Podcast Season 4: Episode 3 – Trauma-informed record keeping

Please note that this transcript is auto-generated and therefore will contain some errors and natural pauses in conversation.

[00:00:00] DAWN: Welcome to the Creative Life Story Work podcast, where we explore how to make life story work better for all care, experienced children and young people. Creative Life Story Work is an approach which can improve children and young people’s lives and their relationships with others, both at home. It’s based on the ROSE model of therapeutic life story work.

[00:00:37] Every month, we’ll explore a different aspect of creative life story work, and we’ll give insights into how you can make use of this approach to help care experienced children and young people make sense of their past, and build a brighter future. Today we are exploring what makes good record keeping and how social care professionals and foster carers can take steps towards creating records which can have a positive impact on people’s lives.

[00:01:05] I’m delighted to welcome to our podcast studio Dr Lisa Cherry. Lisa is an author, researcher and leading international trainer and consultant She specialises in assisting schools, services and systems to create change that supports working with the legacy of trauma. Lisa has been working in education and children’s services for over 30 years and combines academic knowledge and research with professional skills and personal experience.

[00:01:37] Lisa is Director of Trauma Informed Consultancy Services, which offers an extensive range of training sessions, related to all aspects of how we can apply a trauma informed framework to settings, services and systems. Welcome, welcome to our podcast studio, Lisa. So lovely to meet you.

[00:01:57] LISA: Hello Dawn. It’s very, very lovely to be here and thank you for such a lovely welcome.

[00:02:02] DAWN: I wondered if we could start our conversation with a bit of a definition, how you would define good record keeping and why it’s so important.

[00:02:13] LISA: Well, so definitions always kind of put me on the back foot really because just when I think I’ve got a grasp of something, something else shifts and something else changes and I guess that’s really important because that’s the same as a child’s life, that’s the same as our lives, that we change and we shift and we have different experiences that are meaningful at different points in our life.

[00:02:41] I’m thinking of when I revisited Brightness of Stars, which was a book that I wrote over 10 years ago. And when I re read my section, it didn’t really mean very much to me. When I re read my story, the story that mattered for me had changed. And so I asked all the other people in the book if they felt the same, and they did.

[00:03:07] And so all of us had this opportunity to write where we were now. And I think that’s, that’s a really important aspect of thinking about record keeping that it can be trauma responsive and dynamic and can provide an opportunity for healing long after that person has been engaged in that service. So for me, good record keeping is far more than record keeping.

[00:03:38] It’s about. The adult that the child’s going to become. And it’s about having a sensitivity to the different points in life that somebody might want to know what happened to them.

[00:03:52] DAWN: I really like that you have a dynamic definition that’s changing as well as the years go by. And I’m just thinking some of the people who are maybe listening to our conversation around What the challenges might be for, say, a foster carer to hear your definition and to think, goodness, how do I begin to encompass that in, in some of the records that I’m, I’m having to keep?

[00:04:17] Are there some common mistakes that people do where you could just start from there? Like, like, just don’t do this. Don’t do this. This wouldn’t be good because that is so massive, isn’t it?

[00:04:26] LISA: I mean, I call those challenges tensions. There are tensions and some of the tensions we have to just be with. You know, so for example, by attention, what I mean is that case notes, if you like, I don’t like that phraseology because I don’t like to think of any human being as a case, but they are also a legal document, right?

[00:04:50] DAWN: Yeah.

[00:04:51] LISA: So that already is in, conflict, if you like, with somebody wanting to find out what happened to them. And that’s a really difficult tension that I’m not sure we can kind of solve today, right? So that’s the first thing to say. Oh, go on. Were you going to ask me something about that?

[00:05:10] DAWN: You carry on. I’m, I’m drinking my tea.

[00:05:14] LISA: That’s all right. I’ve got my tea as well, Dawn. Cup’s up.

[00:05:16] LISA: I’ve got my cup of tea. That’s the most important thing. We’ve got our tea. This is good. Listen, all of these conversations are so much better with a cuppa, aren’t they? Let’s face it.

[00:05:26] LISA: So yeah, it’s, I think there are tensions that we can’t solve. But say, for example, foster carers.

[00:05:32] An example that I often share is where A brother and a sister or two sisters or two brothers have been separated because it was decided by, say, the social worker that that was the right thing to do, and the foster carers disagreed. But the child who had to go and leave, to go somewhere else, will have internalized that as rejection, right?

[00:05:56] Because Children and young people think everything is their fault. It’s just, you know, the way it works. They may well have internalized from that experience, I was too much, they didn’t want me, I wasn’t good enough. Those kind of things that form inside a person. So what I say to foster carers is write to the adult that the child will become and send it to the social worker so it goes on the file.

[00:06:25] Because the healing opportunity for that child. As an adult, then go and read. Actually, it wasn’t me. They did want me. I wasn’t too much. They didn’t want to throw me out because I was horrible or That’s healing. That’s what I mean by dynamic. There’s things that we can do today that will make a difference in somebody else’s tomorrow.

