333: Trauma-Informed Practice: Why It Matters for Every SLP

Show Notes:

In this episode of SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie chats with Mary Woodward—speech-language therapist, justice and mental health specialist, and university lecturer based in Sydney—about why trauma-informed care belongs in every SLP’s toolkit, no matter where you practice. Mary shares what trauma actually means clinically, how it shows up in communication and behavior, and the core principles that can shift your sessions from unintentionally harmful to genuinely healing. This one’s for every SLP who’s ever wondered why a student shuts down, says “I don’t know,” or gets labeled non-compliant.

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Here's what we learned:

  • Trauma-informed practice is good practice—for every student, every session.
  • If a student doesn’t feel safe, learning isn’t happening.
  • “I don’t know,” shutting down, and avoidance are nervous system responses, not attitude problems.
  • Even small choices—where to sit, what order to do tasks—can restore a sense of control.
  • The therapeutic relationship accounts for more of your outcomes than the tools you use.

RESOURCES

🎤✨ The Speech Retreat is Back! Learn more and register here!
https://www.speechretreat.com

🎉FREE CF Bootcamp on July 1st from 2:00 PM–3:00 PM!
https://speechtimefun.com/cfbootcamp2026

📘✨ Grab your copy of The Secondary SLP Roadmap here! https://www.speechtimefunpd.com/stf-book 

Learn more about Hallie Sherman  and SLP Elevate: 

Learn more about Mary Woodward  

💜LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/woodwardmary

Resources shared by Mary Woodward:

JOKE OF THE WEEK:

Q: What kind of bug is in the FBI?

A: A spy-der.

Where We Can Connect: 

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Hallie: Quick break, SLPs, The Speech Retreat is back. It's the virtual professional development event that is actually fun. Think about it, raffles, laughs, a virtual photo booth, and real world ideas that you can use the very next day for preschool through high school. Six different speakers that actually get it and are talking about topics that are relevant to you. Earn CEUs live, join PDHs on replays, and connect with a community of SLPs who love what they do. Don't miss it, learn about the next event, the date, the speakers, and more at the speechretreat.com.

00:00:44 Hallie: Welcome to SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast designed exclusively for speech language pathologists who work with older students, grades 4 through 12. I am your host, Hallie Sherman, your SLP behind Speech Time Fun, the Speech Retreat Conference, and the SLP Elevate Membership. And I'm thrilled to bring you conversations, strategies, and insights that will give you the jolt of inspiration that you need. Whether you're tuning in during your morning commute, on a break in between sessions, or even during a well-deserved relaxation time, I am here for you each and every week. Let's do this, SLPs. 

00:01:24 Hallie: Hey, hey, and welcome to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk. Today, I have someone from the other side of the world who I know you're gonna love learning from. So, Mary Woodward, welcome to the show.

00:01:38 Mary: Thank you very much, Hallie. It's good to be with you.

00:01:40 Hallie: Tell everyone listening a little bit more about yourself and your SLP journey up to what you're doing now, what you've been so passionate about with.

00:01:48 Mary: I'm from the UK originally, as you'll probably hear in the accent. And I trained as a speech and language therapist, as it's called in the UK, many years ago now. And very early on, developed a real passion for working in forensics and the mental health space. So, working in prisons, working in secure psychiatric hospitals, and working as what in England is known as a registered intermediary. So, kind of facilitating communication between a vulnerable individual and the courts and police. 

00:02:24 Mary: I moved to Sydney, Australia back in 2011. So, I'm now based in Sydney. I've kept my British accent though. And I've been working still in justice and mental health, both clinically and in research. And recently, I worked for eight years for our professional peak body, Speech Pathology Australia, as a senior advisor. Originally, senior advisor for justice and mental health. And then more recently, we split portfolios and I focused on the justice field. And I'm now doing university lecturing. So, I'm sort of helping to train and hopefully empower the next generation of speech pathologists, who will hopefully feel confident to work with people with complex needs in complex settings. 

00:03:16 Hallie: What inspired you to go into that setting?

