Tricia Shalka
Yeah, yeah, the simplest and most powerful is just listening, just holding space. Right. And it seems very simple. And it’s very hard and complicated. And it’s hard and complicated in the face of trauma, because this often activates something in us. And you know, there, there are different levels of that activation, if what’s the activated in us by somebody else’s trauma is we’re being triggered, that’s too much. And that’s harmful to us in a way that we’re not the right person to be doing that kind of support. And that’s a good time for us to, to, you know, get out of that interaction in a way that’s not creating more harm, but take care of ourselves. But if it’s not reaching that level, if it’s just discomfort, like those are those pieces of it’s okay to be uncomfortable, it’s okay to feel unsettled. Because somebody is sharing something really challenging or awful, that’s happened to them. That’s a very natural human response to have.

Keith Edwards
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW, I’m your host Keith Edwards. Today I’m joined by Dr. Tricia Shalka, an expert and author of the new book Cultivating Trauma Informed Practice and student affairs. Many of us are working with students who are more aware and more comfortable sharing their trauma experiences and looking for better ways of engaging and supporting with those students. I’m so glad that you’re here and looking forward to this conversation. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays find details about this episode, or browser archives. It’s studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by Symplicity. A true partner Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him, him. My pronouns are he him is, I’m a speaker, consultant and coach and you can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m recording this from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation. Tricia is so nice to have you here and to talk about this book. For folks who haven’t seen your previous episode with with Linda Kelo, once you introduce yourself say a little bit about you and your work and a little bit about how this book has come to be.

Tricia Shalka
Absolutely yeah, so I’m Tricia Shalka, I use she her pronouns, and I’m an associate professor at the University of Rochester. So I’m joining you today from the ancestral lands of peoples. And I spend a lot of my research work and focus thinking about how does trauma impact college students and their experiences. And for me, that really has a lot of these very personal roots as to why I’ve kind of arrived to that work. So one aspect of it is, I’m someone who identifies as a survivor of trauma well in college. So I talked about this in terms of, you know, this arrival the wrong place at the wrong time. But while studying abroad, I ended up staying in a hotel. And it was a hotel that an arsonist wanted to like prior to that night. So I sustained some pretty severe injuries from that experience. And in, you know, the weeks, the months after, I’m just trying to recover and make sense of what had happened. I found one pathway that was really trying to explore these questions of meaning and sense making through academics so changed my thesis topic entirely as a senior and started exploring trauma narratives. And some of that exploration was something for me that’s very akin to what Bell Hooks talks about in Teaching to Transgress, of how we sometimes arrive to theory, because we’re in pain, right? And it kind of offers us this place of understanding and place of healing. And that’s what that was for me. So it was planting some of these original roots of what would become this academic journey. But the in between space, I worked for a number of years as a student affairs practitioner, and some of that time was spent in residential life. So that space in particular was really a place where, you know, we do have exposure to student trauma, and I was working with students who either had traumas happening by virtue of their lives of students within our campus community, or their, you know, world outside of the campus environment. And now as a faculty member in the Student Affairs program, you know, some of its different some of its very same, you know, we have different students in some ways, I’m working with graduate students now, as opposed to undergrads, but grad students also bring trauma with them. So I’m still working on some of that direct support. And thinking about my role as a faculty member of how do I help train the next generation of student affairs professionals and leaders? And how do we do this work with this trauma informed lens? So kind of a lot of different lenses that I bring to this work?

