Moving to Healing-Centered Engagement: Reimagining Trauma-Informed Leadership
This is the second article in a five-part series of diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace. In this article, Penn Professor Sharon Ravitch―a thought leader on issues of leader and organizational healing and development introduces the asset-based, culturally responsive leadership framework of healing-centered engagement. Dr. Ravitch was a North Star to me in my own healing, serving as Chair of my dissertation committee at The University of Pennsylvania, where my research situated traumatic memory in the post-traumatic stress growth literature. Her thought-provoking article is below.
Leading Healing-Centered Engagement
“Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understand that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community.” ― Adrienne Maree Brown
Two intersecting realities define leadership in this moment. The first is that people are re/experiencing trauma in unprecedented ways induced by the COVID-19 global health pandemic. The second is that there is increasing pressure to assume a transformative leadership stance committed to racial justice, wherein policies, norms, and procedures are critically appraised and transformed in response to the surging centrality of movements for racial justice. These ever-unfolding realities require new kinds of leader learning agility, responsiveness, and a radical growth mindset (Ravitch, 2020).
In “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Arundhati Roy contextualizes the COVID-19 pandemic within the long history of global pandemics that have radically altered the world. On this timeline of human suffering, Roy places the coronavirus pandemic as a necessary portal—an opening that we can, and must, widen to collectively enact global political, economic, social, environmental, spiritual, and psychological change. Roy inspires us to unlearn in order to remake forward,
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks, and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
In these deeply troubling times, leaders must work together to imagine and build back society and each of its organizations not only better—but within, for, and through a radically new and different paradigm—a new house built with more liberating and equitable new tools (Lorde, 1988). To do so, we must learn how to affirm, converge, and amplify our individual and collective stories, wisdoms, and experiences to effect change in our spheres of influence. At the forefront of this work, I believe, is imagining trauma anew, in ways that foreground and lift up individuals and communities experiencing trauma and post-traumatic growth as our guides.
Introducing Healing-Centered Engagement
Just as I was asked to write this piece for TraumaVenture (which is an honor), I was introduced to a promising new trauma-informed framework: Shawn Ginwright’s (2018) healing-centered engagement. Healing-centered engagement offers a generative framework and language for responsive and humanizing trauma-informed leadership and pedagogical approaches. Imagining a constructively critical leveling up of the field, Ginwright avers,
What is needed is an approach that allows practitioners to approach trauma with a fresh lens that 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.
This reframe of trauma is much needed as the field has residue from a history steeped in eugenics and positivist psychology, with their attendant deficit-oriented and binaried systems of mis/understanding complex lived human identities and experiences (Rosales Montes, 2019). Ginwright’s healing-centered engagement framework invites critique of the deficit language, logics, and practices that can be sedimented yet invisible in trauma-informed approaches (even though they are intended to be person-centered). It has helped me to challenge my own internalized Western logic, which assumes trauma to be an individual experience rather than collective and contextualized. As Ginwright suggests, “By only treating the individual we only address part of the equation leaving the toxic systems, policies and practices neatly intact.” And so, building on recent work I published on trauma-informed leadership (Eren & Ravitch, 2021; Ravitch, 2020), in this piece, I shift to the language and values of healing-centered engagement and introduce healing-centered leadership as a necessary and timely leadership approach.
In this time of collective social trauma—our own trauma and vicarious, secondary, and intergenerational trauma—leaders must be attuned to trauma as a necessary foundation for co-creating affirming communities. Healing-centered engagement foregrounds understanding trauma—personal, familial, communal, inter-generational—and its social-emotional reverberations as central to cultivating environments that affirm, recognize, and lift up the resilience and resources of individuals and communities that have experienced/ are experiencing trauma. Healing-centered leaders understand the need to attend to trauma in ways that create the conditions for individuals and groups to build a sense of agency and set of stress-navigation skills in relation to their experiences. Further, they see the transformative possibilities that post-traumatic growth, which is “a positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity and other challenges in order to rise to a higher level of functioning” (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004), can generate in groups, teams, and organizations.
Arguing for necessary shifts in the language currently used to conceptualize, discuss, and engage trauma, and for the need to interrupt deficit-based orientations to trauma and replace them with asset-focused and culturally relevant ones, Ginwright explains,
A shift from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement (HCE) is more than a semantic play with words, but rather a tectonic shift in how we view trauma, its causes and its intervention. HCE is strength based, advances a collective view of healing, and re-centers culture as a central feature in 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.
