Trauma-Informed Care with Rachel Archambault

[00:00:00] In today's world, the word trauma is often used loosely, but what does it really mean to be trauma informed, especially as a healthcare professional? Well, with June 27th being PTSD Awareness Day, there's no better time to dive into this critical topic. And in this powerful episode of Exceptional Leaders, Rachel Archambault, an award winning speech language pathologist and trauma informed care consultant, reveals how the effects of trauma often show up in the speech therapy setting.

And trauma informed strategies that you can take into practice, workplace, or anywhere with humans.

Many times you're going to have someone who is in hyper alert, who is in survival mode, and it's up to us to help support them to make them feel safe. Not us just say, it's a safe room here. I don't understand what you're talking about. I'm a safe person. Welcome to the Exceptional Leaders Podcast. I'm Mei Ling Chan, and together with James Burgess, we're getting you top tips [00:01:00] and resources for building and scaling your disability focused offerings straight from the forefront of disability advocacy and leadership.

Rachel's passion for this critical topic was sparked by her own experience working at a high school that went through a nationally recognized traumatic event. After grappling with how to best support her students in the aftermath, that led Rachel on a journey to discover trauma informed care practices.

For Now, she's on a mission to share these insights with fellow speech language pathologists, educators, and anyone really working with humans, because this goes beyond those who have traumatic events, but really can be helpful for anybody. Yeah, I'm so glad that Matt Haught, who is one of the initial founders of the Speech Science Podcast, he introduced me to her because she is a fellow podcaster over there.

Did you know that, James? I didn't know that until you told me that, but I'm going to listen now. Yeah, they're fantastic. They're doing some great things there. But, um, in this episode with you, we're going to discover [00:02:00] six key pillars of providing trauma informed care as SLP. Um, some single simple language changes you can make to create a safer environment and avoid triggering those who have experienced trauma.

And I'm just going to put a little pin in that one and point out that, um, when you say things like, oh, that blows my mind. So that just kind of gives you an example of. You know, things that we just say all the time that all of a sudden now it's like, maybe I shouldn't be, you know, using that type of phrase.

So the next one is how speech pathologists can support mental health without overstepping their role because really that's not in our scope of practice. But hey, James, just wondering, did you have anything about counseling in your master's program? Yeah, I remember we had one little class. I think we had one class.

Like not a whole course just one lecture about it, and we did some practice scenarios But you know it's like the stat is you forget 50 percent of what you learn maybe an hour after you learn it So I would have to go back through those notes to really get through that so yeah, [00:03:00] not enough not enough Yeah, good point.

Okay, we're also going to touch on, uh, why trauma informed care principles are beneficial for anyone working with humans, not just those with known trauma. And I'm just going to make a point here for our listener is you probably heard us use the word humans like two or three times now, but honestly, in this whole like AI generated society, um, it's really important to bring us back to, you know, this is about real people and empathy and feelings and experiences, you know, and we have to bring that back to our practice.

Thanks. Totally. And speaking of AI, we do talk about that with Rachel a bit about the promise for AI to hopefully not replace human interaction, but enhance it by helping us identify signs of trauma through language patterns or through recognizing facial expressions as we're speaking chat GPT four. Oh, cool.

Is coming out, which I don't think would be used for therapy, but it's just the beginning of a long line of AI tools, which can now use [00:04:00] video and voice to really have that multimodal input. And if you want to learn about these things and stay ahead of the curve with AI, especially in regards to speech language pathology, we do have a free resource.

We're going to link it in the show notes of our episodes, but you can also find that at. Bit. ly slash AI for speech. That's bit. ly slash AI for speech. And that's an 18 page free resource we curated together full of prompts and resources to help you be more human, not less human. Exactly. And I just want to bring back to the reason why this episode is so important for you, our listener, is because This gives you really important information and advice as you are an aspiring entrepreneur and looking to make a positive impact in your community.

