‘Making Cuts that Matter’ in Social Work: A Diffractive Experiment with Trauma-informed Practice

ABSTRACT

Recently Feminist New Materialism has emerged as a field that questions the capability of critique to offer substantive change and calls for more affirmative forms of criticality which add to, rather than subtract from, alternate ways of living in the world. This ‘affirmative turn’ is an emerging influence in social work where it is taken up to disrupt human-centred notions of agency and engage with the non-human and more-than-human relations that make up the material-social world. This paper adds to this work, utilizing Karen Barad’s concept and method of diffraction to critically engage with trauma-informed practice, a current popular approach in social work that draws on neuroscience and social theory. Specifically, diffraction is used to put neuro-trauma theory into conversation with Extended Emotion theory, and through reading the insights they offer, re-configure trauma-informed social work as situated, embodied, relational practices for making differences that matter in the world. This example also suggests what diffraction makes possible for social work as an onto-ethical mode of affirmative critique.

KEYWORDS:

• Diffraction
• affirmative critique
• trauma-informed
• extended emotion
• embodied practice

Introduction

Social science and cultural studies have sought to re-think critique so that it might be more productive. Latour (2004) argues the critical method offers ‘only very partial and … very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs’ (232). He questions whether ‘explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness’ (232). In a similar vein, Sedgwick (2003) refers to the critical method as a paranoid reading, in which the knower stands outside the problem, doing little to redress unequal power relations from the inside. In conjunction with these debates, and calls to de-centre the human, social work is engaging with feminist new materialism (FNM) (see Bozalek 2016; Fox 2020; Tudor and Barraclough 2022; Webb 2020), a scholarly field which shares a ‘vitalizing orientation’ attending to the ontological status of matter and engaging with human, non-human and more-than-human processes. These modes of existence are configured as active, inseparable elements of life which in traditional forms of critique can be left in the background (Mol 2005). Within FNM, critique is an ethical, response-able stance to ‘engage affirmatively with the present, accounting for some of its features in a manner that is empirically grounded without being reductive’ (Braidotti 2013, 5). Methods such as Barad’s (2007) diffraction critically analyse the way power functions but in ways that engage within the relational, localized and emergent conditions of events (Fox and Alldred 2018). Affirmative critique combines these interventions with creativity, in order to promote alternate visions for the future (Braidotti 2013).

In this paper I take up affirmative critique, drawing on Barad’s (2007) method of diffraction to critically engage with trauma-informed care (henceforth referred to as TIC), a current, influential approach in social policy and health and welfare service delivery in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US (Pihama et al. 2017; Purtle and Lewis 2017; Sweeney and Taggart 2018). TIC draws on environmental theory, developmental psychology and neuroscience to understand how current stress can re-activate overwhelming, unpleasant emotions, intense physical sensations and impulsive, aggressive actions for people who have experienced adversity, long after the trauma is over (van der Kolk 2014). It proposes safe, non-threatening professional relationships and service contexts as essential ingredients for healing and recovery (Harris and Fallot 2001b). Despite its popularity, however, TIC has been critiqued for promulgating individualistic interventions and undermining collective action and structural change (Funston 2012; McKenzie-Mohr, Coates, and McLeod 2012)

In what follows, I begin with an outline of the concept and method of diffraction. A summary of the key tenets of TIC and its influence in social work is then provided. Next, the diffractive method is employed to put the neuro-trauma perspective which informs TIC into conversation with Extended Emotion theory (ExE), another prominent theory of emotions. ExE provides a philosophy of the mind framework that extends understandings of emotions beyond humans and their brains to consider the complex socio-material factors that co-produce affective states. Putting these two bodies of work together and carefully reading for differences offers some provocations for reimagining traumatic affects as embodied, worldly phenomena that are always unfolding (Barad 2007). In the final section, I discuss the ways in which the diffracted insights can re-work trauma-informed social work.

Diffraction as affirmative critique

Barad (2007) describes diffraction as a critical practice for reading texts and ‘attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’ (71). They contrast this method with a traditional critique which may provide some important initial insights, is not an acceptable finishing point – ‘the presumed exterior and often times superior positionality of critique doesn’t have the kind of political traction that is so needed’ (Barad in Juelskjær and Schwennesen 2012, 14). In elaborating on their critical practice, Barad (2007) acknowledges Haraway, feminist scientist, who proposed diffraction as an alternative method to reflexivity which assumes that representations (words, concepts and ideas) are able to represent reality and have no influence on the objects of investigation (87). Haraway’s diffraction offers an optical metaphor different to that of the mirror for reflection – a ‘critical consciousness … for making a difference in the world’ (Haraway 1992, as cited by Barad 2007, 87). Diffraction is an apt metaphor for Barad’s (2007) method for mapping differences not as essences or consequences but in terms of ‘where the effects of differences appear’ (300).

Although, for Barad (2007) diffraction is not just a metaphor, it is a physical phenomenon. As a physicist, Barad draws on physics to explicate diffraction as an ontological process, constitutive of the world and how it works (Barad 2007, 72). In classical physics, diffraction involves the way in which waves ‘combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of waves that occurs when waves encounter an obstruction’ as when ocean waves push through a gap in a wall will bend and spread out in interference patterns (Barad 2007, 74). The classical understanding was that only waves produce diffractive patterns: particles or matter do not, given they cannot occupy the same place at the same time (Barad 2007, 83). However, empirical evidence emerged in the early twentieth century showing, under certain conditions, matter can behave like waves and light can manifest as particles. Quantum physicist, Neil Bohr investigated this phenomenon using a two-slit instrument concluding whether an electron behaved as a wave or particle depended on its measurement (Barad 2007). That is, ‘the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus’ or measurement device (Barad 2007, 106). Barad (2007) re-works Bohr’s account within a posthumanist ontology, in which humans are not situated as distinct observers of a world waiting to be discovered, represented through language and measurement tools. Nor are nature and culture, discourse and materiality, subjects and objects understood as separate entities. Barad’s agential realist framework recognizes humans, non-humans and more-than-humans are all part of the world and have roles in its dynamic structuration.

Diffraction involves knowledge-making practices open to the changing, entangled, liveliness of phenomena. For Barad (2007) these practices of knowing are not isolatable from the practices of being - ‘(w)e don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world’ (185). Designating what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ a phenomenon, or what counts and what does not when explaining a concern such as trauma, involves making ‘agential cuts’, boundary-making determinations which enact specific materializations (Barad 2007, 178). Knowledge is ‘constructed through the enactment of particular cuts and not others’ (Barad 2007, 217). So it follows, as materially situated subjects, we are obligated to engage responsibly in these knowledge-making processes (Barad 2007, 178). Diffraction entails an ethical responsibility ‘to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded in mattering’ (Barad 2007, 178). Although which cuts are made are not the actions of a free, choice-making subject, but, the effects of wider ‘material arrangements of which we are a part’ (Barad 2007, 178). Diffraction seeks to engage with ‘agential cuts’ from within – offering onto-ethical method ‘to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded in mattering’ (Barad 2007, 178). I now turn to elaborate on TIC, its influence in social work, before putting its affective neuroscientific knowledge into conversation with ExE scholarship.

TIC and social work

TIC describes an approach to ‘social, behavioral, and mental health services that account for the possibility that clients may have experienced some form of past trauma’ (Knight 2019, 79). Trauma is defined as that which

results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. (SAMHSA 2014, 7)

Although the adverse event(s) is not the only consideration for understanding trauma, but also how the event is subjectively experienced and its effects on an individual’s ability to cope (Anyikwa 2016). Survivors of trauma are recognized as over-represented in service systems where they are considered to be ‘a particularly challenging group of clients given the long-term effects of the victimization and the present-day difficulties they face’ (Knight 2015, 34). Harris and Fallot (2001a), key proponents of TIC, argue despite survivors’ involvement in service systems, agencies tend to work ‘without treating them for the consequences of that trauma … and without being aware of the trauma that occurred’ (3).

