Survivor Informed Care with Molly Boeder-Harris
Content Warning: This episode is focused on discussing, educating and uplifting the voices of survivors of sexual violence. In this episode, we will be discussing sexual violence, the rape crisis movement and healing avenues for survivors. Please be mindful as you listen and share this episode. We encourage survivors to honor themselves and those who are not to be present with this reality and be open to ways we can together create a more survivor informed care standard.
This is not an episode to “consume and move on from.” In this episode, host Katie Kurtz sits down with Molly Boeder-Harris, founder of The Breathe Network, for a conversation that goes far beyond headlines and statistics. We talk about what survivors actually need, how systems of care can unintentionally cause harm, and why healing must be part of how we show up.It’s an invitation to pause, listen deeply, and reckon with how we respond to survivors of sexual violence personally, professionally, and collectively. At a time when sexual violence is once again dominating headlines, this conversation asks an essential question: What does it actually mean to believe survivors and what are we willing to do once we say we do?
Learn more about Molly:
Molly Boeder Harris is the Founder and Executive Director of The Breathe Network, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), and a trauma-informed yoga teacher and trainer (E-RYT). Her own experiences of surviving sexual trauma catalyzed her to enter the trauma healing field in 2003, beginning with her work as a medical and legal advocate with children and adult survivors, a violence prevention educator, and later, as a yoga instructor specializing in working with survivors of sexual trauma.
She earned a Master’s Degree in International Studies and a Master’s Certificate in Women’s & Gender Studies, which inform the way she holds individual and collective forms of trauma, oppression, and healing close together in her work and in her life. Over the last 2 decades of her career and her ongoing healing trajectory, she has found that the practices that recognize the whole person – body, mind and spirit – while also attending to the ways in which both trauma and resilience manifest physiologically, offer the greatest possibility for embodied justice and social change.
Connect with Molly:
https://www.thebreathenetwork.org/
https://www.mollyboederharris.com/
Show Transcript:
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Hi everyone. Before we get into today's podcast episode, I want to provide a content warning and a gentle invitation to be mindful as you move through this podcast. We will be discussing, sexual violence and the nature of sexual violence. There are, stories and emotions that are brought forth in this, space.
And so please be mindful as you move through this. Make informed choices. Take care of yourself. Please be sure if you share this podcast with others, that you also include that content warning so people can use their autonomy and agency to move through this.
We encourage you to try your best to be present. What Molly brings forward is years of lived and learned experience and leadership in this work, and now more than ever, it is so, so important.
So let's dive into today's episode.
Hi everyone, and welcome back to a Trauma-Informed Future podcast. I'm your host, Katie Kurtz. I am so excited to be in conversation [00:01:00] with Molly Boeder Harris, thank you so much for being here. How are you arriving today on how are you inter Introduce yourself in your own words.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): I'm arriving just having hung out in my backyard. My dogs and a lot of weeds. And I did, I planted some things, keeping my fingers crossed that something will grow.
And that's kind of, that's my approach to gardening is like, throw some seeds out there and let's see what happens. And yeah, I think besides, you know, that like going out to the yard, that impetus is also just because I like everybody and handling, living in the world right now with the things that we talked about earlier, like so much kind of constant grief and sorrow and there's a lot of helplessness and there's a lot of just.
Local and national and [00:02:00] international suffering and strife and so much of it can feel out of our hands. So, yeah, so I, I have that like tenderness and I think that is often what sends me to the backyard and it sent me there today is like, okay, things are a lot, I can go pick up dog poop, I can do some weeding and I can plant some wildflower seeds.
So, you know, just trying to find those tangible things that are available in the moment and give me a place for some of this, some of what I am handling. But in my introduction of who I am. I am a trauma-informed healing provider. I am a parent of both humans, a human and animals.
I have two huskies and a partner and, I run a nonprofit organization, which I'm sure we'll talk about the Breathe [00:03:00] Network and I'm a yoga teacher and a lot of my work has been organized around exploring how we heal from trauma. So I used to kind, I used to say sometimes that it's trauma brought me into the field of the different things that I do, but I really think it's the access to healing and the ability to cultivate resilience through a lot of external and internal resources that's really allowed me to stay for the last 20 years or so.
So that's a little bit about who I am.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Thanks so much, Molly. I really resonate. I too started, spent a little extra time today outside and have been just like. Checking in on my plants, hoping and praying. It's, I feel like how I garden is how I do life often, just throwing it out and hoping for the best. But really, yeah, you know, during these times of just [00:04:00] collective dysregulation and there's just so many things coming at us, taking those really present moments to just be in the the areas we can control.
And I think the most constant regulator, co-regulation for us right now is nature. I mean, obviously humans, but there's something very powerful about co-regulating with dirt and plants and flowers and bees and trees and all the things. And I think during these times of collective trauma, it's so a.
Something I don't take for granted and I'm finding myself doing more of. And I think that's a really beautiful segue to talk about your beautiful body of work and the collective and the network you've created with Brief Network. And I would love for you to share what the Breathe Network is, your journey to [00:05:00] creating and co-creating this space.
I share the Breathe Network with everybody I talk to. Thank you. And because I think it's such a, sometimes such a hidden treasure of vetted support and resources that so established and important to have. And I do wanna dig into that vetted piece because I think that is something missing a lot from spaces like this.
But I don't wanna get too much into it, but I'd love to start there. Just with like, what is the brief network and maybe a little about the journey of how it came to be.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Yeah.
And you're right to say that it's a little bit of a hidden treasure because it is kind of, it doesn't have that, the platform yet that I would like it to have.
But I find that the people who find it and know about it and share about it are folks like yourself who really get it and who, whose work iso respect and appreciate. So I really [00:06:00] am so grateful that you would share it with people you know, and that you trust our work. So the Breathe Network is a national organization.
We're a nonprofit largely based in the United States, although we do have some community in Toronto and in Vancouver, Canada. And our mission is to transform the way society responds to the trauma of sexual violence. So we do that. We have kind of two primary pathways that we are kind of navigating to move towards that mission.
The first is to have created a network of trauma trained healthcare and healing arts practitioners that bring a specialty in working with sexual assault survivors as they navigate their healing. So we have over 30 different healing or healthcare modalities represented in our network. So that's anything from.[00:07:00]
Midwifery to naturopathic care. Somatic psychotherapy, yoga, acupuncture, body work, EMDR, equine assisted therapy. A lot of other practices. It's heavier on the, you know, what we might think of as more alternative or holistic practices. And we'll kind of get to, when we talk about the trauma-informed future, we'll get to where I wanna go with it.
But we'll hopefully see, I would like to see greater balance and really bringing in more of mainstream medical providers into our network because that's. That's part of how we holistically take care of ourselves. And then the second pathway it through, you know, towards that mission is to provide education and training for healthcare workers, healing arts professionals, advocacy professionals, and really anybody that interfaces with survivors of sexual violence.
