Youthwork: Responding to Trauma #2
This is Part #2 of a 3-part series for youthworkers on responding when young people experience trauma. Responding to trauma such as accidental death, natural disasters and community events may not be something that we spend a lot of time training for as youthworkers, but some basic pointers can help guide you in uncertain times and give you a reference point. For those of you who have dealt with teenagers in responding to trauma, I’d love you to add your ideas, experiences and reflections to the benefit of others.
Part #2: Managing Impact. Looking at helpful first steps in allowing a young person to effectively deal with trauma experience as best as they are able, including questions around spirituality & future security.
- identifying the trauma and accepting what happened.
- identifying the behaviour/feelings that are trauma-related.
- accepting that the symptoms are completely normal and recoverable.
- putting in place some basic responses to help the recovery process.
Youthwork: Responding to Trauma #1
This is Part #1 of a 3-part series for youthworkers on responding when young people experience trauma. Responding to trauma such as accidental death, natural disasters and community events may not be something that we spend a lot of time training for as youthworkers, but some basic pointers can help guide you in uncertain times and give you a reference point. For those of you who have dealt with teenagers in responding to trauma, I’d love you to add your ideas, experiences and reflections to the benefit of others.
#1: Identifying Trauma and Recognizing the Potential Impact. Focusing predominantly on what various trauma experiences can look like & the symptoms or behaviour you might expect.
#2: Managing Impact. Looking at helpful first steps in allowing a young person to effectively deal with trauma experience as best as they are able, including questions around spirituality & future security.
#3: Self-care & The Walking Wounded. Dealing with trauma first-hand, looking after yourself to better care for others and when a whole community suffers trauma or loss.
I knew something was wrong the minute he walked into the room. My usually bright, energetic (too energetic) teenager was quiet, shaken and withdrawn from the group. But identifying the difference between the sudden onset of adolescent mood swings and the residual impact of a trauma he had experienced days prior took a period of hours and a totally dishevelled youth group night.
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What The Hell Just Happened…
We were just kids, walking to school, skipping classes, drinking too much Coke in the weekends and talking about small things as if the world depended on them. We were well-intentioned, no matter how we played on the edges of darkness and clung to one another in the chaos of adolescence. We held one another with a fervour. Somewhere within we knew that innocence was rushing from us like the tide escaping the shoreline, we longed for our freedom but had no idea what ‘real-life’ would bring.
We were unprepared, no fault of our parents, our school system, our religious institutions or lack of. It wasn’t television, the dawning of the internet age or the influence of sex, drugs’n'rock’n'roll. We were unprepared because that’s how you must be, to enter the fray of life. Stepping up onto the plate, you have to have no idea what’s ahead of you or you would never do it. So we closed our eyes and jumped, hoping everyone was just as scared as we were, trying not to show it.
But that was only yesterday, and what the hell just happened?
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The Art Of Moving Furniture.
Whenever I begin to feel cluttered in my head, I can see the telltale signs in my environment. It starts in my car – a piece of paper left in one place for too long. A plastic water bottle that never gets put in the recycling bin. Then it travels to my office, where a pile of things I need to deal with accumulates in the corner, on the desk, on quickly jotted Post-Its stuck to the iMac and files on my desktop unsorted. Sometimes figuring out the rabbit warren and getting back to calm is like unraveling a piece of thread.. long, laborious and seemingly unending.. until you undo the one little knot that was holding you up and away you fly.
But when I find myself stuck on a knot that I just can’t figure out.. I have one solution, with three simple steps that always helps me to ‘unstick‘ it.
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Shift & Return: Discipleship in Young Adults
This is a thought on discipleship and journey with young people and young adults. For starters, I don’t really believe in young adult or even college ministry being separate from youth ministry in a church context, or even youth ministry being altogether separate from regular community activities. I’m thinking that the future looks far more like embedded than it does integrated. But that’s for later.
For now, I want to think about and talk about Shift & Return in youth ministry in the context of narrative theology and praxis.
There’s more on the theology and praxis side coming, but I need to choose those words really carefully and so I’m sitting on them for a while, but I can write about story and meaning. Throughout the scriptures, we return over and over to the same moments and fragments of history and narrative within the text. Parallelism, quoted prophets, the psalms are full of “remember, remember when”.
When the leadership and direction of the group of young adults I had been working with changed, one of them came to me wrestling with these new stories and new perspectives. I encouraged her, that she was the historian, the storyteller of the group. She had a unique ability to tell the “remember when” stories that surrounded that specific community with their values, their crisis and identity moments, their Shift moments, when something changed, shifted, became apparent or evidenced in their narrative. I think that learning to retell the Shift moments, helps us and our young people Return to the learning processes, the historical lessons, the framework that helps shape their tribal identity.
Similarly, those Shift & Return functions help to create a systemic, life-giving narrative that others can join. It can allow others to step into the story by retelling, relearning, reimagining and reassessing what we experienced, learned, changed and actioned as a result. So it helps a culture stay alive, helps a lesson stay truthful.
But I’m also thinking about Shift & Return in an individual’s life. Sometimes it seems no matter how hard a student or I try to shift from a place or a moment in history, we’re inevitably forced into Return mode. Unless we artfully shift our perspective or understanding of those moments, habits, stories and experiences – we risk becoming stuck in Return mode, constantly brought back to something that feels like the beginning. That’s not discipleship – because too often we ourselves end up perpetuating expectation of a pattern of thinking or behaviour in those around us that prohibits a different outcome.
I want to be a youthworker that harnesses the power of Shift & Return in our communal narrative for our individual discipleship experiences. I want to engage the 3rd dimension – the Up dimension. That as we return to moments, stories, habits our perspective on them changes… that we might move up and away from those narratives. All thorns have the potential to cause a scar. The scar in itself is not depth, but the opportunity for depth. Never returning isn’t depth, it’s just avoiding. Sometimes depth, understanding and growing as a disciple and a discipler is figuring out how to enable Shifting of perspectives, Returning to places of pain and moving Upwards, creating depth in character.
For starters, how do you engage Up? We have to disengage from Stuck mode. Expectation of the same result or behaviour needs to not become a normative feature of our youth ministries.