Keith Edwards
Yeah, thanks. And, you know, there’s the trauma that students experience in college, there’s the trauma they experience before college that they’re bringing with and that might be triggered around that. And I think a lot of student affairs practitioners navigating all of that, as well as their own trauma, right. And so we’ll we’ll get into some of this and then wanting to support students who are experienced trauma who are triggered by their trauma and also create environments that do that support. So it isn’t always the individual before we get too far down into that. Help us frame this up a little bit. What is trauma? And what are trauma informed practices?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, so two very important questions as we get started with this work. So the first piece that what is trauma, I am going to take a little bit of a roundabout way to answer that. And part of that is because there is no one definition that works perfectly and well to say everything we need to say about trauma, and what could be traumatic and what happens because of trauma. And part of that is a couple of different reasons. So one, there’s tremendous subjectivity to traumatic experiences. So we might have two people who to have a very comparable experience look the same thing and one person might be traumatized by that experience and the other person might not be. So there could be some commonality. But there could be some distinct differences in these experiences. The other piece that makes it a little challenging and getting at this singular definition is trauma is very multi dimensional. So, you know, it sort of resonates across these different layers of our experience. There was just an article in the Washington Post a couple of days ago, about stress and its impact on us at this kind of cellular level and DNA level, that certainly is implicated, we’re talking about trauma, it can be sort of very physically felt. For those who are familiar with Bessel Vander Kolk book, The Body Keeps the Score, we kind of know the ways that trauma shows up in our physical body, whether or not it was because of the physical injury, certainly psychological impacts, we talked about in his referrals. And then also showing up in terms of, you know, how somebody like me who’s experienced something traumatic interacts with others, because of that trauma and how others interact with me. So in relationships, too, and of course, communities intergenerationally. So all of this means the subjectivity, this multi dimensionality, it’s hard to come up with this, just one way to capture all forms of trauma. So that’s kind of the big caveat, I don’t want to start with. But given that I try to lean on definitions that are spacious, I have a little bit of room to capture as much as we can. And one of those that I go back to a lot is from SAMSA. So substance abuse, mental health services administration, and they talk about trauma as an event, a series of event or set of circumstances. And I really appreciate that initial framing, because it helps us remember that, yeah, sometimes trauma will be because of, you know, one particular event, maybe it’s a car accident, maybe it’s something like my experience of hotel fire or sexual assault. And trauma also shows up and is more sort of pervasive or insidious ways to that’s what we’re talking about when we’re thinking about race based or racial trauma. So leaving some space for, you know, all of these options in the spectrum. And then they also talk about trauma in terms of it having this lasting adverse effects, in terms of lots of different dimensions. So they talked about spirituality and psychological and you know, many of the things already mentioned, but it kind of it gives us some initial place of grounding to be thinking about what are we talking about. So event and more pervasive insidious, that has some kind of lasting adverse effect, and then impacting us and all these different pieces of our experience. So building from there, then what is trauma informed practice? We’re really just taking, you know, the very nutshell what we’re doing with trauma informed practice is taking our knowledge about trauma and its trajectories. And doing something with that, right, we’re putting it to work. So trauma informed practice is we’re thinking about how our practices informed our policies of form because of what we know about trauma. So not just the you know, we attended a workshop, check that off the list, but we learned something, and we do something with it. So that’s the trauma informed practice piece.

