Season 1 Episode 5: What We Bring With Us: Trauma, Safety & Professional Practice
About This Episode
In this episode, David and Ruth explore how professionals’ emotional safety and trauma intersect with working in domestic abuse and child maltreatment systems. They discuss how all professionals bring personal experiences, histories, and biases into their work—including lived experiences of violence—and why acknowledging this reality is essential to safe, ethical, and sustainable practice.
The conversation examines how trauma can shape judgment, engagement, documentation, and the protective strategies professionals develop over time, often impacting worker well-being and retention. David and Ruth emphasize that addressing trauma is not just an individual responsibility, but a systems issue—one that directly affects outcomes for adult and child survivors.
Ruth reflects on how trauma overlays both personal and professional experiences, and why creating psychologically safe workplaces requires keeping perpetrators and their choices clearly in view as the source of harm. Together, they highlight the importance of organizational cultures that allow professionals to reflect on their experiences without judgment, recognizing that trauma can deepen empathy as well as create risk when unsupported. The episode highlights Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky as a key resource for individuals, professionals, and systems seeking to build sustainable, trauma-informed—and trauma-responsible—practice.
Additional Resources
Online Course: Worker Safety and Domestic Violence in Child Welfare Systems
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence