Trauma, Grief, and Healing

Two adolescent girls arm-in-arm smiling into the camera

By Tanesia Hale-Jones,
IMTI Team Member, ABAR Education

Before the pandemic so many people. SO MANY PEOPLE. Each day experienced food insecurity, housing insecurity and discrimination, job loss and job instability, inequitable access to resources that should be available to all. Before the pandemic IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, People of Color) were disproportionately targeted by police: while running, while sitting in their cars, while having a mental health crisis, while laughing with friends, while sleeping, while existing at all. Across the world queer, trans and non-binary people were violently disappeared. All of this was BEFORE.

At the on-set of the pandemic what EVERYONE experienced was a collective trauma. A face-to-face with the unknown for many this exacerbated on-going trauma from living in a world dominated by colonial-capitalist systems. For others it was the first time that you perhaps wrestled with fear around instability and insecurity.

For all of us it has been a reckoning with.

I remember reading many people writing about being in ‘this’ ‘together.’ The this of the pandemic, of collective trauma. But as with all words the word ‘trauma’ and ‘harm’ were quickly absorbed into the lexicon of the moment. Articles about how to support students, our communities, and ourselves populated my news feed.

I was particularly aware of how often the words ‘trauma,’ ‘harm,’ ‘healing,’ and ‘self-care’ surfaced in these articles. As a black bi-racial educator and human I have a pretty clear understanding of how harm piles up and manifests as trauma, both on a personal level and generationally, but I noticed the subtle way these terms were being co-opted and used as a way for people to connect across difference. (To be clear, all of us are more than the sum of our personal or generational trauma.) I noticed how the idea of self-care has become synonymous with facials and bubble baths. (Boundary setting and rest are also self-care). I noticed how claiming to be on a ‘healing journey’ has started to feel deeply problematic and possibly culturally (mis)appropriative if not understood in the context of community and collective healing.

In the spring a parent asked me, “But how are the children?” I told her that we were holding the space of grief while making time for our joy: silly games and Netflix watch parties and storytelling, but the truth of how we are now and long term is much harder to tease out. While considering all of this within the frame of collective trauma, I asked friend and Montessori colleague, Colleen Wilkinson of Trauma Informed Montessori to help me understand the relationship between harm, trauma and how, as educators and humans, we might carve a path forward. I offer snippets of insight and possible practices.

So what is harm?

“Harm can be perpetuated by anyone. The thing with trauma is we can’t always know what our students bring with them to school, and even when we know them well, we still may not know the extent of their lived experiences outside of our classroom.”

Harm can be seen as a micro-aggression (but as Ibram X. Kendi points out, any form of aggression is simply abuse). Over time all the accumulated abuse becomes a trauma. Sometimes a person experiences a particularly horrible kind of abuse that immediately becomes a trauma (no need for things to accumulate). Harm can be experienced in classrooms, in homes, on the street, the grocery store, or any other place we come into contact with other humans. Harm can be perpetuated by anyone. The thing with trauma is we can’t always know what our students bring with them to school, and even when we know them well, we still may not know the extent of their lived experiences outside of our classroom.

Colleen shared a shocking statistic that 99% of students experience trauma at school. That means that regardless of our well-meaning efforts to cultivate peaceful learning environments, our students have likely suffered while under our care. So, in addition to possible trauma students bring with them, they also might possibly/definitely experience it at school in the form of educational trauma.

In a recent Instagram post Colleen defined educational trauma in this way:

“There are so many kinds of educational trauma. Bullying from peers or teachers or administrators, shame or rewards driven teachers or school systems, inequitable curriculums, harsh punishments, [sic] ostracized from peers, lack of racial or cultural mirrors.”

What are the healing stories? This has been a recurring question of mine. One story is the story of how we might heal our own trauma and then work to ensure we do not reproduce trauma in our classrooms. Understanding how we heal from trauma is layered, but one layer is contemplating attachment theory and self-regulation.

In Queer Attachment: An Anti-Oppression Toolkit for Relational Healing, leah jo carnine and fizz perkal define attachment styles as “unconscious coping mechanisms, or relational adaptations, that we develop at a young age based on our early caregivers.” This means that healthy, safe relationships are preventative measures (Wilkinson) against harmful and traumatic experiences. I can understand this to mean support systems are life-preserving systems.

A support system is community care and community defense in action.

There are so many reasons a child might not get the opportunity to form a secure attachment through co-regulation, including issues around reproductive justice, gender and racial abuse, addiction, poverty, and access to resources (to name a few).

A secure attachment is a factor that determines our ability to handle the harm we might experience in a day. However, sometimes the amount of trauma creates toxicity for a person. This collective abuse is unsustainable on our nervous systems, which leads to unmanageable stress, health issues, and possible challenges with relationships and relational healing.

