Trauma-Informed Leadership: Fostering Psychological Safety with Dr. Sandra Bloom (#007)
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[00:00:00] Sandra, first of all, just want to welcome you. I'm, I'm here with Dr. Sandra Bloom. Sandra, really appreciate you and the work that you're doing and, , would love it if you could just start off by sharing a little bit about why it is that you love this work and how it is that you got into it. Especially as that relates to organizations and teams and people that are working in organizations.
[00:00:24] Well, I've always, , it's a pleasure to be with you, Trace. , and thanks for inviting me. I've always worked in, in teams because I started out my career as a As a secretary and then a mental health tech on an inpatient psychiatric unit, inner city, Philadelphia, um, at a, at a, a, um, medical school hospital, right?
[00:00:52] Uh, temple and. So I got to see from the time I was a teenager, really, I did that job [00:01:00] through college on summers, um, what it meant to work with a team of people and the whole issue of leadership and, democratic participatory processes and dealing with, you know, treating people with respect, even if they were at the moment out of their minds, so to speak, that that's where I really learned.
[00:01:23] In retrospect, I didn't know I was learning that then, but that's how that's how I really learned what teamwork really meant. And then as soon as I had the opportunity, once I got out of my residency, I had the opportunity to pull together. Some friends of mine and created a team and we created our own inpatient psychiatric unit and this goes back to 1980.
[00:01:54] So a long, long time ago and and times were very different than,[00:02:00] . And we created our own program in a, community, small community that was going from being rural to suburban, and a small general hospital, and we took a med surg unit, turned it into a psychiatric unit. A social worker, clinical nurse specialist, and the whole nursing staff, a psychodramatist, an art therapist, a movement therapist, and it was different days for psychiatry.
[00:02:29] And, open, voluntary, no locked doors, um, no seclusion and restraint, none of that. Uh, and about five years into that, we had this revelation as a result of individual patients that we were, we were missing some very important information, which was, , that they had been abused as children.
[00:02:56] We didn't know anything about that. We didn't know [00:03:00] anything about the connection between psychiatric problems and childhood abuse. , and each one of us had an individual patient that just, it was like an awakening. It was like, oh my god, how could I not see this? Because for me, it was somebody I'd been working with for five years.
[00:03:20] And I, I didn't know. I didn't, I didn't know. And, and, and once I knew what had happened to her, a whole lot of pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Everything started to make more sense. And we started reorienting our whole program, both Our inpatient program and our outpatient program to be look, now this is long before the ACEs study came out.
[00:03:48] So we're just kind of feeling our way around. Nobody was talking about this yet. Um, and I got involved with, cause I wanted to meet other people who were doing [00:04:00] this work. I got involved with the international society for traumatic stress studies and met a lot of people that were working with Vietnam veterans.
[00:04:11] And with, uh, victims of disasters and, uh, Holocaust survivors and. I started to see that our patients were part of this much bigger issue around suffering humanity, and all of the ways that human beings have made each other suffer throughout history. And At that point, , it got, it just, in my head, it just got, oh my god, everybody's missing this really, really big, big deal, , and that somehow we have to change the way our systems work.
[00:04:58] It can't just be my little [00:05:00] psychiatric unit, it has to be all psychiatric units, it has to be all of health care, because we were in a general hospital, it has to be child protection, it has to be domestic violence, it had all of this has to change, has to be informed by what we're learning about the impact of trauma in its complexity. So I got more and more involved with other kinds of organizations. , and people doing work in, in other domains, and it became clear to me that, and I, and I came to this work from a systems perspective, because when I learned psychiatry, that's what we learned. We, the, the major school of psychiatric thought.
[00:05:50] When I was learning was social psychiatry. So, and community mental health, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't [00:06:00] biological psychiatry yet. And it wasn't behaviorism yet. It was really a much wider point of view. And so it just seemed a natural movement for me into trying to figure out how do you, how do you get this into wider systems so that everyone, becomes trauma informed.
[00:06:24] It became called trauma informed. , but I think of it as wider than that. Really not only trauma informed, which is a beginning, but how do we get organizations and systems to become trauma responsive and really sensitive to the issues and able to effectively help people to heal? Because that's what we saw, what we saw in our individual unit.