Keith Edwards
And this book is about trauma informed student affairs practice. So what is trauma informed student affairs practice? You’ve already mentioned, it’s not just individual interactions, but also policy and systemic. So what does trauma informed student affairs practice look like? And what would you like practitioners to know to help them better serve students, those thinking about folks who are seeing so much trauma as they interact with students or are on call or meeting individually with students and just want to better serve them? What would you prefer?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, so you know, again, maybe I’ll start with another caveat, for all the reasons that I just mentioned, the subjectivity is multi dimensionality, we have to be context specific when we’re thinking about trauma informed practices. So whatever good principles or you know, theories we might be working with, we also want to put that into conversation with where we are and who it is we’re working with. So that’s kind of, you know, initial disclaimer, as we talked about some of these piece does. But then generally, we’re going to see some some similar flavors or some common themes that cut across a lot of trauma informed work, and some that I would advocate for what a good trauma informed practice looks like. So in the book, I talked about some six different guideposts that can help inform this work for our conversation, I’ll try and distill maybe a few that I really want to highlight. But one, one key piece is education. So this is a really foundational important place of, we need communities where more and more people know about trauma know about its trajectories. And part of that reason is something that I’m always reminded of, of one of my past participants, her name was Liv her pseudonym. And she talked to me about after experiencing trauma as a college student that she felt like she had outlived the collective experience of her friend group. And what that meant to her was a very isolating experience, because she was navigating the suicide of a friend from home. She was in a context in college where her immediate friends didn’t know this person, but they also didn’t know how to handle her after this experience and how to interact with her after this experience. So when we think about education, yeah, it’s knowing about trauma, but it’s knowing about trauma so that there are lots of us are on a college campus who might be at To understand what might be going on for a student like live, and maybe that helps that she’s not feeling that sense of isolation that she did, because of the trauma she was experiencing. So that’s one piece is education piece. Another important principle that would come up and a good trauma from student affairs practice is relationships. So there’s just so much data and research in the trauma world that really stresses the importance of, you know, these strong empathetic relationships for cooperation. And that’s a place where I think we intersect very easily and naturally in student affairs, right? That’s very often what we’re oriented to doing on college campuses. But this may be gives us another reason and later as to why that’s important. And also thinking about that, when we’re talking about relationship building, in relation to trauma, that it’s not just in the aftermath, right, that we’re really thinking about, how do we proactively establish some of these connections and relationships, so all students have that in place. Because I’ve also heard from many research participants over the years that when they do experienced trauma, sometimes they have no idea where to go, you know, they don’t know who they could talk to, or if there are trusted people that they could confide in. So having some of that in place is really important. And that kind of brings me to this third point I want to make, which is a good trend first, in the first practice has to be thinking holistically. So I will offer a bit of an example maybe to help make that a little bit more concrete. So some of of how we’ve arrived at trauma informed practice in in higher ed is, in part due to some of the work that the Obama administration was doing around sexual violence on college campuses. And some of the recommendations that came out of their work was that campus officials who are interacting with sexual violence need to be doing their work in a trauma informed place. So we have seen, you know, conduct offices and title nine offices taking up more these trauma informed practices. So we might imagine, for example, a Student Conduct Officer could be in a meeting with a student who has experienced sexual violence, maybe they’ve decided they want to go through the conduct process, and maybe the reactive piece of that work that’s trauma informed is that professionals thinking about, you know, how was their office setup, then what ways does the office environment communicate safety? what ways does, how they’re interacting with that student and talking and having that that interviewer conversation, communicate safety and control and agency, so all of these good, reactive trauma informed pieces. But we also want to be thinking about these proactive pieces. So that’s where some this holistic approach comes in that, I would hope that long before that particular kind of officer is having that meeting with that student, that that person and maybe their office and University has already thought about, how are our policies and practices trauma informed, you know, what, what