Navigating lived/living experience in professional practice

This work gave me an opportunity to see my own experiences differently, and another shard of shame came loose

– Navigating lived/living experience in professional practice

As a social worker and trauma-informed practice consultant I have always privately considered my “unwanted inheritance” of intergenerational trauma and childhood family violence to be liabilities. These experiences did not meet my imagined standards of legitimacy to qualify me as a victim or survivor. My family, I thought, suffered more intensely than I. The faces of my relatives who had systematically exploited girls and women were only known to me via stories and old photo albums. The family violence that punctuated my childhood was perpetrated by my grandfather, not a parent or a partner, so surely is not as bad?

I can now see how I silenced, minimised and ultimately dismissed these experiences. In my early years I witnessed close family members retreating into their own unresponsive silence when the subject of these traumas was broached. I was encouraged into silence myself by the same, loving relatives seeking to protect me from the anger and violence that drawing my grandfather’s attention would bring. In a horrific warping of logic, the abuse he dished out to those who stepped in to protect me, a child, was my fault because I had made myself visible.

It should be no surprise that my mother and I trained to intervene in such situations- helping others where we could not help ourselves. This is a well-trodden path for victim/survivors of violence and exploitation, for those who have found themselves dependant on alcohol or other drugs, and for those navigating mental health issues, be it their own, or other people’s.

My training did not mention any of this at all. It seemed to assume that I was a clean slate, freshly prepared for professional practice and free from the marks of earlier experiences, ready to be useful and unbothered by my own adversity. My studies failed to prepare me for how my deeply entrenched patterns of survival would play out in my work. It is only now, a full 25 years since I graduated, that I realise my training also failed to appreciate and draw upon the insights and skills that surviving gave me.

Through regular, good quality clinical supervision, as well as schema therapy and Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing I became aware of how my lived/living experiences can interact with my work. I began recognising when I overidentified with clients’ situations, or sought to appease and calm aggressors. My overwhelming sense of responsibility for the safety of others began to make sense, and no longer felt like an uncontrollable, anxious compulsion. I no longer saw my experiences as a “burnout risk” to be managed, nor their activation as an inability to cope.

I admit to a moment of surprise when my ThinkWell colleagues asked me to lead the development and facilitation of a workshop for supervisors of new graduates who have lived/living experiences. That request was the first time my own experiences were sought out and regarded as an asset. I felt that my colleagues were communicating that I have a set of hard-won skills and insights that would be of use in our shared work, and to others.

This opened the door to me reading widely and thinking deeply about the different ways lived/living experience exists in our work as human services professionals. As someone always fascinated by the origins of ideas, I learnt that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders cultures have long considered experiences of culture and community to be equal with, and in some ways superior to, formal learning. I realised that the elevation of ignored, oppressed and marginalised voices created the foundation for civil rights movements, peer support and what we now think of consumer led program design and delivery.

With the support of my colleagues Ariane and Clare I developed and delivered the workshop. I spoke with the participants about the likelihood of lived/living experience being present in the group, and my own evolving professional practice as a survivor of intergenerational trauma and family violence.

Overwhelmingly, the supervisors participating in the workshop understood the prevalence of such experiences. However, they identified an absence of proactive processes in their settings to effectively respond to and utilise these.

Doing this work gave me an opportunity to see my own experiences differently, and another shard of shame came loose. We hope to make a similarly small, but also impactful contribution to others navigating these complicated intersections of personal and professional life.