So that they have the actual training to say that they are a [00:08:00] trauma-informed provider, that they have that specialty. And working with sexual assault survivors, whether or not they formally join the Breathe Network. You know, that's really, that's not as much of a priority for me, is just trying to get training to as many people as possible.
And I founded The Breathe Network 13 years ago, 2012, and that was kind of born out of my own experience as a survivor of sexual violence. And I felt, you know, I noticed all of these physiological, physical, psychological, relational, spiritual changes happen pretty quickly in the aftermath of surviving rape.
And you know, I didn't have the language to really categorize the symptoms necessarily, but I just knew that I would need more than a six week cognitive focused support group [00:09:00] where I had to tell my story. And I had like 45 minutes to do that. And I knew that I had really triggering and retraumatizing experiences working with law enforcement and attorneys and medical professionals.
And yet. When it came to any other resources beyond sort of the, those systems, like the medical system or the legal system or that short term therapy that might be provided at the rape crisis center, you're sort of left with a hotline you could call if you had any future crisis after those six weeks or 12 weeks.
So, I was very fortunate and privileged to have awareness of other kinds of practices that support healing and trauma recovery. And I dove pretty deeply into those practices including traditional Chinese medicine [00:10:00] and yoga and massage and body work and somatic psychotherapy. Those were kind of the primary ones and I just derived so much benefit from being able to come at heal my own healing from all of these angles.
Because, you know, trauma affects our whole being. It's not just a psychological event. It's not just physical, it's not just physiological, it's not just spiritual. It's kind of can be all of those things. It's not necessarily all of those things for each person. For me it felt like it was everything and the resources I was going to need to heal would need to kind of attend to all those different aspects of me.
And and so alongside my own healing journey, of course, like so many survivors, I was really interested in like, well, what do I do? To what do I do with this energy? Largely outrage and anger around sexual violence and how society [00:11:00] responds to it and the prevalence of it. And the clearest outlet for me was to become an advocate and to work as a work at a, get trained at a rape crisis center, and then work as a medical advocate and eventually as a legal advocate.
And so I worked in those spaces and that was incredibly educational for me to really see how the systems interface with survivors who are in really acute crisis. To see how the movement itself relies on survivors of sexual violence to do some of the hardest work which is to show up and meet somebody in the emergency room or at a police station, like just hours after they've lived through that kind of trauma.
With, you know, with no real clinical training to prepare us for that kind of work. Just you know, a pretty, a lovely training, but still not in my opinion now as I look back not as robust as of a [00:12:00] training as I think many of us would've benefited from to work with survivors who are in acute crisis.
So I did that work and I did that for 10 years and I noticed not only the ways in which my peers were having a hard time with their own recovery journeys and really leaning into, behaviors and practices and ways of being in the world and in their bodies that were often harmful, but like allowed them to also cope, to show up for work, to answer the pager to live another day.
And I saw how different my experience was. My experience wasn't like better. It was just I was having a different experience because I had a whole different set of resources. And then I also saw how I myself started to have my old older symptoms that I had worked really hard to heal, resurface [00:13:00] as I think a consequence of the schedule and what I was being exposed to so routinely, and then the lack of any kind of formal supervision as an advocate.
So I felt like, okay, I can't really stay in this work. Unless I'm willing to sacrifice my own health and humanity to do it. And around that time, I went to a workshop with the really incredible Laura Vander, new Lipsky, who you might know. She created the work of trauma stewardship. And she had really sparked this question for me of like, you know, how am I contributing to my mission?
If my mission is to really bring about, make healing more accessible to more people, how do I, how am I contributing to it by sacrificing my own healing? And I saw that in congruence. And so, I felt like I want to leave this way of doing the work. I'm not. I'm [00:14:00] not able to do it in a sustainable way.
I'm not sure if anybody can do that work in a sustainable way for a long period of time. And I see this huge gap. I see that we have crisis services. I see that there's medical and legal advocacy, but I also see survivors six months, six years, 16 years removed from their experience of escaping or surviving sexual violence who are managing this very complex constellation of symptoms on their own, with no resources and no clear place to go and get those those challenges held or met or healed.
So I felt like. If I've gotten all this benefit from these different practices why isn't healing, why isn't accessing these kinds of practices more central in our movement? Why is healing in some ways, to me, a little bit of an afterthought and we've prioritized. Working [00:15:00] with the system, or we've prioritized crisis response services and those really matter.
But we haven't really created the kinds of resources that allow people to move out of crisis and to move towards something different to reduce the likelihood that they would find themselves in those spaces again, to build their capacity to continue living their lives with those histories of sexual violence, knowing they'll face new challenges, just continuing to live on earth.
Life will keep happening. So, that's when I was like, well, let's build the Breathe network and we'll create this national network of all these trauma informed providers who specialize in working with sexual assault survivors. And healing is what seems like it's missing from the movement. And healing is the thing that I love the most, and I could never I'm never gonna burn out on.
The topic of healing because like, it just gives me so much joy and it's like me throwing those wildflower seeds into the garden just like there's so much [00:16:00] possibility there for beauty and growth. And so I started the Breathe Network with like 10, 15 people that I knew. I was like, do you wanna be in the Breathe network?
Here's what it's gonna look like. They were all, most of 'em were my providers. And then we just slowly grew. So the kind of our bulk to this day of providers is still in Chicago, which is where I was at the time and where I'm from. But you know, it's, what happened is I was like, why aren't people joining?
And there's many reasons for that. But one is that I came to realize people aren't receiving education on trauma-informed care and specifically on sexual violence as it relates to trauma-informed care. So that's when about. A year or two years into it. I realized that was the barrier and that's when we started creating more education and training.
And now that's really half of the work we do. Because if we want that kind of well-rooted, well-established [00:17:00] network, they need to get trained somewhere. And they're currently not receiving it in their yoga teacher training. They're not receiving it in medical school. They're not receiving it in acupuncture school.
So that's been a lot of what we're doing. And you know, we have a ways to go, but I feel excited about what we've created thus far.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Thanks, Molly. Having done so much work within the rape crisis movement and working with sexual violence survivors and in the systems as you mentioned know that, know those barriers that unfortunately.
And would love to hear your thoughts and feelings on this. 'cause I'm sure you have then is the, what you shared about sustainability. And the reality is it's not sustainable. These, the majority of the traditional rape crisis model is not sustainable because we don't have sustainable funding. And the only way for these ple these places to [00:18:00] truly be sustainable is to have trauma-informed funding that really looks at creating a plan that is equitable and inclusive and truly su putting survivors at the forefront.