are all these pieces leading up to this moment in time that we’re also thinking about how to do this work in an intentional way. And then beyond even that particular Conduct Officer, part of that holism also means that we want touch points that everybody has that information is thinking in that way. Because in this example, with that student who’s arriving with this kind of Officer for meeting, they’re not having a fractured experience of their trauma, it’s not only showing up with that person, they are going to the dining hall and interacting with dining hall staff and carrying trauma with them. They are in student groups interacting with peers carrying that with them. They’re, you know, in classes, interacting with faculty and carrying with them. So that holism has to be, we all need to be attuned to what might be going on for that student in that moment, not just those that we deem like Title Nine, or conduct or ResLife, that might have these frequent touch points. And then a final piece I just want to emphasize is it has to be equity minded. There’s so much overlap and intersection between trauma and injustice and systems of oppression. Alex SHEVRIN Venet makes this very crystal clear and a book that she wrote a couple years ago about equity centered trauma informed education, and just knowing that a lot of our trauma sometimes has these origins, because of these systems of oppression. So those are kind of four that I’ll pull out of these broader six, but kind of cut across and speak to some of the pieces that we want to make sure are part of the framework that we’re moving forward with.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, a couple of things I was thinking about as I was listening to you is, I think a lot of student affairs work is very engaged with students and supportive to them and easier to be in relationship. But some of it is holding students accountable and saying no, and, and to not distance that from trauma informed like how do you say, No, I’m going to hold you to a housing contract, or I’m gonna hold you accountable to this. Not showing up for your work study position in a way that is also trauma informed. Because I think sometimes we get into this is this part of conversation, I’ll be trauma informed. And this is accountability or no conversation or boundary setting, but bringing all of that. And then I was also thinking as we were talking about the different places a student who’s experienced trauma might navigate through. We might not have any idea what the source of the trauma is for that student and so many different things on a college campus could evoke that. So I’m thinking of the student in the dining hall. If something happened to them in a restaurant or I was thinking about the story you shared, maybe just getting in an elevator, in a residence hall or an academic building might bring that experience back. So just sort of knowing that there’s worth knowing that we’re not going to know. And so many of these things that might be innocuous to one person could be really difficult for another person to navigate. And the individual and policy level is super helpful. Let me because I have them here for me, let me let me give our audience visit your six. From your book, I propose the trauma informed practice and student affairs be number one, holistic, two, power conscious and anti oppression, three focused on relationships, four committed to Knowledge Building, five, harm reducing, and six committed to Wellness Center decision making and practice. You’ve obviously talked about some of those, the one that I’m interested in hearing a little bit more about now, is number four committed to knowledge building, you talked about education. But could you say a little bit more about that one?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, so I, you know, I see this, this knowledge building piece as again, something important that we need to fuse in a lot of different ways. Because we sometimes approach this work of just identify, well, who’s likely to have touch points, and let’s get some information in those places. And then that’s enough. But you know, back to that story of live, it’s not just the title nine person or Student Conduct, or ResLife, and lives case she needed some supportive peers. So I kind of think of that education piece as working across an institution that we need our leaders and you know, some of our divisional leaders, Provost, presidents, everybody having some understanding about trauma, and its trajectories that helps in this very broad way. We need our Student Affairs practitioners who may be having those direct interactions interacting that way, I talk in the book a lot about working with student leaders, too, because they’re often the ones who are interacting with their peers, and also need some information about what might be going on. And for us also to be able to help support them through what can be some really difficult situations that we put student leaders in, I talk a little bit in the book about this danger of the superhuman construction that we sometimes create, consciously or unconsciously, but holding students leaders to these higher standards that can be asking things that put them in these positions of difficulty with peers. And then of course, you know, we also need students to understand what’s going on, so they can be supportive to one another. So I sort of see this educational piece as something that is multifaceted. We really need our entire campus community invested in this work?