The increased focus on trauma in service delivery emerged in the 1990s in response research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) which found repeated exposure to trauma in childhood, impacts on physical, mental and emotional well-being in later life (McLaughlin et al. 2012). Adverse environmental events include early parental mistreatment, family dysfunction, bullying, death of a family member, illness, out-of-home care, physical and sexual abuse and witnessing domestic violence (Levenson 2017, 105). Oppressive and discriminatory systems that perpetuate poverty, historical, patriarchal and colonial violence are also recognized as ACEs (Pyles 2020). Childhood trauma is recognized as having ongoing developmental impacts, accounting for nearly half of all childhood onset of psychiatric disorders and a third of all cases of onset in adolescence and adulthood (McLaughlin et al. 2012) and its lifelong impacts predominate services in other clinical contexts including child protection, youth justice and the prison system (Levenson 2017). The emergence of the affective neuroscience in the 1980s, a field which seeks to understand the role emotions play in brain processes and behaviour, has also contributed to new knowledge of trauma (Stevens 2022). Bringing together evidence from affective neuroscience with developmental and environmental perspectives of childhood adversity elaborates on how extreme stressors occurring during sensitive developmental periods in early life can change the structure of the brain and are linked with issues with learning and behaviour in later life as well as physical and mental health issues in adulthood (Shonkoff et al. 2012). TIC brings together these multi-facetted perspectives to trauma including van der Kolk’s (2014) neuro-trauma model and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics developed by Perry (2006).

Although it should be noted that the ACEs have been challenged for mobilizing moralizing policy imperatives to target problematic parents (Asmussen, McBride, and Waddell 2019; Macvarish and Lee 2019). So too the influence of neuroscience in policy and social work is challenged by Wastell and White (2012) who argue the predicative claims made neuroscience regarding the impact of insecure attachment in childhood on psychological, social and cognitive functioning in later life, privileges a ‘biologically worldview’ to justify state interventions in family life. Notwithstanding these critiques, TIC positions itself as a non-pathologizing approach influential in a wide range of practices contexts, not just those catering for children, youth and parents such as adult mental health, hospital settings and prisons where it has a focus on ensuring survivors are responded to in ways that do not cause further harm (Bloom 2017; Jewkes et al. 2019; Tomaz and Castro-Vale 2020). TIC recognizes that people living with poverty, homelessness, mental health problems, alcohol and/or drug addictions or experiencing disabilities are likely to have experienced past adversity and are at increased risk of further victimization. For example, the Sanctuary Model, a trauma-informed organizational approach developed in the adult mental health inpatient setting due to increased recognition that most people who access social or health services have experienced childhood trauma and the service context and practices were often re-traumatizing particularly if they ‘took an authoritarian approach in addressing challenging behaviors in the treatment setting’ (Bloom 2017, 499). TIC understands that survivors often come with backgrounds marked by marginalization and discrimination, and their interactions with professionals and helping services can be highly charged, with each new experience of not being validated, evoking feelings of helplessness, fear or other unmediated responses to past trauma.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHS) framework (2014) is influential in social work (Anyikwa 2016; Bent-Goodley 2019; Levenson 2017), outlining key principles for TIC organizations and practice. These include ensuring people who have survived trauma experience a sense of safety in the service setting and relationship with workers, services and interventions are transparent and trust is established through setting appropriate boundaries and making the tasks of service delivery clear and a strength-based, collaborative approach is taken which enables survivors to be experts in their lives and plan their own services (SAMHSA 2014). Trauma-informed social workers bring an understanding of trauma into their professional relationships through carefully assessing early life experiences and the influence of adversity on survivor’s present-day challenges (Knight 2015, 34). They seek to assess the survivor’s history and how it may influence their ‘present-day challenges and normalize and validate the client’s experiences’ (Knight 2015, 34). Taking care to validate and normalize survivor’s experiences also aims to reduce the risk of practitioners inadvertently retraumatizing service users (Carello and Butler 2015). Being trauma-informed depends on social workers ensuring working relationship with people facing adversity so they may ‘experience validation, understanding, and support’ (Knight 2019, 82). TIC also brings a focus on practitioners themselves, who are also considered at risk of secondary trauma – ‘negative psychological, emotional, and cognitive effects from the exposure to the traumatic stories of clients’ (Bercier and Maynard 2015, 81). Creating emotional safety for social workers involves them tuning into their own self-care needs. It also involves supervisors and managers normalizing the need for support without stigma, implementing systems to identify social workers affected by secondary trauma and providing training, support and education so social workers feel prepared to meet the needs of trauma-affected service users (Bent-Goodley 2019). Trauma-informed practice seeks to address the impact of intersecting factors trauma survivors’ environment and history that influences their current response to trauma, recognizing race, ethnicity, gender dimensions of discrimination and oppression are significant (Anyikwa 2016; Pyles 2020). For example, in Aotearoa New Zealand acknowledgement of the impacts of intergenerational and colonial trauma and racism for indigenous Māori has led to the development of Māori-led social and health services (Cleaver 2016) and indigenous approaches to TIC (Pihama et al. 2017).