00:03:18 Mary: I don't know. I think maybe in an alternative life, maybe I would have become a psychologist. And I think I always had interest in why people behave in the way that they do and what might be underlying that. While I'm certainly not saying that communication needs are the only factor involved in why people might become involved in the justice system, we certainly know that there's a very, very high prevalence of communication needs in people who are involved in the justice system. And I found that fascinating. And I have always loved being able to make a real difference to somebody's life and giving them an opportunity to develop skills and to overcome some of the adversities that they may have faced previously.

00:04:04 Hallie: So amazing. For those listening that might not be as familiar with this setting and role, what is your role? And when would someone reach out for the need of a speech pathologist in the justice system? Like, how does that work?

00:04:18 Mary: We know from research, as well as obviously from clinical experience, that the prevalence of speech, language, communication needs is really, really high – and literacy – is really high in populations involved in the justice system. And that can be for lots and lots of different reasons. There are lots of factors that predispose someone to involvement in the justice system that kind of co-occur with communication needs. And communication needs can exacerbate everything, as we know. It's foundational to engagement in school, to our social participation, et cetera. So if that's difficult, it's certainly gonna make life much harder for people. 

00:04:57 Mary: And a lot of people who are involved in, or in fact, majority of people who are involved in the justice system have experienced really hard lives. And they have histories of adversity and trauma, et cetera, which again, we know, increasingly know, affects people's cognitive and language development and their interpersonal relationships, et cetera. 

00:05:23 Mary: Once people are involved in the justice system, whether that's in youth justice or as an adult in custody, for example, they're expected to use language to get through the day. They're expected to use language to engage in like talk therapies and offender treatment programmes. And they're expected to understand their legal rights. And legal language is complex for people with really strong communication skills, let alone people with communication needs. So it's having communication difficulties really disadvantages people in the justice system. 

00:06:00 Mary: So not all justice settings in Australia or in England, and certainly not all in the US as well, I know, have access to speech pathology. So a big part of my role for our peak body was in advocacy and advocating for better awareness and recognition of people's needs. And then what the role of speech pathology could be to help address those needs. And that could be at a population level. So it could be kind of helping to modify the environment and build the capacity of the justice workforce and engage in projects where you might be helping to modify the offender treatment programmes, for example. 

00:06:44 Mary: That's gonna benefit everybody who's involved in the justice system. Nobody is disadvantaged by having language simplified, let's face it. Or if that isn't enough – and I suppose I'm really thinking along the response to intervention framework here. So that would be the kind of universal precautions. If that isn't enough for specific kind of individuals in the justice system, you might be working with them at more of a kind of targeted level. So that might be closer liaison with the people who are working with them. It might be setting up goals or strategies. It might be running groups yourself, whether that's literacy groups or language or communication or social, whatever the needs are.

00:07:25 Mary: And for a lot of people that will be enough. But if that is also not enough, then that's when you might get into the more it's a specialised one-to-one assessments and therapy. Again, it'll entirely depend on what that person needs. You would hope to be considering not just kind of the impairments. So, where are they scoring poorly on a test score, but what are they struggling with in their daily life and what skills would help them not just in the prison setting, but also thinking about their future, what skills are gonna help them integrate into society in a more functional way in the hope that that will help to reduce the risk of recidivism or re-offending.

00:08:06 Hallie: So interesting. Thank you for explaining that, because I don't know how you're gonna answer that. I'm curious and then everyone listening is like, I need to know more about this.

00:08:15 Mary: Well, I'd be very happy to come and talk more about that in the future if you'd like.

00:08:19 Hallie: It's so, so fascinating. And you touched upon this, that a lot of the clients you work with experience a lot of trauma. And so it's so important for SLPs, excuse that, wherever you're living to be very informed of trauma-informed care. What exactly is that?

00:08:38 Mary: I guess I'll start by thinking about what we mean by trauma, because we're not just talking about like a single horrendous event. That obviously can be the case. But when professionally we're referring to trauma, we're talking about really any experience that's overwhelming a person's ability to cope. And we define it by the impact on the individual, not by the event itself. You might experience something as trauma that doesn't really phase me, but it doesn't stop it being trauma for you. So you can't kind of look at a piece of paper and say, oh, well that happened to that person. Well, that doesn't count as trauma because you don't know how it was perceived and felt by the person.