[00:06:47] Was that when we changed and we were really focusing on, , trauma and adversity, people got better people who hadn't [00:07:00] gotten better before with whatever it was, we were doing did get better, right? Remarkably better. , when, when we changed our approach. And so it, it was like, people don't have to stay in the place where they're at.
[00:07:18] And this, this whole issue of diagnosis and chronic mental illness and all of that was just, uh, started to question pretty much everything that I had learned. One of the things that I, I hear you saying about we had changed and then that change kind of reminds me of something that I've heard you talk about before, which, which I also talk about in my work too, which is that in order to do our work, we need to actually do our work.
[00:07:44] In other words, we've got to do the work inside. And I've heard you refer to this, that trauma informed. education has got to kind of start with you. And so I'm curious what you mean by that, and if you could say a little bit more about that. [00:08:00] Well, we know now, right, that, , pretty much everyone in, , our cultures, have experienced childhood adversity.
[00:08:10] It's pretty hard not to in, in the cultures we live within. And because this has been going on in Western culture for thousands of years, there's like no family that hasn't been impacted by terribly traumatic things. , and it's unlikely that much of that has ever been processed along the way. So it means that we have to understand This knowledge from our own personal point of view, know about our own history, look at our own behavior, the things in our life that we feel is failures or haven't worked right, or things you're [00:09:00] guilty about, or things you're angry about from the past.
[00:09:04] Try to know as much as you can about your own experience. Family history and how that may have impacted you and, , start to do some healing work as an individual. I think for many people it's therapy. Right. That's really what the therapeutic process when it goes well. , that's what happens, but a lot of not everybody can can afford to do that or has access to actual therapy.
[00:09:34] So, , there are different ways to do that. So, journaling. Is, is a really good way to help yourself start to integrate the different parts of yourself. Cause what, what trauma does, as you know, is that it fragments us, it fragments, like it shatters us into all different pieces and. We're [00:10:00] meant to be whole.
[00:10:02] We're meant to have all of that, those pieces of ourselves integrated. And so we need methods that are just inherent in Our cultures that help us to regularly heal from those shattering kinds of splinters that have impacted all of us. Inevitably, it just there. I, I don't probably most anybody has ever met anybody who they would think of is really whole.
[00:10:38] I don't think we know what that looks like trace. I don't think so either. I don't think we, I don't think we have any real idea and I think we need to be listening to, for me, most recently, it's been really kind of trying to learn more about Native American [00:11:00] culture, because I think before the West came here, I think there was, there was a lot of wisdom.
[00:11:11] That's been lost and yeah, thank you for that. I want to double click on that a little bit because in Canadian culture, we have had, um, some big initiatives across the country that have attempted or are attempting to benefit from that ancient wisdom. That's been there. And there's a huge amount of work that needs to happen for healing to happen there as well, because in both of our countries, the United States and Canada, of course, were a colonized, um, society.
[00:11:44] And so we still are living in the, the consequences of that. And I know in healthcare, where in the organizations that are across the country, there is this, , real Hope that we can somehow decolonize our [00:12:00] systems. And so I'm curious what your experience is with that or what you think about the idea of decolonizing a system and how that might be possible through a trauma informed lens.
[00:12:13] Yeah, I wouldn't say I've had experience trace. I wouldn't claim that. , I think it begins just like learning about trauma begins with, uh, learning and I'm, and I'm, I'm very much still in the, in the learning phase. Um, um, I, I read a really interesting, um, book who's, you know, the title will come to my mind.
[00:12:39] Um, um, And it was about how, when the Jesuit missionaries came over to Canada, to convert the, the native people here, , [00:13:00] they learned to speak the language of the native people and. The native people learn to speak, for you guys, French, right? It was because it was on that end of Canada. And, they wrote back to Europe, these detailed conversations that they had with indigenous folks about What all different kinds of things, but including, , some really severe critiques of European culture that the Jesuits disagreed with.
[00:13:41] So the, so the native people thought it was really bizarre that there was this authoritarian structure and that men were in charge of everything and that. , there could be anybody that could go hungry, that they would have people who, , would be [00:14:00] starving and not be taken care of.