[00:06:49] DAWN: I’m just thinking of Richard Rose’s words about repetition, like being consistent and the repetition, and I’m just wondering about the role that that plays in some of the record keeping that goes on, so that the child’s getting that same message, whichever note it is that they’re reading when they come back in later life.

[00:07:12] LISA: Yeah, I mean, first of all, Richard Rose’s work’s beautiful, isn’t it? I’ve just reviewed his next book and you’re all in for a treat. Oh, have you? I have. I’m not telling any secrets. But it’s, you’re going to love it and it’s, he’s so practical, isn’t he? You know, he’s so about the practical application and that’s fantastic.

[00:07:34] And he’s absolutely right, you know, that repetition is really important. So if you think about that from a negative perspective. I mean, honestly, some of the stuff I’ve seen written down would make your toes curl. If we’re going to be repetitious, let’s do that in the positive. You know, let’s not do that in the negative, because often what can happen, what really bad practice is when a file is a catalogue of words.

[00:08:02] of negative events, as opposed to, for example, a dynamic trauma responsive opportunity for healing. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen catalogs of negative events. So there’s something in there, isn’t there, about writing the nothingness of life. Nothing happened today and it was beautiful because we smiled all day.

[00:08:27] You know, like, every day doesn’t have to have an event. You know, and also writing together where appropriate, you know, age appropriate and desire appropriate writing with, you know, so there’s some kind of ownership. So you’re not reading stuff. When you go back and look at your father and you think, where did that come from?

[00:08:50] Who, who, what, what’s going on there?

[00:08:54] DAWN: So like the, I really liked the idea of almost to use another set of words, co creating some of your observations that might’ve happened. And it reminds me actually of another conversation that I had with. Christian Brock from Virtual Memory Box, who was talking about using technology almost to do that.

[00:09:16] So he was saying we could have a photograph of the child on the beach and a voice note that comes up from the foster carer saying you’re on the beach at South Shields and it was strawberry ice cream that was your favorite with sprinkles on and then being able to share that as well. And I just wondered your thoughts on how technology might support or change the way that records are being kept.

[00:09:43] LISA: I mean I think that’s beautiful and I have to say it’s not something I’ve particularly explored, so I can’t sort of answer other than what comes to mind in you bringing that into this And I think it’s, I think it’s fantastic. I love the idea of voice note recordings. Yeah. And holding, holding those memories because in the negative events model, the beautiful stuff isn’t in there.

[00:10:13] You know, the, the noticing of those little moments just get lost. And so I love the idea of voice notes being held.

[00:10:23] DAWN: Yeah, it was those little, it was the little moments that, that prompted that thought, actually, that, you know, just, yeah, sitting on the beach, enjoying an ice cream. And that was It’s our day today, you know, and being able to go back and look at that 20 years later and think, Oh yeah, I did used to like strawberry ice cream.

[00:10:42] LISA: I’d forgotten about that. I mean, just thinking about digital shifts in how, you know, we can work, my mind’s just gone into overdrive and got really excited about, you know, having photo web pages. Where you can have collections of pictures that can be stored and held in somewhere. I mean, how you hold all of that stuff together, I’d be fascinated.

[00:11:04] But there’s all sorts of different ways that you can use the way we work digitally. That we can use that to sort of shift and change and hold more of the glimmers. You know, the idea of glimmers as opposed to triggers. We can hold more of the glimmers because let’s face it, if you’ve ever read, a file, and I, I read my file in my early 40s.

[00:11:30] There are lots of, and I wouldn’t say triggers, but certainly activation moments. So if you can read some glimmers, That’s going to be incredibly healing, isn’t it?

[00:11:46] DAWN: I love the word glimmers as opposed to triggers. It’s like flipping it again. Let’s go to a short break so you can hear about our creative life story work membership offer.

[00:11:59] Trailer (2): We want people to gain more of an understanding about what it’s like to be care experienced and to have a better understanding of what it actually means. Could creative life story work make a difference to the care experienced children and young people you work with? Maybe you’re a social worker. I think we forget at our peril that actually telling a child the story of their early life is one of the most profound uses of social work power that we could ever operate.

[00:12:30] Perhaps you’re a foster carer. You know, when they say it’s all about the child, it’s not because our experience It’s about the carer and the child, and it just gives a new angle to our relationship because we’re learning about each other together. A Creative Life Story Work Membership will give you, or your whole team, access to resources and resources.

[00:12:50] Including activities you can use in direct work with children and young people. Training with life story work experts and lots more. And I think a lot of our children are looking for meaning. Looking for, you know, well why is it I feel this way when my, you know, my friends don’t? Why is it I get angry internally and my friends don’t?

[00:13:10] The greatest thing we see is when we are able to say to young people, this is your story, this is about who you are. And then children towards the end say, it’s not my fault that these things happened. It’s But it is something that I can do something about. And once we have that, then we know we can move forward.

