Season 4 Episode 2: Coming “Out” as a Survivor in a Professional Setting: A Practitioner’s Journey
About This Episode
Listening to the voice of lived experience experts, aka survivors of all forms of abuse and neglect, is becoming more and more a part of the domestic abuse–informed professional landscape. At the same time, self-disclosure of being an abuse survivor in professional spaces can be fraught for some practitioners. It can be associated with fears of judgment and marginalization. Even though those survivor experiences can positively inform direct work with families, enrich organizational culture, and help guide policy, safety, and support for practitioner survivors is often not the articulated norm in many organizations.
In this episode, Ruth and David interview Aleigha Manski, the 2023 winner of the Safe & Together Champion Award for Systems Change in the Asia Pacific Region. Aleigha shares her journey as a professional and a survivor. She talks about how the Safe & Together Model impacted her self-perceptions as a survivor and assisted her in improving her ability to engage with families struggling with domestic violence. Aleigha reflects on how the process of partnering with survivors and the Safe & Together Model principles assisted her in self-reflection on the abuse she endured as a child and the organizational and system responses to that abuse.
Aleigha, David, and Ruth address the “elephant in the room” and how societal victim-blaming and internalized shame can affect professionals, even ones that are survivors themselves. Facing that reality head-on with a partnering framework not only helps to separate those personal realities from professional practice but also assists in healing and improving responses to victims of similar forms of abuse. The partnering concept can not only improve practitioner-survivor practice but also provide a pathway to healing and improve worker safety, satisfaction, and retention.
This is an important episode for any professional who struggles with talking about their own experiences of abuse and any agency that wants to be trauma- and domestic abuse–informed. The Safe & Together Model partnering process can offer a pathway to healing for professionals who are also survivors and are working with families experiencing domestic violence. Creating space in organizations for professionals to safely disclose and not be blamed or professionally harmed by the fact someone else chose to abuse them is vital to having a truly domestic abuse–informed organization and to professional competency and worker satisfaction.
Additional Resources
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