In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, David & Ruth tackle one of the most pressing issues in the domestic violence field: how to make mental health and addiction services more domestic violence-informed when it comes to interacting with survivors. While awareness of trauma and its impact continues to increase, it often is decontextualized from the dynamics of coercive control. Mental health and addiction professionals are often ill-prepared by their education and training to integrate coercive control into their assessments. Organizations that are striving to trauma-informed are not always committing to be domestic violence-informed. Domestic violence survivors are often harmed by these gaps.
In this episode Ruth & David, discuss
David & Ruth also tackle how structural sexism, racism and colonisation dynamics are often ignored in mainstream mental health and addiction paradigms to the detriment of clients from oppressed communities. Ruth also shares about how she's been impacted by reading Judy Atkinson's book, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia
If you like this episode you may want to also listen to the following other episodes of Partnered with a Survivor:
Season 2, Episode 5: How professionals can avoid being manipulated by perpetrators
Season 2, Episode 1: 6 Steps to Partnering with Survivors
Episode 30: 4 Ways the Concept of Trauma Bonding Works Against Survivors
Episode 18: Survivors aren’t Broken! An intimate discussion about support and partnership in relationships
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, David & Ruth tackle one of the most pressing issues in the domestic violence field: how to make mental health and addiction services more domestic violence-informed when it comes to interacting with survivors. While awareness of trauma and its impact continues to increase, it often is decontextualized from the dynamics of coercive control. Mental health and addiction professionals are often ill-prepared by their education and training to integrate coercive control into their assessments. Organizations that are striving to trauma-informed are not always committing to be domestic violence-informed. Domestic violence survivors are often harmed by these gaps.
In this episode Ruth & David, discuss
David & Ruth also tackle how structural sexism, racism and colonisation dynamics are often ignored in mainstream mental health and addiction paradigms to the detriment of clients from oppressed communities. Ruth also shares about how she's been impacted by reading Judy Atkinson's book, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia
If you like this episode you may want to also listen to the following other episodes of Partnered with a Survivor:
Season 2, Episode 5: How professionals can avoid being manipulated by perpetrators
Season 2, Episode 1: 6 Steps to Partnering with Survivors
Episode 30: 4 Ways the Concept of Trauma Bonding Works Against Survivors
Episode 18: Survivors aren’t Broken! An intimate discussion about support and partnership in relationships
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:And we're back, you are listening to partner with a survivor and I am David Mandela, executive director of the safe and together,
Speaker 3:And I'm Ruth Sterns Mandela, and I'm the e-learning and communications manager.
Speaker 2:Soon. They have a new title coming soon, coming soon coming soon. And we are back for one of our old school podcasts. That's just a conversation between ourselves
Speaker 3:Sitting on the couch with Tiberius, the dog
Speaker 2:Yes. In our new offices. And, um, today's conversation is about intersections of domestic violence, mental health, and addiction. But I want to just acknowledge that, that you're joining us. So we're recording from, uh, uh, settled land, you know, of the Tunxis people, uh, in the North America, part of the larger Algonquin, uh, nation, and just part of a CIC knowledging, the history of colonization and settlement and structural racism in the United States and other places. So just want to start that way. And we start a lot of our public meetings that way. Now, even though it's not a tradition in the United States to do that and acknowledgement of country, it feels important to do that.
Speaker 3:Well, it's an important conversation to have that intersections and intersectionalities. We won't be talking about intersectionalities, but that co you know, structural racism and colonization and forced separation of families and enforced poverty has really created the reality of addiction and mental health disorders. Um, you know, removing people from their familial contexts and from their understanding of themselves and their families is a really violent act.
Speaker 2:When you, when you, we, we just walked into one of our, our themes, you know, major themes today, which is how do you, um, not decontextualize addiction and mental health issues from, from all forms of oppression and how do you not make it a individualized psychopathology, uh, which, which rebounds against that, that person who is may genuinely having addiction trauma issues, but, but that their experience can't be disconnected for one of structural racism or colonization. And, and I think the, the, the mainstream mental health and addiction movements or fields or disciplines often do that. And so
Speaker 3:Are, uh, uh, a licensed professional counselor. So you've been trained as a mental health practitioner, um, in very Western paradigms. And, you know, we know that those Western paradigms were created by white men in a white context,
Speaker 2:Few white women, white women,
Speaker 3:Much the mental health community does need to face that there are theories of, uh, addiction and mental health come out of the very people who were trying to argue that those who were socially abberant, who didn't fit into the social norms, who displayed trauma reactions. Um, and we're really talking about, we're talking about ethnic people, you know, young was not a good guy. He was a Nazi, and he argued for the Nazis that they would be able to take children away from their families and institutionalize them, you know, and the whole notion of the collective unconscious that he had was stolen from, from indigenous people. That was an indigenous,