[00:14:02] They just thought, they thought that the Europeans were really uncivilized. And, and that, that knowledge became best sellers in Europe. So people like, uh, Voltaire. And, um, John Locke, , people like that read these, the stuff that came back over from French, the French Canadians. And it's thought that that had a profound impact on the Enlightenment, where did the, where did the ideas of freedom come from?
[00:14:42] That didn't come from European culture. There was no sense of freedom, equality, none of that was, it was part of, um, Western culture, quite the opposite, right? , and then I read another book called, [00:15:00] um, The Weirdest People in the World. And Uh, that's by a guy named Joseph Henrich.
[00:15:08] The other one is, is, the other one's by David Graeber, and I, and it's got everything in the title, and I just can't picture the whole title. The Weirdest People in the World, he uses weird as an acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. And he traces how that developed in Western culture.
[00:15:34] And it's pretty staggering when you, when I read it, I went, Oh my God, because he doesn't say this explicitly, but I, my interpretation of what he wrote was that way, way back when the Romans first came over to [00:16:00] England and Europe, that all of our ancestors, if you're from, if you have European ancestors, all of them lived in tribes.
[00:16:12] And so we all came from tribal cultures. And then he details, point by point, how the Romans and then the Roman Catholic Church destroyed all of the tribal cultures. And I read this and I went. Oh, that's exactly what we did. Traumatic reenactment is exactly what we did when we came to this continent. And so I think we need a deep, a deep understanding.
[00:16:44] If we're going to do this thing you're, they're calling decolonization, right? Then we've got to do a deep dive into our own history, um, not just that we have to, we need to understand what [00:17:00] Native American and Native Canadian culture once was, because it's been so, it's been so undone by what's been done in the last few centuries, right?
[00:17:12] And then we need to look at where we come from. , and,, what has happened, the, the good and the bad, right, a lot of the positive outcome, but also the really negative traumatic outcome , of our long history that goes way back.
[00:17:29] That's a long time, that's many generations back. Sandra, one of the things I love about your work is just how I mean, systemic it is and how global your thinking is. And I want to kind of go back to what you were saying about doing one's own historical deep dive. , I wonder, you know, the first time I've ever heard anybody else use the word fragmentation and description of trauma, uh, it's, it's been you.
[00:17:59] And [00:18:00] I, I use that word really intentionally because for me, when I, Look at my own history and my experience of trauma. Um, I kind of lean into some of the definitions like Peter Levine has got where, you know, trauma is energy in the system that has been fragmented off and encapsulated in a moment in time.
[00:18:20] And that that is always meant as sort of a defensive survival skills so that. At some point when the system feels safe enough again, then that coalesces back into the system and becomes what it's meant to be, which is energy for life and for thriving and to be in the world. And so I'm curious about what your thoughts are about that.
[00:18:43] And from your perspective, what's really happening there when that happens? When people heal, when people come back together. Is that fragmentation and encapsulation, that's been kind of my own definition of it. What are your thoughts about like what's happening with trauma? Is it [00:19:00] energy that is kind of encapsulated for a time?
[00:19:03] From your perspective, what would you, how would you define that? And then the process of it actually coalescing back to um, what happens from your perspective then? I Think the moment of
[00:19:19] Traumatic experiences is by definition, so dangerous, either physically dangerous and or psychologically dangerous that it is. I think the idea of it being encapsulated and separated, . and wordless is, , it's really useful. , and I think it's useful , for me, anyhow, I found it useful to recognize that we have two very different hemispheres of our brain.
[00:19:50] And they, they process information in very different ways. So our left Hemisphere is, and this is the work, lots of work of a lot of [00:20:00] people. Um, but, uh, the guy who's written extensively about this is a guy named Ian McGilchrist. He's from Scotland. That's amazing work. , so our left hemisphere, for most of us, it's our left hemisphere specializes in language, but our right hemisphere is incredibly interesting.
[00:20:20] Because we, we don't really understand all that much about the way the right hemisphere works, but it is. Not really very verbal, and it's our earlier, evolutionarily, it's the earlier part of our brain, so language develops later in time, and they're meant to be, I suspect, fully integrated. But trauma fragments them so that , the [00:21:00] traumatic experience, I think, is kind of held, um, in the non dominant hemisphere, the non verbal hemisphere.