But unfortunately, because of the inner intersection of systems that are often involved, like you know, law enforcement, hospitals those are two places that. Aren't trauma-informed. And I will say I don't think law enforcement can ever truly be trauma-informed. I think there can be strategies utilized, but the essence of the system that carceral system is inherently violent, so its, it's not going to, we can't reach that. And I know that's a hot take, but one I stand pretty firmly in.
And so I'm curious, like, you know, we know trauma-informed care. One of the origins of this approach was at that culmination of time in the late sixties, early seventies, where we're seeing, you know, the civil rights movement, the [00:19:00] L-G-B-T-Q-I-A movement and the rape crisis movement and child advocacy, all these things happening kind of at the same time.
But we know one of the strongest seeds for this approach has been the rape crisis movement. And that is because of. We know that when it comes to the spectrum of trauma, and I don't adhere to like Big T, little t like trauma's trauma, right? But we know there's a continuum, right? And we know that when it comes to sexual violence of any form, it is innately traumatic.
And there are so many complexities to that trauma that requires a complex system holistic system as you use that term to support those survivors. And so I'm curious if you can share a little bit about, you know, why [00:20:00] trauma-informed care is absolutely essential when caring for survivors?
Because we know like not all trauma re responsive services are necessarily administered in a trauma-informed way. Which always. Continually breaks my heart. But it's, it's true. And also, h how we also need to ensure people truly understand more of the complexities of sexual violence as trauma as compared to other types or forms because of how it plays out individually, collectively, systemically.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Okay. I'm, I was like so deep in the journey of your words. Sorry. So the fir No, I you ask questions exactly like I ask them. So this is really good for me to be on the other side of it. So the first is like, why is trauma-informed care so important for healthcare workers, healers, in all of these spaces and particularly for the survivors that they're serving.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): And specifically understanding the [00:21:00] complexity of sexual violence as a form of trauma.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Okay. So. This is like a thesis, but the question, but I think that, you know, I think one of the things is that comes up for me, especially when we're talking about systems and like where the movement's been and where it is now and where funding is we, something happened, and I don't know what it was, I don't know if it had to do with federal funding, but something happened where funding got tied to those systems.
So funding for those rape crisis centers got tied to the medical system, but also pretty heavily the criminal justice system. Justice system. And so we see that it, what I see from my perspective is that the priorities of the movement kind of followed the money in some way. Even though those of us who are survivors that are receiving services, those of us who are survivors that are working in those [00:22:00] spaces.
Feel this feel that incongruence or feel and know that those systems are re-traumatizing or they're unjust or they're biased, or they're only gonna be accessible to certain survivors. People's livelihoods and organizations staying open still depend or rely on them, partnering with those systems at this point.
And so what I think has happened is the funding has kind of shaped the narrative around how our society thinks about what survivors want in the aftermath of sexual violence. And so we have a lot of just general citizens among our, in, among our populations, but then also care providers who think that the first thing that a survivor wants in the wake of disclosing.
Sexual violence is to go make a report about it somewhere. And I have [00:23:00] never met a survivor. Doesn't mean they're not out there. 'cause I've only met this very tiny slice of all of us who are in the world. But that's never been the first impulse of anyone I've ever met in the wake of sexual violence is I need to go and fight a cop right now, or I need to go and talk to a, I need to go tell a doctor I wanna go to a hospital.
That's just not what been my experience, that's the place that people wanna go to in those acute states of crisis. Often they just want to. Be with the safest person or have a warm blanket wrapped around them or have some water or take a slow walk or lay down somewhere comforting. They don't necessarily wanna go and have to talk about what happened to them in a way that is actually more like they're being investigated or interviewed around the process.
So I think one of the first things that's important for anybody to know is that is that [00:24:00] we have kind of lost sight of survivor's own needs and wants and the movement. And so when it comes to trauma-informed care, I think of like showing up in a way as a blank slate and being curious about what it is that person who's in your space is actually seeking.
Are they just seeking something that will. Be physical and help them with, in a, with a physical aspect of their healing experience. Is it something psychological? Is it more about a housing situation or an issue in their place of employment? Is it that they do wanna talk to law enforcement or they do need medical intervention?
But I think that one of the, those primary pieces of trauma-informed care is curiosity and not making assumptions even when it comes. And I feel like that's a really broad generalization and that may not be so helpful, but it's like, I feel like even as a as a yoga teacher and as a somatic experiencing practitioner, like I'm not [00:25:00] making assumptions when people come to me that they wanna go diving deep into their body.
Even though my work has this very embodied quality to it, and in the description of my work, that is a possibility that we will notice your body and pay attention to your body. But I still don't assume that's their primary focus, that's something that they're excited about doing, that's something that's gonna be accessible or comfortable for a very long time.
So it's like even knowing the scope of my work includes certain things, I still have to go, who's this person in front of me? What are, what's their capacity? What are they looking for? My work is not leaning very much towards like language and verbal processing, but I have clients who come in and they actually need to be able to talk to somebody who gets it.
So it's like, I can do that too, and I can find creative ways to. [00:26:00] Slow things down and to kind of creatively like model or mirror for them, like my, with my breathing and my own body language. But like, it's okay to also be in our bodies together, but I'm not steering people towards the thing that I think that they need.
And I'm often letting people know at the onset, this may not even be the right thing for you. Like, let's see what happens. Let's see how the session goes. See how a couple of them go. You might find that like, working this way with your body is not the pathway for you. So I think that falls under this, like being curious about who the person is.
And then I think the other thing is that, you know, I think of the, for me it's always been very the physiological nature of the experience of sexual trauma has been something that's been very important to me since my own lived experience with it. And then looking out [00:27:00] afterwards being like, wait, nobody's like talking about this experience.
Which now we're talking more about the physiology of trauma and we talk about fight and flight and freeze. I still think that we could dive deeper. But I'm glad we're talking about it. But when I was in the throes of it, that was the early two thousands. The only place I was finding information about it was through.
The somatic experiencing realm and just, there were other somatic practitioners that were definitely talking about it, but maybe didn't have the platform that Peter, Dr. Peter Levine had, which is where I first really got a handle on like, oh, okay. So that thing that happened to me was freeze.
And then the more I learned about it and I learned about my own tendencies towards freeze in other states of any kind of stress or even mild confrontation, that, that was like a pathway that got really familiar or comfortable for [00:28:00] me. As comfortable as you can be under stress. That was like a go-to.
I started to get even more curious about the. Impact the kind of connection between the physiological state of freeze and then our experiences of shame. And I think that shame is such a shame is such a problem and challenge in our culture at large. Like people are shamed for so many people are just shame for being who they are.