And I really believe that being trauma informed will help you to be able to lead your teams in all areas. Exactly. So whether you're an SLP educator, healthcare provider, or again, just a human [00:05:00] entrepreneur, please enjoy this enlightening conversation with Rachel Archambeau.

Today I'm joined by Rachel Archambeau. She's an award winning speaker and consultant for trauma informed care, as well as a licensed speech language pathologist. She collaborates with service providers like SLPs and doctors, PTs and OTs, parents, businesses, schools, hospitals, universities, and more, all in the mission of incorporating communities, uh, with trauma informed care and bringing it to their setting.

So Rachel, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. So diving right in, you have such an interesting niche. What inspired you to start your Instagram account and consulting practice, the PTSD SLP? What inspired that journey? So I am a speech pathologist by training, and I, Was in my second year as an SLP, my first year as a fully credentialed SLP [00:06:00] with my season, everything in the set of thing that I was working, which was a high school.

I experienced a traumatic event at work, which was nationally recognized and being at the beginning of my career being in. You know, my personal life, the age that I was, I didn't know what to do with my trauma that I sustained the trauma that the community had. And then most importantly, the students and what my role as a speech pathologist was to help them after trauma.

So after going through this trauma together, I could not care about the students that were in front of me trying to work on an R sound when they didn't feel safe on campus. So trying to re imagine what the role of an SLP is after experiencing trauma together. Healing together, but most importantly for us, not causing additional harm when it's already so sensitive at that time.

So I found trauma informed [00:07:00] care online. I typed in, how do you work with students who have been traumatized? And along the way I found trauma informed care. I found things that I had been already doing in that setting that were considered trauma informed and how I could. Better make myself a trauma informed SLP.

And it wasn't actually until a year later that I created the Instagram page, PTSD, SLP as a way of getting all of the resources out there that we got from a nationally known traumatic event to other SLPs that sustained some other sort of trauma in their life or in the specific situation that I came from, um, I wanted to post the resources there and it's kind of become this juggernaut of a mental health.

resource for people to understand trauma, to understand post traumatic stress disorder, everything along the way relating to speech and mental health. I'm trying to connect our role as speech pathologists to the mental health world. Mm. Yeah. Thank you for [00:08:00] sharing that. I can only imagine that going through a traumatic event alone, but then also with students and then also trying to work with students.

And you're right. Yeah. Like working on an R sound sounds so trivial in the midst of that still important, but when you're thinking, going through that journey, Were you incorporating counselors from, from the school? Or like, SLP obviously is interlinked with mental health. I remember grad school, we're talking about stuttering, for example.

You can't really separate, there's a psychological component that exacerbates your stutter. doesn't necessarily cause the stutter, but it can make it work if you have a lot of anxiety. Still, in practice, there's, you know, we have these silos, for better or worse, of I'm a mental health clinician and I'm a speech language pathologist, though we're all talking about humans and brains and emotions, and you can't separate those things.

So I just wanted to say that, but also. You know, did you feel like any trepidation of, uh, I'd be stepping on [00:09:00] anyone's toes that were mental health clinicians and I should let them be doing this? I'm just curious because that's what I would be thinking possibly. And I totally understand that thought process because when I present to other SLPs and they don't know what trauma informed care is, they.

Automatically say to me, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a psychologist. And the way that I teach trauma informed care, we are not getting into that role. Our job is not to treat the trauma. That's not what we're doing. But what we can do is speech pathologist is prevent any harm. We can refer them to the proper professionals and really knowing where that line is at that if there was anything like, Ooh, this is not my territory.

That's okay. But I refer to in our school, the social worker, whoever, and because our trauma was so nationally recognized, I mean, we had experts flown in from around the country. We had every school psychologist and I'm in the sixth largest school district in the country. That's like hundreds of [00:10:00] people.

We had them all deployed to our school, which takes away resources from other schools. But we had the counselors for the students. We didn't really have a great plan of what to do because they were all put in the library. And then you had students that were sitting next to each other, recounting their stories next to each other.