Whilst TIC seeks to respond to the socio-cultural and political dimensions of trauma, there are concerns that too often the site of trauma is located within individuals and interventions are ‘designed to reduce trauma symptoms and changes to environments that reduce and contain individuals’ symptoms’ (Becker-Blease 2017, 133–134). For example, in the field of women’s homelessness, Funston (2012) notes a focus on reconnecting women with their children, building supportive relationships with other women and accessing education programmes, but little attention to the lack of affordable housing, inadequate welfare support system and ‘the ongoing risk of gendered violence, domestic and family violence’ (218). McKenzie-Mohr, Coates, and McLeod (2012) state that whilst TIC responds to ‘the complex psychological, relational, and social/political challenges’ experienced by survivors it falls short of addressing ‘underlying structural causes’ (137). This work seeks to politicize TIC extending the focus beyond the personal manifestations of adversity to address the structural inequalities that perpetuate it. Politicizing TIC so that it is better mobilizes social and critical theories and methods may be trickier than anticipated. Bringing together discourses which are underpinned by different assumptions, methodologies, values and priorities, which can be in dispute with one another can result in particular forms of knowledge becoming dominant and working to marginalize the contributions of others (Bracken and Thomas 2010, 219).

In this paper, I seek to critically engage and rework TIC using a diffractive analytical process. This involves disrupting the linear and fixed causalities and dualistic systems of thought that shape TIC and creating productive interference patterns between it and ExE scholarly work. Whilst I critique brain-centred constructs, I do not seek to dismiss the materialist, embodiment of trauma that neuro-knowledge brings. Rather I contend that the kind of neurodevelopmental theory TIC makes use of, cannot fully explicate the embodied, social and relational dimensions of trauma, and furthermore, it deploys a historical form of psychological discourse which, despite its intentions, affirms dualist Western notions of ‘mind over matter, head over body, rational over emotional and, individual over the environment’ (Lucas 2017, 30). In the next section, I outline the key tenets and challenges with van der Kolk’s (2014) neuro-trauma theory and bring it together with ExE theory to configure an externalist perspective of the bodily, relational and environmental mediators which enable traumatic affects.

Diffracting with neuro-trauma theory and ExE

One of the most well-known and influential affective neuroscientific accounts of trauma and the ways to address it, is that of Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and researcher who wrote the bestselling book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ (2014). van der Kolk’s work proposes a physicalist theory of trauma, arguing that repeated and prolonged exposure to serious stress leaves a neurobiological impact on survivors. Like FNM van der Kolk disputes mind/body binaries, proposing an integrated brain–body theory which outlines the ways in which past trauma continues to impact on the emotional part of the brain – its stress response system (the amygdala and limbic system) maintaining it in a state of overactivation and adversely impacting on survivor’s ability to manage signs of danger, either real or perceived. He observes that in traumatized brains, stress hormones can spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli and take much longer to return to baseline (van der Kolk 2014, 46). While responding to these re-traumatizing stimuli, the amygdala and the limbic system run at maximum speed, making it difficult for people to control their emotional reactions (van der Kolk 2014, 61–62). The effects of ‘constantly alleviated stress hormones inhibits the natural development and connection of neurons, increase attention problems, irritability and sleep disorders’ (van der Kolk 2014, 46). In non-traumatized brains, the prefrontal cortex which van der Kolk (2014) refers to as the rational brain, can help restore balance through observing the stressful situation, predicting what may happen and informing decision-making. Trauma makes it hard for survivors to interpret whether a situation is dangerous or safe. High levels of stress hormones limit the capacity of the rational brain to restore balance (van der Kolk 2014, 60). Essentially neuro-trauma theory elaborates when the emotional brain is out of balance with the rational brain as it often is for trauma survivors, it operates as a ‘faulty alarm system where even innocuous comments or facial expressions can lead to blow ups or shutdowns (van der Kolk 2014, 62). The effects of ‘constantly alleviated stress hormones inhibits natural development and connection of neurons, increase attention problems, irritability and sleep disorders’ and survivors can turn to alcohol and drugs to manage their constantly, re-activated affective states (van der Kolk 2014, 46).