“A profound truth is that when we validate our students’ lived experiences, when we validate others and honor the fullness of their humanity, we open up the field of potentiality for healing and flourishing to occur. “

Colleen emphasized that in the context of our classrooms, teachers and students can participate in aggression and abuse that harms other students and teachers, which in turn creates educational trauma. Our job as Montessori educators is to ensure that our classrooms are validating, equitable, and focused on justice and liberation and that we work to build relationships in “cooperative and collectivized” ways. Colleen reminded me that because we can’t know the trauma our students experience (not really), we must instead commit to NOT creating more trauma.

A profound truth is that when we validate our students’ lived experiences, when we validate others and honor the fullness of their humanity, we open up the field of potentiality for healing and flourishing to occur.

“We all have unhealthy responses to our own trauma and must learn how to see it and heal it. This process is on-going and looks different for everyone, but to be in-service to our students means we must learn to know what is ours, so we can show up for the preciousness of their lives.”

Rooted in Dr. Montessori’s pedagogy is the call to action for the teacher to prepare their spirit for the work ahead of them. I always love how Pat Ludick frames this as a kind of spiritual surrendering (humbling) ‘yes.’ At this particular moment this call to action is about intentionally creating classrooms that center the lived experiences of all our students and specifically IBPOC students where the wholeness of their humanity is celebrated. Preparing the spirit also directs us to unlearn, to heal our own trauma responses and develop our relationships with our students and their families through a lens of equity, inclusion, and justice.

Colleen framed it as “adapting the adult.” I understood this to mean:

As educators are we seeking connection or compliance? Do we have different ideas of what this looks like depending on what our students look like or how they identify?
As an educator am I am taking the time to genuinely know my students, their families and their communities? Do I make my classroom accessible for all of them?
As an educator, am I interrogating my own practices?
Am I developing an anti-bias, anti-racist lens?
Am I working to create culturally sustaining pedagogies that affirm the students in my class?

We all have unhealthy responses to our own trauma and must learn how to see it and heal it. This process is on-going and looks different for everyone, but to be in-service to our students means we must learn to know what is ours, so we can show up for the preciousness of their lives.

It also means understanding that healing for folx with marginalized identities is an act of resistance. Resistance against a dominant culture that refuses to see them and value them. This must be honored and prioritized. And, it means knowing that moving from ally to co-conspirator includes doing your own healing.

Practices/Ways to co-regulate with adolescents

Consider implementing mindfulness practices in the classroom. Opportunities for everyone to notice, name and respond in healthy ways to feelings develops emotional intelligence. Being aware that allowing students access to their full range of emotion also means noticing when we (the adults) name an emotion ‘scary’ or ‘bad’ or ask students to tone it down. Does this happen more to girls or femme presenting students? Does this happen more to students of color, especially Black and Indigenous adolescents?
Actively honor the humanity and lived experience of your students. Adolescents experiment with the performance of identity often and with such beautiful creativity, but each iteration is real and valid. Their emotional landscape is likewise shifting and often experienced as confusion and theatrical bigness, but this, too, is valid and must be held with tenderness and grace. There are so SO many resources out here that can help us grow and learn, which means we do not need our students to account for their lives
Observe and communicate. What is the need behind the behavior? What relationship building/healing is needed? Are there more people who need to be involved in the support of the student?
Actively holding space for building relationships based on mutual trust, which must include reserving judgment and supporting them in verbalizing emotions and needs. Adolescents need to hear: “I see you,” “I want to understand. Help me understand.”
Teach and model coping mechanisms. Modeling being a whole, vulnerable, complex person with a range of emotional expressions is powerful. Students must see us be radically vulnerable and whole.
Incorporate skill building around social emotional learning. Educate yourself on the ways privilege and power impact students’ ability to fully express their identities, cultures, and personhood. Do your classroom practices prioritize cishetero White patriarchal values? Do you center European narratives of personhood, resilience, and healing? How do oppressive systems limit you in the expression of your identities? How might your classroom community create a healthy space for creative self-expression in all its forms?
Apologize when you have caused harm. This one is powerful for me. @mia.mingus writes extensively about this from a queer disabled perspective, and her work has guided me toward understanding the ways I do or not take accountability for my own actions and how quickly I flee to defensiveness rather than just listening to understand. How can we establish with our colleagues and students a culture of accountability, truth, and restorative practices that include apology and relational healing?

Colleen reminded me that Montessori originated from the work Dr. Montessori was doing with children who were experiencing/had experienced trauma. At the core of her work is the fundamental belief that all people deserve liberation. The core of our work then is to apply this to the world we live in now, the trauma being experienced now and the collective healing required to build a world that values all of us and liberates us all. The final invitation is to actively work to create a school culture that is trauma informed which means creating “a welcoming environment, addresses inequities, change teacher mindsets and help mitigate education trauma.”

Special thanks to Colleen Wilkinson for taking time to share her wisdom and expertise and for the invitation to deepen my own practice as I learn more about attachment, trauma, and healing.