BEYOND TRAUMA-INFORMED CERTAINTY: CENTERING VOICE, POWER, & NARRATIVE PATHWAYS TO RELATIONAL & CONTEXTUAL HEALING

This article offers a critical reflection on trauma-informed care, not as a rejection of trauma work, but as a caution against its growing standardization and the certainty with which trauma knowledge is sometimes applied. Trauma-informed care has helped human service, legal, educational, and mental and behavioral health settings become more attentive to harm, safety, and retraumatization. Yet it can become reductive when treated as neutral, universal, or standardized professional knowledge. Trauma, understood here as a wound caused by an experience or series of experiences that overwhelms or significantly affects a person’s capacity to cope and leaves lasting emotional, cognitive, physical, relational, or behavioral effects, is experienced uniquely and never apart from personal, relational, cultural, historical, and social context. Because trauma does not follow one pattern, trauma work can become ethically and epistemologically risky when trauma becomes the dominant lens for under ... continue reading->

Keywords: Trauma-Informed Care; Trauma-Conscious Practice; Narrative Practice; Critical Social Work; Epistemic Injustice; Power; Healing; Voice; Structural Harm