people may deal with the trauma in similar or different ways both collectively and individually.

1. I was surprisingly intrigued by the community resilience model. One, because I understand concepts best when I see them laid out in a logical format; two, because it gives social workers logical points at which to intervene in community crises. This is especially helpful because so much of the social work field is inundated with theory, conjecture, and non-scientific concepts, so it's helpful to have this model to guide interventions. For example, if a community experiences resistance you notice the graphic stops; if they experience transient dysfunction, they are likely to maintain vulnerability which will likely lead to persistent dysfunction. A useful intervention based on this graphic would be to assess where a community is at and then do what we can to build up protective factors which promote resistance and resilience. Since individual and community/generational trauma are more prevalent than ever, this understanding is super helpful.

2. Although 9/11 examples were helpful at explaining the concepts of community resilience and resources, it would've been more helpful to use updated examples. In just a couple months, I will be working with clients experiencing individual and community traumas such as gun violence, rapid gentrification, and ongoing racism, and I feel there are other, more current examples that would better equip me to work with clients. I'd also like to look at events which specifically impact communities of color in ways which differ from their White counterparts.

3. Yes. I found this week's readings to be helpful, and I especially appreciated the description of resilience as a process, not an outcome. I will definitely remember that in my upcoming field placement/career.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
The bit from the lecture that stuck out to me most was the snippet about the four different properties of a resilience resource: robustness, reduncancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity. This stuck out to me because it got my brain thinking about how these properties exist here in Philadelphia, particularly in light of the recent shooting on South Street. The context here is important, as Philadelphia is the poorest large city in the country, and as a result, I would argue that our robustness and resourcefulness is pretty low, especially when these types of violent events happen in areas of the city that receive less attention. This is the first time in a while I remember a shooting in Philadelphia getting national attention, but the cynic in me says that is because this is the first time a mass shooting has occurred in a wealthier (read: white) area. This ties into rapidity, which refers to the timeliness with which priorities are met – I wish this much city-wide attention and outrage occurred when a shooting happens in North Philadelphia.

2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?
This is hard to say, because I found it all to be impactful, but I think I still struggle with how rigid the definition of historical trauma is – that it must occur as the result of willingly/deliberately malicious behavior. This is definitely the case in most instances, but I also think those in dominant groups and in power can also inflict trauma unintentionally – sort of like microaggressions, but on a larger scale. Again, this is more of a nitpick, because the overall idea behind historical trauma I believe is brilliant and makes a lot of sense. It would be fascinating to see a scientific study (if its even possible) to see how the brain changes due to intergenerational and historical trauma.

3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?
The information from the articles definitely did increase my knowledge on how to work with traumatized communities. I especially liked the article about the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the concept of ontological security. Ontological security is in the same vein as the importance of having a stable caregiver – people need a safe and stable environment/community to live in, and if they don’t have this, they are more susceptible to and won’t be able to recover as easily from trauma. The authors suggest that ontological security is most applicable in instances where a disaster causes displacement, but I feel that you could also apply it other areas, like a neighborhood plagued by violence. The residents of this neighborhood may feel that this is not the way their neighborhood “should” be, and as a result they lack this security. I will definitely keep this concept in the back of my mind going forward.

Trauma is a physiological mechanism which follows a predictable path. Pioneers in the field such as Van der Kolk, Levine, and Porges amongst others continue to prove the intractable and sensible response system designed to buffer emotional and physical trauma. This week’s material highlighted collective trauma, yet this concept is intrinsically linked to individual trauma on multiple levels.

There are those wounds we incur during or after birth and those wounds we are born into. Though the current focus within our field is to connect individual and collective level trauma, I believe the linkage may be further explored.

Part of our prompt this week was to examine that which proved most and least impactful, and I found that a piece of missing information in this week’s material sparked confusion and curiosity. Our recent understanding of and focus on trauma has created a movement which has pushed us to equate individual trauma such as abuse and neglect with collective experiences such as oppression and war. I commend this critical shift in thinking. However, I notice there is an incongruity that does not receive attention. It is deemed that the mechanisms of trauma within and amongst individuals follows a predictable path. Trauma disrupts and overwhelms and wreaks havoc on the body. Thus, collective trauma creates similar devastation in groups of individuals, and this is partly where my interests lie.