Speaker 2:We, we jumped right into it. So let me, let me pull the lens back a little bit as we often do. Now, let me talk about Freud now. Right. You know, but it's, it's, um, let me just kind of frame this larger conversation and, and, uh, and talk about the concept of intersections is as we talk about it, the safe and together Institute, and, and then kinda dive back in, but yes, you've got a little preview and taste of where we, where we're going, but, um, you know, for me, um, when I create the safer together model in the critical components, there was a place for things that weren't causal, but were essential, are really important. And one of those was culture. So from the beginning that was there, um, socioeconomic status and, um, and then things like addiction and mental health issues. And it was really important for me, for them to be included from the beginning, but not be put into that box of being causal to the perpetration of domestic violence. Because often times people lay off domestic violence, our culture, and again, racism is often really critical there, um, or addiction or mental health issues. And, and so that was the starting point in the safety of the model for, for intersections, but as time evolved, um, the thinking around it evolve to where the term intersections who became used because, um, of the gap or the lack in terms like co-occurrence, um, and then the practice that was often very siloed. So you think about the problem being, that's the languaging, like co-occurrence sort of that these things are that they're happening at the same time, but they don't tell you anything about their relationship between the two things. Right. And, and, and then the siloing of services or the siloing of in, in discussions of cases where it's just like, Oh, this family has a history of mental health addiction and domestic violence. And I can't tell you how many times I read that in a case file. And it became clear to me that we weren't having this, this conversation about how these things connected and, and that lack of conversation. We were not seeing the perpetrator's role, the person choosing violence, his role in impacting the rest of the family's issues like mental health or kids' behavioral health issues, their partners addiction. Yeah. And that we weren't having sophisticated, accurate conversations about how that person who's choosing violence owned course of control related to their addiction. We're having simplistic conversations, which were well, if they're an addict in there and they're, they're violent, well, let's treat their addiction and we'll assume that their, their abuse will go away. And, and, and so it really became clear that, that we needed a much more nuanced and framing of the issue of assessment and engagement and thinking about it, because if we didn't do that, then also what would happen is survivors Issues would get decontextualized from the perpetrators violence and control. So that's the inception of the concept of intercept intersections. That's what we end up talking about intersections and intersectionalities to talk about both that, and then the issue of structural racism and other forms of oppression and vulnerabilities that are structural in society like gender and race and class. So anyway, so that just the, kind of the first level of background on, on the term intersection. So, so really it became about really understanding lots of things, and it's continued to evolve, and we can talk about all those things, but you know, it, it, it, it encompasses we, we, when we train and encompasses these three broad categories, cause again, I wanted to, to center first perpetrators patterns and would often find myself when I was doing consultations with child safety workers in the U S reminding them that the person that they were seeing in terms of the survivor after a few years of abuse may not have been the person that this person was when the abuse started. And they would say, well, she's got mental health issues and she's got addiction issues. And I I'd explore them and say, well, what was the impact of the perpetrator's behavior on her wellbeing and her mental health and her addiction? They didn't have a framework for that. So to start creating a framework that said, okay, did he cause her mental health issues?
Speaker 4:Right? Did he cause her addiction
Speaker 2:Stay cause her addiction answers? Did she not have them before? We have to have a model? We can language and say, this person's anxiety or this person's depression, right? Cause we're often talking about anxiety, depression from a mental health point of view or posts or other trauma symptoms, you know, that, that those things would be caused. They didn't exist before we have to have a model a way of saying that it looking for them.
Speaker 4:I know that the way that you break it down is did the perpetration cause did it impede and did it exacerbate, right? Like those are the three measures, but having worked heavily within the medical community, I know that diagnosticians are really hesitant to draw causal links. So given that particularly within the mental health community, you know, how many mental health professionals would be willing to look at the pattern and behaviors of a perpetrator and the, and the co you know, the responses of the, of the, of the survivor and say, this seems to be causal to this person's mental health issue.
Speaker 2:When we, we have the framework, we can, we can, we can say what we know. And my experience is, if you say things like prior to this relationship and the abuse beginning, this person had no symptoms or issues with depression, anxiety, you can lay out side by side the timeline and say, and within the context of this, these symptoms have arose. Once you put the behaviors in and, and you can say, and these are not uncommon results of this. So you can, you may not feel comfortable saying this caused that in a formal piece of documentation, but you can basically walk people through it, through it. And, and most people, unless they have some particular resistance to getting it, we'll get it. And we've seen that with other things like that. I think a lot of times, one of the, one of the, I think the values of the, that making the perpetrators pattern of behavior visible in documentation assessments versus just referencing others initiative, domestic violence, is that it makes it easier for somebody unacquainted with the case of the dynamic to see the value of the conclusions or, or make sense of the issues that are being presented. And so we've had cases where things like cessation of breastfeeding was described in result to assault that happened around somebody, the child being breastfed at the time of the assault happened. And so here's the perpetrator choosing as a parent, as a parent to assault the mother and the child in essence, while she's breastfeeding. And so a normal, normal, normal breastfeeding assault, while breastfeeding next day, the breastfeeding stops we presented those facts were presented, I think, to a judge. And the judge understood that the assault actually interfered with the presser.
