“You are a taonga, and when you are with me, I want you to know that” - Psychologists’ Constructions and Negotiations of Trauma-Informed Practice

The emergence of trauma-informed psychological practice in Aotearoa emanates promise in light of the increasing demand for the profession to benefit society. Trauma is complex and involves profound psychological, somatic, social, cultural, and intergenerational effects on individuals, families, whānau, and communities. Despite trauma having a profound impact on the health of our society previous literature reports inconsistencies in psychologists’ perceptions of how to approach trauma in practice. Questions remain about how psychological practice becomes trauma-informed, leaving the enactment up to interpretation. In response, this study investigates how psychologists construct and negotiate trauma-informed practice. A critical realist discourse analysis explores the accounts of eight psychologists in relation to how they understand and draw on discourses surrounding trauma and material conditions. The analysis identifies nine constructions in participants’ accounts. The first two constructions identify trauma as shifting from an event to a subjective experience and trauma as ruptures in social and cultural connections. The analysis then identifies seven constructions and ways of negotiating trauma-informed practice. These include: the necessity of trauma-informed practice to effectively attend to service users’ needs; the contextualisation of traumatic distress to reveal the purpose of people’s emotions and behaviours; trauma therapies as intrapsychic processes to subdue individual distress; resistance to medical discourses to mitigate retraumatising healthcare; negotiation of physical space and practice structure constraints; understandings of how trauma-informed practice aligns with te Tiriti; and ensuring practice efficacy by prioritising personal well-being. Participants took up multiple discourses to convey tension across the accounts. This research argues for psychologists to consider how trauma-informed practice realigns the knowledge base, power, and guiding principles of the provision of mental healthcare towards an approach that is restorative and responsive to the impacts of trauma.