Leading a healing-centered approach means understanding the need to, and how to, foster conditions and processes that support organizational agility and responsiveness to the daily, lived effects of trauma as a central ethic of leadership (Ravitch, 2020). It Involves becoming knowledgeable about, and building informed and compassionate attention towards, the range of traumas people face and the effects and possible impacts of these traumas in work environments, including online. As well, it requires understanding how trauma shapes cognitive functioning, relational skills, and engagement styles. Broadly, this means building a concept of trauma as part of community life that can, and should, be seen and affirmed as a mission mode and central organizational stance.
Racialized and Identity-Based Trauma
Beyond simply rejecting deficit perspectives widely attributed to people who have experienced trauma, with a double bind on people of color who experience trauma given its intersection with structural racism, leaders must understand racialized trauma and identity-based stress as they manifest in teams and organizations. Racialized trauma and identity-based stress grow from direct and vicarious discriminatory racial encounters that can impact individuals both during and after a stressful event (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019). These discriminatory racial encounters can occur at interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels (and sometimes occur simultaneously); they are triggered in environments with threats of harm or injury, where there are humiliating or shaming events, and where people observe or experience harm to other people of color due to both real and perceived racism and discrimination (Stevenson, 2014). Understanding the racialized and identity-based dimensions of trauma matters, especially in racially fraught times when people feel victimized and vulnerable in a host of ways that relate to political trends, state-sanctioned racialized violence, and a global health pandemic.
Healing-centered engagement foregrounds storytelling and re-storying in ways that pay critical attention to contexts that shape and constrains people’s lived experience of possibility. Healing-centered engagement foments culturally responsive support systems and processes that are informed by an intersectional approach to identity and equity. Storytelling and re-storying processes help shift normativizing myths and social scripts that can keep people locked into patterns of thinking and behavior that are not in the service of their individual wellbeing or conducive to organizational health (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). In order to work against the double-deficit discourse attributed to trauma survivors of color in ways that affirm intersectional identities, leaders must normalize the reality that no one is “normal.” Jettisoning this deficit-generating language is a form of community inclusion, compassion, and care. Choose language, ideas, and shared processes that re-story and re-humanize everyone as central, valuable, and worthy of support and respect. Working from and promoting an asset-based approach for each person and with the collective is a vital leader stance. Healing-centered engagement benefits everyone in organizations.
With all that’s happening in the world, people yearn for a place to name, understand, and process their stress and trauma in community—for their experiences to be seen, heard, and validated, to feel affirmed and connected and to feel a sense of control over their lives while the world feels so fraught and coarse. People need to be actively supported as they learn to navigate the stress and trauma of the twin pandemics and build inner-resources for calm in conflict. Attention to this relational and reflexive aspect of wellbeing is a necessary foundation for all kinds of learning, collaboration, and development. As Ginwright offers,
[H]ealing centered engagement views trauma and well-being as [a] function of the environments where people live, work and play. When people advocate for policies and opportunities that address causes of trauma, such as lack of access to mental health, these activities contribute to a sense of purpose, power and control over life situations. All of these are ingredients necessary to restore well-being and healing.
Healing-centered leaders work to understand the emotional and relational dimensions of organizational life and actively consider how trauma histories play out in professional contexts. It is vital to understand that while we are all traumatized by the COVID-19 pandemic in a broad sense, all traumas are not the same. While the pandemic and civil unrest is a kind of shared trauma, it lands into the lives of already-vulnerable populations in ways that can cause more severe diffusion effects. People already have trauma histories separate from COVID-19 that must be considered in relation to current stressors and challenges. Leaders need to connect with people to ensure that they feel seen and heard, and that they have access to support based on what they share. This is an ethic of leader compassion evinced by Muriel Rukeyser’s words “My lifetime listens to yours.”
Importantly, listening to another’s lifetime requires that we gain critical distance from our own. Enacting healing-centered engagement requires understanding how we view and interpret trauma within the frames of our own cultures, ideologies, and belief systems. For example, one difference between justice-oriented frames and White Western frames on trauma is the foundational assumption of the latter that trauma recovery means the reclamation of safety. This is built on a problematic assumption that safety is a resource“ out there” for the universal taking (Cheng Thom, 2020). The implication of this false notion of safety is a limited perspective on trauma—that all people of color need to do to heal trauma, including racialized and intergenerational trauma, is to work harder in therapy or engage in more positive self-talk or self-care irrespective of structural conditions. As Cheng Thom (2020) avers, people of color are not necessarily preparing their bodies to return to a general sense of safety that’s widely available. Assuming this uncritically negates the traumatic lived realities of structural racism since people of color may feel they’re preparing their bodies/their children’s bodies for struggle—training for healthy survival and the ability to experience joy in the midst of threat. This is vital to understand as a leader.
