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Our understanding of the impact of
trauma alters our fundamental explanations for human dysfunction.
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At present, there are basically three
widely accepted reasons for why people do deviant things: the person is
“sick”, the person is “bad”, or the person is both “sick and bad”.
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Trauma theory implies that it is far
more useful to assume that a person has been “injured”.
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The concept of sickness, so much a part
of the traditional medical model, long criticized by practitioners of the
therapeutic community, implies that the etiology of the problem lies within
the sufferer, unconnected in any meaningful way with the outside world. The
notion of badness remains connected to the notion of original sin.
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Sickness implies a basic and intrinsic
weakness, malfunction or defect that medical science can hope to stabilize if
not cure. Badness also implies a basic defect for which there is little hope
that anyone can correct, although we can and should punish it.
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Sickness holds an expectation of
passivity on the part of the sufferer who must wait patiently for the expert
physician and his various helpers to administer diverse devices, remedies, and
cures before his suffering can be relieved. Badness requires self- corrective
action that is totally on the part of the bad person, even in the face of
punishment.
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Sickness also denies both personal and
social accountability for the course of the sickness. The person can do
little to help him/herself, nor can the society since the cause is within the
individual. Meanwhile, the bad person is wholly responsible for their deviant
actions and should simply stop the misbehavior regardless of its origin or
accept the consequences.
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Injury, on the other hand implies an
etiology that is obvious or at least discoverable, and connects the sufferer
to the social environment that allowed or failed to prevent the injury.
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An injury model implies a process of
recovery and rehabilitation, even if the sufferer must learn how to cope with
a semi-permanent or even permanent disability.
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Injury requires the active
participation of the sufferer in the process of recovery and puts helpers more
in the role of consultants and catalyzing agents of change than healers. And injury requires the assumption of
both individual responsibility on the part of the sufferer and social
responsibility on the part of the larger social group.
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The individual must look at the ways he
or she contributed to the injury in order to ensure proper risk management in
the future, and must take whatever steps are necessary to ensure recovery and
future risk prevention.
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The larger social group – represented
by family, school, workplace, or the community as a whole - must come to
terms with the role the society played in failing to prevent the injury as
well as providing the necessary means and contexts within which individual
healing can occur.
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Mental Models |
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Sanctuary Model of Organizational Change |
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Components of the Sanctuary Model |
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Social Legacy of Trauma |
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Trauma Theory |
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Seven
Commitments of Sanctuary |