And then they would go back the next day that counselor was gone. And then they'd have to retell their story the next day. So there, there wasn't much organization that in that beginning, because We can't tell what each school district, the kind of resources that we're going to support, but our role is never creeping into the mental health role.

We can still be SLPs and support mental health without doing that. Well, here's what you should do and giving advice or anything like that. That is not our role at all. Mm hmm. That's a good clarification. Yeah. So then I'm curious you a year later, you have this Instagram account. Did it just start as an Instagram only?

And did you have an intention of doing service offerings from the beginning? Or like, how did [00:11:00] that evolve? Organically, I'm assuming just from your interest. So I'm kind of an impulsive person in general. So I was actually on family vacation, um, in Nashville and I'm sitting in the hotel room and I just created the Instagram account.

Like I hadn't thought about it for a while. It was just like, Thought in my mind, and then I just went ahead and did it. And then it got passed around to a bunch of people. I did my first presentation at flasher by the sea or flasher on the sea, which was a cruise, um, for the, uh, Florida speech language hearing association.

And that was a two hour presentation. And I look back to even that presentation in June, 2019, that was not trauma informed Rachel that I would present today, because one of the things that I was asked to do was Kind of recount my story, which I stay away from now when I talk about, yes, I've experienced trauma, but I find that especially to SLPs that work in the system, this is a very scary, real fear that they have that this is going to happen to [00:12:00] me.

So I can't teach about trauma informed care with them knowing, Oh gosh, am I ready to hear what she's about to tell me if they want to hear it in another area? If they want to see me at a convention and say like, will you tell me your story? I'd be happy to. Well, I wouldn't be happy to, but I would tell them.

Um, but in the presentations, I can't talk about trauma informed care when they are so stressed about what they could possibly hear. So my presentations have changed over time, but it's become now more people. Are wanting to hear about trauma informed care, especially after COVID coming out of COVID. We recognize that there's a huge mental health component and they're like, okay, what do we do about it now?

What do, how do we help as speech pathologists? So that has in the last two years grown. I just came back from Indiana. I was in Georgia places around the country are asking what is trauma informed care, whatever settings, school, private practice, personal life. You can apply it there too. What do we do? To [00:13:00] be trauma informed.

And it's been awesome to see that people are caring about this and making little changes to become trauma informed. Yeah, it's just obviously COVID and isolation. And I know you've talked about capital T trauma and little t trauma trauma has been sort of, you know, not to downplay it, but it's like a buzzword in some circles I see on Tik TOK, same thing with autism and neurodivergent neurodivergence.

It's like, um, you know, everyone. Might emphasize that. So how has your, how has your service offerings evolved from that flash of cruise to giving these in services? And like, how did you find the niche where you said, okay, I'm the one who can talk about these topics from this angle. And. That need is not being filled by other people.

It's interesting to see now because just even at the last Asha convention, which was last November, there are a lot of SLPs talking about it now. Um, and you just mentioned like neurodiversity. So [00:14:00] neurodiversity, they are also talking about trauma informed care, the presentation, the convention, I was just in Indiana, almost every presentation throughout the entire three days there.

Had some way that they were also talking about trauma informed care relating to their specific things. So whether that's AAC, whether that's feeding, they're able to talk about it as well, but I'm able to talk about it more generally. I find that the people that are coming to my presentations, they might've been told about trauma informed care, um, or they might've even been trained on it, but it's, Not in our scope.

So I've met some SLPs that have been given an ACEs study, which is the adverse childhood experiences. And they are thinking that they are now going to their students, their clients, trying to figure out what traumas they've sustained, which is not our role. That is the therapist, like school psychologist, that's their role to actually investigate and make sure that everything is safe.

Everything is okay. Our role [00:15:00] is to provide the six pillars of trauma informed care. Which would be safety choice, collaboration, trust, mutuality, and ensuring that we're trained in cultural, historical, and issues of our clients so that we don't cause any unnecessary harm. That is our role in, in being a speech pathologist and being trauma informed, but it is really interesting to see that within our field.