Keith Edwards
Well, and it’s not just that they can be supportive of their college peers, it’s also they can be supportive when they’re a supervisor of someone in the workplace or when their parents or when, you know, so thinking about sort of trauma informed practices as a useful life skill that develops, because once you leave college, the trauma doesn’t stay behind there, right? It’s so many of us walking through day to day experiences of life. Absolutely. Well, let’s shift into talking and you’ve pointed to some of this already about how we can be proactive. We’ve talked about responding to a student being supportive of a student or thinking about policy about a student who might navigate some of these difficult things. But you’ve talked about creating systems of equity and well being how can one be proactive? Obviously, we want equity, we want well being I think, everybody’s for that. Maybe that’s an overly broad statement these days. But how do we create structures? And I’d love to hear your thoughts on Are there other policies or ways that we can go about doing that to be proactive and creating systems of equity and wellbeing, so that less trauma happens so that those who have experienced trauma are better supportive? And all of

Tricia Shalka
that? Yeah, yeah. It’s all those pieces that you’re mentioning, right? Because it’s trauma from work is about support. It’s also about harm reduction. So we’re not creating new traumas moving forward. But I think we’re at this really interesting moment in time of there’s so much potential for visioning different ways and different ways of being. And I think trauma has a lot of wisdom that comes with it. Of course, there’s plenty of difficulty, but there’s a lot of wisdom and some of the wisdom of trauma is that, you know, what happens sometimes when we’re traumatized and moving through the world is our nervous systems a bit revved up. And what a ramped up nervous system really wants is some space, some space to to decompress. And so I think the wisdom of trauma is there’s an innate desire for that, for that spaciousness. And I see that in this organizational potential moment of, we can envision organizations to be trying to do different things. And those different things that I see this connected to equity and wellness is, you know, rather than this just places to get some things done, we end up very stuck in the doo doo doo of our organizations. institutions, what if these are spaces that the purpose is equity, you know, in acting, and demonstrating equity, and acting and demonstrating wellness, creating spaces that are about healing and healing potential. So that’s a different framework to be moving forward with. And of course, we have to have wellness and equity at the center of that work. So, you know, this starts to ask us some some different kinds of ways of being maybe, and some cultural work, maybe. So this was a conversation that my chairman from leadership class was actually starting to have last night of, we were digging a little bit into algebra and Bennett’s book. And she has this term that she talks about, quote, unquote, cutesy wellness. So you know, these activities were, or yeah, maybe we have a massage chair show up for wellness day, or we bring some doughnuts to a staff meeting. And that’s fine, that’s good. But that’s not getting at some of these bigger, broader pieces of culture shift to enact sort of this equity minded and wellness centric organization. And so what what does that look like? What does that mean? I think for those of us who are trying to envision these, these different ways of being, it means we have to be comfortable with some discomfort, because we’re going to meet some Rob in our organizations of this is not how we’re oriented to be to think about that spaciousness, and that wellness and that equity and in many ways, but it also means that as we’re doing this work, we’re being mindful to engage others in this conversation of helping to bring everyone along and being comfortable with that discomfort, and kind of getting to different places. So what does that start to look like? And you know, micro macro ways I’m thinking about a lot of different things. I’m thinking about a conversation that happened on Student Affairs now with Dr. Carlton green, and Michelle Pope was interviewing him and talking about these cultures of nice and intersecting racism higher ed. And Michelle asked him at one point about what what would it look like if that disappeared tomorrow, we woke up and it was gone. And he said something along the lines of Well, we’d be centering the most marginalized voices on our campuses. That’s the point from which would work, you know, that would be a different perspective. For many of our campus organizations, it would be Towards this end, thinking about, you know, are we leaving spaces for grief, for sadness for dissent, those would be some different ways of being in many of our spaces, and not trying to implicitly or explicitly demand toxic positivity, as Susan David might call in her work, and thinking about, you know, micro macro things of are we leaving space for faculty, staff, students, to say no, and for saying no, to be an act of, of well being for self and others and not, you know, this Act of, I’m just trying to be obstinate. So thinking about how we do these, you know, micro macro movements to envision a different way of being for organizations and a different purpose, perhaps for our organizations.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I love this framing around equity and well being because I think a lot of times we spend our time dealing with students who are not well, right, physically hurt their ankle, mental health issues, but creating spaces of well being. And I think we’re spending a lot of time responding to inequity systems of oppression and racism and homophobia, but creating systems of equity and well being not only reduces the harm, but also creates some spaciousness where maybe someone can, is less triggered by their trauma, it maybe surfaces less often in their college experience. Or maybe we create systems of equity and wellbeing, so that I might experience an incident. And it might not be as traumatizing because of the well being and the resources, and I love your language of spaciousness, I was literally thinking about so many orientation schedules that are don’t let them have any free time, because who knows what they’re going to do. So let’s keep them up until two o’clock in the morning. And let’s start them at eight because we don’t want any alcohol to be going on in there. And I’m hearing so many campuses say no, we’re putting a 45 minute break, to attend to your well being to go to your room and be alone to visit with the people down the hall and learn about them and connect and so for different people what we might do with that 45 minute, while this might might might look differently, you might take a nap and that might be okay. Right? Yeah. And that can be a good thing. That capacity and so, some structural some policy things, but it means but as you said, shifting our thinking from getting programmed from beginning to end and no gaps and shifting away and giving some spaciousness, for people to share for people to be authentic and be able to bring their full selves, people that bring their experiences and something you were pointing to earlier, what they’ve learned from recovering from their trauma. What they’ve learned from a healing process might be beneficial to others who may have had a different traumatic experience or maybe haven’t had have traumatic experience, but that still is a valuable learning that that can be shared along the way.

