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Wednesday 31 December 2014

Airing

It's frustrating to see people repeatedly make decisions that we all know aren't going to be healthy.

I suppose that's what I expected when I chose my career path, but what I didn't expect is that my peers would be the ones I'd watch making harmful decisions repeatedly. We're one semester into the program, but we're more than halfway done with our first degree. This isn't good.

I'll tell you a lot of people who choose this path might do so because we've experienced a trauma or multiple traumas and we're fed up with the pain and we want to make it better for the next person. We're healing and we want to make the healing better for broken people who come our way. Trauma theory is a relatively new concept and the research is progressive, recent, and far from extensive. But it's there. Some of the literature indicates that the behaviours that are often pathologised can be the very things that help someone survive a trauma. What we perceive as harmful might be the only way a trauma survivor can make it through (Tseris 2013).

But we're going to be placed in agencies next semester. So why are these behaviours, indicative of trauma, or what would quickly be pathologised by some, rampant amongst my peers?

It scares the crap out of me. We believe people are dynamic. You can overcome all the shit the world throws at you. That's what the strengths-based perspective is about. But I don't believe it's licence to step into disaster.

Tseris, E. J. (2013). Trauma theory without feminism? Evaluating contemporary 
understandings of traumatized women. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social 
Work, 28, 153-164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0886109913485707