Actually at Asha, this upcoming year, there is a trauma informed track or trauma informed, um, group that's rating different presentations. On being in the trauma informed track, I guess. So that's really exciting to see that it's growing and all of us present. It's really interesting. I've seen a lot of presentations now on trauma informed within our field, and we all talk about similar things, but within our own experiences, which is.

Good. I like that. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Your experience obviously informs how you, how you talk about it. And you mentioned six pillars there. I would love if you [00:16:00] could give an example or yeah, talk a little bit more about how do you actually practically integrate trauma informed care maybe broadly or specifically as a speech pathologist.

So one of the first ones, um, the six pillars of trauma informed care are not one on top of the other, or it's not a step thing. It's just, I kind of use it as a checklist. Am I providing safety to this client? Am I providing choice to this client? Am I fostering trust in this client? So the first one, the most important for me would be safety.

Um, so many of us in a field, whether we are a teacher, whether a nurse, whether a. Speech pathologist, any of those related services. I think we like to think that we are a safe person. We are the chosen person within that relationship for a student. Oh, they like me better than this teacher. I'm their safe person.

I would rather say I am not the safe person or how can I make them feel more safe here? So [00:17:00] in terms of the school that I was at. We didn't feel safe at all there. Our trust had been broken by this event. So we have kids and staff that are so dysregulated that they're stressed. Their body is in survival alert and it's not my job to be, it's okay.

You're safe here. That's their body. That's their brain telling them, do I feel safe here? Do I not? And for many kids, it took months and years to finally have that feeling. But what I could do as a speech pathologist is ask them, what would make you feel more safe here? That could happen in a private practice.

What would make you feel more safe here? Or you can ask a parent, you can ask a caregiver, whoever that support system is, what would make them feel more safe here? And safety could be emotional safety. It could be physical safety. But again, it's the individual who decides if it is safe or not. And many times you're going to have someone who is in hyper alert, who is in survival mode, and it's up to us to help support them to make [00:18:00] them feel safe.

Not us just say it's a safe room here. I don't understand what you're talking about. I'm a safe person because again, it's their body and brain telling them maybe they're not, or they're not ready yet. They need to be shown that it is safe. Right. Great point. And I know in another podcast, you talked about.

If you're working with different age groups, you might not say it in that exact language. You might not say, uh, what makes you feel safe? You know, are there ways to, maybe they don't know what makes them feel safe. They've never even thought about it or they're overwhelmed. And even just being asked that question, you know, doesn't help them necessarily.

Are there ways to circumvent that, that you recommend? Yeah, you can work your way backwards. You can see if anything is distressing them in the room. If there's something that they're being triggered by, which you mentioned trauma being this buzzword trigger is also like a buzzword of everyone is triggered by everything.

But what is the thing that is stressing them out in this room? That is preventing them from being able to access speech language therapy with us. I'm a big fan of going on [00:19:00] walks, so maybe the room itself is set up in a way that doesn't allow them to feel safe, whether it's, they're not able to look out the window or someone's able to look in and they don't like that.

So I would. Say, all right, we're going to go on a walk. We're going to do a walk today around the building. We're going to go to the garden. That's just downstairs in a private practice. I've been able to do this too. I don't have to be in that specific room or maybe there's another room. Maybe there's an OTPT gym in there.

Um, make use of the space you have, even outside if it's raining. I mean, I'm in Florida. It's raining all the time here. Um, it's too hot outside, like be smart with it. You can make those choices of just, Hey, here's a different day. Let's change things up. Let's try to regulate you a little bit more. Let's do some body movement activities.

Let's try to show that we are working towards safety and showing them that this is important to you is one aspect of finding safety. Yeah, like just showing we don't have to be so clinical about this or routine like, you know, we're gonna break the [00:20:00] norm I've even done that with students who didn't necessarily go through a traumatic event But just to show them, you know what you seem stressed out today I can tell you're not focused like why don't we go for a walk and just talk or you know Sometimes the best therapy is not the therapy plan.