Not only does van der Kolk’s work elaborate on the embodied nature of trauma, he also proposes that trauma may be re-mediated through working with emotions and the body. This position is positively received in FNM which critiques mind–body dualisms for ‘valuing the rational, male perspective and marginalizing the ‘feeling’ side of knowing, generally associated with women’ (Coffey 2013, 4). Instead of cognitively-oriented, talk-based therapies, van der Kolk (2014) recommends embodied practices such as yoga, breathing meditation, dance as a means to reset the emotional brain and restore compromised neural pathways. Lucas (2017) cautions, however, observing ‘despite the interest in seeing mind and body as one, or investing in the idea that mental and physical health are deeply implicated, the cultural axiom to ‘listen to your body’ already inherently creates a split’ whereby people are encouraged to move their bodies to improve their thinking and mood (Lucas 2017, 32). Fullagar (2020) alerts us to how neuroscientific notions of mind–body relations are deployed within neoliberal policy such that active embodiment is subsumed to individualistic practices aimed at ameliorating mental distress through exercise.

ExE theory provides a non-linear understanding of emotions recognizing affective states as situated within the continuously, shifting ‘interplay and interminglings of the goings-on of the brain, body and environment’ (Slaby 2014, 38). Like neurobiological developmental theories, ExE is an extensive field which draws on empirical research and integrates social theory, psychology and neurobiological science. In what follows I provide a diffractive reading of ExE texts (particularly those of Joel Krueger, a theory of the mind scholar) with van der Kolk’s (2014) text offering ways to explore the often overlooked or unattended aspects of traumatic affect. Whilst discussed separated, the diffracted relations should be taken together to re-conceptualize trauma affects as entangled bodily-worldly phenomenon (Barad 2007).

Traumatic affects as embodied matters

ExE challenges the Cartesian belief that mind and body are separated, along with the view that emotions are primarily mental states. Krueger (2014b) discusses research which indicates when an individual’s physical factors are compromised or missing, the character of the emotions are diminished too. He examines research on Moebias Syndrome, a congenital form of bilateral facial paralysis which diminishes a person’s capacity for facial expression noting subjects report a flattened affect as a result of the lack of facial movement He adds, however, that a person can learn to feel through their bodies. Citing research on a girl with Moebias Syndrome, who learned to use physical gestures to express her emotions in later life. Involving her whole body did not just enable her to communicate her feelings but recalibrated and intensified her emotional experience (Cole and Spalding 2009, as cited by Krueger 2014b, 534). These findings and other studies lead Krueger to claim that there is a reciprocal relation between emotional experience and its behavioural expression such that ‘our emotions are lived in and through our bodies, and are not simply a matter of brain chemistry’ (Maiese 2011 as cited by Krueger 2014b, 535). ExE disputes that the brain has a regulatory role in managing emotions, supporting feminist work which has challenged the patriarchal understanding of the mind (and logic, reason, order), traditionally associated with the masculine, in a hierarchical relation to the body, its devalued, feminine opposite (symbolizing disorder and excess)’ (Coffey 2013, 4).

ExE also proposes the concept of background emotions – ‘low-grade, inconspicuous affective states that constitute the tacit backdrop of experience and subtly organize thought and behavior’ (Varga and Krueger 2013, 271). Background emotions, first proposed by Damascio, are the ‘composite expression of various ‘bioregulatory reactions’’ providing an ‘orientation for our various engagements with the world’ and are experienced as the ‘space of action possibilities’ (Varga and Krueger 2013, 272). Some background emotions present a sense of unambiguous and heightened opportunities, while others encourage repressed and diminished states (Varga and Krueger 2013). Bringing this concept together with van der Kolk’s model enables us to understand traumatic affects as intensely felt, embodied emotions, that lack mental representation and are accompanied with a tacit sense of (dis)connection with others and the world. This rendition of traumatic affect also attunes to the possibilities for change, and, in this respect ExE joins with Barad’s (2007) position that emotions and affects (like other agential conditions) are not fixed states but emerge and shift within the always, unfolding world.

Materially-dispersed traumatic affects

Another area in which ExE and neuro-trauma theory converge is in the involvement of the environment in emotional expression. ExE argues the material wold is constitutive of affective states drawing attention to the ways in which things and places are able to evoke emotional experiences. Neuro-trauma theory understands the environment as the provider of sensory information processed by different regions. However, if the signal is too intense and/or the neural pathways within the rational brain are compromised then individuals lose their ability to control their flight or fight responses. van der Kolk (2014) also recognizes the environment as a means to calm down or recalibrate the emotional brain. For example, when working with traumatized children, he advises setting up safe areas to enable the child to calm down and working on developing regulatory skills so their emotional states are not highjacked by environmental stimuli (van der Kolk 2014, 59). Krueger (2014b) argues the involvement afforded to the environment in these kinds of examples is unidimensional, promulgating a ‘snapshot’ perspective in which emotions are reduced to physiological episodes (states) that intervene between environmental stimulus and behavioural response (Krueger 2014a, 334). In posthumanist social work, this person-environment perspective is critiqued for relegating the environment to being merely a catalyst or resource for human-centred experience (Fox 2020).

