ABOUT

I BELIEVE...

It's all about the relationship

I'M JO

I’m a psychologist whose career has been focused around working with people who have experienced a lot of trauma.

Learning to work in a way that doesn’t make things worse for my clients has been a game changer for the things they have been able to achieve. It’s also removed the anxiety I used to feel about the possibility of making things worse, and given my career satisfaction a huge boost.

Now, I want to share what I’ve learned with other dedicated helping professionals to create a safer and more trauma-informed world.

Let’s start at the beginning…

I went to university to study psychology and along the way I became really interested in criminal justice work.

After I got my Masters degree, looking at patterns of re-offending in a sample of high risk male prisoners, I worked in prisons and community Corrections setting across New Zealand and Australia. My jobs involved assessing clients’ risk and the factors that were linked to their offending, and then delivering individual or group-based programs to help address that risk.

I also spent a year working in Child Protection in remote Australia, focused mainly on responding to incidents of domestic violence alongside a counsellor and a Police Officer.

So many (probably all) of my clients in those settings had backgrounds of trauma.

But it was never specifically my job to address that.

It sat in the background as something I didn’t want to poke at too much, in case

It opened up things I didn’t know how, or have the time or resources, to support properly; or
It made things worse for the client

I would try to ask the questions I needed to as quickly and painlessly as possible, but there was always a little worried voice in the back of my head.

Could I have done something to trigger their trauma?

Might they be suffering after leaving my office because of the questions I've asked?

Are there things I could be doing better, without crossing boundaries into something that isn't my job?

I tried to read articles and books about trauma, or to learn skills and strategies from my colleagues, but in the early days (that makes me feel old, ha!) it wasn’t something that was talked about a lot, and there weren’t a lot of resources available.

To be honest, it sometimes feels like that is still the case.

Google Scholar is full of articles on trauma, but practical support to put those into practice isn’t so easy to find.

It could have been easy to just keep ignoring that voice in the back of my head; doing my job to the best of my ability, and hoping for the best.

My turning point…

When I took a job outside of government, something shifted.

My job was no longer about contributing one piece to the puzzle and I had to learn to really understand exactly what was going on for my clients. The service I worked for provided wraparound support for incredibly vulnerable families, so we needed to work hard - and fast - to build relationships and get things right.

I had to move the length of Australia for that job, so I was already busy and stressed. Trying to get on top of the whole trauma field was a lot of extra pressure, but I knew that it was time to listen to that little voice and make this work.

Starting to address trauma more directly was intimidating in the beginning. I really didn’t want to make things worse and I didn’t have the experience to be sure that what I had learned in theory was actually going to work in practice.

But it did work.

My clients started talking more - telling me things about their lives that weren’t what they might think I would want to hear.
They came to their appointments more often - and even started showing up unannounced between sessions!
They started seeing our service as somewhere that would really help them.

My mission…

I loved my work in that job, but the gaps in trauma-informed service delivery were a little overwhelming.

I understood how to provide trauma-informed care, and my team were learning, but all around us were colleagues and other service providers who were compassionate, dedicated, well-meaning, and, inadvertently, sometimes making things worse.

Now I teach those professionals to do their work from a trauma-informed perspective, so that they can do the job they trained for, in a way that helps clients to engage and receive the support they are trying to give.