Speaker 4:That was an endangerment that's
Speaker 2:Right. But, but really specifically brought it down to the breastfeeding. And I think that's that sort of, um, you know, not an unusual circumstance, I think you're right. That people may be reticent to say cause, but I think that once you kind of lay out the facts, so to speak many people, get it and understand what they're saying, because it also combats a sense of wanting to pathologize survivors. You know, I think we're fighting so much gender bias, right? That, that anything we can do to counteract that by making the perpetrator's pattern visible is going to help, because I think there's really, you know, because of cultural, um, stereotypes about women, you know, and, and that are very violent. Women are crazy. Women are emotionally unstable, and then you add in layers of racism or on top of that, you know, that, that, that sort of, you know, can, can make that around, you know, black and Brown women, United States or indigenous women, you know, and, and then, and so there's a, there's sort of a bias in that direction.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, it's funny because we speak about these biases disconnected from the entities that have these biases and those biases are baked in to child protection and social work in ways that we actually really need to face because social work again, has a framework, a very Western framework, which really deals with controlling the family unit, their expression and culture that that family has to be culturally appropriate to the Western culture standards. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Speaker 2:It's, it's, it's a willingness to engage in. I'm not going to take a, take a turn in it and then come back, but you'll appreciate this. I think, which is sort of, I think that, you know, I'm speaking to any of my peers who are in mental health or addiction say we have to be willing to acknowledge our blind spots in the complexity. And the first thing that comes to mind you, you brought up call you and right. You know, uh, and I really have been admired over the last around collective consciousness of deep psychology and, um, have seen the value of that kind of work in, in, for healing. Uh, I'm about to bring it Margaret Sanger, which has a particularly, and it's for you, but, but you know, that she's considered in the United States that the mother of the modern birth control movement. Right. But she was
Speaker 4:And a racist, racist. Yeah. She was a Nazi collaborator
Speaker 2:And planned Parenthood has had to acknowledge that recently the United States. And, and so I think that's an example coming out of the medical, you know, kind of public health, you know, feel family planning field, where you have to say, okay, that's a reality. And we have to be willing to acknowledge it and say, okay, that's, you know, part of she was part of an oppressive structure, you know, her intent was this actually, but it opened a doorway to things that, that are also positive in terms of women's freedom and control over their bodies. So it's, I think the same thing is true in mental health, you know, an addiction that we have to have that, that ability to, to see the complexity. And, and I think, you know, going back to the, that framework that you mentioned, you're right, that we, we have this, you know, we have to have this concept of did the perpetrator cause these, whether it's the adult or child survivor, you know, the kids behaviors and I've watched cases where, um, what's happened to the kids is blamed on prior history or other issues. Um, so maybe somebody does have prior issues, but we have to have the language of, did it make this worse, right. And from a parenting point of view, for holding a parent accountable, that if a parent knows a child has an issue and then engage in behaviors that exacerbates those, those, those issues, are they engaging good parenting or not?
Speaker 4:Yeah. This really makes me think of the vulnerabilities of neurodivergent kids who are truly vulnerable, like in ways that just break my heart, um, to domestic violence perpetration, and are often targeted by it, um, because of their challenges and their needs. Um, and I don't have any doubt in my mind having witnessed so much violence and witnessed violence towards children that were neurodivergent, that it is causal. It does solidify, um, mental health and anxiety disorders in those children. You can't live in a world where you, first of all, the world is difficult to understand as a neurodivergent person because everybody else is behaving in ways that don't always make sense, you know, but then to add on top of that, the, the, the violence and the harm, um, for making a mistake or doing something different, you just create this, this huge wall of anxiety and those children and their comp they're terrified though the rest of their lives. And, and, you know, I've talked to two neurodivergent survivors about this. So we really do have to start to see the choices of perpetrators, not just towards their, the adult survivor, but what are they solidifying in those children? What type of, um, mental health disorders are they creating in those children? Um, and I think it becomes really, really clear the direct line of course, of control and domestic violence to mental health challenges. More so when you look at children, because many professionals are willing to look at adult survivors and say, well, we don't know what their childhoods were like. We don't know, you know, X, Y, Z, but very, very few people are looking at children and pinning their ADHD, their anxiety disorders, whatever they've been diagnosed with and looking at the family status and saying, well, there's, there's domestic violence, or course of control in this home. This child is, is living in high anxiety all the time. There's no way for their body to not respond to that.
Speaker 2:And this is where I can start weaving in why, I think in many ways, the traditional mental health, and again, social, work's a little bit different depending on how it's practiced. And I don't want to speak broadly because I think there's still places in the world where social work is practiced as a social endeavor and not a mental health endeavor. But I think the mental health professional has really made in roads into a profession that was really meant to be about social conditions,
Speaker 4:Social conditioning, and social
Speaker 2:Conditioning, instead, it was meant to be, you know, that was really about social environment and about, you know, and, and still you have many social work schools who are teaching about policy, who are teaching obviously about group work, they're teaching about case ma I mean, they're teaching it, but a lot of it starts skewing when it gets down to practice into kind of the kind of case management that people get pushed into these systems that focus on service delivery. Very much, a lot of systems are focused on service delivery, not about ameliorating conditions. And so the, I think there's a lot of gravity, the gravitational pull of the, the idea of a diagnosis and treatment. And, and, and I think it's a colleague, you know, who says, it's really emanated out of the United States and it's one of the things we've exported. Right. Um, I don't know, you know, that was his opinion. And, um, you know, um, and, um, but, but when you start thinking about this, what you just said, that we cannot take a, um, let's only look at symptoms diagnosis, let's, let's only look at what's happening inside the clinical four walls, the clinical space kind of you, we need to have, so you have what you described, neuro-diverse divergent children, you know, and you have to say, okay, not only is there increased anxiety and, and, and, and abuse and, and name that, but you have to say, okay, but maybe they had a great support system in this location. And the abuse disconnected that kid from that support network, you know, and, uh, forced them to change schools or push them into refu to a period of time. And that exacerbated their symptoms and made it harder to manage what was going on. And, and so, so that we, we, we do a disservice to the experience of adult child's of virus when we take this very narrow mental health view of, of the connection between domestic violence and, and, and, and, and harm, you know, and I think a lot of the wonderful work done in the, in, in around trauma and the, and the idea of systems becoming trauma-informed, unfortunately, for some people who have taken that in a very simplistic reductionist way. Right. You know, means that we, again, we're, decontextualizing,
Speaker 4:Let's, let's, let's pause for a second, cause I want to talk to everybody about reductionism. This is when you say I only work on hearts, or I only work on lungs, and I don't understand all the systems that interact with that and infect it like affect the, the, the ability of that particular organ to do its job. This is so in the mental health community as well, sort of by the medical construct, that you have an individual inside your office, that you are then going to diagnose within the context of that office and the context of the conversations you have disconnected from, from the, the reality of the environment around that human being that's being created and supported by most messaging that they hear. And I always want to bring practitioners back to that reality of the environment around those survivors, because what happens, particularly if you diagnose a person who is being abused with a mental health disorder is materially that diagnosis then is used in certain contexts, either for therapeutic reasons or as evidence in court. And now you have pressurized that survivor, all of the problems that were created, and the, in the influences that have gone into creating that pressurized atmosphere for that human being are completely stripped away. And all we're looking at is this, that single human being, and we're saying, what's wrong with you, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Let's give you some medication, but we've, we've stripped them of any context of their environment. And it's very much coming from a reductionist medical attitude, right? We need a more holistic way of looking at people,
Speaker 2:Right? You, you, the person becomes their, their symptom and their diagnosis. And, and I think, again, speaking to my car, my mental health and addiction colleagues that you didn't set up the system, we didn't set up the system that reducing that, but we operate in it. And we, I think we have responsibility to understand it and try to change it. And, you know, we're looking at, I'm going to do the best job. I'm really excellent clinician. I'm really excellent diagnostician. I developed good rapport with my clients. I care about them. I want them to heal. I want them to get better. That's those are amazing skills and a real gift to any client. And we have to think about, for instance, you know, what happens with that diagnosis and that information, how does it impact things like family court decision-making right. And to our protection decision making, are we operating in a pathology or deficit Laden system, again, to identify and to support and to fix or to, to heal, but, but do we identify regularly parenting strengths or things that somebody is doing right. Um, and therefore, because if we don't, then those things don't get fed into these systems that are looking for that information. You know, so again, the, um, it's not enough to say, well, somebody is showing up and complying or participating in, they're getting some out of the counseling. It, it, it sort of, it's still, that's a still, uh, in a dialogue with those, the systems around deficits. And so I think we have to really acknowledge that, that a lot of this Western framework is very deficit driven, not very holistic siloed, very solid, very reductionistic, and that, that, and that it for domestic violence survivors who, who could be also dealing with structural racism and force poverty into forced poverty, who may be scared of systems, distrustful of systems, you know, we have to really recognize the history of, like you said, Ruth earlier about mental health and research and medical fields being used against black and black and Brown indigenous people. So there's a lack of trust there for good reasons, right? For good reason, you know? And so just that, that, or that people don't under the practitioners who are treating them, don't understand the cultural context. And so it's not, it's not as meaningful for them or, or successful with those clients. And then, but then all those things then get used in these other settings. You know, your, your compliance and success in the mental health field will matter whether you keep your kids or not. So people need to understand that they're part of this, this larger process. And it's, it's understanding that and, and understanding that the domestic violence perpetrator may be turned to manipulate all those things and interfere with, for instance, somebody getting to their mental health appointments
Speaker 4:Or getting to their addiction mandated addiction, and I've dealt with it,
Speaker 2:Uh, cases where the perpetrators, um, coercion threats, he shows up at her treatment program and calls the police
Speaker 4:Well, there's even more of those even more insanity in the system than that in many rural areas, survivors are mandated to the same addiction programs as their perpetrator, right. By the same judge. Right. Usually at the same time. Right. And so what do you think is going to happen? Right? Come on people, I mean, this is, this is kind of like, I, you know, where I, I start to spin out in my head as a survivor. And I think who came up with this, this is ridiculous. Who, who thought this was a good one?
Speaker 2:This is why being trauma informed or, or being, you know, having a good, you know, addiction program, you know, and some systems have drug courts and specialized courts for drug offenses. Um, but I don't think it's enough. And I think that when we look at addiction programs, for instance, or mental health programs, and we know we've got a survivor, but dealt, or we have kids coming to the program that part of that mental health or addiction assessment must. And I don't say that a lot. You don't hear me say a lot, but most include a component of assessing the current situation, our course of control. And is there anybody out there who has the willingness and ability to impede either somebody's getting physically to the appointments or is actively trying to sabotage their recovery or their mental health or behavioral health things. So I want to say this again, because it is like, it's so important.
Speaker 4:Just like, just like, this is, this is another issue, but it's, it's similar. Just like, you know, we've seen judges mandate the perpetrator to be the supervised visitor, uh, to, to, to be the person who supervises the visitation of the survivor and the child. And then that survivor gets abused during that period of time. Um, you know, there's similar things that happen, particularly when the perpetrator is perceived as not having an addiction, not having a mental health disorder, because they're very good in their course of control. Um, and then they become the arbitrators of that. Person's mental health. You're going to control it. You're going to control the medication.
Speaker 2:You're gonna, you're gonna make sure that she doesn't take too much, you know, you can make, um, you know, statements about her mental health without any, without her training, without a train. You know, there's how many times have we seen cases where the allegation of mental health issues sticks and the only source of it, or the original source of it is the perpetrator making a statement.
Speaker 4:And I'm going to make an example, and it's going to be a pop culture example. You ready, Brittany Spears, Britney Spears, that whole thing, as you read the whole history of it and how her, her father has been able to control her life and her money and her ability to have contact with her children is absolutely indicative of how the system supports perpetrators and demonizes women who have mental health or addiction problems because of that control and that perpetration, right. And then hands that perpetrator all the power in country.
Speaker 2:So, so this is, again, if you're seeing somebody, if you're listening to this, and you're seeing somebody who, who, uh, you know, as a domestic violence survivor adult with child, uh, and it's not based on whether they're living with that person who perpetrated or not, because the control may be going on post-separation, you need to be assessing and asking questions, you know, is there anybody getting in the way of you coming here? Is there anybody in your life that, um, tries to undercut your success in, in, in recovery? You know, is there anybody interfering with your ability to get your child to counseling or, or, you know, disrupting your routine of medication with your child, if that's what's recommended really basic. And I would almost say so common that it should be universal in any kind of treatment plan, develop development, because, okay.
Speaker 4:Talk about that. Let's talk about impeding a person's ability to get assistance. And I, and I want to really clearly say that a lot of people are going to go directly to physical impeding directly to threats of violence. Well, you have to think about other things as well, has that perpetrator told a story, particularly to their children, that counseling is stupid, right? That mental health professionals are stupid, right. And created an adversarial like right. Connection between healing, mental health and those children being able to access that because perpetrators do that, they demonize, they demonize anything that would start that healing
Speaker 2:Well, and this is where we can go. We can add in the intersectionalities piece, which is if this is happening in communities where there's this history, that's true, you know, you could be, you know, and, and somebody saying, well, you can't go to mental health professional. You can't, you shouldn't talk about this. Cause they're gonna, they're going to try to do conversion therapy on you. You know, there's, you know, sort of the, using the real threats that are out there for[inaudible] institutional environment, you know, you can't tell our secrets, there'll be used against you. You know, how many minority communities have a culture of, we deal with our own issues. We deal with our own business ourselves. And how many times is that derived from the fact that it's not safe, that if we go outside our community to seek inter intervention, the support from the wider dominant culture that will be abuse will be abused. It will be bad for us, our family or community. And so, so it's, you know, whether it's, you know, it's, we could be talking about anywhere really, you know, in some of these issues,
Speaker 4:Credibly complex, by the reality that that perpetrators will use the mental health industry, they will get their sort of their victims committed. They will try to commit their victims to, to control them and also to solidify their power and control. Um, and, and the, and the fact that the industry has allowed that to happen by, by not, um, being aware of these things really does create again, an impediment to people seeking healing. So, so the industry itself has to clean itself up,
Speaker 2:Like now, now this is, this is, this is, this is the impact you've had on me. I'm not thinking about, Oh, we need a truth and reconciliation commission for mental health and addiction around, around mental health and addiction. But I'm just saying in this context of this podcast, you know, cause we could go broader, but around racism and gender oppression around a real reflection and critical thinking and saying where we're have, you know, uh, where are these fields really, really done harm, uh, and, and how that harmful and differentially on black, Brown, indigenous people and poor people and, and, and really, really reflect on it and say, wait a second, you know, um, this is the ways we've done this. And th there's real differences. You know, like if you look in the U S and I was reading, I've been reading over the last years, all the opioid quote unquote epidemic. And I'm putting in quotes because I think a lot of this is, is political and how it's understood and defined and the terminology, but, um, and that women's experience of addiction and men's experience of addiction is different. And one of the particular differences is that men are more likely to be introduced to drugs by their friends and women are more likely to be introduced to drugs by their partner. And you've got to wonder what the context around abuse and control is there, you know, because now that we're talking about two, I want to get you hooked. So you're dependent was I, your drug dealer was, is tied to pimping you out at all. You know, there's just sort of that we, we need that real conversation about these things. Uh, but we often talk in very broad strokes like we do about trauma, you know, without, uh, identifying the source of the trauma. That's a whole other, I can talk about that in a minute, but
Speaker 4:Gonna say we should, we should actually talk about how trauma informed is not domestic violence informed right. In the mental health context. It's not, um, and, and everybody sort of tutes on the trauma informed horn. And I love it. I love, I know a lot of really good mental health practitioners who are trauma informed, but they're not domestic informed. And their documentation is still very, very focused on the survivor. It does not contextualize the situations under which the behaviors of the perpetrator under which this arose. And it does not protect that survivor by also mapping out their protective capacity, because it doesn't matter if you have an addiction or a mental health disorder. If you remove somebody from that act of perpetration and you get them assistance, right. If they're no longer being perpetrated against, if you make sure that you're focusing on the perpetrator and holding them accountable so that the survivor is over here and can heal, then a lot of times you'll see people make a tremendous amount of progress in those mental health and addiction areas. But if it's done disconnected from that environment, you have ongoing anxiety, stress, and perpetration happening, which is often even more damaging because it's not being acknowledged or seen by professionals who in, in the mind of a survivor, who's not a professional one should be able to draw those lines of correlation between the harm and the environment that you're living in. And the fact that you have these struggles that arise, you know, we, we really are, we're doing is we are institutionally violent towards survivors.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the ways you can operationalize this is to think about where, and when as a, as a professional in the addiction field or the mental health field year, you're trying to identify past or current patterns of course, of control. They've impacted this person and, and, and particular you naming them is that by giving people the language to understand it, is that, and are you also looking for, like I said earlier, are you looking for this, you know, interference with their, with the current environment? I think, and what I want to say is the trauma-informed work. Um, excuse me, you know, is, you know, the, when you talk about safety will be centered in the language of, of trauma-informed, that will be identified as a critical part of being trauma-informed. I think the issue often comes in how it's operationalized or not in the way we practice, you know, and, and really that we have to look at how we're defining safety. I think course of control really gives us a really good view of this, you know, and, and, and I think a lot of times, um, mental health practitioner, I've worked with some really world-class mental health, public health practitioners who are dealing with domestic violence and kids, and they were weren't, it was fascinating. They weren't willing to work with kids and, and their mothers when they were still with the person abusing. But the line they draw was that, that they could work with them after they were separated. And, and, and with some sort of notion that, that the abuse had stopped. And I get that there, there are things that are really, can be different when there's physical distance in separate households, but, but we have to think more that those things is on a continuum. We have to think about the tactics actually may be escalating post-separation. We need to be thinking about the kids may now have unsupervised contact with that person. Um, and that, and that, so our, our, our view of this really has to include a clear identification. It can't be diagnosis and symptoms, you know, trauma treatment, you know, TSCBT trauma, trauma informed, you know, uh, cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, like there'll be talk about things like that, which is a great kind of modality. I don't, I don't have a problem with the modality at all, but the idea is when you do that, and you just look to the trauma and the clinical and the symptom lens, you often miss the diversity of sources of trauma, and that those things matter. You know, again, if you're talking about intergenerational trauma from racism, you know, or the trauma that comes from, you know, being the, you know, in Australia, the stolen generation, you know, where kids are removed or, or, uh, and put with white families, and then the disconnection that comes from their cultural identity and the abuse that happened, you know, and then the, you know, disconnected from family. I mean, just the layers of that, you know, to treat that similarly talked about in the same bucket, as somebody who lived through an earthquake or a migration of violent migration experience or car accident, or, or had childhood abuse in a, in a, in a family that was, uh, of a particular kind, all those things are, have very different dynamics around them and different meaning to those people. And I'm not saying that we, that there aren't tons of practitioners who actually that aren't sensitive to this, but I think our conversations at the macro level really don't do justice when we just talk in these broad strokes here, but we need to be trauma informed because it really wipes that again, racism, structural forms of abuse, oppression, and it's often talking about things that happened in the past versus things that are gone now. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I, I think, I think that, you know, our human tendency is we want to fix problems. And, and if we feel like somebody is still living in abuse, we feel like we can't fix their problems. But the reality is, is that one of the
Speaker 3:Most. So I got a beef with the mental health community.
Speaker 4:I put myself in counseling at the age of 17. After I left a Colt and experienced a lot of really bad counselors, FYI, and some really good counselors. But what I found was particularly when I was living in course of glee controlling relationship, and I was going to
Speaker 3:Couples counseling, that those counselors are not willing to look at behavioral behaviors and call them abuse. The mental health community has to get more comfortable with looking at behaviors
Speaker 4:And saying, that's coercive control.
Speaker 3:You're being abused, particularly in a marriage and family context, particularly when that person is trying to figure out how to leave safely. And in fact, I believe that it is a
Speaker 4:Huge injustice that's been happening that diagnosticians
Speaker 3:Bins are unwilling to behaviourally assess and say to
Speaker 4:People who are coming to them for assistance,
Speaker 3:I I'm here to support you by acknowledging that you're being abused, that this is going to be complex. And I'm going to keep acknowledging to you, okay,
Speaker 4:That these behaviors you're experiencing are harmful and destructive.
Speaker 3:And then here are resources for you to figure out how to safely manage or leave or whatever it is that has to happen. But if mental health practitioners were better at looking at perpetrators and saying, you are
Speaker 4:Abusive, here are the behaviors you're willing to engage in actions, which harm your family,
Speaker 3:Family, and which they tell you is harming
Speaker 4:Them. And you feel entitled to do it
Speaker 3:Because of your trauma, your past, your religion, your deeply held beliefs, your sense of what the family structure should be like, whatever it is. But if you intend to live happily with other people, and they tell you that, that you are harming them by your behaviors, then you need to stop. And if we did that as a culture, if
Speaker 4:Did that, if mental health practitioners did that at school counselors did that.
Speaker 3:If somebody looked people in the eye and said, the behaviors you're engaging in are harmful to your family, and you need to stop, and let me help you figure out a way to do that. Then I think that we would have a moment,
Speaker 4:Much better response from the mental health community, towards victim survivors, with
Speaker 3:Less room, for
Speaker 4:Other systems to use their diagnoses to harm,
Speaker 3:Because it will still be very focused on the person who's choosing to engage in those harmful behaviors. But I never, once not once had any mental health practitioner look at me or in my relationship and say, you're being abused, you're being forcibly controlled. It's harming you. And the choices that that this person is making don't seem to be getting better, they feel entitled to do so. So let's talk about your, your, your choices, how you can take care of yourself, how you can, how you can have a stable environment in order for you to, to start to heal, to be less anxious, to be less fearful. Nobody did that.
Speaker 2:And I'm sorry that nobody did that. I may think this is, this is, um, where we want to go. And I think what you described there at the end happens can happen in really good men's behavior change programs, but not in the wider field, but, or, and not, but, and I want to name some of the barriers, and this may be the way we wrap up today. And some of the barriers to what you're saying, because you're given that very straight clear sense of this is what would be ideal from a survivor's point of view. This is what we need. This is what I would have needed from, you know, from the medical professionals. I didn't get that from them. And what I want to say is, you know, as you're listed to you and, and, and, and in 110% support, I'm thinking about what barriers and we need to unwind. And here are a few of my mind. One is that you still can go through mental health and addiction training in a lot of places, if not the majority of places without a mandated course, or set of courses on family violence, even marriage and family therapy at least a few years ago. And I think that's really, I think we need to all sit with that, that kind of statement, that, that, again, that, that the mental health and addiction field don't, and, and, and, and one of the good things about how it's not framed as is that, you know, we don't have that as a diagnosis in, in the, in, you know, mental health perpetrators of family violence. Shouldn't be, and isn't a mental health diagnosis. So I think people need to wrap their minds around that as well. But I think you need to prepare and train people and, and prep them for them. But the truth is we actually don't train people in marriage and family therapy and addiction in two big subject areas, violence, and sex. That's a whole other conversation, but it's really important to see that gap. So that's one thing. Second thing is that, um, as I've said in other settings that we're not training a lot of our professionals to work with males, right? And so I've been hearing recently from different settings as we're, we're moving more into this area of, of, of training mental health addiction, that fear of their own physical safety for the safety of their clients, but also fear of, of lawsuits and being hauled into court particular in the context of family court is one of the reasons they don't be as direct as you are suggesting. And I agreed that they should be right. And so we have to think about the systems that really support that directness in documentation and assessment and engagement and both that's, that's the skills, that's the knowledge, that's the, the motivation, understanding how you're failing clients, if you don't do that, but then all the bits and pieces of safety around that and support. And if you're working a lot of people working so low, but a lot of people working in organizations and each of their needs are different. If you're a solo practitioner, you may feel very vulnerable physically, you know, and, and you may not feel like you've got the resources or the energy or the way to deal with it. But if you're part of an organization that's a whole of thing, will you be supported? Will you be backed up? If you start getting harassment or complaint,
Speaker 4:I just I'm, I'm still, I shouldn't be stunned, but I'm just still stunned that the court relies on mental health, diagnosticians and addiction programs, uh, to, you know, a lot of compliance issues in family court hinge on that and those experts. So those experts know that their, their stuff is being used in these family court contexts and in other contexts as well. And the fact that they are not trained, I think they're practicing outside of their scope of practice.
Speaker 2:I think, frankly, I think that's a question we need to ask about, about, about, you know, legal professionals and others really about what's the level of training, what kind of training, but then when judges or magistrates order people into services, they have the ability to say, we, we, this kind of service, even if it doesn't exist, and this is where leadership can come from the judiciary or government to say, this is the kind of service we're going to purchase, and we will purchase not just trauma-informed, but domestic bonds have warm services because that is what we think the standard should be around this. But I think when you look at these barriers for doing what you're saying, it's, it's training and education, but that's not enough. It's about procedures for screening and assessing and understanding how you do that. And do you meet with people separately every time? Um, do ask questions about course or control, you know, if you're dealing with somebody who's, who has addiction or mental health issue, and then, you know, safety issues. And I think those are, those are some of the key things we need to consider. And now we're not even talking to this may be a subject for another podcast about mental health and addiction and fields work with perpetrators could really, while we've been framing the issue around a perpetrator pattern, we've been mostly talking about how those systems are not doing well by survivors today. And
Speaker 4:I, I feel like one of the things that needs to be demystified is working with perpetrators. And, you know, one of the beefs I have with the way that we communicate about domestic violence is advocacy. Porn is what I call it. Women with bruised and broken faces. And there's a shadow of a man with his fist balled up it's it needs to stop paper and, and perpetrators for the most part, there's a, there's a certain percentage of perpetrators who are truly monsters. And I have encountered them and lived with them in my childhood. People who had, who had been in jail for horrible things. And I saw horrible things from them. I would be afraid of that human being. Absolutely. But most people who are choosing to abuse their family have done so because they feel entitled and the culture is supporting it, their pastors, their religious leaders are supporting those narratives. Um, the predominant culture is supporting those narratives of the entitlement of that person to control and harm their family. And that's actually, if we start to really focus on behaviors collectively, right? All of the people around this family, right. If everybody who deemed themselves a professional and was taking money from families to try and help their mental health, learn how to do it in a domestic violence informed way. I think that a large percentage of people who are choosing to abuse their family would stop because they don't like to be held accountable. And they don't like to feel shame. And they don't like to feel like a burden
Speaker 2:It's about consequences, um, and all about self-perception, but I'm saying consequences, internal and external. When you, when you do what you're describing, you raise the sense of internal consequences in addition to possibly external consequences, not arrest, but, but to community,
Speaker 4:I want to feel like they're responsible parents, um, that they're providing and giving their kids what they need. Right. And that image, that outward image needs to be shattered a limit a little bit in those professional spaces where we hold behaviors
Speaker 2:In a constructive way. So I want to come back. I want to end with one more, let's let it go back to survivors, but maybe this actually we'll talk about purposes as well. Um, but I wanna, I think we need to do another episode on, on just perpetrators and intersections more in depth, because I think also there's whole questions about, um, um, how do you integrate to cultural trauma with people who are perpetrating, but I'm actually, when I kind of, you've been reading trauma trails. Yes. Yes. I'm just wondering if, you know, Judy Atkinson is that, you know, which is, you've been really enjoying for awhile, I would say. Okay, okay. Sorry. Joanne is not enjoying, is that the,
Speaker 3:I, I am enjoying it, but it I've taken, it's almost been two months now I'm in the middle of the book and I use it daily, almost like a meditation, and it really is a journey.
Speaker 2:So I'm just wondering if, if we can take five minutes here before we wrap up for you to talk a little bit about what you've been getting from reading her book and just a little bit of background of what it is for people who don't know what it is. And I think it has a lot to inform this conversation about an intersection.
Speaker 3:Judy Atkinson is a mental health professional, but she's Aboriginal as well. And she's using an Aboriginal framework, um, in order to help people through this healing process. And she, she uses the Aboriginal principle of dadirri, um, which is deep listening. Um, you know, we know through the truth and reconciliation, um, uh, committees that we've seen in Rwanda and South Africa and other places that one of the biggest things for people who have experienced violence is that, that, that violence and the harm that it did needs to be acknowledged by the wider culture by, by, by people around us, by the institutions that inflicted that harm as well, that participated in that, and that continue to participate in it. And that, that, that acknowledgement is really just the first step on a journey of people sharing their stories, um, and reconnecting with themselves and with their cultures around them, um, with their families, with their kin, with the land that they came from. And I really, truly, you know, I felt like, I mean, I think I read the page where she gave a definition to dive theory for three days, because, and the first time I read it, I cried. I just wept because it felt like it gave a name to something that is deeply inside of me. I can't say it's deeply inside of us, but is deeply inside of me. And that is that, you know, I experienced something similar. I was stripped from my cultural context. Um, I lived in a communal setting and we were unable to have, or even know about our extended family. I didn't even know about my paternity. Um, and I had a very rich cultural history behind my father's family, you know, that's, um, Hispanic and Portuguese, and I lost all of that context and it created, um, a real sense of, of, of trauma. And there was forced poverty. We, we didn't have to be poor. It was enforced and it was real poverty. I mean, we were hungry at times and we didn't have electricity and running water at times. Um, so as she was telling the stories of the journey of Aboriginal people being stripped of their context, being enforced poverty, you know, I, I really felt a tremendous amount of empathy and resonance. And, and we have to get to a point where collectively, culturally, we can acknowledge the damage that we've done and listen to people's stories. It's not just about the acknowledging. It's listening to the stories of those who have survived that violence, and then collaborating with each other for healing. That means action. That means that means informed doing right, not just casting about for solutions, but having those stories and that, you know, those experiences teach us and inform us about a better way to respond a better way to do about our way to act. Um, and, and, you know, it seems so simple because it's just that to me is organic. That's an organic process that makes sense. I don't believe that we can heal as cultures until we start to deeply listen to survivors and how they're being harmed. And we have to reattach our practices the way that we behave, the things that we do back to their needs and to the way that it supports them. And really, truly, I think that in the end that those services, that claim that they're helping survivors, if the preponderance of their actions, aren't helping survivors, they should lose funding because they're doing us damage. They're continuing the cycle of violence. And I think particularly about the response in Australia to the course of control laws being raised, and the real concerns that Aboriginal women are rested at high rates and women who experienced violence are rested at high rates and, and, and convicted prosecuted for crimes. And to me, it's insanity to think that we can make these laws and these policies and not look at the institutions and the things that they are doing. For example, the police and the retention of domestic violence perpetrators, you can't separate our response out from the racism and the anti-women attitudes that exists. And the, and the perpetration within those institutions that are supposed to be assisting us. We need a holistic overhaul.
Speaker 2:And th this is why you, you, you start saying, you know, fixed systems, not survivors. And I really, I really liked the deep listening piece. And, and, um, thinking about, as you're talking, just the deep listening to people who have been harmed, whether it's in the context of, of, of individual relationship or a family or, or cultural abuse for generations, you know, is, is, uh, the feelings be able to hear and sit with hearing somebody's anger and rage and, and despair and grief and loss, which those harms can't be on Dawn. Can't go back in time to make that not have happened, but you can listen and hear somebody's pain. And I was talking to somebody, somebody shared with me about working with Aboriginal clients and was talking about just there, he was talking about their anger and the depression that was just so present for so many of them. And it wasn't that, you know, it was just there. And anyway, so I just wanted to bring in, because I think it's, it's really important in this context of returning that intersection of domestic violence, mental health, and addiction, that we are, again, widening out the scope of the conversation away from this very Western pathology diagnosis, individualizing Iceland, you know, and I keep wanting to wrap us up, but I keep thinking about a fatality review report out of New Zealand. A number of years ago were named that the, that, that the term that the phrase empowerment is now used in this very individualized way, but the, the Genesis of the term was about collective, about groups,
Speaker 3:Violence. I think, I think it's, it's violence to pressurize the individual and make them responsible and totally not see how everything around them is supporting this, this perpetration in this narrative right down, right down to the practices of businesses that fire survivors, when their perpetrator is stalking them, which includes by the way, mental health and domestic violence.
Speaker 2:Well, as I say, it's because of the safety of their staff or unit, right. So we've got to get better. Okay. So we, we obviously have a lot to say about this, and hopefully it's been interesting to you. I loving this conversation and it's been a couple of weeks in the making. We keep saying, we, we, we, we,
Speaker 4:We have so much work that we've been doing that we were not able to record a podcast for a while, and, and we apologize for the gap, but we're working tremendously hard. Okay.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to partner with a survivor in today's conversations about intersections, and we will be doing more in the future. And we really welcome your questions and comments and your engagement, you know, with this, with this issue, it's a huge one. And would encourage you if, if you're, you know, relevant white papers on our website include one on worker safety, one on perpetrators, um, uh, uh, intervention program certificates are dangerous about sort of measuring change. There's another one on how perpetrators manipulate systems. And so it's, you know, so, so not only, you know, if you're listening, you know, you're here with us, uh, in the audio world, um, you can go to our website safety dealer.com and get free resources there. Um, and, um, and check out our events coming up. And I'll, you know, we've got events going on all the time and different things. And then also come to our virtual Academy where there's, where there's lots of learning opportunities and paid, and that's Academy dot safer together into.com. And we have a discount code that Ruth
Speaker 4:We do as partners all lower case. It's a coupon for you for that per 15%, I believe. Yeah. That applies to all the, it does all the courses,
Speaker 2:Courses there. And, um, and, uh, please, uh, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and, um, and, uh, please share this podcast wherever you're listening and subscribe to whatever platform you're listening to it and,
Speaker 4:And fix systems, not survivors systems, not survivors. Okay. And we're out and we're out,
Speaker 1:[inaudible].