ExE proposes that emotional experiences can also be invoked through ‘subject-world integration’ whereby the distribution of physical elements of a place are experienced as a whole – encouraging us to make us feel tense, or light and joyful, or heavy and mournful (Slaby 2014, 43). Although these kinds of affective arrangements evoke rather than determine affective states - we are able to appreciate and intersubjectively agree on the joyful atmosphere of a room, for example, whilst feeling detached from it (Slaby 2014). ExE recognizes material places and spaces are able to ‘do things’ – ‘they envelope us, press upon us, and in so doing play an important role in shaping how we evaluate and get on in the world’ (Krueger 2021, 112). Although, Krueger (2021) notes some bodies experience an easy fit within some kinds of affective arrangements whilst for other kinds of bodies such arrangements ‘disturb their sense of embodiment, agency, and affect at a deep level’ (117). Incorporating insights from feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, decolonial and indigenous scholarly work, Krueger (2021) highlights the ethical and political consequences when certain kinds of bodies are not allowed to comfortably ‘find their way into and through certain kinds of arrangements’ (117). In the context of trauma-informed practice in the United States, Ashley (2014) discusses how black woman often have to contend with stereotypes which represent them as aggressive, ill-tempered, illogical and hostile, emotions which are understandable given the intersecting cultural, patriarchal and historical forms of oppression they must face. In their efforts to avoid the label of ‘Angry Black Woman’ they may suppress expressions of anger and as a result, can feel unsafe in the social service environment and are left with feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and self-loathing (Ashley 2014). ExE assists to understands how the affective arrangements in trauma-informed organizations, social services and rehabilitation facilities, whilst not necessarily intentional can act in such a way that they exclude raced, gendered and classed bodies and deter specific kinds of emotional expression (Krueger 2021, 116).

Interpersonally-dispersed traumatic affects

Both ExE and neuro-trauma theory focus on the early infant-caregiver relationship as a significant event in emotional experience. van der Kolk (2016) notes ‘safe and protective early relationships are crucial for children’s development but ‘if parents themselves are the source of distress, the child has no one to turn to for comfort and restoration of biological homeostasis’ (268). ExE scholarship agrees this early relationship is important, elaborating that infants lack the mechanisms for cognitive processing and emotion regulation means they are dependent on caregivers to realize emotions (Krueger and Szanto 2016). Caregivers assert most of the agency in these early interactions but ExE argues that the nature of these dyadic emotional experiences is that they are socially extended, enabling the infant to access emotions that they could not access otherwise (Varga and Krueger 2013). For example, in response to an infant’s expression of negative affect, the caregiver ‘will initially express sympathetic emotions … but then elevate the shared affect by smiling broadly and adopting a jollier, more melodic and buoyant mode of expression’ (Varga and Krueger 2013, 282). The affective contours of these interactions over time provide predictability to infants enabling them to integrate emotional experience and co-construct a shared vocabulary for different forms of interpersonal closeness and connectedness. Thus ExE affirms the crucial role of the caregiver-infant relation but situates emotional expression and regulation as distributed across their interactions (Varga and Krueger 2013, 282).

ExE discusses how missing out on consistent and predictable caregiver relationships creates issues in later life, in part because of the diminished ability to enter into ‘regulatory relations with others – an experiential constraint that decreases the individual’s ability to adapt to demanding situations’ (Varga and Krueger 2013, 272). The lack of proximity experienced in childhood can have long-lasting effects on adult’s abilities to connect with another (Varga and Krueger 2013, 285). Whereas van der Kolk (2016) argues the neuronal connections that result from early caregiver relationships continue to underpin the fundamental substance and meaning of adult lives including ‘pervasive biological and emotional dysregulation, failed or disrupted attachment, and a hugely deficient sense of coherent personal identity and competence’ (269). ExE emphasizes that early experiences of trauma foster a ‘loss of a basic sense of trust … [that] later come to regulate encounters with people more generally’(Lopes 2021, 942). Trust emerges as background emotion providing a ‘general sense of confidence that enables our being at home in the world - an inconspicuous, atmospheric feeling that encompasses the whole web of intentional relationships we are capable of’ (Lopes 2021, 943).