Which, you know, changes the way they're able to show up in the world, but also really changes the way they show up in their bodies. And I think particularly for survivors of sexual violence who have this like, it's like 85%, there was a study done, it's referenced in Peter Levine's book in an Unspoken Voice, but there was a study done about the very high prevalence of the freeze state, the physiological state of freeze during [00:29:00] the experience of attempting to survive sexual violence and, the more I learned about, you know, what that state creates at a physiological level, but how shame has such a freezy quality to it. Like how shame kind of dampens things down, slows things down. And then I think about survivors handling both the shame that they're getting from the outside of society, telling them that what happened to them was somehow their fault and gives us, you know, the laundry list of ways in which we should have or could have avoided that person making the decision to assault us or persons even if we're little ones.
And then I think about the internal quality of shame that in some ways I think can arise for survivors when we are in the state of freeze and feeling like. We are not [00:30:00] doing anything actively to stop the violence and how that in and of itself can create like a body level shame state that I think can resurface for survivors in a lot of different nuanced ways where it's like there's some kind of body level culpability that feels very shameful of like, maybe I could have actually run, or maybe I could have screamed or maybe I could have like given an elbow to that person, or maybe I could have done something different.
You know, we like all of that because we don't know that actually no. What was happening was really happening. And actually what freeze will do is it will make it so that you can't speak and it will make it so that you can't move. And even if it isn't doing those things, it will do everything in its power to get you with still as possible, to reduce the threat of anything as escalating further and to [00:31:00] help you survive.
But I think what can happen is we don't necessarily know that intellectual, like we can actually, we can learn that intellectually like, oh my body did what it had to do to survive. But I think it's a much longer journey to somatically accept or at a body level to accept. And I'm gonna feel really tender.
I don't know why.
I'm just gonna let myself do this, if that's okay with you. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
It is so interesting, Katie, because it's like, the tenderness is always like, for me, two things. It's like,
oh gosh, it's so, so hard. And there's so much grief about that. And it's also like, oh my God, it's so [00:32:00] amazing. Like my body is so amazing.
And I am like 10 days out from my anniversary of like what gets me here.
So I always feel like this month of like, whoa, anything can happen. So it's happening. Yeah. And for your listeners, I am okay, but I just don't, like, I could have stopped that. I just don't do that anymore. Like the, that was part of my like. When I said goodbye to working in the advocacy field, I was like, I'm saying goodbye to shutting down my emotions to make everybody else comfortable in the workspace or yeah, so I'm really letting myself cry if it comes up, but yeah, because often you like, let it come up and then it's like, oh, I'm actually okay and I don't have to waste any of my energy, like managing, having this like side conversation while I'm with you, but also like bracing the feelings or the emotions or the sensations.
[00:33:00] So, I think that it takes a lot of work for us to really integrate and for me it's really been ongoing work. Like, there's no shame, there's nothing my body could do that would ever cause me shame. Like I. I really want my body to know that. And I think that a lot of my practices and a lot of the why, the Breathe Network has had a pretty heavy emphasis on really trying to help people get a handle on the nervous system and the physiology in the way it's makes sense to them, whether as a survivor, whether as a practitioner, always within their scope of practice is because that can be this missing piece from a lot of the work.
Like I don't, that thing that just happened to me feels very, it felt very physiological, felt like I'm just sort of, I'm like calling forward as I'm speaking about. The free state and what my body [00:34:00] went through and the shame, it's like I'm inviting this stuff to come through me and I want other survivors to be able to have those conversations and not have to put the brakes on them.
'cause then we end up, we just we like only have so much capacity and so much energy. And I found for myself in the movement, it was really exhausting to have to constantly be like, oh, I gotta dampen that down and don't feel that feeling. Or this isn't the space for it, that's not professional. And so I really think that for practitioners to really understand how shame might come into the space and how it might show up and how it can actually, how shame has that inhibitory quality?
How can you like work to as one of my, one of my teachers, Kathy Kane said, you know, when shame comes into the room, I move towards it. That, to me feels like that [00:35:00] kind of speaks to the like role of, you know, co-regulation and helping people to disinhibit these, all of these things they've had to do to survive trauma in the moment, but then to survive all of the interactions they've had to have since then.
Whether it's like interactions with parents or siblings or partners, or its interactions with care providers you know, well-intentioned people stay and do things that are just like, just so brutal. And and so I think that kind of understanding like shame is gonna come into the room possibly at some point.
And what does that look like for you as a provider? Will you be noticing that at a muscular level? 'cause you're a body worker? Are you gonna notice that like they're gonna not make eye contact with you or you're gonna see them not being able to talk about something or dropping their, are you gonna look at [00:36:00] posture as you're sitting with them as a psychotherapist or as a doctor?
Are you gonna see them just kind of dissociate when you ask them about their, what happened? And then how do you, what do you do then? What do you do next when it comes into the room? And then it's like that's where that trauma-informed piece is so much about the provider. And that's where the Breathe Networks trainings are also pretty heavy on.
I always feel like our training is 50% looking out and getting educated about. Sexual violence and how you show up for people and here's all your tools and ways of supporting them and resources, resourcing them. And then 50% of it is like, here's how you keep coming back to yourself. Here's how you do the work.
Here's how you recognize that your own paying attention to and allocating time for self-care. And physical and psychological and spiritual wellness is actually part of your scope of [00:37:00] practice and like your responsibility as a provider so that you can actually show up and hold space for folks. So yeah, I think that for me, that kind of, you know, you can call it the nervous system or you can call it the understanding some of the physiology of trauma and resilience.
But I think anything that care providers can do to get an understanding that they're not just talking to like. A neocortex and they're not just working with the body and they're not just doing like energy healing, like regardless of your scope, the whole person's in the room. So you need to know your scope well, but you also need to recognize there's all these other ways people are impacted and you need to know who to refer out to.
I always feel like knowing my scope really well and having built up a network of other providers allows me to stay in my scope and then feel really confident [00:38:00] and like I can still provide good care when I'm directing somebody to somebody, a client, to somebody else, because I don't feel like I'm just saying, I don't know how to help you with that.
Like, that's outside of my scope. It's like, oh, you know, that sounds kind of familiar. That sounds like some of the work that my. Physical therapist colleague might be able to help with, or I have a naturopath who I can refer to, or an acupuncturist or a psychiatrist might be the person that we wanna work with just to see if we want to get some other resources on board.
You know, it's like I am not attached to anybody working with me as a trauma informed provider. I am really just focused on how do we figure out who this person is and where their, you know, where their challenges are physically, psychologically, spiritually. And then how do we open up those doors to get them to the providers that they need to work with to feel [00:39:00] better in the world.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): I first just wanna thank you for allowing that grief to come forward and to be with it. This is something that comes up so often and I'm sure for you too with people you train. And the biggest fear is like, well, what happens?