00:09:18 Mary: And there are lots and lots of different forms of trauma. There's acute trauma, which is that more that kind of single catastrophic event, chronic or complex trauma, developmental trauma. And systemic and cultural trauma. And here in Australia, we have to be especially mindful of intergenerational and systemic trauma for Aboriginal Australians because of the ongoing impacts of colonisation here. 

00:09:45 Mary: Two students, two people can experience the same event very differently. With that being said, any speech pathologist, sometimes people will say, oh, you know, I don't work with people with trauma, so it's not important to me. But no, any speech pathologist in literally any area of practice might be working with someone who's experienced trauma. We know how common adversity is, whether that's family instability, exposure to domestic or family violence, community violence, discrimination, bereavement. Disability can also become a form of trauma to people. 

00:10:22 Mary: And we might not know. We don't know the full histories of that person sitting in front of us. Even if we think we do, people may not have disclosed it. They may not even have considered it to be a form of trauma themselves. And obviously there are some populations that we know are statistically more likely to have experienced trauma. And that would be students who have been given behaviour labels, for example. Chances are they have experienced adversity in their earlier lives. Neurodivergent students, students with disabilities, far more likely to experience trauma through their lives than people who don't have a disability. Students in alternative education or in kind of justice adjacent pathways or involved in the justice system, statistically, we know there's a much higher, there's a really high prevalence of experience of trauma.

00:11:14 M :So I guess we need to make the assumption that someone sitting in front of us may well have experienced trauma. So just like I was saying earlier that nobody is disadvantaged by having language simplified, no one is disadvantaged by having consideration of trauma-informed practice principles. And that starts with firstly recognising that we don't always know someone's history, but we can assume that their nervous system has been shaped by their experiences, whether those are positive experiences or negative experiences.

00:11:45 Mary: So we're not gonna be necessarily kind of digging to find out if someone's had trauma. There's things that we can do to have trauma-informed care as a universal precaution. It can be kind of thinking about reframing the behaviour that we see. So shifting from thinking about what's wrong with you and why are you doing the wrong thing to, or what's happened to you? So reframing our thinking in language, for example, if we used to, you know, if we see a behaviour and we think, oh, they're being non-compliant. 

00:12:19 M :And you'll see these words written in notes and in reports, et cetera, someone's non-compliant. Is it that they are deliberately choosing not to comply with someone, or is it that they're overwhelmed and they can't? You know, I always think about that quote of, you know, people typically do well if they can. If someone is being aggressive, yes, that might be the label for the behaviour, but what's going on for the individual? Is it actually that they're dysregulated because of X, Y, and Z? If they are avoidant, is it actually that they're feeling unsafe and they don't feel safe enough to engage? And just shifting the thinking can be really, really helpful. 

00:13:00 Mary: There's a brilliant article that came out last year that I thoroughly recommend all speech pathologists read and memorise by Samantha Koury and her colleagues. It was an article called Trauma-Informed Speech-Language Pathology: Application of Universal Precaution, and it sets out so beautifully some of the considerations that we might need to make, because what we do in our sessions has the potential to re-traumatise, to accidentally cause more harm, or to help start that healing process. So in terms of kind of how we might accidentally cause more harm, and again, this is something that Samantha Koury goes into. I know that your audience, I think, there are a lot of speeches who are working in a school setting, is that right?

00:13:50 Hallie: Yes, and typically middle school and high school.

00:13:52 Mary: Middle school, okay.

00:13:52 Hallie: So a lot of them have a lot of backgrounds that we might not be aware of. And even other SLPs that they might be having trauma, you never know, so.

00:14:03 Mary: Yeah, absolutely. So thinking about the environment, something as basic as thinking about where is the session being held? And if your session is being held in a small room with no windows, which I don't know if that's… it's common, yeah. How might that impact someone who has faced neglect and has been held in, you know, not necessarily even kind of – it's not necessarily about totally replicating it. I'm not saying, oh, watch out, because that child may have been locked in a cupboard. I'm not suggesting that.

00:14:34 Hallie: It's a great strategy to give to your administrators, guys, of why you should not be in a closet. 