When an unintegrated traumatized individual relives a past traumatic experience whether through a triggering emotion or sound, the physiological response system causes the individual to feel as if the trauma is happening in the present. The person may smash furniture or berate a beloved family member unrelated to the event. Our job as clinicians is to help the individual gently begin to distinguish hind-brain, trauma-based reactions from more prefrontal cortex reactions. If we are to link collective trauma experiencing with individual trauma experiencing, then we must consider this trauma mechanism at the collective level as well. When an impacted group relives a traumatic experience due to a current trigger, it will also react as if the trauma is occurring in the present. In many aspects much collective trauma is ongoing, yet it also seems helpful to explore traumatized groups’ tendencies, just as with individuals, to react in trauma-locked ways. I believe that collective, generational, historical trauma is salient, devastating, and often overlooked. I also believe that an overarching trauma lens may help both individuals and groups reflect more deeply upon the nature of the traumatizing experience and most importantly upon the nature of his/her/their reactions. As always, I find myself moved by our lecture and readings to question the topic in focus and myself, and to seek others’ reflections.

1. What was most impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

the concept of informal networks that help with trauma recovery/resiliency from the lecture felt like an important point to me! We talk so much about established systems formal avenues for care as social workers, so much of it governed by the rules we put in place for the official channels. It is refreshing to have informal avenues acknowledged, especially with respect to community resiliency and the importance of building community / social connectedness to heal from trauma. Also a good thing to be thinking about after last week's discussion on gun violence and the discussions/readings we have had on indigenous communities - thinking of all the informal ways native people survive and thrive in spite of being denied access to many formal channels, and all the informal ways the survivors of the Uvalde shooting found to support each other when they were failed by the official formal avenues of help.

2. What was least impactful to you based on the assigned readings/lecture?

In light of this Informal network thing, I found (and always find) a lot of the suggestions for practice a little underwhelming in their reliance on the system to actually help people. For example in the you fix my community you have fixed my life article, it felt a little like you give a man to fish he eats for a night. All of the implications for practice and policy were totally valid, but the stuff about disaster relief being too narrow just didn't hit at how little these policies actually help most people. I would love to see more about community autonomy and individual community led healing practices - more teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry again stuff! How do we disseminate this information to communities impacted by trauma so they have the power heal instead themselves of relying on formal avenues to do so for them?

3. Did the information from the articles increase your knowledge on how to work with communities impacted by trauma?

yeah, I especially liked the Goodkind et al. article

This whole class readings,lectures and videos/movies we watched have been very eye opening to me. For someone who has worked with clients who have experienced severe types of trauma , there was still so much for me to learn to improve my work with my clients. Ignorance to a client's cultural background ,race and ethnicity can retraumatize a client. To be aware of these things is previlant to the work that I do as A Social Worker/Clinician. Also , I cannot ignore the systematic set up of white supremacy and white privilege and how that influences and impacts both staff and clients traumas. Finally I must as a Social Worker take time for self care and therapy for myself to address my own traumas so that I am prepared and healed enough to help my clients heal. In addition it helps to be able to teach clients how to work through the healing process but I cannot do that as their clinician if I have not done that work myself. Finally , agency trauma is big problem for the social work field for their is not enough staff , to help all clients and not enough push for workers to engage in proper self care to be able to effectively help clients heal. The healing approach and perpective is imperative to my work. Finally , this class exposed me to how trauma informed care is needed so much more , in the work field we should have trainings , lectures, movies and videos that we watch periodically to keep us all up to date and informed on the current traumas that are going on in the world today.
In Conclusion the final thing from this class that impacted me most was the discussion on gun violence because live blocks away from South Street and the studio I rehearse acting from is literally is on south street. So my home and community was impacted heavily. The moment it happend I called all my friends to make sure none of them was shot and to be in a trauma informed class and be able to speak about what I have experienced is refreshing.