What happens if someone has a trauma response? And it's like, do we call someone? And I'm like, we, that's a good indicator that you are feeling some hypervigilance and maybe some activation yourself. And so what you need to do is find your feet and find your center, because reacting as if it's a crisis may make it one when really it's just someone being a human and feeling.
So like notice for anyone listening, like, I didn't rush to comfort you or hand you a virtual tissue. Right? Or you know, [00:40:00] like, oh my gosh, we need to stop the podcast. Like, just let it come up. And then. Right. You know yourself best. If you needed to pause, you would tell me you know, we can certainly edit that out.
But it's your choice. And like there isn't people feeling or alchemizing their own feelings through their body, especially through crying is crying is on an indicator of crisis. And we need to allow people to feel and then be so attuned to ourselves. Like you were saying that self-awareness is something is essential to trauma-informed care.
Like if you are practicing the elements of self-awareness and personal attunement, then you won't be able to attune to the person or people before you. Right. And that's where you use that lens of curiosity, which I love that you talked about. Curiosity over judgment That is. Something, you know, in the trauma-informed model that I [00:41:00] use and teach that is a principle which I think we lack in the traditional trauma-informed care principles is this lens of curiosity to utilize active listening and consensual inquiry and active listening to really and critical thinking, which we know is lacking.
Yes. To really invite in curiosity over judgment or assumption and just to simply ask questions and check in is, seems so simple, but it can be so hard for people because we, it's counter-cultural, right? We're, yeah we're. We're so used to the power dynamics needing to be this assertion of power rather than collaborative power sharing that we assume we just need to have the answers or know what to do, when in fact we, if we just take a pause and ask, we could build [00:42:00] trust points with people that will deepen the experience no matter what it is, whether it's a healthcare provider or a healing arts practitioner.
So I love that you talked about that because I think it's, I always say like, this isn't complicated, but it is a choice and we have to be intentionally choosing to lead from these principles, which Yes, include, you know, autonomy and trust and transparency and collaboration. You know, you've mentioned a few times this the role you had with as an advocate, and it's so common.
I've never really met anyone who works in the field of sexual violence prevention and advocacy and care, who hasn't also gone through some has their own lived experience or connection. Yeah, personal connection. So the, especially as advocates, volunteers, et cetera, there are so much, so many elements of peer support that go [00:43:00] into, even though they may not be necessarily holding that title or receiving a training as an official peer support specialist, there's a lot of those elements that go into play.
And I think what you were sharing is something I see so often in that, in those organizations and across the board, right, I see this in healthcare in so many other places, is we forget that trauma-informed care is a bi-directional approach. That it's not just the care we give to others, but it's also the care we give to ourselves and the care we're giving to the.
To the people, the workforce. Yeah. Et cetera. So like when we say like, I'm a trauma-informed organization, my first question is for your people, for your workforce, and what does that look like? Right? Because if we're burning people out, you said like that freeze response, I immediately went to what you said of like the burnout.
Like burnout is that emotional, physical exhaustion we have. Yes. That is [00:44:00] also that very hypo arousal, that very similar freeze response. And so yes, that's what we're experiencing within the people who are keeping this movement alive. We need to be asking really important questions about how are we looking at sustainability?
Especially given the current political climate and the barriers that continue to. Strength to support survivors.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Yeah. And I think about the quality of care that we can provide as organizations when our own staff are in those places of burnout, and then we're sending them to go meet the communities that we serve, and they're showing up from that place.
There's an impact there too that we're having that maybe we would wish would be different.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Absolutely. I wanna [00:45:00] kind of take some things that you shared before. So many good things. I, again, I always say this every time I talk to people, I'm like, and there's three more podcasts that we're gonna have to do from here, but I, you know, I think one of the big things when we think about survivor informed care, healing informed. Care practitioners is, how do you know safety is of the essence, but we can't just have the intention of safety and people are gonna feel safe. Right? We can't just say safety and safety appears. Right. We know that it's built through trust and trusting providers and practitioners of any kind. I mean, we all have horror stories of a doctor or a nurse or a therapist or something where harm occurred.
And so, especially when survivors are specifically seeking out trauma-informed care practitioners, trust is of the essence. And it's, you know, I always say like, trust is built at the pace of our [00:46:00] nervous system. And so yeah. We as the trauma-informed leaders, what are we doing to ensure that's being very transparently communicated?
That there's indicators that trust points can be built. So safety of all kinds can be eventually, hopefully felt so, and that there's skills developed by practitioners to know all of these things that we discussed. So I'm curious with the Breathe Network, because something that I think makes, I hate to say like unique because I wish this was the standard of Care Everywhere is your process for kind of onboarding people into the network.
And I was wondering if could share a little bit about that so people know if they go to seek out the Breathe Network, this isn't just like a list of resources, right? It's a very Yeah. Intentional, methodical process to Yeah. Bring people into the space.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Yeah. Thank you for that question. 'cause I do think that is one of the things that makes our organization unique. We [00:47:00] have, we developed this pretty rigorous, I think, vetting process rigorous compared to what other platforms do, where, you know, there's other organizations that have put together, maybe it's a list of therapists or practitioners of any kind. And you can do a search based on your location or a modality and find that person.
But they don't go through a formal application process like ours is. And so, the reason we did that, there's a couple reasons, but o one is that survivors, you know, a very typical example is survivors are hearing that Yoga heals trauma. So this is like, there's headlines in kind of popular media that talk about this.
There's the body keeps the score which. Is a whole other podcast. And so they hear like, oh, I should just, I just need to go to yoga and that'll heal my trauma. And then they go [00:48:00] into a yoga class and the yoga teacher plays all sorts of music that they find upsetting. The yoga teacher gives them a hands-on adjustment.
Yoga teacher like tells 'em they're not doing a pose, right? And it feels very shaming. The yoga teacher does something shaming about their body type or ability or size. They rest in the final resting pose, corpse pose or Shavasana, and they feel like they're having a panic attack because it's so quiet and it's so still, and they don't know when they're getting out.
So they have all of these terrible experiences there, and they leave those spaces and feel. Not necessarily that the yoga space, the yoga teacher or the practice was not appropriate. They feel like it was their fault. Like something's fundamentally wrong with them. And I see that with many different kinds of practices where people will say like, well, I tried that, but then I totally freaked out during the session and I just can't [00:49:00] handle that kind of practice because of my trauma or whatever it might be.
And they don't know that, well, actually maybe it was the container was the problem, it wasn't really you. And so, that's often when I was really more focused on just teaching yoga. That's how I most of my private clients came to me is through negative experiences in those kinds of spaces.
And so I felt like, okay, we need to create it's not just that yoga as a practice or acupuncture as a practice or massage. Is inherently going to heal trauma. It's that combination of the practice and the provider working in collaboration with the survivor's, unique set of strengths and vulnerabilities that will support that healing process.