[00:13:24] Find out about our membership for individuals and for organisations on our website, creativelifestorywork. com

[00:13:36] DAWN: I think we touched on it earlier about a lot of the information that might need to be recorded is very confidential. And I’m just wondering about how you balance that with the need for transparency as well.

[00:13:53] I’m thinking about some of the ethical considerations as well. Words are put down on a page and how you begin to think about that when you’re, when you’re writing in a child’s notes.

[00:14:08] LISA: I mean, look, it’s a minefield.

[00:14:10] DAWN: Yeah.

[00:14:11] LISA: But the reality is most people will go into practice and have no reflection time and training around this.

[00:14:19] And yet you’ve just raised some of really, some of the really difficult aspects. of this, not least that somebody, often an administrator, will be making the decisions about what to redact from a file and what to keep, which in itself is a massive area of concern, isn’t it? Who makes that decision? Where does that decision come from?

[00:14:48] Whose right is it to own that decision? And I’ve, this has been raised with me with an organization I did some work with where the, they were working with somebody who wanted to go into her file to find out about abuse that she’d experienced and that information had been redacted. It had been taken away from her.

[00:15:13] I think that’s the a very re traumatizing service system trauma because somebody else knew about something that happened to her and they, it had been taken away from her but they had that And everything about that is not trauma informed. Everything about that is re traumatizing. So that’s certainly one aspect that’s really tricky, is this idea around third party information.

[00:15:51] But actually the whole file is kind of third party information, isn’t it? Yeah. So it’s quite a strange power imbalance. And I guess I love that you’ve raised ethical considerations, and I think if we’re addressing the power imbalance, I think we’ll make better decisions than if that power imbalance is not being addressed.

[00:16:15] DAWN: What happens if something’s been missed out? Or if a mistake’s been, or if a mistake’s been made? How do you go around changing that or adding things in? Like the, you, you talked about the person before who’d had something redacted. But what about if a mistake’s been made? Can that, can

[00:16:34] LISA: that be changed? I don’t know anyone who’s managed to appeal those kind of decisions, but I’m sure people have.

[00:16:42] I’m sure people must have done. And I guess it also depends on when you’re reading your file, because let’s face it, you can have it from 18. So you can have it when you’re still really in the system.

[00:16:54] DAWN: Yeah.

[00:16:54] LISA: Which is very different than if you’re getting it midlife or beyond. You’ve had, you know, you’ve lived a life and had very, and had experiences that you just can’t have had at 18.

[00:17:08] DAWN: You started to talk about it before, but I’m thinking about some of the foster carers who’ve been in our sessions and I’m just wondering if you’d like to say a bit more about what they should keep in mind to ensure that what they’re writing down is a complete and compassionate story of, of what they want that young person that they’re supporting at this moment to know about themselves.

[00:17:37] LISA: Yeah, I mean, language, the way we speak about people is crucial. Yeah. And we cultivate belonging in, in the, in language that we use. And I think that’s one of the. The biggest areas, if we can change language. So for example, you know, I’m going to use some really simple examples, but things like saying that somebody is attention seeking, they’ve been attention seeking all day.

[00:18:06] So what we might ask people to think, and many listeners will be familiar with this, is to think about connection needing, attachment needing, beyond shifting that in your mind, because that’s. That’s how you work with what’s in front of you. When you’re then writing about that person, that child, that young person, not using language that problematizing the child is kind of crucial.

[00:18:37] So using language that also understands that this child or young person has experienced trauma, they’re in care, so they have, it’s that simple. Holding that in mind, then we don’t use. language like challenging behavior, you know, anything that they’re not engaging, you know, they’re, they’re hard to reach, you know, all of that kind of language that makes them the problem is not good record keeping that is not going to be helpful for the adult.

[00:19:17] And, and I often hear social workers say to me, I was always told, imagine the child’s on your shoulder. I would say, imagine the adult is on your shoulder. Imagine that the adult is on your shoulder and you will write differently. Definitely, definitely. Focus on the language. Make sure it doesn’t make a problem out of the child.

[00:19:39] The problem is the problem. The problem is not the child or the young person. And not writing in ways that indicate very clearly that you’ve taken what, what’s happened personally, you know, it’s not personal. So I think just having that clear understanding that the problem is the problem.

[00:20:03] DAWN: Thank you so much for our conversation today, Lisa.

[00:20:06] Thank you for your time. And it’s been so lovely to meet you. Finally.

[00:20:11] LISA: Thank you so much, Dornan, for such thoughtful questions.

[00:20:17] DAWN: Whether you’re a foster carer, someone who has experience with the care system, or you work with children and young people, we hope this episode has given you an insight into how we can make life story work better for young people in And how you can use it in your own practice.

[00:20:35] Lisa is delivering our upcoming live classroom, and you can find out more on our Creative Life Story Work website, creativelifestorywork. com. You can find us on LinkedIn or X at creative L S W. Please do get in touch though, with any comments or questions as we’d love to hear from you. And if your podcast app allows you to, please do leave us a review.

[00:21:00] As it really helps others to find our show, so until next month, bye for now.