[00:21:11] And that's why it's so hard for people to talk about it, to remember it, because we, we remember things with words, um, through language, right? So if you don't have language for an experience, then you can't really remember it. And, and so there, that's the divide in, in therapy. How can I work with somebody every week for years and not know anything about what had really happened to her as a child?
[00:21:40] Well, there were no words for it. She was profoundly fragmented. So, I think that that's really important to understand, and I think it's really interesting because it leads them to, wow, well then, what do we [00:22:00] do to help people to heal? How do we, how do you access? Without words. What does that look like?
[00:22:09] Well, that's where creative therapies becomes really important it's things like EMDR. Why does that work? Well, because it's accessing another way of being we use psychodrama. We use art therapy. We use movement therapy because I could say to my psychodramatist, look, I'm getting nowhere with this person.
[00:22:32] I have no idea what's going on with her. Can you do some work with her? My psychodramatist would go. Sure. I can. And the person would come back to me after psychodrama and go, Oh, my God, I can't believe what I now understand, you know, um, So, you know, I think we have to think in a different way. If we, if you, if we understand things in a different way, Alan, sure, has, has done a lot around the right left hemisphere issue as [00:23:00] well, which I think is really good.
[00:23:02] Um, that fragmentation, the only way we can become whole is to get all those pieces is, I think, Humpty Dumpty. means a whole lot more than we ever thought about. I think all the, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Gumpty together again. Um, yeah, no, the king's horses and the king's men won't do that, but there are ways that people can, , become whole again.
[00:23:32] And, and I think we're just, In the very early days of figuring out what those ways are and having them be just part of routine daily life, which is what needs to happen. So, one of the things that I've noticed in my work is that there, there is a phenomenon that shows up when people feel genuinely safe.
[00:23:56] And I'm talking about psychologically safe, [00:24:00] neurobiologically safe. And that phenomenon is that those fragments begin to manifest themselves in real time in that space. And so emotions will begin to surprise even the person that are expressed, that is expressing them. And so there's this natural. What I see is a bit of a natural healing process that wants to become, um, engaged that the system of the, this human energy system called our body is actually already acquainted with, maybe much better than we are.
[00:24:32] And so I'm curious, what's your experience with creating safe spaces like that? And how can we in day to day life, especially in an organization that's incredibly busy, , incorporate and integrate. Practices that create those kinds of environments where we can process these fragments. Yeah, that's a really important question.
[00:24:54] Right? Um, well, I think that it's all about [00:25:00] safety and it's perplexing. I've been writing about the importance of safe spaces for, you know. Over 30 years, and we just keep, it just be, the environments become less and less and less safe,, and it's really disturbing, but it's, I guess what keeps me going as well, because you keep shouting into the universe, we have to get safe.
[00:25:29] It's not okay. , not to be safe because exactly what you put your finger on. Healing cannot occur if people are hyper aroused and scared. And so if you want to have an effective organization, then you as a leader, you have to create. a safe organizational culture. And that means that every individual in the culture has to take [00:26:00] responsibility for their own safety plan.
[00:26:02] I have to have a safety plan. , And it has to include how they're going to manage emotions, , when, when they get riled up and the organization has to have conflict management. Abilities it's human beings, we're going to get into conflicts.
[00:26:22] So if you want an organization to function well, then people have to feel that they are safe with each other when that happens, just as you put your finger on when people feel safe, things will emerge because I think there is a drive. Towards wholeness, towards healing, towards, you know, it's in our bodies, our bodies.
[00:26:50] When you take away whatever stresses our bodies are under, or if you, if you [00:27:00] experience an injury, say you, , sprain your ankle. Well, for a while. You nurse your ankle, you stay off it, you put a nice bandage on it, you put some ice on it, you take some anti inflammatories, you baby it for a while, while the healing process begins, and then you gotta start getting back on your ankle again, or you're gonna have a frozen ankle, and you do it gradually, a little bit at a time, so that psychological healing isn't a whole lot I don't think than what we know to do with physical injuries, which is, you know, you do exactly what I just described.