So we're going to be very specific when we create this network that these are providers who recognize that their practice isn't going [00:50:00] to just be like a one size fits all that they're going to need to adapt it. And in that vetting process, we ask them to explain how are they going to adapt to their practice?
What are the kinds of modifications they offer? What is the training that they've done around trauma-informed care? What is their specific interest in working with sexual assault survivors? What is their, who are they accountable to? Like any communities any organizations what does that even, what does accountability mean to them and their application, there's like eight or nine kind of essay questions that they have to answer.
And then they have three references that they have to provide. They have to be some kind of professional reference. It doesn't have to, it could be like they were a volunteer somewhere and that's the reference, but it's not like their family or friends providing references. And we check all those references and then we take that [00:51:00] application, which is pretty long, and we sort of flip it into their practitioner page.
So on their practitioner page, there's all of these categories and kind of like sections essentially that describe. Here's my approach to trauma-informed care. Here's what traditional Chinese medicine is. It's not just acupuncture. It's all of these things. And here's what those things are. We like really describe the practices.
Here's what trauma-informed yoga is for me. Here's how I teach it. I include these three things. When I teach yoga, here's how I modify the practice. Here's what you can expect from a session. Here's who I'm accountable to. And I think that what that does is then the survivor can go to our website and it's not just a name with a website that has basic information they can kind of get to know and they can sort of vet that person based on the things they read there.
They might read there like, [00:52:00] oh, I really don't love how they talk about the practice. I don't think that's for me. I'm gonna look at something. And so it's a little bit like informed consent of what you're stepping into before reaching out to that person. And then and then part of why we do that also is that we did a research study with 200, a little bit over 250 survivors.
And one of the things they told us that helps them to reach out to a practitioner is knowing in advance what to expect knowing in advance how they work with sexual trauma, knowing in advance ways that the practice that can be modified. So survivors told us these are some of our, these are some of the things that remove barriers to us getting calling that person or.
Sending them an email to work with them. So I think that has really set our work apart. It's slowed down our growth [00:53:00] process like by like 90%. I think that we would probably have 500 practitioners or a thousand practitioners if you just had to sign up. But because you have to be really intentional and you have to allocate time, and you know, some people aren't it, you know, I get that for some people it's it's a big ask to say, can you sit down and like, type out these responses?
And so we will also work with people if it's like, I just, I had one provider who basically sent me an audio recording of their answers and I transcribed 'em. I was like, I, whatever we need to do, because also there's a lot of people in our. On our website who aren't writers, you know, like, that's also kind of what I love is like different people have really different ways of reflecting about their work.
And some folks are really like, you know, their language they're writing multiple paragraphs and it's very like [00:54:00] flowery and expressive. And some people are very direct and it's very tangible and digestible. And I think that different survivors are gonna resonate with those different ways of communicating about the work.
But I just, you know, because we don't have like a any other real, like, you know, it's a liability for us to be saying, you know, we have all this language on our website that's like, you have to personally vet these people. And the Breathe network is not liable for what happens when you work with that person that falls under that person's like license and.
Their, how they've set up their practice, but it's still like, for us, it still is. We feel a liability. We feel responsibility. We feel like I want the most high integrity platform possible, and I take it really seriously. And if it means if somebody looks at our website and says, I'm not sitting down for two hours [00:55:00] to write out these responses to join that network.
That to me is a reflection of the level of their commitment to working with that population. And I don't like judge them for that. That's fine that they don't want to do that. But to me the, like, I feel like one of the greatest stories of my job is when somebody applies and like, oh my gosh, like you sat down.
You care so much. You were willing to carve out this time to go through this process, to reach out to your references, to let them know that you care about this community. And I think that it ensures like a better fit for everybody, for the survivors, but also for the practitioners. So I don't, I think that is how we've kind of tried to build in more integrity to our work.
And it comes at the cost of a very slow growing organization. Like, you know, we need 10,000 providers. We have like 150 at this [00:56:00] point. And there's other things that are in the way of that. It's not just the application process, it's funding and personnel. It's me. It's working at the speed of Molly's nervous system and how much I can get done in one day.
So, but to me that has been really important. I don't wanna just send survivors to any yoga teacher or any acupuncturist or any body worker or any midwife. I want them to go to somebody who says like, Hey, I understand the trauma can impact you on all these different levels, and I'm here to be curious about you and to collaborate with you.
And I actually have a certain sense of responsibility because I've affiliated myself with the Breathe network. You know, we're not like some big thing, but somebody has, they, they have like. Said like, I'm part of this network. And there is some kind of, there's even that accountability to us and so, you know, I [00:57:00] wanna do what I can, knowing that we can't guarantee any experience for any survivor.
I can be the best provider I can possibly be, and somebody for so many different reasons may come into my space and not feel like that's a space that they can settle into, or that's a space that feels safe enough for them to do the work. But we can try to remove as many of the like, unknowns that prevent survivors from being able to take a really big step, which is to be like, I need help as possible to make it a little bit less scary or less intimidating and feel slightly more like in the know about what they're stepping into when they seek out healing.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): You know, I'm gonna reference in, in the show notes for this podcast, Julie Johnson, who is a part of the Breathe Network. Yes. Also runs the Integrate Trauma Informed Network. I had her on the podcast last year talking about vetting and helping us [00:58:00] reframe vetting as a really beautiful boundary based practice to help, you know, lead our integrity and trauma-informed principles out loud.
And I always tell people that. Someone who says they are trauma-informed, will welcome questions. They will like, I love it. Like, oh, you wanna know about me? You wanna vet me? Great. Like, I will happily answer eight essay questions because I too value that level of transparency, integrity, and I know how important it is to have vetted and verified professionals who don't just fill out an application or are done, right.
There's other elements to ongoing learning and community of practice and demonstration of skills so that we can truly create the trauma-informed future we want. And so I think that, I always tell people when you're doing your own personal vetting, ask a lot of questions and that will help tell you and show you who somebody is and help you [00:59:00] discern.
You know, what is best for you? We have a lot of healthcare providers who listen to this podcast. So people who are in traditional medicine, and I'm curious what and people who in a variety of healing arts as well as survivors themselves, I always say like, survivors are always among us, right?
And we don't need to know, or we don't need them to self-identify for them to receive this kind of care that we all need and deserve. So I'm curious, how can someone learn about the Breathe Network? Perhaps join especially if they're in a more traditional healthcare system.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Yeah, so the best way to learn about it is to go to our website which is the Breathe network.org.
And on our website we kind of talk about like what is our mission, what are the different resources that we offer, whether it's like direct services for survivors or it's education or training programs or workshops. And I always welcome people to just write me [01:00:00] directly at my email which is molly@thebreathenetwork.org to say, you know, like, I wanna learn more.
