Season 4 Episode 1: Using the Concept of Partnering with Survivors to Promote Worker Health and Well-Being
About This Episode
Working with domestic violence means professionals come into contact daily with complex and challenging trauma. Beyond the complexity involved with working toward the safety of the family, working with domestic violence survivors often confronts professionals with their own prior experiences of abuse and trauma. Partnering with survivors using the Safe & Together Model is powerful, efficient, and effective—and this very same process may reveal to practitioners where they were blamed for the abuse they suffered, where their own strengths or needs were not acknowledged, and can even trigger their own memories of trauma.
In this episode, Ruth and David discuss how the concept of partnering is a powerful way to support professionals who have experienced violence and who also encounter challenging and traumatizing dynamics in their day-to-day work. Many practitioners have reached out to express their own self-revelations when learning the Safe & Together Model and how the six-part process of partnering helped in their healing.
David and Ruth look at the six steps of partnering from a worker-supportive standpoint, which improves worker well-being, safety, and satisfaction and assures that organizations are responding in a domestic violence–informed way to the needs of professional victim-survivors in their employ. Ruth and David leave the listener with a series of questions that may assist in the process of partnering with professional survivors and with ourselves when we are uncovering our own trauma.
Additional Resources
Podcast: Season 2 Episode 23: Minisode on Worker Safety & Well-Being: When Workers Are Survivors Themselves
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