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, I mean, I’m thinking to in your example, that orientation, all the places we do this in higher ed and one other examples coming up for me is the search processes, right? We kind of bring candidates to our campuses, and it’s back to back to back to back. So what it might mean for, you know, all the various ways that we’re working with thinking about space and capacity to pause and, and what that means, like you say, it’s not just about those impacted by trauma, it means for all of us to have a little bit more space and pause in our work, we’re able to relate to each other in in different kinds of ways that are supportive directly of those who have experienced trauma. And those who haven’t.

Keith Edwards
It’s you said earlier, if we design this for the most marginalized, it also works for people who aren’t the most marginalized. And so if we, sort of, on the trauma side, think about how would we design this for students who have experienced a wide range of trauma? If we can figure out how to do that, it’s also going to work for people who have experienced less trauma or maybe know trauma. As we navigate through this, what else would you want practitioners to be thinking about that we haven’t given voice to? Already, I’m thinking about folks who are on call, or are rewriting a title nine process, or are going to be doing that soon, when when new regulations come out? I’m thinking about orientation directors who are now rethinking the orientation schedule and thinking about work study supervisors, what’s what else would you want to offer, folks?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, I mean, I definitely invite people to engage with the book, because there’s lots of more specific information that I think then, you know, it can be translated into these very specific different contexts. But one way that I do some framing in the book is thinking about these different layers of our experience organizationally. And I think that that’s one piece where sometimes, sometimes the temptation or pushback to to some of these conversations is, well, I’m not a president, I can’t change everything, or, you know, I’m not working directly with students. So I’m not saying trauma, but it’s really thinking about what is our particular location and area of control? And how do we start working from that point. So, you know, the layers that I talked about in the book, The first one is beginning with these very personal practices, these ways of being, as I call them, and thinking about how do we show up within for others? Because that’s a key part of the way we’re doing trauma informed practice. It’s not just the Yes, I write this policy through this lens. It’s also how am I making judgments and are not about others, and in a conversation and a meeting. And so some of these ways of being a part of the work that we start with, then there’s kind of this next layer of what is that direct work that we might be doing with people who have experienced trauma, I talked about it in terms of students in particular, and helping to support student leaders who are supporting others in the book. And then there’s this, you know, bigger level of the system’s level kind of things we need to be attentive to. And again, that’s not just for senior level leaders, they of course, have to be part of the conversation, but it means all of us have some agency and shifting the way that we envision our institutions. You know, so one very small example, but in the book I talked about and cite some of Jennifer Fried’s work, she talks about institutional betrayal, but she talks about institutional courage too. And the ways that institutions can actually respond and do things differently to not create some of the harms that they create by their actions or inactions. And one of the principles she talks about in terms of institutional courage is cherished the whistleblower and she talks about this in terms of the people that we want to label as trying to dismantle things are very often the ones who actually have fierce loyalty to an institution because they want to be better. So how can we, you know, lean into those kinds of pieces of seeing those who are actually trying to push and nudge and what things are different within an organization, not as troublemakers in a bad way, but troublemakers in a really good way? Because they’re helping us see some potential in the work that we’re doing.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, and seeing those folks is is deeply committed to the organization, the institution, the system, the culture is you pointed to the hiring processes, what do we want to bring people into? What do we want to begin by socializing them into through how we structure an interview day? Or what questions do we ask and seeing those who are really challenging and you know, the organizational end goal of equity focus systems of wellness and care? What could that look like? How could that better serve everybody? As a deep commitment to the students to the institution to doing things better?