I looked at your website, but I have more questions. I have a lot of email conversations, zoom calls, phone conversations, a lot of what I do. 'Cause there's a lot of things that, you know, I think the way that we do the work is slightly different from the way it's always been done so people don't always understand and need, want more information.
And. For healthcare workers. I mean, the application to join is on the website. So there's a link to join and they're able to see the full application. It's a Google, it's like a Google form, but they can also see it as a PDF, so they can see like, what are the questions in advance? And they fill it out through, they fill out that form.
I'm the one who gets the form. I'm the one who speaks to their references. I am usually in kind of a back and forth dialogue with people about that onboarding process. [01:01:00] And they might feel like there's things I wanna do before I join. I like the idea of providing trauma-informed care, or, I like the idea of saying I specialize in working with sexual assault survivors, but maybe I'm, I don't feel totally ready yet, or I am not an individual provider and I work in a hospital.
Setting versus like a specific clinic that's gonna do a specific training with the Breathe Network. We do have organizations that join, like Lumos transforms as an organization that probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with. They are part of the Breathe network. So, so, but they might say, I just wanna build up my own competency.
And if they're listening to the podcast, they've probably done a lot of training with you already, but if they're looking for more training, they can access, we have on demand trainings we that people could go through just to build their own competency, whether it's like a 20 hour training or a 40 hour [01:02:00] training.
We also have, our toolkits, we have two different toolkits that are downloadable from our website on trauma-informed care. And that can be like a nice kind of introduction. People could read that and feel like, oh, that feels just like it validates what I'm already doing. Or some of this feels a little bit different.
I think I wanna go further and get more education. So, I think that is, I think the website's a really good starting point. And then I am also really happy to help people figure out like, oh, do you wanna join? Do you wanna just do some training with us? How do you wanna get involved? I'm always open to how people get involved.
Do you wanna bring us to your clinic and have us do a training or a workshop? 'cause we do a lot of customized trainings for. Universities or for medical schools or rape crisis centers. So there's a lot of ways to get involved. But to kind of go back to that piece I mentioned earlier [01:03:00] and towards the trauma-informed future, you know, I've been really trying to emphasize to people in a lot of my work lately, whether it's like writing or in conversations with funders or in trainings that we are, we need survivors need to be able to go to the doctor.
Survivors need to be able to go to the dentist survivors. Like I feel that a lot of our alternative or holistic spaces have been interested in picking up the trauma-informed care trainings. You know, there's a trauma-informed yoga training in every place You can imagine these days like that. Field has gotten, or that community's gotten very interested and like I, people are going to give birth people again, have cavities.
People have wanna get, need to get annual screenings for preventative care. And when those [01:04:00] spaces, those mainstream spaces aren't trauma-informed, what I have learned from some of my elder survivors is that they stop going, they or they just don't go. And the consequences of that are literally life and death for a lot of survivors.
If you have not gone and gotten any screening for breast cancer because you are terrified of the idea of going and doing that. You are at such a like, and there's a history or no history regardless. Your risks are higher if you're not getting a pap smear because the one that you had when you were 24 was so traumatizing or you were sexually assaulted during that, and you're like, it's just like there is a correlation with like, you know, I always think of like, I've been saying this and I know it's like, I want it to become like a slogan, so let me, we will see.
Does it become, does it go viral? I think that healing is prevention. I think [01:05:00] that accessing healing, whether it's been. Six weeks, or six days or 15 years, is a way that we prevent the future onset of a whole host of physical and psychological and ultimately generational health consequences and issues.
Like if survivors can get to the doctor regularly, they don't have to have all of their teeth replaced in their sixties, which is something that I've just navigated with a survivor a survivor colleague of like, my trauma was so severe and it was all around my faith. I didn't go to the dentist my whole life, and now I am looking at tens of thousands of dollars of having to have all of my teeth replaced because I didn't get the care I needed when I was a child to help me heal.
And then this became, this was a place I could never go for just. Treatment and preventative [01:06:00] medicine, like those are some very severe consequences. Or like a colleague of mine who works in hospice and palliative care who did our training because, and I will always get tender at this and I will not ever apologize.
She was saying to me, I need this training. Because there are so many people who are disclosing as they're approaching their like end of life care and that they help this their whole life and like they need somebody now who can, they need to finally unburden themselves of this story. And it like breaks my heart, like it breaks my heart as a survivor, as a human that like they waited.
Because they had to, that there wasn't a space for them their whole life, that they had to guard that and that they didn't have somebody tell them that it wasn't their fault, or to show them that there was a way that this could be less painful or less overwhelming. And it wasn't [01:07:00] until they met that care provider as they were kind of, you know, facing that end of life moment of crossing that threshold.
And I'm so glad, and I'm so amazed for those survivors that like they were able to lead their lives without ever being able to say those words out loud. And I know that they were able to heal regardless of saying it out loud. Like, I don't think that's a requisite, and I wish that, you know, and I have to hope that like there were so many ways that they accessed healing without ever putting words to it.
And like I want more for survivors and I want them to know that at any point in their journey that it would be okay to bring that part of their lived experience forward. And so I think that's where that mainstream healthcare space, getting educated can be a vital piece of it. Because hopefully they are going in for a skin check at their dermatologist.
Hopefully they are going in to see their [01:08:00] dentist or getting their eyes checked and things might arise and hopefully they have a provider who knows what to do. You don't have to be like a trauma expert to you to know how to sit with somebody when something comes up. Like I think of my eye doctors, I'm always trying to let them know like, this is really intense to go through this eye exam.
I have a lot of tools. Yet I find this is a very evocative experience that I have to go through once a year. You know, now we know about like neurobiology and we know about the eyes and we can understand why those, you wear glasses, so I'm sure you get exams. Like it can feel very upsetting, getting your eyes dilated is just gonna change your perception.
You know, it's like there's a lot about how we're altering the physiology of that part of the [01:09:00] body and brain just at the eye doctor that doesn't get help. You know, and I'm like, I tell my eye doctors like, this is so challenging for me and I just would love for you to just let your other patients know that it's normal, that they might feel a little bit off and they could take it easy for a little bit afterwards.
Or do they need breaks? Like I try to do like my informal education. That's like one doctor, you know? And so I just want, in that trauma-informed future, I just want anybody who works with physiology or personality or physicality to have some degree of understanding that all of us have been through things.
We're going through things right now, and like any way that we can really anchor ourselves as providers tend to ourselves slow things down in our physical treatment spaces to the extent that we're [01:10:00] able, like I get. That medical doctors have a schedule, but any way you can find to creatively adapt your work to accommodate and make space for more to come through in a way that isn't overwhelming.
