This Isn’t a Sticker: The Real Work of Becoming Trauma-Informed

These days, “trauma-informed” is everywhere. It’s on funder decks, staff job descriptions, and training flyers. But too often, it’s a sticker slapped onto systems that haven’t done the inner work.

At Johnson Mapenzi Consulting Group, we say this with love and clarity: trauma-informed care is not a buzzword. It’s a discipline. A practice. A deep commitment to disrupting harm internally, interpersonally, and institutionally. Because if you’re not willing to shift how you hold people, how you hire, how you repair… you’re not doing trauma work. You’re performing it.

To Be Trauma-Informed Is a Way, Not a Place

“Trauma-informed” isn’t a destination you arrive at after a single training it’s a way of moving. A way of building. A way of being in relationship.

Before you can ever claim to be trauma-informed, you must move through a layered, intentional journey:

• Trauma-Aware – Recognizing the impact of trauma and how it shows up

• Trauma-Sensitive – Honoring that awareness in your interactions and environment

• Trauma-Responsive – Taking action that promotes healing and reduces harm

• Trauma-Informed – When those principles become embedded in culture, policy, and practice

Only then can the real journey begin.

As Laura van Dernoot Lipsky writes in Trauma Stewardship, real trauma work requires sustained presence. It is about choosing, every day, not to let the weight of what we witness disconnect us from our purpose. And as Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma lives not just in the mind, but in the body. Healing isn’t just procedural—it’s physiological, cultural, collective.

This work is nervous system work. It's culture work. It's care work.

The Harm of Shallow Implementation

It honestly stings to see 'trauma-informed' slapped on initiatives that haven't gone deeper. It's not just ineffective; it can actually cause more hurt. We’ve seen:

• Staff retraumatized under the banner of “wellness”

• Boundaries disrespected in the name of “transparency”

• Teams silenced after they’ve “already had the training”

We've all seen it, haven't we? The team that went to the workshop and then... nothing really changed. Trauma work is found in how we open meetings, how we hold space in conflict, and how we respond to each other in our most activated moments.

What Real Trauma Work Looks Like

Real trauma stewardship is not performance—it’s posture. It looks like:

• Centering rest, not just grind

• Listening to lived experience as expertise

• Reviewing policies through the lens of harm reduction

• Holding accountability with tenderness

• Making room for grief, joy, and complexity—at once

Trauma-aware work isn’t neat. It’s not linear. But it is liberating when done well.

To be trauma-informed is to remember—every day—that people carry histories in their bones. That systems aren’t neutral. And that healing requires more than intention; it requires action.

Drawing from books like The Body Keeps the Score and Trauma Stewardship, we’re reminded that trauma doesn’t just shape behavior; it reshapes our nervous systems, our relationships, and the way we move through the world. If we don’t tend to that impact with care, we carry it with us into our work, our policies, our partnerships, and how we show up for one another.

Let's choose to tend. Let's choose to build.

🖤 If your organization is ready to move beyond the surface and cultivate a truly trauma-informed way of being, we're here to guide you.