I have shown up perfectly zero percent of the time. One of my lifetime burdens is unlearning this desire for perfection. Perfect is not possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This past week I have done some digging into trauma-informed care and am looking forward tomorrow\u2019s day one of our Behavioral Health Summit<\/a> for Kody Russell, MSW, Executive Director of Kitsap Strong to talk to us about trauma-informed care. I\u2019ve read that the foundation, as outlined by our Federal agencies<\/a>, is that trauma is so widespread that one can assume a person\u2019s behavior is a coping strategy developed because of past trauma. Our current pandemic and economic repercussions are traumatic. Racism is traumatic. Poverty is traumatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I recommend watching Oprah Winfrey\u2019s 60 Minutes special on Treating Childhood Trauma<\/a>. She says one of the life-changing lessons she took away from the report is learning to ask, \u201cwhat happened to you.\u201d This simple question forced her to unlearn her previous assumptions. Trauma-informed care forces you to unlearn that a person is always behaving rationally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The process of unlearning is lifelong. One of the other aspects I am building into our work this year is cultural humility. This comes out of a need to move away from the idea of cultural competence<\/a> that implies a static state of mastery and toward the idea of a continuous process of self-questioning, like hiking up a mountain with no summit. So much of the process of cultural humility is aligned with work to be antiracist. For me, work to be antiracist<\/a> is like being a person who runs. I do not identify as a runner, but I am a person who periodically runs and as I run all I can think about is that running is hard. Sometimes I hurt myself. Sometimes I would rather never have to exercise again and just float around on a perpetual Zoom call like the people in Wall-E<\/a> (which feels a little too close to home at the moment). To be anti-racist one must continuously do the work. This is a process and the process can be hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n