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Summary
The fatigue and trauma from events of the past few years has affected many of us – not just personally, but also professionally, and at the organizational level as well. For the most part, the corporate world has recognized the impact these past years have had on employees and teams. However, many organizations have only recently become aware of the longer-term effects and are struggling to support their people as they work through the long tail of trauma In this special community call, produced in partnership by Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience curation teams, Uday Gajendar facilitated a discussion about the long tail of trauma, with Rachael Dietkus, LCSW, Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW, and Dr. Dawn Emerick.
Key Insights
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Involving people with lived trauma experience in research teams helps anticipate triggers and design sensitive methods.
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Trauma manifests differently across cultures; understanding local norms and body language is crucial to avoid misunderstandings.
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Asynchronous research methods can empower participants to share their stories at their own pace to reduce retraumatization.
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Self-care and team debriefing rituals like 'Friday feels' are vital for researchers to manage vicarious trauma.
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Trauma-informed approaches must critically assess systems that perpetuate trauma, avoiding simply reforming harmful institutions.
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Organizational change, especially in HR policies and leadership openness about mental health, is foundational to trauma-informed cultures.
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Consent is an ongoing process; participants must feel safe to pause or stop without pressure to produce data.
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Trauma is ubiquitous and can appear unexpectedly even in sectors like tech, finance, or gaming.
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Research settings need flexibility — taking breaks, informal moments, and reducing clinical atmospheres relieve participant anxiety.
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Being trauma-informed is a continuous process of learning and adapting, not a fixed state or checklist.
Notable Quotes
"Trauma is not so much an external event as it is the way that event embeds in an individual's body."
"You can’t heal your way out of death or oppression by making prisons more user-friendly or trauma-informed."
"If you’re working with humans, you’re working with trauma — it’s always there, even in unexpected sectors."
"Sometimes people will just tell you what they think you want to hear because they believe that’s the purpose of the activity."
"Being trauma-informed is as much about caring for your own trauma as it is about your participants' trauma."
"There are no best practices because trauma responses are so individual and culturally specific."
"Leadership modeling vulnerability and openness about mental health is the first step in creating trauma-informed workplaces."
"Consent is ongoing; if you sense discomfort you must pause or stop research to protect people’s well-being."
"We have to be careful not to commoditize trauma-informed work into a checkbox exercise or the next empathy fad."
"Assume everybody you work with carries trauma; approach every interaction with that in mind."
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