[00:27:43] And all of this, all of the things that people do to really mess up their lives. It comes down to having been injured, and that's, that's one of those [00:28:00] big shifts that our cultures need to make, is it's not about sickness or badness, it's about injury, and the injuries can be very extensive. They can be multi generational, you know, you can, you can define it in all, in a very broad way, but it's all about injury and, and we all know, we all know something about how to mend from physical injuries, but we're really pretty naive.
[00:28:32] And often self destructive when it comes to how do you heal psychological injuries? Well, I think even to like for an organization to place that as a prioritized goal is we're still a long ways from even understanding how to do that because in healthcare organizations, for instance, there's this constant culture of.
[00:28:55] urgency, high pressure, high stress, as well as traumatizing events [00:29:00] and cumulative stress over time that, that both creates new issues in the moment, as well as triggers anything that we're carrying to. And then we ignore all of that phenomenon and say, okay, show up, do your job, do it better, do it faster.
[00:29:17] Like, how do we actually create an environment in a place like that with punitive processes? With punitive, punishing policies, like it's, and it's so counter what you're talking about, like, what, what's been your experience with those things? Yeah, it's really counter to what I'm talking about. It is.
[00:29:40] Exactly. It's completely counter and it's because the, the underlying paradigm for Western culture. Has not shifted. So we're, we're pretending that somehow trauma [00:30:00] is this individual thing and, uh, everybody's okay if they just go on doing their job the way it is. But everything needs to change the health and health care, right?
[00:30:18] Health care are the mothers, right? They, they're the caregivers, the doctors, the nurses, the, the, um, direct care staff, all the people that are there. To help people to heal or to heal as much as they can or sometimes to to die. Mm-Hmm. . Right. Whatever it is, it's caregiving. And we are really abusive culturally to our caregivers.
[00:30:59] Mm-Hmm. . [00:31:00] Um, as long as the only thing that matters. is money. Well, then there's a real conflict in, um, how we prioritize what we do about caregiving. If we want our caregivers to be good caregivers, then just like we want our parents to be good parents. Well, then you can't go on abusing them. It means they have to be well, provided for financially.
[00:31:42] It means they can't be overly stressed. , if they do encounter traumatic events or very stressful events, then they need to be able to have time to recover. And the environment, which in, within which recovery is possible, [00:32:00] none of that is going on in caregiving on this side of the border. I don't know about Canada, but I don't, I expect it's not all that different.
[00:32:12] , it's, it's exactly the same. And there's many, many people who are. Attempting to do incredibly good work inside of a system that is still in that liminal space between two places, right? Between that punitive hierarchical system that isn't working and is imploding all over the world.
[00:32:33] Exactly. And something new that's emerging. And one of the initiatives that I've seen that's been really interesting to watch, from my perspective, is the, , the birth of trauma informed care as it comes into management, leadership, and organizational development. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are on trauma informed approaches to leadership and management and what you think about that.
[00:32:57] I think They're critical. And I [00:33:00] think for the most part, that's not happening. I think that, , the notion of what trauma informed really means is being diluted so that it becomes just a clinical issue. Oh, we just send the clinicians to a couple hours training and then we're trauma informed as an organization, right?
[00:33:21] No. No. , And, and that's why, you know, with the program I've created,
[00:33:28] , which is called creating presence. We divided it into tracks for specifically that reason. So there's a clinical track, there's a direct service track, there's an indirect service track, and there's a leadership track. And the leadership track includes the Board of Trustees.
[00:33:48] So, if they're not on board, Then nothing, nothing's going to work unless your leadership is, is truly trauma informed, unless they've [00:34:00] made that shift in their mental awareness and mental consciousness, then it'll just go on being just the way it's been, the problems will not be addressed.
[00:34:11] I think it's so powerful to have a systemic approach to creating presence or to being present. , one of the things that really bothers me about trauma informed in the way that we're expressing it right now is that I often think that trauma informed can actually be trauma ignored because what ends up happening is , , we're equipping people to identify the signals of trauma, but then we're not equipping them in any way to create a safe space for that to be processed.
[00:34:40] And so what ends up happening is we just all go around afraid of re traumatization, triggering people, , because man, I mean, we don't want to do that work here. This is where we work. And at the same time, I'm thinking, well, where are we going to do it if we don't do it here?