Usually the best therapy is the direct lesson plan In that sense, right? And one thing that I do want to mention, a lot of people think that trauma informed care is for kids who have sustained trauma. And yes, it absolutely is. Trauma specific services are more appropriate for that group. Trauma informed care is something that we can do before to make sure that we are not causing harm to make sure we don't know For Every situation that every client has gone through, whether they're children, whether they're adults, we're not going to know their history of trauma.

So there are certain things that we can do, which is trauma informed care to make sure that we are not the one that's causing harm or to make them feel safe in this space, to make sure that they're able to access the care that they need. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of [00:21:00] the concept of universal design, which we talk about a lot is like, instead of an afterthought of making things accessible, it's just designing the world to be accessible in the first place.

So that doesn't have to be a decision tree. And so it sounds like trauma informed care. It's really could be useful for mostly anyone to just be mindful of how you use your language. Are there any examples? That you can give about how, you know, language can exacerbate traumas and vice versa. How we can use language to minimize that, that triggering the recurrence of it.

Absolutely. So this is one of my favorite things to talk about in my presentations. I could talk about this all day. The biggest thing that I changed as a trauma informed individual, once I learned about trauma informed care was these language changes that were so simple. And it wasn't like, There was a list of them.

It's just things that I started recognizing that were or weren't done. So one of the things specifically that was done at my school without any training, [00:22:00] no one told us to do this was changing our language to remove violent terms. So our situation had just changed. Involved a very violent event. So in our culture, many of us don't realize how many graphic things we say that are just like random comments.

For example, one of them being shoot me a text, shoot me an email. That was something that was not said at my school for the six years after that. I was there that that was not said instead, we'd say, send me a message, send me, you know, we're more direct with it because using the word shoot at that school was inappropriate.

And was not trauma informed because what that does is it sends the person who's receiving that into, wow, I'm starting to think about this other thing and that prevents them from being in their learning brain. They're now in survival brain or they're just distracted thinking about an event before and not accessing the material that we are trying to give them.

So removing violent language is a big one. Just be more [00:23:00] direct with what you're saying. The purpose behind that with. Not knowing what trauma kids have gone through. We have kids that overnight might have experienced a domestic incident. And if you're saying when push comes to shove or beating or something like that, we don't know what's happening at home.

We don't know what they've just experienced. So if you're tiptoeing around, well, I know the history of this kiddo. I'm going to change my language specifically for that one. You're going to miss kids. If you just remove it all, you're going to remove it. And this also applies in a veteran's affairs. This applies in adult settings as well that might've experienced violent events.

Um, we know more in a veteran's affairs group that the likelihood that they might be triggered by this language is higher. So we can remove that altogether and not stress them out. Other language changes, um, Adding inclusive language. So especially in the school system, we get a lot of letters that say, dear parents, if we just change that to dear adults.

There are many more kids living with [00:24:00] adults than are living with parents. If they are not living with an adult, we need to investigate that further, but they might not be living with a parent. They might be living with a sister's friends, uncle, you know, somewhere along the line, someone is taking care of them.

That is an adult for one reason or another. positivity. I can't tell you how many things were said to me after experiencing a traumatic event that seemed just. Yes, inappropriate at that time, but also just enraged me and enraged other people or made them sad or made them guilty. Um, things like, well, everything will be okay.

Or you're, you're so strong for this or something along those lines. Um, other people have it worse was a big one. It's dismissive of our feelings. And if I said that to a student, it's dismissive of their feelings. Like, yes, someone along the line will always have it worse than the person in front of them.

Someone is going to be [00:25:00] experiencing worse things, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve to have those feelings of being sad or depressed. Whatever they're feeling. So it's much better to help people cope. And the evidence based way to help people cope is by validating emotions. So if you're telling me a really sad situation that you're going through, instead of me saying, all right, get over it.