Tricia Shalka
Absolutely, yeah.

Keith Edwards
I would love to hear from you. You’ve written other things. You’ve done research on trauma. You’ve written pieces in about campus about trauma informed student affairs practice. You You’ve written with others on this, you’re teaching a course On this, what did you learn? Through this process of writing this book? What was sort of an aha moment might be something new that you learned through the process? Or might be something that you return to, as you were writing this? What? Were there any learning points or aha moments for you through this journey?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, I think, you know, maybe one broad Aha, and then I’ll frame it more specifically, but is, there’s so much work to do. But with that, so much work to do, it means there’s so much possibility that we know we start doing these little pieces, and it starts to have a very large impact. So even for me in writing this book, there’s more to say, you know, this is the beginning and thinking about what are the next steps. But in some of those next steps for me, I’m currently engaged in a research project where I’m trying to understand how does do trauma show up in these academic interactions or spaces, and try to understand that from perspectives of students and faculty. And so in this work, I’ve now started doing some more trauma informed practice kind of work in supporting faculty and faculty groups, and something that I’m hearing in some of these spaces that resonates entirely with students as practitioners, too, because I hear it in those spaces, too, is? Well, but you know, don’t we need to know what happened because I often say, we don’t need to know student’s trauma to design these kinds of environments that are trauma informed, we don’t need to know any of the details, any of the specifics. And I think what’s behind that kind of question is this desire for proof and evidence. And, you know, we need to sort of unwind that, because that’s really an issue of, of trust. And I think that’s kind of this broader social and cultural place that we’re in to have, we’re losing the capacity for faith and hope in each other. And so the place that, you know, I’m kind of thinking more about is how does this intersect trauma informed practice? And what does this mean to think about the trust element of this as well, certainly, in terms of one on one relationships, but again, back to the broader systems to really needing to be focused on anti oppressive kind of practices, because trust relies on safety, and we need to build systems in places and relationships where that can be fostered. And we can start returning to that recommendation, as opposed to dehumanization that you seem to be doing more and more that is very dangerous in this current moment.

Keith Edwards
For sure, and I think that that rehumanization is something that so many of us are just yearning for. Wanting so badly seeing being so needed, feeling it in ourselves, seeing it in the world, seeing it in our students, and I think, seeing so many students, oftentimes leading the way, in that, in calling for that, but also wrestling with that of themselves. I’m really excited about your thinking around how faculty can be supportive. My experience has often been faculty are deeply committed and deeply caring but unsure what to do. Right. Like, I see students struggling, I know that they’re experiencing trauma, or have experienced trauma. And I refer them to the counseling center. And wanting to be able to do more, but worried about getting it wrong, worry about making it worse, worried about some of this. And then I think by extension, I think there are many student affairs professionals who maybe feel the same way but feel like they should know what to do. Right? They should this is expertise I should have where I teach physics. That’s not expertise, but a student affairs professional. Are there a few tips or suggestions that you would offer for folks who maybe this isn’t their focus, but here’s some simple things that folks can do? That maybe if they’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg? That would be helpful?