ExE is clear that ongoing, interpersonal, mutual affect develops and changes in later life such as relationships between people going through the same event, for example shared grief for parents whose child has died. Both parents have direct perceptual and tactile access to the grief of the other – expressions that in turn feed back onto, permeate, and directly modulate their own grief’ and they share a ‘common emotional focus … as well as a common stock of shared memories, experiences, and associations that define the narrative history of their time with their child’ (Krueger and Szanto 2016, 870). The parents form an affective dyad such that their grief is distributed across their relationship. Although the relational nature of these and other mutually affective relations does not mean that each person experiences the same emotions; individuals make their own responses but other factors are nonetheless significant (Krueger and Szanto 2016, 870). ExE understands how individuals are always interacting with others’ responses and it is the connectedness of the relationship which is most crucial for positive emotional experience. Some relations can reinforce or amplify traumatic affects while other relations can create new, unanticipated emotions (Krueger and Szanto 2016, 870). Like neuro-trauma theory, ExE views professional relationships such as those between social workers and survivors of trauma as having potential to address past adversity, although relational synchronicity is identified as the significant force in the re-formation of distributed emotional responses (Varga and Krueger 2013).

Affirmatively re-working trauma-informed social work

Putting ExE into conversation with neuro-trauma theory, within Barad’s (2007) diffractive methodology, reveals the uneven weight given to colonial, patriarchal and anthropocentric ways of knowing in TIC. Through critiquing and disrupting mind–body, person-environment, human–nonhuman dualisms diffraction enables us to open up multiple dynamics of embodied interactions, inter-subjective relations and the role of affective spaces and places in trans/forming traumatic affects. FNM recognizes agentic capacities exist within entangled multiplicities of bodies, things and social formations and proposes resistance as the micropolitical effects, moments and movements that move contrary to power (Fox and Alldred 2018). This diffractive approach draws attention to the range of relational, material ontological tools and practices that social work has at hand to assist TIC to further engage with its commitment to socio-political change (McKenzie-Mohr, Coates, and McLeod 2012).

So what then might be the possibilities for making cuts that matter in trauma-informed social work? I offer some suggestions. Firstly, social workers need to be cognizant of how the theories and methods such as TIC are imbricated in the development of dominant Western forms of knowledge. This involves taking ethical responsibility for what we do as social workers – how we engage with ‘care, social justice and seeing oneself as part of the world’ (Bozalek and Zembylas 2018, 52). However, this form of criticality is different to agency-structure analysis which situates human-centred modes of rationality as the dominant mode of operating (Satour and Goldingay 2021). Disrupting dominant knowledge systems connects with the growing movement to decolonize social work and contribute to processes for redressing colonial trauma which have marginalized Indigenous peoples’ forms of knowing and being. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Pihama et al. (2017) argue utilizing a TIC approach derived from overseas, Western theories ends up ‘othering’ Indigenous Māori who become positioned as the deviation within normative, generalized theories of behaviour. Orientating TIC with Indigenous communities to Western principles that are not commensurate with Indigenous modes of knowing and being may actually cause further harm and undermine the very justice it seeks to obtain (Pihama et al. 2017; Satour and Goldingay 2021). Culturally responsive trauma-informed practice recognizes Indigenous people’s experiences of historical, colonial and collective trauma and racism but also that Indigenous ontological belonging is grounded in embodied relations, traditions and connections to land (Drummond 2020).

Secondly, the traumatized body is understood as the site where historical, social-cultural and colonial forces are played out but also for its capacity to re-work adversity. Embodied social work practice offers opportunities for survivors to stay with the body rather than escape from it, ‘forcing a person to confront their limitations and dependence on others’ (Braidotti 2012 as cited by Fox 2020, 76). Social workers can contribute to connecting survivors with their own and others’ bodies through dance, art, craft, drama, music, yoga and play (Mesinga, Pyles, and Stanford 2021). However, the aim of this kind of trauma work is not just to provide a sense of safety or for survivors to better manage their emotional triggers. The feeling body is not merely an effect of power, nor is it something to control, and material practices are not passive tools to use in order for rational thinking to occur (Coffey 2013; Sodhi and Cohen 2011). Research by Hickey-Moody and Willcox (2020) engaged children from refugee backgrounds in art-making with their stories of loss, belonging, identity, culture and home - creative, physical practices to readdress or unpack trauma and enable change. Such embodied practices connect with the potential of bodies, which are always in ‘continual, immanent processes of change and becoming’, highlighting the possibilities of social work as a space for survivors to interact with themselves not just as subjects of trauma, but in terms of what their bodies are capable of and what they may become (Coffey 2013, 12). Pyles (2020) refers to this as a healing justice approach, emphasizing how ‘embodied, contemplative, and interpersonal healing work can transform historical trauma and internalized oppression’ (179).

Thirdly, this analysis offers a place-centred perspective revealing the ways in which service contexts enact situated agential conditions that can invoke sensory experiences and shift relations of belonging, identity and attachment for trauma survivors. Although TIC’s focus on safe, non-threatening practice environments can unintentionally give subtle but none-the-less powerful messages about the preferred kinds of identities and forms of emotional expression. As discussed anger whilst recognized as a normative response to trauma it is to be deterred as a longer-term, unsafe and undesirable form of irrationality. These kinds of anti-anger practices can close off gendered, classed and raced bodies from services but they also undermine the political potential that anger offers. As Garrett (2023) argues whilst not all anger is productive, ‘knowing resistant anger’ garnered from one’s recognition of being part of a community which is managed, handled and silenced offers ‘affective fuel’ in the struggle for social justice (10). Practice contexts which offer survivors possibilities to interact emotionally in diverse ways can act as intermediaries, opening up collaborative spaces for subjugated, non-mainstream knowledges of becoming with trauma to emerge (Fox and Alldred 2018).

Finally, utilizing insights from ExE scholarship in TIC recognizes social workers not as separate observers of survivors’ manifestations of trauma but as actively immersed in the relational, material conditions that enable traumatic affect to be understood and addressed. Barad’s (2007) position is that ‘the practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated’ (185). Social worker’s feelings and sensations are important in their practice encounters and organizational contexts. In their research on emotions in child protection, Bjerre and Nissen (2021) observed that when it was difficult to make sense of the existing information, social workers would tune into their felt experience of the situation to identify potential risks for a child. They argue that instead of limiting the influence of social worker’s embodied emotional capacities, these feelings should be cultivated as they provide additional forms of knowledge, valuable for practice. Organizations can facilitate affective atmospheres in spaces such as team meetings, enabling practitioners to express and think with their emotions together (Bjerre and Nissen 2021). Although from a TIC perspective, the notion of invoking affective, relational synchronicity in practice brings with it concerns about secondary trauma. Social workers are cautioned to monitor their stress levels and develop emotional self-management skills to limit the risk of indirect trauma (Bent-Goodley 2019). van Rhyn, Barwick, and Donelly (2021) note, however, the process of shifting between affective validation and emotional detachment are complex cognitive-emotional tasks. They advocate for an approach in which social workers tune into their own bodies as they listen to stories of adversity, alerting them to their own emotional reactions which can serve as protective resources, helping them to understand themselves as bodily distinct (van Rhyn, Barwick, and Donelly 2021, 158). Through cultivating embodied practices, social workers can bypass cognitively demanding tasks which require them to empathically understand and instead attend to ‘being with’ survivors as they work with trauma (Slaby 2014).

Conclusion

Barad (2007) emphasizes because we are part of the world, we are ethically accountable for the cuts we make to understand what is inside and outside phenomena. Utilizing the example of TIC, this paper has offered ways to understand social work encounters with trauma where brains and bodies, humans and nonhumans, social and material conditions and science and social theory are incorporated into the analysis (Barad 2007). Disrupting binaries and pushing normalizing practices in new directions and affirming ‘not-yet’ forms of knowing, being and becoming this re-worked proposal for TIC addresses power and resistance within the ‘relational micropolitics of events, activities and interactions themselves’ (Fox and Alldred 2018, 321). Diffraction reveals itself as an ethical mode of criticality for provoking inventive knowledge practices in order to make differences that matter in social work.

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Raewyn Tudor

Raewyn Tudor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work focusses on the utility of post-structural, posthumanist and feminist materialist thought and methods for social work research, education and practice. She is currently engaged in an arts-based research project examining young women's experiences of anxiety and fear, through zine-making.