We Can Own This Too!

I've been questioning why we have believed for so long that in order to heal from trauma it is necessary to work with only qualified professionals. Peer support in the arena of trauma - whether as a result of combat, disaster, childhood neglect/abuse, or crime - is still a new idea, still. Many of us have been told that the work of moving beyond the impact of trauma in our lives is best left to professionals who are trained to deal with "it." But weren't we told the same thing about mental illness? We didn't buy it. So why do we in this realm?
I doubt that any of us is really willing to accept the notion that recovery and transformation must be put on hold until the mental health system has enough money to pay for trauma specialists. In effect, though, that's what we do when we cease believing that we are capable of helping one another re-connect, re-discover, or re-imagine our lives in the glare of trauma.

These are the beginning times for peer support in trauma work. Despite the medications and the daily living skills and the supported employment and the anger management classes and even counseling, many of us go on living - not in relation to our future - but in relation to our past. This for me is the true meaning of the death of dreams: It is the death of my future.

In an ideal mental health system, consumers would have REAL choice. Our role would be about educating each other about options. Mental health centers would just be one of many places to access services, while what we build in the community through self-help and mutual support as well as peer support would be another. Peer run respite and crisis homes staffed by consumers 24 hours a day would serve as an alternative to hospitalization. We could even go there before we got swamped by crisis. Working through crisis with peers (think WRAP) would allow us to really use crisis as an opportunity for growth as Shery Mead maintains (mentalhealthpeers.com).

But we have to take ownership of trauma to make this work. We've got to start creating a knowledge base and practice in order to truly serve one another when so many of us (up to 98% of consumers in the public mental health system) have been impacted by trauma.

The first step is to begin to question some pretty fundamental assumptions about what doing trauma work looks like, and means. We're going to have to take a look at how clinical expectations -- and what we have subsequently learned to expect from ourselves and each other as we deal with trauma -- may actually contribute to many of the extreme coping strategies that make trauma work so, well, scary? or at least off limits to us...And yet this is us.

The consumer movement is built on the foundation of person as expert rather than professional as expert. Peer support has come to mean, for me, paying attention to what I know and to what my experience has been, and then finding a way to use it in relationships with others. I want to do this work. I suspect there are a lot of us out there who would like to contribute, as well.