We're all gonna do, we're all gonna feel better, we're all gonna feel more human. You know, trauma is so dehumanizing. Our systems of care are actually quite dehumanizing how we learn to be care providers. We get like dehumanized through the process. So thinking of these creative micro ways and maybe sometimes radical ways we can find community to, stay in our own humanity. To see other people's humanity is so, so essential because I don't think that inherently we need to burn out in these spaces. I think they were built in ways that burn us out. But I think that we're at this moment where everyone's kind of [01:11:00] reached their collective like capacity, that we have an opportunity.
We've been sort of unfortunately forced into this big reckoning of like how it's worked isn't working. So now what, you know, how we've been funded, that funding is gone. And so it's so unfortunate that we've lost this funding and it's scary, and yet there's a big opportunity for us to find ways to sustain our work without it being tethered to the criminal justice system.
You know, that's like one of the big things that I'm seeing right now. I'm like. Survivors need to be able to access services without having to participate in the systems that like our government or our leaders or our billionaires have decided are of value. You know, we need to make these care accessible outside of those spaces because once they're tethered to like the federal government, then survivors healing and recovery [01:12:00] and justice is at the whim of random politicians who know nothing about what survivors actually need. So I don't know yet what that will look like. Yeah.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Or perpetrators of violence, which makes this even more of a tumultuous place to exist in. Right, right. Yeah. Thank you so much, Molly. I work a lot in healthcare with a lot of healthcare systems, a lot of medical schools, nursing schools, and higher ed institutions.
And then also as a caregiver who I feel like I live in healthcare systems as somebody who's worked in hospital, like healthcare is just something that broadly my work is so entrenched in and you really emphasize, you know, something that I do too, and I think it's so worth noting here, is that, you know, most healthcare providers not all see the value in [01:13:00] trauma-informed care.
And they, it makes sense to them and they want to do it. Unfortunately, the system they work in won't allow them the space or the time or. Ability to do it, but what we need those people at the C-suite level, the decision makers of these systems to understand, and I'm speaking specifically to healthcare, is that the cost of trauma is insurmountable.
You'll never be able dig yourself out of that and you stop anybody in the street right now and they will have some sort of traumatizing story of harm that has happened in a healthcare setting. Yeah. And I think this whole do no harm. Yeah. It may not have necessarily been physical harm, but we're talking psychological, cultural, moral, financial harm.
And if healthcare systems would just take a moment to see. The [01:14:00] benefits, the multitude of bi-directional benefits that come from adopting a trauma and from culture of care, they would see exactly what you pointed out is that when you have one trusting provider that can change the trajectory of that person's health outcomes.
Yes. And their life. And you know what else they do? They tell everyone about them. Yes. They will say, don't go to this person, go to this person. Don't go to that system. 'cause we talk and we know. Right. When you've been harmed by a system, you let people know so they don't get harmed to. Right. And so that piece of building trust with a provider of any kind, dentist eye doctor, like get me into those spaces.
I would love to work with dentists and eye care providers. Side note. Totally. But if you find somebody that's just not like a nice thing. Right. We're not just talking about like a being a nice person and kindness and all that bullshit. We're talking about positive childhood experiences, study. The pace of [01:15:00] study, which yes focuses on childhood but applies across the lifespan.
Is when you have safe, healthy, nurturing relationships with people. You can see the resilience amplified, you see Yeah. The resilience outcomes which focus on healing outcomes. And you see the lower risk of those adverse experiences minimize and those positive ones rise. Right. And that's the science.
I mean that's like the NEAR science behind this is that people don't understand like this is evidence based work we're talking about. Right. It may not be an evidence based practice 'cause trauma-informed care is not a clinical intervention, but Right. This is all evidence informed. We're not just out here trying to like be nice you guys like Right.
Be a good person. Yeah. But also it's more to that and I could go on and on, but I'm, so, I hope people who are listening in healthcare. To this podcast, know that there are people like you, Molly, and the Breathe Network that exist as not only a [01:16:00] resource to share with patients and community stakeholders and your colleagues, but to please join.
Join because we are at this threshold of a movement that, you know, we need, people are looking and we need now more than ever, my least favorite. But most you saying these days, yes. Indicators and signals from the health holistic, healing world to say, yes, I have, I commit to this. I am trauma-informed because you can see it and feel it through my actions.
And I'm vetted through reputable networks. Like, like Breathe.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Yeah. Yeah. And I just wanna say, I know we're, we've been here forever. For those healthcare workers. I just, I want, I'm also very realistic that they work inside of a system.
And that I never have the expectation of like, you're gonna go from doing it this way to radically doing it a totally new way the next day.
I'm like, can you take a breath before you go into see your [01:17:00] next patient or, exactly. Or when you walk out of the room, can you take a breath in your car of three breaths before you go into the hospital? Or can you sit in your car and take three breaths? You know, I'm like the smallest interventions that just interrupts for a moment, that velocity of what that system demands and just like gives you a second.
I feel like even that, if somebody starts there it's something and it's really, and it matters
Katie Kurtz (she/her): 100%. I say that. Exact same thing to people. Like, this isn't giving you a whole new thing to do or telling. You know, you have to, right. I always say like, you can't walk into a cooking class and leave an Iron Chef 45 minutes later.
Like that's not what we're expecting. It's those small shifts that make big movements, and even if it is just taking one breath before you walk into the next patient's room. Making a little eye contact. Simple language shifts can make all the difference, right? Yeah. [01:18:00] Right. Love that. Yeah. Well thank you Molly so much.
This is such a rich, you're welcome and important conversation. And I will link everything you shared in the show notes so people can familiarize themselves with the Breathe Network, reach out to you directly with questions or clarifications and begin to, you know, peruse and see who is across our country and even our friends in Canada, like who are doing this work.
Because you are mirrors for us and mirroring the future we want, which is this more community based care that is surmounting positions and silos and systems, but really creating intersectional care.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Thank you. Thank you so much for your work, Katie. It's so, it's just so, uplifting to me to be doing it alongside you.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Oh , total honor. That's why I love selfishly love having these podcasts just to connect with people doing this to reinvigorate that hope and like one in honor of a lifetime to know we're in this work together. Yeah. In different [01:19:00] spaces, but always I love being able to share, breathe, network.
It's in every resource I give to everyone I, anyone I ever train. It's always something I share. Oh my gosh. Of course. All right. Are you ready for our gentle spritz of questions? Yes. Yes. Oh my
gosh. I thought we were Okay. Let's do our spritz.
If you could describe trauma-informed care in one word, what would it be?
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): This is the spritz. If you have more
Katie Kurtz (she/her): than one word, that's okay.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): No.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Co-regulatory. What is your current go-to for nervous system care?
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): My garden.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): And what does a trauma-informed future look like for you?
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Remembering our humanity.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Molly, thank you so much for being here and sharing this conversation with me and for everyone listening.
Molly Boeder-Harris (she/her): Thank you so much for having me, Katie.
