Destroying Sanctuary

Abstract

This book describes what happens to human service delivery programs under the impact of unrelenting stress and multiple losses. Never perfect places of safety in the first place, many social services of every size, shape, and variety are collapsing under over thirty years of system fragmentation even while public costs have escalated dramatically. The result is that important places of refuge–of sanctuary–for the children, adults, and families who have been exposed to the greatest amount of adversity and trauma, are struggling to provide even the most minimally adequate services. We believe that at this point, our social service network is functioning as a trauma-organized system still largely unaware of the multiple ways in which adaptation to chronic stress has created a state of dysfunction that in many cases virtually prohibits the recovery of the individual clients who are the source of the underlying and original organizational missions, while damaging many of the people who work within it. Just as the encroachment of trauma into the life of an individual client is an insidious process that turns the past into a nightmare, the present into a repetitive cycle of re-enactment, and the future into a terminal illness, the impact of chronic strain on an organization is insidious. As seemingly logical reactions to difficult situations pile upon each other, no one is able to truly perceive the fundamentally skewed and post-traumatic basic assumptions upon which that logic is built. As an earthquake can cause the foundations of a building to become unstable, even while the building still stands, apparently intact, so too does chronic repetitive stress or sudden traumatic stress destabilize the cognitive and affective foundations of shared meaning that is necessary for a group to function and stay whole. The goal of this book is a practical one: to provide the beginnings of a coherent framework for organizational staff and leaders to more effectively provide trauma-informed care for their clients by becoming trauma-sensitive themselves. This means becoming sensitive to the ways in which all human beings and human systems are impacted by individual and collective exposure to overwhelming stress.

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