00:14:39 Mary: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Because it's difficult to feel safe if you're in a tight, enclosed space, potentially with someone that you don't know, potentially doing something that is really challenging. That environmental space is really important. When we use physical touch, you know, we might be doing an oral motor assessment, for example, and I'm not suggesting don't ever touch anybody anymore if that's part of the clinical process, but it's important to consider how that might be experienced for someone who might have experienced trauma.

00:15:13 Mary: So it might just be about thinking, okay, firstly, do I actually need to touch this person? And is that touch going to be therapeutic? And is there anything I can do to help that person feel safe while I'm doing it? It could even just be telling them what you're about to do and why, and asking them if it's okay, rather than it's the norm for us. We're quite used to just getting. We might say, okay, I'm gonna do it. But we don't necessarily think through fully how that might be experienced by someone.

00:15:41 Mary: Our schedules often change, so we might be going in and pulling a student out of class without warning at a time that it's not their norm, et cetera. And I think about all the times I used to do that. That's just the norm, and you kind of think, oh, it's fine. But actually, for someone whose nervous system might be in a really heightened state a lot of the time, the unpredictability of not knowing if someone is suddenly gonna come and, not literally rip you out of class, but like take you out of class, or you don't know when that door's gonna open and it might be someone coming for you, or it might not be, and that could be really unsettling and really unnerving.

00:16:19 Mary: Talking about them in front of them, really kind of invalidating, dehumanizing, not sharing assessment results with them, or sharing them but not giving them the time that they may need to ask questions about the assessment results, or ask about the therapy itself. Does the young person know why you're doing what you're doing? Because if not- 

00:16:42 Hallie: The older one, they have a right to know. They wanna know why are they being pulled aside?

00:16:47 Mary: All of them. Even a three-year-old. You'd explain it in a different way. Thinking about the times when I've been in hospital, for example, it's really disconcerting if a medic just comes in and comes and looks at a clipboard, and does a… or comes and does a… takes a blood test or whatever, but you've got no idea why. We're speechies. Our job is around communicating. So we need to be communicating effectively to help people understand why we're doing what they're doing, and they're more likely then to engage if they understand and they can see the value in it.

00:17:22 Mary: Repeatedly asking them to share their personal narrative, repeatedly asking if anyone listening has ever been through a tough time, whether that's losing someone or a tough medical time, or a tough breakup, either. If you have to keep telling that story multiple times to different people, that really feels hideous. That is not usually healing. That is usually re-traumatizing. 

00:17:51 Mary: Even thinking about the therapy targets. I think, you know, in recent years, we know a lot more, thankfully, about neurodiversity-affirming practice, and I would hope that we're moving away from sort of forcing eye contact and things like that. But there will undoubtedly still be targets that we might set because we think that they're kind of neurotypical, that even for a young person who may well not be neurodivergent, may, because of their trauma history, feel uncomfortable or unsafe. So again, it's having conversations about what we're doing and why, and is that going to be a good thing for that young person or not? 

00:18:33 Mary: And then kind of how we respond to behavior that challenges us. Behaviorist responses can certainly, unintentionally, I'm sure, but re-traumatize, or using time out or exclusion as behavior management. You know, isolating a kid who is upset and dysregulated and actually needs connection. There's that other quote about connection before correction… is so important. We need to be providing a safe space before we can expect someone to be able to modify behavior, much of which behavior is because of a nervous system on high alert.

00:19:10 Mary: The kind of, I guess, good side is that, yes, there's a lot of what we do that might unintentionally make it harder for a young person, but there's also a lot of really very simple things that we can change in our everyday practice that can help, that can be trauma-informed. So trauma-informed isn't really about necessarily doing extra things, it's about just modifying what you're doing with a trauma lens on. 

00:19:38 Mary: So there's some key principles of trauma-informed practice, and if you go and read more about it, whether that's Samantha Koury’s article or not, there are kind of core principles of trauma-informed practice, and that's safety, trust and transparency, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural safety. 