Like every day is a new day. We can say that sounds really hard. Thank you for telling me, or it sounds like you're having a really tough day. That is. Evidence based to show people that you are caring. Um, it's a better way to have people cope than just moving right through it and trying to get them back to the status quo of happy.

It's okay to be another emotion other than happy. So this is really where a lot of people with the mental health kind of divide. This is where we're still able to kind of Have that therapy speak. We can try to get the skills, the mini counseling skills from therapy, but we are not a therapist. We are not a mental [00:26:00] health counselor, um, just by changing these types of language.

Hmm. That's so important. Thank you for deep diving into those examples. Are you looking to go beyond your degree and expand your impact? Whether you're a clinician or educator, you can leverage your skills outside direct services. Maybe you want to break into the exciting world of health and ed tech, or maybe you're interested in carving your own path in digital entrepreneurship.

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Now let's get back to the amazing interview. I'm really happy you touched on toxic positivity because I think that is a cultural wide thing. And, you know, it can be good to be like, Oh, to take stock [00:27:00] of what you're grateful for, but it can also completely, yeah, dismiss people's feelings and backfire and, and just cause more harm.

So switching gears a little bit, I actually would love to wax philosophical. You know, we live in a Interesting time where we can nerd out on the intersections of AI and technology and speech language and psychology. And I was, as I was researching for this interview, I see this interplay between language and mental health.

going two ways, especially in the SLP context. I'm just curious what your thoughts on this. So, you know, language can be a diagnostic tool in the context of trauma. Uh, Rachel, I don't know if you've worked with, you know, early intervention, but I've seen some studies of you can see if someone might have had trauma by seeing some of their speech and language patterns.

Yeah, I'm curious just if you have thoughts on on using language as a diagnostic tool for trauma, if there's any blind spots [00:28:00] there that we should be aware of, or for early interventionalists, maybe when they can refer out some things they could look for. I think it's very exciting to see where AI is going that I can imagine just, you know, someone diving into a monologue or something, and you're able to assess whether they have PTSD or whether they've experienced trauma just by their language.

I think that is a very cool futuristic kind of thing, hopefully not too far out, but I think that is coming soon. I think there are little ways that maybe psychologists can look at. At a toddler's language. I mean, we do know the differences in how Children of ages like preschool, elementary school and middle high school, the way that they talk and act after sustaining trauma is different throughout the ages.

So, for example, preschool Children will act it out in play. Elementary school children will talk about it nonstop and high school will also talk about it [00:29:00] nonstop, but like in a different way. And it's funny if you've ever worked in an elementary school, you've had a little kid come up to you that just goes, my grandpa died yesterday.

And then they tell every single person that they meet and it's like, All right. We're going to learn to, you know, you got to cut that out a little bit. Like, yes, let's talk about grandpa in this setting, or let's get the social worker involved here. Um, maybe we need to continue talking about what death means.

There are a lot of great books out there. Um, Circles is one of them that talks about grief for Children. It's a picture book. There are things out there of how to children on social emotional language. Um, grief, trauma. We're able to talk about about those things, even when Children are really young. I think from a language component, we are doing more research in Identifying children at an earlier age.

Um, I know even the ACEs study, the adverse childhood experience study that was made way back in the nineties has been modified several times and [00:30:00] changed multiple times because the original ACEs study only had 10 types of trauma on there. Basically, Hey, which trauma have you sustained, but that's leaving out.

Many, many types of trauma of possibilities. So just the change over the last 30 years has been significant when looking at identifying trauma. And I think that is coming into the speech world. I would love to see more trauma informed assessments. I think that would be good. I think there is one out there that advertises as a trauma informed assessment.

Assessment for language. That would be awesome. But I think we really need to depend heavily on our our co workers are mental health professionals, psychologists, social workers and everything for identifying trauma and referring to us because then we do find that students who have had trauma. Struggle with executive functioning, the symptoms of trauma end up in our field.

Anyway, they're going to be coming to us for language because they're not able to express their emotions. The executive functioning [00:31:00] is poor. The ADHD is what they are checked off as, but actually those are trauma symptoms or they're experiencing. Symptoms of ADHD, but really could be caused by trauma. We don't know.

So we are there to treat the symptoms of it and we don't need to go, well, what trauma have you had in your life? Little four year old, like that's not our role, but we can treat the symptoms of what it does cause, which the development actually changes the brain of children who have. Gone through trauma at an early age, their brain development changes.

It's in survival mode and that's being expanded versus the academic areas of our brain aren't changing. So we definitely have to look into more about our assessment within trauma informed care. Well articulated. I just going off with a lot of ideas while listening to you and on the flip side of diagnostics, there's the treatment side for trauma, which I don't think this would fall in line with a speech language pathologist.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as a therapy [00:32:00] tool, we can use language to rewrite. or not rewrite the story of that trauma, but to help contextualize it in a new way. So what I've come to understand is seeing, you know, people write about their experiences when they're ready and put it in a new context where they find meaning and resilience to move through that trauma.

In a meaningful way that's not avoidant and not toxic positivity, as you mentioned, but rewriting the story that they repeat in their mind and in their heart about that trauma. I just think it's so cool how this, how language and mental health have this interplay and we can leverage one to treat the other.

Absolutely. Have you, have you used language in that, in that way with your speech pathology sessions or is that more of a mental health intervention purely? I think we do need to partner with those professions. Absolutely. Because we do have SLPs with the best intentions going like, all right, I'm going to show them that this is something that's making them stronger or [00:33:00] whatever, you know, it's kind of that toxic positivity.

So they'll come up with an activity. Um, and there are activities in the school system that are under the name of like, Great bonding exercises that end up being more harmful, such as like the baggage activity, which basically asks a classroom of students to write down things that they're struggling with, put it in a bag or like crumple it up, put it in a plastic bag.

And then, uh, the children take one by one, they open it up, they read it out. And then someone can be like, that was mine. I'm struggling with this at home. That's a forced bonding activity. That's something that is like, Trauma bonding them of like it's trying to get them to open up to one another. Um, but those activities are like not recommended at all.

So I think sometimes when people hear about trauma informed care, they get very involved in like, all right, I'm so trauma informed. I'm going to talk about trauma all the time, but it's actually more of the opposite. It's letting them come to you with it and how you approach it. But I do like to think of.

When we were just talking about the previous [00:34:00] example, what our role is with helping people understand the trauma, um, I'm, I worked in a high school, which all of the students that are there are with me because they have a language delay. There's, there's some reason that they're there. So these are high schoolers that might be an 11th grade that are reading on a first grade level.

So we had thousands of articles coming out online about our situation that they would read and come to the incorrect conclusion of that, or they couldn't even read a paragraph of it because mostly they're written on an eighth grade level, and they're like, I don't understand what these words are. Or my friend said, this is what's happening here.

So. Actually, in my therapy, I would take those articles that they would bring to me and say, let's go over it together. Let's go paragraph by paragraph and talk about it together. I'm not giving them a position on how I feel about the death penalty. I'm not going into that. I'm talking about the reality of this is a death penalty case.

What does that mean? Either this will happen or this will happen. They can make their own conclusions [00:35:00] on what that means for them, what that means from their beliefs and their cultures. But they couldn't even get to that point. Based on the first paragraph, they weren't able to get to the understanding of what that article meant.

So we need to help them get to those conclusions based on our language understanding skills. We're still reaching those goals. I can still say, Oh, I, I did that goal that they're working on, but this is a real functional life skill of being able to understand the articles that are coming to them on their phone.

Yeah. Yeah. And processing those in a meaningful way. I remember having high school groups as an SLP in schools. And if someone had, you know, so, so much stories, they would tell themselves about not having confidence or, you know, negative self talk. The good thing about speech and language therapy is you can use different stories that speak to different themes, you know, not trying to be heavy handed with like, be, you know, be growth oriented, but really, um, showing stories of other people who had similar.