[00:34:57] Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. [00:35:00] You hear a lot about, oh, well, I can't talk about that because I might trigger somebody. Well, if somebody gets triggered and they have a safety plan, then they have some way to deal with their emotional arousal that is not destructive to themselves or others, but that would have to be embedded in the organizational skill set.
[00:35:25] Right? You'd have to know how to do that. You have to know, you have to learn, because safety, at the level we're talking about it. Now, when I talk about safety, I mean, physical, psychological, social, moral, and cultural safety. So I have a really wide definition of what I mean by safety. And to create a safe organization, there have to be some skills built in.
[00:35:53] Safety plan being One of them, that's every individual's responsibility. But then even just you want [00:36:00] people in every level of leadership who can know how to start a meeting and create a safe space before the people in the meeting are able to calm down enough to use their heads. So, , I mean, there are really simple things that people can learn.
[00:36:21] But they have to learn it because it's not natural in our systems to really be concerned whether we have safe organizational cultures. It just, it's, it's not been a part of it. And , so, yes, what you're talking about. So, instead of actually creating safety. Which takes effort which takes universal knowledge.
[00:36:45] Everybody's got to get on the same page. , Instead go. I learned that people get triggered and I don't want to be so we're not going to talk about it. So, we'll just ignore it and pretend it isn't there. , and because it's too much, we can't do this in [00:37:00] the workplace. I can't have people, I can't have people thinking that they get therapy in the workplace.
[00:37:05] That's not what the workplace is for. Are you sure? Sure. That's not what it's worth. It might just be, it might just be, it might be the only place, um, you know, where we can do. And, and importantly, we may not be able to do effective work unless it has happened. Look, they, they, the surgeon general here, right?
[00:37:31] Came out with a, a report. I'm not, I'm not a numbers person, so I won't remember the numbers, but, yeah. Most people in the workplace were miserable. They didn't like their jobs. They wanted to make a change. They, you know, um, no surprise there, of course. So why, why, why, why are people so Unhappy at work? Well, [00:38:00] I think it's pretty obvious why it's not a safe place to be.
[00:38:03] Mm-Hmm. and I get, I teach, you know, at at, at Drexel in the School of Public Health. So I have the opportunity to engage with, , graduate students and or getting a degree in public health and undergraduates. But at the university, I've, I've 42 of them right now. And, uh, I get to hear a lot about their workplace experiences and it's not a pretty picture.
[00:38:34] Um, and these are kids, you know, they're just learning the ropes. So what they're exposed to, they're going to carry into their next setting. And the, the stuff I'm teaching them about trauma, about I have them create a safety plan, I have them create a wellness plan, um, I, I have them do all kinds of skills, um, in order for [00:39:00] them to be able to carry them wherever they go.
[00:39:03] It's all brand new. They've never been in anywhere where any of this gets talked about. I know, and I first, I haven't been working in healthcare that long. I come from more of a corporate background, but over the last eight or nine years, I've transitioned into healthcare. And I, I remember just how shocked I was to hear a nurse say, Oh yeah, you know what happens to our new graduates?
[00:39:26] I said, no, what? Well, we, we actually nurses eat their young. And I was like, what are you talking about? Eat their young. And so she described that graduates come onto a floor and they're incredibly, , dysregulated is the word I would use. And they're put through this punishing process of having to pick up everything at a speed that they're just not even ready to process at.
[00:39:52] And then the, the older or more experienced nurses oftentimes will sort of. Take them through this [00:40:00] gauntlet of, , bullying, harassment, , judgment, all of that stuff. And as I listen to that, , you know, there's this sense of like wanting to make, people oftentimes want to make somebody bad or good in that whole thing.
[00:40:13] But what's really going on is both of those people are having a trauma response in their own way. And rather than categorizing them, what do we need to do to create a space like you're describing, that feels safe enough. For us to get real with each other and really start to work in a different way. And that's, that's what I'm hoping will happen.
[00:40:33] And as you're sharing about your work, I'd love to hear a bit more about the practical way, , that you think that that happens. And I know you've created programs, presence sanctuary, and even you've shared about your, , approach with self as well. And so I'm curious, like, you know, we don't have enough.
[00:40:51] Clinical psychologists or counselors to process all the trauma that there is. So how do we create and embed this [00:41:00] into the culture? Well, that's why we designed this program, right? Cause it can be online and it can, if an organization starts doing it, it's going to take them 18 months.
