Therapist helps first responders rethink trauma

A local therapist says reframing our cultural understanding of how trauma works is fundamental to creating institutional and personal strategies for healing that truly work.

While there is a growing awareness in Canadian workplaces and communities about the prevalence of trauma in both personal and occupational contexts, a nuanced understanding of healing is still in the early stages, says Barbara Allyn, a certified trauma therapist and crisis intervention worker based in Vancouver.

“There’s tons of people getting trauma-informed out there,” Allyn told StarMetro. “But (people) don’t know what to do about it next. It’s like you’re giving somebody a tool and they go, ‘I don’t know what to do with this. I get that it’s a tool, but I don’t know where to go from there.’ ”

On Thursday and Friday, Allyn will introduce a group of B.C. first responders to her program called Tribal Therapy, which teaches people how to overturn their assumptions about how trauma works and begin the process of healing.

A 2017 study published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry showed the regular exposure of first responders — such as police, firefighters, paramedics and 911dispatchers — to “operational stress injuries” put those individuals at far greater risk of experiencing a “mental disorder” than the general popula- tion. These include post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder, according to the study, which also identified vulnerability for an alcohol use disorder.

The study found 44.5 per cent of first responders reported symptoms consistent with at least one such disorder, while Statistics Canada puts the frequency of diagnosed mental disorders in the general populace at just over 10 per cent.