Struggles to them and overcoming [00:36:00] them. So while you're talking about those topics, you're sneaking in the speech and language goals and you're speaking to their self confidence. So that's a, it's a beautiful way to interject both and, you know, looking forward. Well, actually, let me ask you this question real quick, because we have some people who are listening who are aspiring entrepreneurs, or maybe they're clinicians, right?

Maybe they're not. Maybe they've had this, a unique experience that they want to share with the world and get out there in the same way that you did. Do you have any advice just generally for people who want to get into entrepreneurship in this maybe a delicate space, not necessarily trauma, but you know, with working with people with disabilities and growing in that area?

I always say that trauma informed care is for anyone who is working with humans or even animals. And my animal is sitting right behind me. But Anytime you are working with, with people, we should be trauma informed. So that is entrepreneurs. That is owners of a [00:37:00] clinic owners of whatever it is to the employees that you are working with.

You have to be more trauma informed than the person who is under you. So in my case, I have to be more trauma informed than the students. My administrators have to be more trauma informed than me so that we can pass this along. To make sure that the people at the bottom are feeling that trauma informed care.

So I would say to entrepreneurs and anyone that's working with people is look at the pillars of trauma informed care. Really reflect on your language that you are using. Um, look at the rules and regulations that you have in place. For example, I was just talking to a school that has like two, uh, Sick days for students.

Um, and it has no consideration of for a wedding For example, it gives an exception that you can go to a wedding if it is for an immediate family member Well, what if you're an only child, but your best friend is your brother or your sister that is someone who is getting married [00:38:00] You are saying that only immediate family matters Looking at that's a kind of system thing that you can say who does this leave out?

Who would this hurt by not being able to go to this wedding? The systems that you are putting in place, are they causing harm outright? Are they preventing anyone from accessing their time there from? Are you actually causing harm in that environment? These are heavy things to reflect on that people are gonna say, no, I'm not causing harm.

There's no way. I've never caused harm in my life. But if we work our way backwards and say, yes, I have caused harm, how can I help? Make sure that the people that I'm employing are not hurt by the decisions that I am making. I think that is a really great way to lead with trauma informed care, understanding that the people that you are supporting do go through trauma and toxic stress can lead to trauma.

So the more that you can do to support the people who you are supporting, the more [00:39:00] trauma informed you can be, but it takes a lot of self reflection on what you are doing. Doing in that setting. So that is what I would recommend. Thank you for that. Yeah, just, you know, the more I think about any mental health thing, it's like community and our webs of influence are so important.

And we can't do these things alone. We're social creatures. So much of individual therapy is just like. reframing it in your brain alone, but if we can hold each other without just trauma bonding and being toxically positive and actually lift each other up in our web of influence, then that's a beautiful thing.

Absolutely. So Rachel, thank you so much for, um, for coming and sharing your influence and your inspiration, your insights. I could ask you more questions, but I want to be mindful of time. But, um, where can people find you if they want to learn more about what you're doing and inform themselves? Sure. So my Instagram is ptsd.

slp and my website is ptsdslp. com. Those are the two main places you can find me. [00:40:00] Um, if you don't have Instagram, I do have a Facebook page called PTSD SLP, so you can see the same thing that I'm posting on Instagram. Um, but I always love when people reach out, if you want to message me on Instagram, message me on my website, my email is up there.

So, um, I'd love to talk to you all about trauma informed needs. Wonderful. We'll put those in the show notes. Cool. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. That was awesome. We hope you enjoyed this episode and invite you to leave us a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share the show with people you think will find value from it.

This helps the show a lot or have a great guest referral. Reach out to us at X leaders at gmail. com. And if you want exclusive tips on becoming an exceptional leader delivered straight to your inbox, just go to exceptionalleaders. com and sign up for our mailing list. Thanks for [00:41:00] listening.