00:19:58 Mary: So if we think about each of those briefly in terms of what that might look like in a therapy room…cwith safety, it's about recognizing that physical and psychological safety, they have to come first, they have to be the foundation for engagement, learning, meaningful participation. If people aren't feeling safe, you are not gonna be able to help them learn. And so you might start sessions with activities that might help them feel grounded and regulate. And again, thinking of grounding as being a universal support strategy, not just a kind of treatment technique. Something like, it might be some kind of sensory regulation tool, there's so many different ones out there. 

00:20:46 Hallie: Even like [inaudible] App or like something like, [crosstalk] calming or something. Yeah. 

00:20:48 Mary: Or even kind of literally just… it could be literally just spending 30 seconds with your eyes closed, thinking about, okay, what are five different sounds I can hear? What can I smell? Even things like, what's the furthest sound in the distance that I can hear? All the way through to, okay, what are the middle kind of sounds? Or what's the closest sound I can hear? Or can I hear any sounds in my body? Or anything. It could be sitting with your feet on the floor and pressing your feet into the floor and what can you feel? What are the sensations? Just a sensory grounding can really help bring people into the present moment. It can help their nervous system calm enough to then continue with the rest of the therapy session.

00:21:33 Mary: Explaining what's gonna happen before it happens. You know, I gave the example with the oral motor assessment, but it's the same for anything that we do. Explaining what's gonna happen and why. And that could be previewing assessments, not in terms of, you know, telling them what the, you know, what the exact questions are gonna be, so it invalidates the questions, [inaudible] invalidates the norms. But explaining again what you're doing and why and what that's gonna look like. 

00:21:58 Mary: Trying to reduce unpredictability, whether that's having a regular session time or having kind of routine, if you like, to your therapy session. Noticing dysregulation or signs that someone might be struggling before just pushing through and actually addressing that in whatever way you need to for that person. So that's kind of around safety. Wanting to help them feel safe and moving out of that broom cupboard.

00:22:24 Mary: I used to do a lot of therapy, kind of sitting on a park bench in the grounds. I obviously worked in a hospital, in psychiatric hospitals, and we used to work… I used to do a lot of sessions on park benches in the hospital grounds if that person was… if it was felt safe enough to leave the hospital unit. A lot of people feel more safe with that open space than kind of, you know, behind a locked door.

00:22:47 Mary: Trust and transparency. So trying to be clear and consistent and honest really helps build trust, especially for people with histories of trauma or system harm. So again, asking – sorry, explaining why you're doing something, why you're asking a question, where the information goes, who sees reports, what happens… who do you talk to after the session? What does that look like? What are you gonna write in your notes? It's a thing, you know. So again, it's unnerving when you're in an appointment yourself and you see someone… I don't know if you've ever been to counselling and you see someone scribbling down, you're like, ah!

00:23:24 Hallie: Even my administrators, when they were observing me, like, and I'm like, did I do something wrong? Like, is that why they're writing down a lot? Like, it's all of a sudden you just start sweating.

00:23:33 Mary: Exactly. So just explaining to someone, possibly even if you dare, letting them see it. And if they're notes, if they're your case notes from the day, maybe the last few minutes of the session could be reviewing together how you feel the session went. Looking at your notes together, for example.

[crosstalk]

00:23:54 Mary: Yeah, exactly. Did I misunderstand something? Very much kind of taking the blame yourself. Did I misunderstand something? Not did you do something wrong or did you not communicate it effectively? It's like, I sometimes get confused. Can you help me out here? Choice, offering choice. So thinking about choice, because offering genuine choices, and I do mean genuine, can restore a sense of control and autonomy. And trauma and traumatic experiences often take that sense of control away. So the more we can do, even if it's on really on a really small scale, can be really meaningful and impactful to that person.

00:24:32 Mary: So small choices, like what order you're going to do tasks in, or what topic you're going to discuss that day or focus on, or where to sit in the room can make a big difference. Even in mandated services, so services where they have no control, they actually… they don't get a choice, they have to attend, whether that's as part of their bail conditions or whatever it is, you can still give them those small choices so that they do have some sense of control over it. 

