Season 2 Episode 10: Trauma-Informed Is Not the Same as Domestic Abuse–Informed
About This Episode
In this episode, David and Ruth tackle one of the most pressing issues in the domestic violence field: how to make mental health and addiction services more domestic abuse–informed when it comes to interacting with survivors. While awareness of trauma and its impact continues to increase, it often is decontextualized from the dynamics of coercive control. Mental health and addiction professionals are often ill-prepared by their education and training to integrate coercive control into their assessments. Organizations that are striving to trauma-informed are not always committing to be domestic abuse–informed. Domestic violence survivors are often harmed by these gaps.
Ruth and David dive into:
How perpetrators can cause and exacerbate existing mental health or addiction issues for adult and child survivors
How perpetrators can interfere with other family members' treatment and use their involvement with treatment against them
How systems, like family court and child welfare, may perceive a survivors' mental health and addiction issues more negatively than perpetrators' coercive control
How practitioners and organizations may have blindspots regarding how current coercive control dynamics could be impacting survivors' mental health and addiction treatment
David and Ruth also tackle how structural sexism, racism, and colonization dynamics are often ignored in mainstream mental health and addiction paradigms to the detriment of clients from oppressed communities. Ruth also shares how she's been impacted by reading Judy Atkinson's book Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia.