Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel
This podcast is a series of conversations.
What started as a series of intimate conversations between Ruth and David that ranged from personal to professional experiences around violence, relationships, abuse, and system and professional responses which harm, not help, has now become a global conversation about systems and culture change. In many episodes, David and Ruth are joined by a global leader in different areas like child safety, men and masculinity, and, of course, partnering with survivors. Each episode is a deep dive into complex topics like how systems fail domestic abuse survivors and their children, societal views of masculinity and violence, and how intersectionalities such as cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and unique vulnerabilities impact how we respond to abuse and violence. These far-ranging discussions offer an insider look into how we navigate the world together as professionals, as parents, and as partners. During these podcasts, David and Ruth challenge the notions which keep all of us from moving forward collectively as systems, as cultures, and as families into safety, nurturance, and healing.
We hope you join us.
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Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel
Season 6 Episode 11: We Are Not Our Trauma: Exploring Post-Traumatic Growth Beyond Deficit Models in Therapy with Oli Doyle
Surviving trauma isn't evidence of brokenness—it’s proof of extraordinary strength. Yet traditional therapy approaches often miss this crucial reality, focusing instead on deficits and pathology while forcing survivors to relive painful experiences without first creating safety.
In this powerful conversation, therapist and trauma survivor Oli Doyle joins David and Ruth to challenge conventional therapeutic wisdom that keeps trauma survivors stuck in cycles of shame and self-blame. Together, they explore how true healing begins with recognizing the remarkable resilience that allowed survivors to endure seemingly impossible circumstances.
“How the hell are you sitting in front of me still alive, still breathing? How have you done that?” Oli asks his clients, shifting focus away from pathologizing trauma responses toward honoring the ingenuity that enabled survival. This perspective represents a radical departure from approaches that ask, "What’s wrong with you?" instead of, “What happened to you and how did you survive it?”
The discussion delves into how trauma lives in our bodies, requiring more than verbal processing for healing. Ruth explains, “You can’t talk your way out of a body response. You have to use body-based strategies to help the body get through that moment.” This embodied understanding of trauma recognizes that memories live in our tissues, manifesting as behaviors that once served protective functions but may now cause suffering.
Beyond individual healing, the conversation challenges the cultural narrative that personal choices determine outcomes regardless of context. As Oli notes, “What we’ve been taught in colonial cultures is that contexts and structural factors don’t matter. If you just make the right choices, you’ll have a good life.” This individualistic perspective serves systems of power while obscuring how structural inequities shape trauma and limit options.
For mental health professionals, this episode offers a powerful invitation to examine implicit biases and deficit-focused approaches. For survivors, it provides validation that survival itself represents an extraordinary achievement worthy of recognition and respect. And for everyone, it illuminates how honouring survivor strengths rather than focusing on brokenness creates pathways to genuine healing and post-traumatic growth.
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."
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And we're back.
Ruth:Hi, hey, same time, same time. How are?
David:you Good? How are you?
Ruth:I'm good.
David:So once again, you're listening to Partnering with Survivor and I'm David Mandel, ceo and founder of the Safe and Together Institute.
Ruth:Once again, I am Ruth Reymundo Mandel and I am the co-owner and chief business development officer, and we are here today and we're going to be having a conversation with Oli Doyle, but before we do that, I want to do our land acknowledgement and I want to say that right now, the land that we are on, which is part of the Tungsthuis Masako Nation, is extremely hot and unseasonably so. We are up in the 100 degrees, which I believe is 36, 38 degrees.
Ruth:And people in this region are not used to it. So all the plant life is looking a little bit parched and a little bit thirsty and we are hiding inside and we want to send our honor and respect to the traditional custodians of the land and to the elders, past, present and emerging.
David:That's great, thank you, and we are joined by Oli Doyle and we're going to be talking about therapy, but in a different way, as it intersects with the Safe and Together model principles, but also really exploring some of the things that are really important to me and I know important to you, ruth about how traditional ways therapy is practiced, may not be getting it exactly right being very deficit-focused, not really being very individual focused in the sense of blaming individuals and holding them accountable for things that may be beyond their control structurally, blaming individuals and holding them accountable for things that may be beyond their control structurally and these are really important things when we look at survivors from the safety of the perspective. So, just with that as an intro, I just want to welcome Oli Doyle.
Oli Doyle :Thanks so much. It's really nice to be talking to you both. Before we start, I'd love to just acknowledge that I'm sitting on Dja Dja Wurrung country, where it is maybe one or two degrees I've no idea what that is in Fahrenheit and just I'm sitting on stolen land that was never ceded and where there's no treaty and sovereignty has never been ceded, and in a place where the country is sick because my people don't know how to care for it. They only know how to profit from it, and we really need to give that land back to the Dja Dja Wurrung people so that they can care for it, and hopefully we can be a part of that journey. And thanks for having me.
David:Yeah, thanks, and Oli, it's just great to have you. I know you've been trained in Save it Together and you're a therapist and you also publicly identify as a trauma survivor. So we're just saying that, so people know that we're not outing you in terms of your personal story, um, and you've got a very specific journey and also specific framework, so can you talk a little bit about that journey? Um, you know that brings you to your approach uh, helping others heal from trauma sure, um.
Oli Doyle :So I guess my journey has a couple of parts. One is my own experience and one is my professional background, which is kind of working in family services here in Victoria and in family violence practice. And I guess when I came across Safe and Together, it was the first model I'd seen that really made sense of the experience of being a survivor, not just in terms of abuse but in terms of how the systems and people around survivors tend to perpetrate this kind of secondary abuse, by victim blaming, by not believing them or by holding survivors accountable for the behavior of people who are using violence. And so when I came across your model, and so when I came across your model, I was so excited and started evangelizing it immediately and then I kind of I left the sector for a think.
Oli Doyle :A lot of practitioners have their own experiences of being in some type of controlling situation or relationship. But there's this thing that when we look at survivors, somehow we can just get pulled back into these, this cultural folklore that says you know well all the unhelpful things that that you, you guys, talk about. Um, so I guess my my own personal journey, um it, it really showed me how, how important it is to be believed and to be just understood and supported and how you can't do. I don't think you can do any therapeutic work unless the person sitting across from you knows that you're with them 100% and you're not going to judge them in any way.
Ruth:Yeah, you know, I would be really interested to hear a little bit about your more body-centric creating safety methodologies and how they hook up with creating that safety in practice, that safety in practice. A lot of therapists who use talk therapy really don't understand how to create a container of trauma-informed and abuse-informed safety and they make some very routine mistakes. I would call them that create an environment where people do not feel safe and secure enough to not only explore their disclosures but to really fully relax into their body disclosing those disclosures, which are two separate things. Your mind and your mouth disclosing is different than your body disclosing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Oli Doyle :Yeah, I think one thing I think about a lot is what kind of like setting conditions or what kind of relationship conditions do we need for people to feel safe and therefore to do this kind of work?
Oli Doyle :And there's something about the way you relate to people that I always think trauma survivors or people who've grown up in foster care or people who've experienced violence and control are the best in the world at picking up on other people's signals, at knowing what other people think, and they also often don't trust themselves.
Oli Doyle :But they have really good instincts and people will go really quickly if you're not genuine or if you're judging them in some way. And so I think that the first step is you have to have safety in the room, you have to have safety in the relationship for anyone to feel comfortable to talk about these kind of intimate things. And one thing I learned from trauma theory that I really made sense to me is that we're not dealing with the things that happened specifically. We're dealing with how those things show up for the person now, in the present moment, and how those things impact their life in an ongoing way, because I think one yeah one mistake therapists make is thinking the important thing is that you tell all the hard parts of your story and through that you're going to feel better, and potentially we're just re-traumatizing people for no great, no great benefit and a lot of people don't remember the key parts of this story in a coherent way, absolutely.
David:This is what Ruth and I were talking a little bit about before the interview started, which is, even though I'm trained as a therapist trained in psychology and counselling there's a little bit of anti-therapist in me, or at least what I would refer to as a little bit of skepticism about the sort of automatic response to people feeling like to support healing. Well, we need to ask you about your childhood, we need to ask you what happened. We need to explore that, and I don't want anybody to hear I always say this. I don't want't anybody hear that I'm not saying don't do that. What I'm talking about is this almost automatic sort of default back to well, let's explore where this came from, versus saying how are you experiencing the world right now, how are you experiencing yourself right now, and is there, is there a simple way for you?
David:If you're suffering in your experience of the world right now, either it's because real things are being done to you or there's some suffering you're right now creating yourself. If somebody's not, if that parent that maybe abused you isn't standing over your shoulder right now and isn't a real threat to you today, then you're bringing that suffering with you in your body, and so you don't necessarily need to tell that story. Maybe you do, maybe you want to, maybe you want to be heard Again. I really want to be clear if that's important, but I think on the professional side, this can be this energy of well. It's my job to bring you back to the past so you can heal the present. And, Oli, I think you're saying that maybe that's not the way we need to practice. All the time is that is that correct?
Oli Doyle :yeah, well, I I come from the point of view that the past is in the present, like it only exists in the present. It's not like there's this other place that exists that we can kind of you know we're not doing back to the future stuff and which I watched recently is so problematic. Anyway.
David:I won't go into that I say so.
Oli Doyle :The an example is like I was. I was talking to someone the other day and I won't give too much detail because for obvious reasons, but they were talking about how, when particular interactions with their partner who's not abusive happen, that they basically just want to go and cry and hide under the covers and they just cannot have a conversation, they cannot function and it's completely overwhelming. And my question was if you, you know, if you think about some of your past experiences, does it make sense? Why that might, you know, set off some alarm bells and they, they said yeah, absolutely. And then they, they disclosed some of the things because they wanted to, but they didn't actually need to tell me the detail for us to have that conversation.
Oli Doyle :They could have just said yeah, I've had some experiences where these types of conversations have been unsafe or where these types of things have happened, and then I've been hurt and we could have then jumped straight back to okay, like as you're saying, ruth, like what shows up in your body in that moment, what shows up in your body now as you talk about it, and can we kind of find a place to just pause and hold that and let that be there because the past is important, I think, because one of the things survivors experience is that we think we're going crazy because someone asked us an innocent question and then all of a sudden we're like crying under the table.
Oli Doyle :An innocent question and then all of a sudden we're like crying under the table and and these are like people, like like you and me who have, who go out and do presentations in the world and go out and talk to people and have professional jobs and aren't really have all these things they're competent at and then someone asks them an innocuous question and all of a sudden they're like hiding in the in the closet and under a bundle of coats and they just feel like there's something, there's something broken in me, there's something fundamentally wrong with me right and I think if we make sense of like how that makes sense because of these past experiences then, first of all, we can normalize it and people can see themselves differently.
Oli Doyle :Like I'm not this bundle of madness, I'm just someone who had some hard experiences and then we can start to, to process Um.
Oli Doyle :But to do that, this whole kind of the whole um take me through everything that happened that you remember, step by step by step is was the best thing people could you know, think of and come up with, you know, in the after world war one or in the in the 40s and 50s um. But but the problem with this and I'm a bit anti-therapist, too david, but the problem is these things just hang around in spite of survivors telling us it's not helpful, evidence telling us it's not helpful. Somehow these practices just seem to to really stick well, the.
Ruth:The challenge of the human body is its variety and the opportunity of the human body is its consistency. And we are actually machines. We are human, organic machines and we have a limbic system that takes on training and once it has identified some behavior or some emotional feeling as a threat in a formative way, it takes a lot of conscious work for us to undo that training. And what we're really bad at and people who call themselves trauma-informed are also really bad at is recognizing trauma-related behaviors in the present moment, not pathologizing them but pausing. So, instead of pathologizing, pausing and dealing with that behavior in a different way, not punishing it, not creating more shame in the immediate sense, but drawing a boundary around it. Nation cultures that believe that when we experience trauma, that we become fractioned, our psyche becomes a little bit fractioned and pieces of us stay in that moment to protect ourselves, to warn us about that thing happening again, even if we didn't quite perceive all the pieces of it appropriately, because we were a child and we blamed ourselves or we laid the blame in ways that were not actually real because of the trauma, and that the job of a therapist should be to help a person to regather themselves, collect themselves here in the present moment, so that they can see when they're responding to fear from the past or they're responding to fear of the future based on the past, based on patterns that they've experienced and fears that that's going to happen again.
Ruth:And that's where a lot of people, I think, really don't understand that mind-body connection, that these memories live in our tissues, that they get manifest as behaviors. And some trauma behaviors will be that collapse, that cry, that on that flight. But some trauma behaviors will be aggressive, violent, coercive, controlling, controlling just to stop what the person fears may happen based off of their prior experience. And that's where I really feel that it's important for us to be able to look at ourselves or at other people and say you're responding to something that doesn't exist in this moment and, uh, try to help them to be more stable and safe. That's the way that I see it and it's a very body thing. For me. It's not. You can't talk your way out of a body response. You have to use body-based strategies to help the body to get through that moment.
David:I think it's wonderful what you're saying, ruth, and I'm thinking about how far we are sometimes, and one of the dilemmas with sort of this going back to the past framework is when we talk about domestic abuse survivors, a couple of things can happen that I think are bad. I'd say that One is all the energy goes to understanding their past and we lose sight of the present moment they're living in right and the present moment of what they're perpetrating on themselves and others yeah and uh, you know and uh, and there's different versions of that and but but a lot of times that they become pathologized.
David:and I know, uh, ollie, you talk a little bit about, or maybe you'll talk about a minute about post-traumatic growth and you, you know sort of and you said this earlier but the whole person who's strong in all these other ways, I think a lot of times they get reduced to their pathology. And then we've had we did another podcast episode about trauma bonding.
Ruth:Right A long time ago.
David:A long time ago, and then we were interviewed for a show on Stockholm syndrome and you know which is connected and those just as an aside for those who are curious. Stockholm syndrome has almost no science behind it, None, you know, and it's kind of still talked about like it's a real thing, and that's why it applied to women.
Ruth:Yeah, by the way, it's true.
David:But the idea that trauma bonding well, it can work practically for some survivors, and some survivors will talk about how it helps them think about their experience. This person's still with this perpetrator or has a connection to them before you've and a victim blaming potentially one before you fully assess entrapment, control, social factors, um, and you know so, this tendency to move to a personalized, pathologized view of survivors goes along with what you're saying, what you're both saying, which is of if you stay in the moment and you're in the direct experience of the moment, you're less likely to fall into that Psychologizing, pathologizing. Your past is the reason why you're in this situation. Your past is why you feel this way and if you can get through through your past issues, you'll be empowered somehow and that magically makes all the current circumstances evaporate or less powerful if you, if you can, just regurgitate your past experiences over and over again, then maybe you'll you'll train yourself.
Ruth:Well, it's a version of the sort of insight, the magic of insight.
David:If you have better understanding of your past and better understanding of your awareness of what's happening to you, then automatically the threats, the entrapment will evaporate, and I think that's a real really dangerous and dangerous.
David:So, Oli, I wonder, you know you do a lot of different modalities, whether it's acceptance and commitment therapy. You know you're a mindfulness practitioner and you've written books about mindfulness. The thing I you know would love to hear about specifically at this point, though, is this of of post-traumatic growth. I think people are really familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder, but can you talk about what you mean when you talk about post-traumatic growth?
Oli Doyle :okay, yeah, that's a really good question. Um, so, when I think about traumatic experiences well, any experiences, but we're talking about trauma here I think about we experience things, and then we have these combinations of what we think about the event, how we felt during the event, and then the meanings we made of the event. So how do we make sense of the event and then the meanings we made of the event? So how do we make sense of the event? And for trauma survivors, one of the meanings a lot of people derive from their experiences is things like I'm weak, I'm pathetic, I'm useless, I can't do anything right, or just I make bad choices. I never pick the right relationship, can't do anything right, or just I make bad choices, I never pick the right relationship. You know all these kinds of um, cultural, cultural folklore that permeate our society which says if you just pick the right partner, then everything will be great, which you know, we all know, is completely true. So after trauma, then one of the things that I see as critical in therapy is how do people see themselves? What do they think of? If I say, like, what kind of person tell me about yourself and people were honest, what would they say, and a lot of survivors say you know those limiting kind of things because they've made sense of their trauma in a particular way. I'll jump back to what you said, david.
Oli Doyle :If we look at behavior in context and we understand the context, we understand the entrapment, we understand the choices it always makes sense to me. It always makes sense why people kind of went this way and not that way, given what their options were. Afterwards they tend to think it's because I'm broken, it's because there's something wrong with me. And if you think about it as a kid, particularly that meaning makes a lot of sense and I think, can be really protective. Because if I think, like if I'm being abused as a child, I can't stand up to that perpetrator, I can't overpower them, I can't get out of the situation, but I want to have some sense of control or some sense of self-efficacy, then what makes sense to focus on is me. So maybe if I do everything right, I'll be safe. Maybe if I don't do this, if I do that.
Oli Doyle :And so people then get focused on how to survive by changing themselves, and so they put a lot of blame or responsibility on themselves, rather than saying that the problem is the perpetrator's the behavior is the perpetrator's responsibility.
Oli Doyle :So then, coming back to post-traumatic growth, in coming back to post-traumatic growth, the question is, how do we have conversations or, yeah, how do we have conversations that help someone reconsider their past, kind of looking back on it in terms of what choices they had, in terms of how they resisted, in terms of smart things they did that helped them survive? How do we help them kind of reconsider that? And then, in light of that conversation, what new meanings might they have about themselves, how might they think about themselves differently? And I find, when people get to a point of seeing themselves as a competent, skilled, brave survivor of terrible circumstances, and when they see the person who caused harm as responsible for the harm person who caused harm as responsible for the harm then it opens up this space of possibility for what they can do in the future, which is what I see as post-traumatic growth.
Ruth:Well, I think one of the ways that the Safe and Together model really does highlight that traumatic and post-traumatic growth I'm going to include traumatic growth. Trauma is a common human experience. It's the most common human experience actually that we share. We share joy, we share pleasure, we share pain, we share trauma. We share all of those major emotional drivers because we experience so many different experiences. Whether it's family violence, or it's an accident, or it's a war, or it's a forced migration event, or it's a death in the family, we all experience trauma and through that trauma we do gain perspective, strategies and growth.
Ruth:They don't always necessarily make us feel comfortable.
Ruth:They don't always help us to fit in with society's expectations, but one of the things that I really feel and I heard a survivor say this the other day really feel and I heard a survivor say this the other day, a survivor who's also a professional was using the PPMT and she said I realized that I'm actually a really good mom.
Ruth:I thought it was a terrible mom, I thought it was broken. My perpetrator kept telling me I was broken, but I realized by doing the mapping tool that I was actually a really good mom and that I did all these things for survival strategies under abuse, under stress, under war-like situations and what I'm going to say is that survivors, if you're here right now and you're listening, you're here and you survived and you did a really good job and I'm really proud of you, and not everything that you may have employed as a strategy may have been beneficial to you long-term, and maybe you had to unlearn and let go of those things, some of those things when you were safe and you were stable. But you did a really good job and you should not be ashamed about surviving.
David:I think that's really powerful and I've heard that from other survivors. You know and I'm thinking and reflecting on the development of the model can say that now was the the really basic fact that if we believe that when somebody's a victim of domestic abuse, that they're not the creator of that experience but the perpetrator is like we've all been talking about, then there's zero reason to assume there's anything broken in that victim. There's no reason to treat them from any other lens, but that they're a normal, healthy human being. And I think that I would ask every professional this is the flip side out there to really scour your belief system, to really scour with rigor your belief system and say that, because they're being presented to me, they've experienced victimization at the hands of another person who chose to be that way, chose to act that way towards them, was completely in control of their choice to do it. The victim didn't create it or invite it or want it. Do I really believe that and do I start from an understanding that there's nothing automatically wrong with this person because they're a victim or survivor of abuse? Do I really believe that or do I let other ideas creep in there and become a filter trauma theory or childhood abuse theory, or we invite in things, or if you're new age, I attract certain things, and we have all these different ideas that I think you know are, I think, in the best, most generous view of people trying to make sense of things that are scary and and unpredictable, because we all can get in a car crash.
David:We all can be abused. The smartest, best, most educated, from the best families with the least problems. They can grow up and end up in abusive relationships. That's the reality and I think a lot of people look for. Well, maybe there's something that can explain this in my background or maybe I can understand it when I see you. So I really want you to. So this is kind of a reverse version of what we do, I think, a lot of times at the end, which is you know what's the takeaway? We ask the interviewee, but you know, for me, I think we just did the reverse version, which is you said if you're a survivor, this is what I want you to hear, and I'm saying if you're a professional, scour your belief system, because if you've got those beliefs, then they're getting in the way of you being present and partnering with survivors yeah, yeah, I would like to hear more too.
Ruth:A little bit about, um, how you help people to recognize their post-traumatic growth.
Oli Doyle :Just a couple of points for people well, I think I start like jumping off what you said, david. I start by asking people like how did you, how did you survive? And we'll really lay out the context in quite a heavy way. So it's like so you're born into this kind of situation, you grew up in this kind of situation when you were 18, you ended up in this kind of relationship. You've been in that for 20 years. You just got out of it Like how the hell are you sitting in front of me still alive, still breathing? How have you done that?
Oli Doyle :And most people don't think of that as an achievement. They think their life is a failure and they made bad choices. And I think about it like if someone had just walked out of a hurricane or a bushfire or an earthquake or you know something, you know survived fleeing war or something like that. I't I wouldn't say why did you choose to be in that place? Or why didn't you leave earlier? Or I would say, wow, what was? What did you draw on? What is it about you that you managed to survive that, um, that set of circumstances? So I want to lay the context on really heavy and I'll just be curious about that.
Oli Doyle :And I think the starting point, like you said, david, is assuming that the person in front of you has a whole lot of skills, resources, strengths that allowed them to survive, like, like. That's my starting assumption and so all my questions. I want to know about that and I want them to give themselves credit for it. I think it's great if we're giving compliments, but if I say, how the hell did you survive? What did you draw on? What does it say about you as a person that you, and sometimes with with um, work I work with young people as well. So if I'm working with like 15, 16 year olds who've grown up in surrounded by violence and I'll say, well, how come? How come you're not like that, like why, how did you? How did you do that? Because all our, all our cultural beliefs say oh, that's what causes it. You know, if you grow up around that, you learn it, you do it, you'll repeat it and I'm like well, you're, you're sitting in front of me, you're not being being aggressive, you're not being violent towards me.
Oli Doyle :How, how did you, how did you manage to to take a different path?
Ruth:Right. Yeah, it's so important to help people to see their own contexts. You know, and we're really formed by the world we come from. I don't actually believe that people have the behaviors and words and context to be able to see themselves fully when they've been raised in a way where they've been constantly told that they are at a deficit. Them seeing their strengths means that other people need to see them. They need to acknowledge them and bring those forward, and we're really uncomfortable as humans doing that basic acknowledgement of other people's strengths. There's something in us that fears doing that, but we're really happy to tell people about their deficits and where they're failing. So that's obviously some human trait that we have to train ourselves, uh out of.
David:you know now now, you want, now I want to do like a cross-cultural study to see like, is that in certain societies or other ones are better at that? Which is just saying I, I see how hard you're working, I see, uh, you know what amazing stuff you've done, and don't lead with people's deficits or their trauma or their assume, I think, for me, I summarize, assume this person isn't a problem, assume they're not broken. It just sort of becomes like and then how do I interact with you, based on the assumption that you're not a problem and that you're not broken? It's, it's sort of and it's, it's really, I think it's.
David:Again, I'm going to put a challenge out to my therapeutic colleagues out there who orient themselves to seeing the brokenness first and and seeing and this is really subtle and I don't want to lump everybody in the same boat but where you see you, where you really see the person as, as being a problem somehow, and I don't have another way to say that. And again, I'm asking people to reflect on my words, versus being the being on the receiving end and having normal responses and, like Oli you said, like you know, responding and engaging in a human way with what's being presented or being done to them. So, Oli, I really appreciate you, you know, coming on and chatting with us. I really appreciate the time. I know it's early there or earlier for you there in Australia.
Ruth:Later for us.
David:Later for us.
Ruth:Yeah, and I would just. I would just to say if there's one thing that you want to say to other mental health practitioners about, you know, traumaformed and domestic abuse, informed practice and how it can support you in uncovering people's strengths and supporting them in behaviors which have led to their resiliency all of those things well, it might be a couple of things I try to.
Oli Doyle :I try to keep it succinct, um, what we're, what we've been taught culturally in, particularly in colonial cultures, is that what matters is people's individual choices.
Oli Doyle :Um that you know, contexts and structural factors and socioeconomics don't matter.
Oli Doyle :If you just make the right choices, you'll have a good life, and I think that serves the interests of the system that we're living under.
Oli Doyle :Um, and I would encourage people to to flip that completely upside down and say take your, take your focus off critiquing individual choices, lift up the context and the structures and the things people have had to deal with and and put them front and center, critique them and then, as as David said, you know, look at people's behaviour through the lens of that context, make sense of it in terms of entrapment, in terms of limited choices, in terms of what the other person or the situation's doing to them, doing to them, and start from that point, start from a point of assuming this person has a hell of a lot to teach you about how to survive difficult scenarios and try to learn all you can about that before you give them any advice or um, and just drop all the all these pathological labels that you know the the mental health labeling system is collapsing because they can't find the diseases that they've been diagnosing people with for the last 40 years.
Oli Doyle :So if we understand behaviour in context, then we don't need to be slapping all those labels on people unless they find it useful.
Ruth:Yeah Well, I think that's a really good place for us to stop and for professionals to reflect. And, um, I would just encourage people that if you're calling yourself trauma, informed that you're not focusing first on survivors deficits, that's your support. You're focusing on their resiliency and their survival skills and the things they did to protect themselves first, survival skills and the things they did to protect themselves first and then working with them to bring them into the present moment. And, yes, we have to teach people skills, behavioral and otherwise, to deal with the realities of systemic inequities and harm and the failures of our systems, to really hold accountable those people who are causing harm, deficit, resource lack and causing a lot of damage to human beings. But let's move with individual people from a place of amplifying their resiliency and strengths and then helping them live the best they can in the context of the world as it is, which is already challenging, which is already difficult, which we don't have a lot of control over, but we do have control over how we support people.
David:I think it's been great spending time with you, Oli, and, for those people who are listening, I hope you check out our website, safetyinternetinstitutecom, our virtual academy, academysafetyinternetinstitutecom, and that you like and follow and subscribe to partner with a survivor. Check out Oli's book Mindfulness, Plain and Simple, and he's got a book series that follows on to that. So I hope you check that out and I think, with that note, we are out. Thank you.