Last week I attended an all day training session with colleagues on trauma-informed practice, run by Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA).
As some readers will know, for a little over three years I have been involved in the National Find & Connect Web Resource Project, a large scale collaboration between archivists, historians, organisations and the community to help Forgotten Australians, Former Child Migrants and others with an interest in the history and records of out-of-home ‘care’ in Australia. Context Junky readers may also remember a previous post – Parallel histories, overwhelming histories – where I briefly touched on the cumulative effect of working with this type of subject matter and the emotions it can bring to the surface.
The training had more than one purpose: to allow us to better understand the experiences of people who have experienced trauma, particularly as children, and the impact of some of those experiences; to provide guidance on how projects like the Find & Connect web resource could be further adapted to meet the needs of our primary audience; and to assist us in better understanding how such work can affect us as individuals.
One area discussed during the training was the idea of ‘complex trauma’. From a recent article in The Conversation by John McAloon:
People react to threat or danger with a system comprised of biological, cognitive and behavioural responses. The biological responses involve a cascade of interdependent neurochemical changes in different parts of the brain and body. These, in turn, influence thinking and behaviour.
Normally, following the perception of threat or danger, the body’s neurochemistry returns back to normal. In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the neurochemical responses outlive the original threat and inhibit the system’s ability to return to normal.
In people with complex trauma, research suggests that repeated exposure to traumatic events early in development not only inhibits the neural system’s ability to return to normal but changes the system to appear like one that is always anticipating or responding to trauma.
For this reason, people who have experienced complex trauma may display symptoms including poor concentration, poor attention and poor decision-making and judgement. They may also appear highly reactive and respond to threat even if it is not present. Their behaviour may be aggressive in response, or they may take flight or simply freeze.
In this way, complex trauma translates into a range of social, emotional, behavioural and interpersonal difficulties that can be life-long. The associated personal, social and economic costs are high.[1]
Since then, I’ve been thinking: what should archives and archivists be doing to better support people who have experienced such trauma? Many in our profession are used to dealing with researchers, academics, family historians – people described snootily by some as the ‘educated public’. But if our services and access regimes are tailored to people like this, are they suited to others who may desperately need access to archival records for a whole variety of other reasons? What of people who have been discriminated against, marginalised, traumatised or abused? What of Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, or refugees who have been through the detention system, or people traumatised by war and conflict, or those whose human rights have been violated?
A hypothetical example created from an amalgam of repositories I’ve visited:
Someone has heard a repository holds records that might relate to their experiences as a child. They arrive at the repository and walk into a large, imposing institution. They are unsure where to go so they approach a desk to talk to some who might be able to help. The desk is raised, so the person they are talking to is looking down on them. Their manner is short and a little distracted. The visitor tries to walk through the entrance indicated by the staff member behind the information desk, but a uniformed security guard tells them their bag is too big and they have to put it in a locker.
Eventually, their bag locked away, the person makes it through the entrance and into a huge space of stone and wood, lined with books. They feel dwarfed. It’s like entering a church, or a court. There is very little sound other than the rustling of papers and a few whispers. The person navigates their way through and reaches a door labelled ‘Archives Reading Room’. They push, but the door doesn’t open. Looking round they see a bell and press it. Someone comes to the door and the person tells them why they are here.
On finding out they don’t have an appointment, the staff member tells them the records aren’t kept on site so they will have to order records and come back another time. The visitor explains they have come more than 100 kilometres to be here, getting angry. Taken aback, the staff member snaps at them, telling them they can’t help, and closes the door.
Regular visitors to the archives are used to navigating these types of physical spaces and institutional protocols, with all their inherent frustrations; but many people are not, and the rigid and formalised nature of the experience could easily be very off-putting, prompting the reactions of aggression, flight or freezing noted above.
The opposite is also true. In our training session we discussed the idea that positive experiences can be therapeutic, helping to build connection with others and with knowledge about one’s past. Though people suffering complex trauma may start on the defensive, assuming they will be ill-treated by a large, initially imposing institution, if they are welcomed and treated sensitively and with respect they may be able to overcome their initial doubts.
Adele Chynoweth recently wrote about the need for a whole-of-museum approach to survivors of trauma. She writes:
When such stakeholders encounter museum staff who listen empathetically to their painful experiences, then the site where this understanding happens, this listening place, may take on an appealing resonance for these visitors. No longer, then, is the museum only the site that may satisfy periodic bouts of curiosity for middle-class, educated, and “healthy” visitors; it may also be deemed a refuge from a mainstream culture that may ordinarily treat the trauma survivor as a stranger.[2]
Many archives have a similar potential to become ‘listening places,’ places where trauma survivors are not only treated empathetically, but where they are guided and supported through the process of discovering and accessing evidence. And that evidence is not just ‘research’, it can be the key to their identity, prompt re-connection with lost family members, confirm doubted memories of the past, or provide the sought-after evidence required to seek justice.
Archivists need to be aware of this, and archives need to provide training and support to their staff wherever possible. Staff need to be informed about the effects of trauma, and understand that the confronting behaviour of some users may be the result of the traumatic events which inspired those users to visit the archives in the first place. Rather than reacting to that behaviour, we need to understand the needs of the person.
Most of all, our profession needs to talk about how we can provide better, more welcoming spaces for different types of users. We need to talk about what trauma-informed practice might look like in our institutions, and change some of what we do to better meet the needs of the community. We need to have scope within our professional associations and educational organisations to train and support archivists working with trauma affected users.
Helping people seeking records and evidence can be a vital part in the healing process, and archivists have a vital role to play.
[1] John McAloon, ‘Complex trauma: how abuse and neglect can have life-long effects,’ The Conversation website. http://theconversation.com/complex-trauma-how-abuse-and-neglect-can-have-life-long-effects-32329 (accessed 4 November 2014).
[2] Adele Chynoweth, ‘”Your Rhonda Is Downstairs!” The Need for a Whole-of-Museum Approach to Survivors of Trauma,’ in ‘Forum: Museums and Mental Health,’ Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 2 (2014): 133-169. doi:10.3167/armw.2014.020109
November 5, 2014 at 5:46 pm
It’s an issue that goes both ways. We, too, may suffer trauma in our day to day lives, that affects how we relate to others, whether they be colleagues or visitors to the archives. Archivists and archives staff can become traumatised by the records they deal with, and the responses to it from the researchers – whether that be joy at finding the record, hurt at the loss of identity or anger at the content. We need to provide crying spaces and laughing spaces, as well as quiet, reflective spaces. We need to recognise that we are all human, and that by sharing that humanity we share in those emotions.
This year, I was privileged to be on the research desk when a long term researcher came in to share some news with the office. He had spent years trying to find out about his family, to document the dreadful things done to him and his peers in state and other institutional care, trawling through the archives with a fine tooth comb. At the Perth hearings for the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, he finally received recognition of the hurt that had been done to him and others, and a form of apology. He came straight to us, to share his relief and to express his thanks for our assistance. I was able to say, without any hesitation, that on the contrary, it was we who thanked him – for his dogged persistence, for allowing us to share in his journey, and in the privilege of being able to assist him find that peace of mind which the Commission had just given him.
November 10, 2014 at 11:24 am
Yes, it definitely goes both ways. Thanks for sharing the story of one of your users – I think the idea of sharing in a journey is a really important one.