[00:41:15] And We want it to take a long time because we want them to have meaningful conversations with each other about what it means. So self is one of the tools that we give them and it stands. It came out of our work with with our patients. . it became evident that there were, there were four kind of compass points.
[00:41:39] We, we, I picture it as a compass and the four points are safety, emotions, loss, and future. So we use that as a compass to get through any of the difficult points in life. What do I have to do to be safe? [00:42:00] In order to be safe. What kind of emotions am I having and what do I have to manage? How am I going to do that?
[00:42:09] What am I going to have to give up? What have I already lost? And what am I going to have to give up in order to change, to make a change? And why change? What's the future I want to get to? And then you just keep going around in a circle. And you can start anywhere for like a, in a, a meeting in an organization.
[00:42:32] Faced with a problem. So I'd probably start with the with the future. So, okay, . We've got to figure out how we're going to solve this problem. What if we solve it? What does the future look like? What does it look like? If we, if we fix this problem, people talk, come to terms with what the future they want it to be.
[00:42:57] And then what are we going to have to give up in [00:43:00] order to get there? And what's that make us feel? So we gotta, what do we have to do to get safe enough to be able to get through those feelings, get through that loss, and get to that future. I mean, it's simple. It's so simple. But when you actually use it, it embraces enormous complexity.
[00:43:21] It's really, really helpful. I teach my students that. I teach them a presence meeting, which is how to start a meeting, to just get, go around the circle. How are you doing? Um, what do you, what do you feel appreciative for? You know, some questions, I'm just key questions to start a meeting, giving everybody a chance to relax because everybody comes into whatever meeting it is in the world we live in.
[00:43:51] People are coming in stressed. So they're coming in hyper aroused. So their biology is their cortisol. Right? [00:44:00] So you have to start them, even if it takes a few minutes. Yes, it's going to take a few minutes. You got to settle everybody down so they can use their, they can cognitively think. Everybody is individually responsible for the safety plan.
[00:44:16] Everybody's individually responsible for their own wellness plan. What can they do to help themselves to heal and stay healthy? What am I willing to commit to for my own well being? And then you share them with each other, so that if I work with you, and I see you, um, You know, sitting at your desk when you said at lunchtime, you were going to go take a walk, then I can say to you, let's go take a walk.
[00:44:48] , because it's part of your wellness plan, right? I mean, there are lots of things that can be embedded and not, not just not interfere with the work, but actually [00:45:00] Help people be more efficient and more effective, whatever their job is, but it takes a shift in understanding what we're dealing with, that we are dealing with massively stressed and previously traumatized people.
[00:45:19] And that's, we know that from all the research. There's just no, you just look at the ACES data and most people in any workplace are going to have a history of exposure to childhood adversity that in all likelihood is continuing to impact their performance. That's just a given and leaders don't recognize that they don't understand that they don't understand how it's costing them a whole lot of money not to take care of their organizational culture.
[00:45:56] Thank you so much for that. , Sandra, how can people get a [00:46:00] hold of you or what's the work that you would love for people to engage with that you're doing? Well, , CreatingPresence. net that's where you can access what, what presence is about for the organization. And then, , Sandra bloom dot com is my website with all my publications that, that are listed there.
[00:46:25] Or you can just download 'em. So I've written a lot. Trace, um, . I know. I just threw it all. I just, you sent me homework for this interview and I was like, oh my gosh, I don't know that I can get all this read. It was so great. Oh my God. You didn't, I didn't expect you to, you just asked. So. I'll deliver. Um, well, you, you know, the other person I think of when I think of you too, is Stephen Porges is also this prolific writer.
[00:46:53] I mean, I don't know if the two of you know each other, but I know you don't because you both should actually talk [00:47:00] to each other. So yeah, so sanderbloom. com. And, creating presence. net, creating presence. net. Thank you so much. You know, I just love your presence and I really appreciate your generosity, Sandra.
[00:47:14] It's so beautiful to be here with you. I feel really enriched from this conversation. Thank you. Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity, Trace. It's really fun to spend some time with you and, and have a wonderful conversation. Thank you. Yeah.