Understanding the diverse and dynamic ways trauma is lived is vital to creating healing-centered organizational processes and leadership practices. Understanding the transcendent power of post-traumatic growth creates new individual and organizational possibilities that uplift everyone. Healing-centered engagement is a defining leader mindset and stance in these trying times. As Arundhati Roy suggests, we must leave behind our dead ideas and prejudices, making the choice to “walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” We must leave the luggage of misunderstanding trauma behind us. Informed, imaginative healing is the path forward to collective dignity, belonging, and liberation.
Suggested Leader Practices:
Read Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma-Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Work to understand trauma complexly including how it manifests in teams and organizations. Create a culture of intention and care around trauma language; integrate an asset-based understanding of trauma and post-traumatic growth into organizational policies, procedures, practices, professional development, and performance assessment.
Seek out a range of opportunities to affirm the strength, creativity, and resilience of individuals and groups that experience trauma and to lift up post-traumatic growth; centralize a multiplicity of voices, wisdoms, and ways of viewing health and wellness. To support this mindset, watch Adrienne Maree Brown’s Compassionate Communities. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
Learn about intersectional identities, racialized trauma, and identity-based stress navigation skills, for example, watch Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later and read about individual, organizational, and structural racism 11 Terms You Should Know to Better Understand Structural Racism. Engage Dr. Howard Stevenson’s work on racialized trauma, Hearing the Lion’s story: Racial stress can silence children. Storytelling can awaken their voices and TedTalk How to resolve racially stressful situations.
Attune to the specific traumas and stressors of 2020 as they relate to intersectional social identities—seek out therapists and healers of color such as Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson and Dr. Shawn C. T. Jones’s Our Mental Health Minute, activist-therapist Araya Baker, and Kai Cheng Thom as guides.
References and Further Reading
Anderson, R. E. & Stevenson, H. C. (2019). RECASTing racial stress and trauma: Theorizing the healing potential of racial socialization in families. American Psychologist, 74(1), 63-75.
Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change shaping worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Carter, R. T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress. The Counseling Psychologist, 35(1), 13-105.
Cheng Thom, K. (2020). Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse.
Crenshaw, K. (2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later. Interview. Columbia Law School.
Eren, N. S. & Ravitch, S. M. (2021). Trauma-informed leadership: Balancing love and accountability. In Pak, K. & Ravitch, S. M. (2021). Critical leadership praxis: Leading educational and social change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Ginwright, S. (2018). The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma-Informed Care to Healing-Centered Engagement. Medium.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays by Audre Lorde. New York, NY: Firebrand Books.
Roy, A. (2020). “The pandemic is a portal.” Financial Times. April 3, 2020.
Ravitch, S. M. (2020). Why Teaching Through Crisis Requires a Radical New Mindset: Introducing Flux Pedagogy. Harvard Business Publishing Education. August 12, 2020.
Ravitch, S. M. (2020). Flux Leadership: Leading for Justice and Peace in and beyond COVID-19. In New Tools for a New House: Transformations for Justice and Peace in and beyond COVID-19. Perspectives on Urban Education, Volume (18). Special Back-to-School Pandemic Edition.
Ravitch, S. M. (2020). Flux Pedagogy: Transforming teaching and leading during coronavirus.
Perspectives on Urban Education, Volume (17)4, 18-32.
Rosales Montes, I. (2019). “I feel like I'm the same as the other students”: Negotiating language policy used to identify students as English learners and disabled. Dissertation on ProQuest.
Solórzano, D. G. & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an
analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23-44.
Stevenson, H. C. (2014). Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences that Make a
Difference. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Tedeschi, R. G. & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence.” Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1-18.
Valencia, R. R. (2010). Dismantling contemporary deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice. Abingdon, OXON: Routledge.
The author thanks Dr. Shannon Waite for introducing her to healing-centered engagement. To stay in touch Twitter @SharonRavitch.