“Genuine and good support can make you laugh again, it can bring you back actual happiness, a few years ago I never laughed, and now all I do is laugh.” - FLIC client.

Trauma is a painful, disturbing, and overwhelming experience. Trauma is an almost universal experience for all FLIC clients, which in the majority of cases has been untreated and goes back to early life and childhood.

Applying a trauma lens to our work has helped us build and sustain meaningful, trusted relationships, understand and work effectively with trauma-related behaviours without refusing access to our support, and be truly person-centred meeting people exactly where they are, not where we need them to be.

We have learnt that trauma is not just an individual issue, it’s a systemic one too. “...poverty, trauma and structural disadvantage combine to create and perpetuate multiple disadvantage.” Therefore, the system itself can facilitate growth and change.

Working in a trauma-informed way is a principles-based approach that emphasises the importance of relationships. In the absence of a regulatory body overseeing this work, the way that services and practitioners live out these principles can vary, making it difficult to figure out the boundaries between what is or is not trauma-informed in any given context.

Our trauma-informed approach emerged through reflecting on the relationships we have built with people over the course of the programme, and the result is our booklet ‘Trauma Informed, reflections on our way of workings’.

In our booklet you will find;

• Our definition of trauma
• How trauma can impact a person
• What being trauma informed means to us
• Systemic Trauma
• FLIC's Learning about System Behaviours
• What gets in the way? And what can we do about it?
• Sean's Story - A review of Non-Trauma Informed Responses vs Trauma Informed Responses

See below for a preview of the booklet below and download a copy for yourself here.