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, yeah, the simplest and most powerful is just listening, just holding space. Right. And it seems very simple. And it’s very hard and complicated. And it’s hard and complicated in the face of trauma, because this often activates something in us. And you know, there, there are different levels of that activation, if what’s the activated in us by somebody else’s trauma is we’re being triggered, that’s too much. And that’s harmful to us in a way that we’re not the right person to be doing that kind of support. And that’s a good time for us to, to, you know, get out of that interaction in a way that’s not creating more harm, but take care of ourselves. But if it’s not reaching that level, if it’s just discomfort, like those are those pieces of it’s okay to be uncomfortable, it’s okay to feel unsettled. Because somebody is sharing something really challenging or awful, that’s happened to them. That’s a very natural human response to have. But being able to just sit with their own discomfort if it truly is just discomfort and hold space for someone to share and have that sense of connection around their trauma. You know, again, back to to live, that, that helps that connection that takes people back away from isolation, and we need that kind of connective tissue. So listening, just listening, holding space, opening up space for people who want to share is really, really powerful and all that we need to do.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, there’s kind of a hidden theme. You hear about folks wanting and feeling in into the doing space? What should I do? How should I do it? How should they do it, and you keep bringing us back into the being space, right and start the book with that. And then this listening is less about what we do as the listener and more just being present with the other person, not making it about you, not making about the advice not making about the answers you might have or what you think they should do, but really just listening. And I think that’s, that’s so powerful. My own research around men’s identity. That was the power of the conversations, there was no coaching, there was no intervention, there was no, there was no, I just listened to them. And that was so powerful for them just to be, of course, my research, I was listening to them as though they were the experts on their own lived experience. Right. And that’s a different way of listening. Right? Yeah. And just how powerful just being with someone and being genuinely curious, not, as we You pointed to not, I need to know all the details. But what’s that like for you? How is that showing up for you here? Is it different here than where you were before you came here? What is it that you think might be next for you? But I think so many of us jumped into the doing and having the answers and fixing and the referral. And the next steps we can sort of skip over the being with in the deep listening can be so powerful. Yep.

Tricia Shalka
Yep, yep. And in that setting, with also just holding on to that holism, again, of knowing that, you know, none of us would experience something traumatic, that’s not all of who we are ever. So leaving space for that, you know, fullness of who we are, and potential for, you know, hope and dreams, and all these other good things that are part of human experience, too.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, what a wonderful sort of reminder for us to move to concluding on that. So much of this is about paying attention to trauma and paying attention to what students might have experienced and paying attention to all the things that might interact with that and the things that we can do. And let’s also not a centralized someone to moments or a day, or an event, or a particular relationship, or a series of events, as you pointed to earlier, lets people can experience trauma and not be centralized to that dramatic experience and their experience of it. Right, yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We’ve we’ve sort of moved all over the place, as we kind of expected to do but as we move toward the end of our time, we always conclude and you’ve been on the podcast before. So you, you know how this works. Student Affairs NOW and we always end with what is with you now what are you pondering or wondering or troubling, can be related to this conversation or might just be other things in the world. And if you want to share where folks can connect with you, we’d welcome to give you an opportunity to do that as well.

Tricia Shalka
Yeah, I think in many ways, I already kind of captured this with the the trust piece. That’s something that’s really sitting with me lately, and I’m pondering, I think the other piece is probably which we alluded to a little bit but space and pausing and what it means to envision or work in different ways around that of, you know, being able to do different kinds of work, and perhaps even more creative work by virtue of not moving so fast and slowing things down. So those are probably the two big themes that I’m thinking through these days and trying to figure out a little bit more how to, you know, figure out and also how to enact for myself as well. And then yeah, you can find me Twitter and LinkedIn.

Keith Edwards
Awesome. Yeah, I love that getting away from the doing into the being getting away from schedule, schedule, schedule, go, go go to some more spaciousness. And how do we create that? How do we create that for ourselves? And how do we create organizations and structures and policies and schedules and certain processes and so many other things, so that the individual doesn’t always have to create that for themselves? How we’re recreating. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, congrats on the book. And thank you for joining us and sharing a little bit more about it. And thanks for all your your research and your thinking and your sharing. You’ve been such a leading voice in bringing this area into Student Affairs thinking and learning and practice. I really appreciate it.

Tricia Shalka
Thank you. Appreciate being here.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Thanks to you. And thanks also to our sponsor for today’s episode Symplicity. Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. A true partner to the institution Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being, student success and accessibility services. To learn more, visit symplicity.com or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, are in LinkedIn. As always a huge shout out to our producer Nat Ambrosey who does all of the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. We love the support of these important conversations from our community. You. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and our weekly newsletter announcing each new episode and more. If you’re so inclined, you can also leave us a five star review as helped these conversations reach more folks. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our fabulous guest today. And to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you.