Trauma Competent vs Trauma Informed

You deserve trauma-competent care. Here’s why.

by Meagan Good, MA, LPC; Founder of Take Heart

March 4th, 2024

Organizations we work with often ask if we are trauma-informed. At Take Heart, we believe that our clinical staff MUST be not only trauma-informed, but trauma-competent to provide the most healing and beneficial services to all clients, whether they come here with past trauma or not. If you are looking for high-quality therapy services, whether your therapeutic goals include trauma work or not, you deserve trauma-competent care. Here’s why.

A trauma-informed approach realizes the pervasiveness and widespread impact of trauma, recognizes the signs of trauma in individuals and families, understands that there is hope for healing, and reacts by implementing this knowledge about trauma into every part of its operations to prevent retraumatization. (From the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration)

 

A trauma-competent clinician embodies this approach. Essentially, the clinician not only believes in the trauma-informed perspective, and not only understands all the science backing it up… they live it out. It is not just head-knowledge, but heart-knowledge and a way of life. They do the work to become, personally and professionally, a person who is safe, nurturing, and attuned – and bring this to the time they spend with their clients.

 

The risk of not working with a truly trauma-competent clinician is that they might actually cause more harm. They can mean well, but inadvertently fall into patterns of interacting with you (or with the horse) that actually retraumatize you! They can completely reset your healing back to square one. For example, imagine struggling to complete a task with your therapy horse, and your clinician completely takes over for you, simply meaning to help. This interaction could be triggering, it might remind you of a past codependent relationship, it might feel disempowering, or it might enable you to walk away from challenges. You might leave the moment feeling like the old belief “I’m not good enough” had just been reinforced.

 

Part of what sets Take Heart apart is that not only do we train and do a lot of work to embody trauma-informed principles – we do a lot of personal work to live it out. If we didn’t, the horses would call us out in session! The horses don’t know who’s the client and who’s the clinician – they are just authentically responding to what’s happening in the moment – so it requires us to do our own work to become, personally and professionally, in our interactions with people and in our interactions with the horses, trauma-competent.

 

Below is a breakdown of the difference between trauma-informed and trauma-competent clinicians. It’s essentially a difference between just understanding concepts, and what it looks like to be lived out. Of course this isn’t an all-inclusive list – that could be a whole book! But it’s a peek into what you should expect from a trauma-competent clinician, and what you can expect from our clinical team at Take Heart.

Trauma-Informed: We shift our thinking from, “What is wrong with you?”, to “What happened to you?”

 

Trauma-Competent: 

  • We hold space for you and gets to know you as a human who has experienced hard things, not a diagnosis or issue.

  • We create safety for you by attuning closely to your emotional state throughout the session, and what is spoken and unspoken.

  • We always use language of grace and understanding, never blame or shame. Even if something happened that was due to your choice, we work together to understand why that choice was made through a lens of grace and learning. When we learn better, we can choose better – AND we equip you with the support, skills, and encouragement you need to make healthy choices for your life.

  • We help you explore and understand your past experiences, adaptive behaviors, and relationship with self and others that led to where you are today.

  • Three of the major themes we see in clients with trauma are feelings of powerlessness, feeling responsible for the traumatic situation, and feeling alone in the situation. We use this knowledge to help you speak with a bold voice, separate guilt from shame, make empowered choices, and develop relationships that support resilience through the inevitable hardships of life.

Trauma-Informed: Understands the neurobiology of trauma.

 

Trauma-Competent:

  • We understand neurobiology and the connectedness of the brain, body, and behavior, enough to explain it in simple terms to you, so that you are empowered by this knowledge, too.

  • We filter information about you through this understanding, to help conceptualize why you struggle or have strengths in certain areas.

  • We approach you in an intentional manner to not only care for you as a person, but care for the dysregulated nervous system within you. We want to provide co-regulation throughout the session so that your nervous system learns to feel safe.

Trauma-Informed: Understands attachment theory.

 

Trauma-Competent: 

  • Because we understand attachment theory, we know that relationship is what helps people heal. We build a safe, nurturing, healthy therapeutic relationship with you to support your healing.

  • We are able to explain attachment styles in a way that supports your learning and personal insights, without blaming or shaming.

  • We support you in creating a healthy relationship with yourself, others, and your faith. All three relationships are valuable parts of healing.

  • We work with you to understand what would help you on a clinical level AND human level regarding attachment, as well as what is the ideal, and what is or was lacking for the client before me. Not to point out what is or was not given, but to help the client get those truly important, safe connections now.

  • We help you feel safe to be authentic and vulnerably request your needs to be met in relationships.

Trauma-Informed: Understands what clinicians call “bottom-up regulation.”

 

Trauma-Competent: 

  • We attune closely to you so that we can go back and forth between hard things and safety in the present using regulating activities.

  • We support you in-the-moment, as needed, to attain a more regulated state through incorporating bottom-up regulation activities throughout the session.

  • We understand the value and importance of literal and metaphoric “rhythm” in regulation, and incorporate rhythmic activities in the session to help you attain a more regulated state.

  • We support you in bringing rhythmic, regulating activities into their lives outside of sessions.

Trauma-Informed: Understands the somatic piece of trauma work.

 

Trauma-Competent:

  • We respect that you may not have the words to say to explain your trauma or your emotional state, and honor that you do not always need verbal processing to heal.

  • We understand that “the body keeps the score” – the body holds onto emotions and those emotions need to be released safely.

  • We help you tune into your own bodily sensations as well as your emotional states, and learn to manage your internal energy through regulation activities.

  • We empower you with tools to regulate your sensations and emotions through rhythmic movement, breathing, grounding, or other presence-based bodily activities.

  • We incorporate somatic experiences and activities intentionally through sessions, to help you embody feelings of regulation, safety, connection, peacefulness, belonging, calm… not just feelings in a fleeting moment, but empowering you to achieve these feelings and states in any situation off the ranch, too.

As you can see, trauma-competent care involves embodying the knowledge we have about trauma and living it out alongside you, empowering you to embody safety and healing through activities designed not only to teach, but to help you live it out, too.

 

Some of our clients report feeling safety for the first time. Some begin to experience emotions in their fullest after shutting them out for most of their lives. Some share their healing through everyday changes: she finally felt free to wear something beautiful. He expressed his emotions respectfully instead of hitting his brother. She handled a loss without losing herself. He reached out to his dad and had a conversation with new boundaries, and left the conversation feeling good about it for once. She stopped waking up in the middle of the night and finally sleeps through each night.

 

We believe it’s pretty powerful when someone’s life is changed, so we take this work very seriously! What can trauma-competent therapy do for you? We’re glad to talk with you about it.

 

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