00:24:59 Mary: And that kind of, I suppose that links a bit with collaboration, which is one of the next principles, about working with people and involving them in decisions about their treatment and their therapy, rather than just doing it to them. So it's principles of shared decision-making and respect ultimately. So it could be setting goals together, which I would hope speech pathologists do, but you'd be surprised how many people just set goals from their assessment results rather than actually talking with an individual about what's going to be functionally meaningful to them. 

0:25:32 Mary: I say discussing your session notes at the end. It could be, yeah, involving, let teens write their own goals, like literally that you could… you can have talked through assessment results first, so it's not that the assessments are pointless. You can talk through these sorts of things, but what would make school or whatever easier for you? What does that look like for you? And then collaborating with them.

00:25:57 Hallie: I advocate for that as well, like, hey, but you can't assume that doing well in school is motivating for them. [crosstalk]  might have a different desire, like getting a job. [crosstalk]

00:26:07 Mary: Yeah, and what would that look like? What would make that easier for you? Exactly. And it's about empowering them, and empowerment is one of the core principles of trauma-informed practice. So building strengths and confidence and self-efficacy rather than fixing deficits. So using strengths-based language. I mentioned at the start, reframing language, but not just reframing language, reframing our thoughts and our attitudes to understand what might be underlying, what could be perceived as negative behavior or negative interactions, and focusing on what's actually going really well.

00:26:46 Mary: And what are their strengths? Because everybody has strengths, even if they're relative strengths, even if, you know, in comparison to their peers, they're still challenges. For that individual, they might have more strength in, I don't know, storytelling than in receptive language, for example. And so we need to build on that strength. Ask them and consider ourselves about what is working, what already helps, whether that's stuff that we're doing or strategies that other people are doing or strategies that they're doing themselves. 

00:27:19 Mary: A lot of the young people that I worked with, and adults that I worked with, and I'm sure it's probably the same for listeners, sometimes when they're coming in front of me as a teenager or as an adult, it's the first time they've ever seen a speech pathologist. And they've got by their whole life masking their difficulties, whether that's masking their difficulties with like talking the talk, but not actually understanding really what's going on, or, you know, masking by choosing a peer group where they can copy what they're doing without necessarily having to make those decisions themselves and they sometimes can be a negative influence, et cetera. 

00:27:58 Mary: They have shown a huge amount of resilience and social strategies to get to where they have. And no, we don't want them involved in the justice system, of course, but their primary teachers didn't necessarily spot that they had language difficulties, et cetera, or literacy difficulties. Sometimes people are adults and have got through their whole life not being able to read and write. And nobody knew. I worked with someone once, that their partner didn't even know they couldn't read and write. 

00:28:29 Mary: And you just think of the, obviously that is a huge deficit to use that word, but what incredible personal strength must they have used to be able to kind of mask that and to compensate for it? And how can we use that strength to then develop their skills in the way they want to, building their identity and as a positive identity, not just individual skills. Let's think about this person like holistically. What part do we play in shaping their future identity and self-esteem? 

00:29:09 Mary: And then the final one, I mean, there are lots of principles of trauma-informed practice, but the final one that I'll cover today is around cultural safety. And as I said, certainly in Australia, that's crucial. Cultural safety is around respecting and responding to a person's cultural identity, to their values, to their experiences. And again, cultural safety has to be defined by the individual themselves.

00:29:33 Mary: So for example, a speech pathologist might then look to understand how culture and language and lived experience shape communication needs. And it's not necessarily just in inverted commas, culture as in ethnicity or kind of where someone's from, there is culture associated with community groups of disability, of neurodivergence, et cetera. How is that shaping their communication needs? How can we adapt our assessments and our interventions accordingly and check that that person feels respected and safe within our service? 

00:30:14 Mary: I guess it's really, it's about prioritising, understanding why a behaviour is occurring rather than just kind of enforcing rules or kind of making them comply so that they feel emotionally regulated and safe enough to form a strong therapeutic relationship with us, because we know that ultimately it almost doesn't matter what we do in therapy. The therapeutic relationship has been shown, you know, even in research, we know that the therapeutic relationship is actually accounts for a huge proportion of the therapeutic outcomes. The relationship we have with someone is just as if not more important than the tools that we use in therapy. We need to play our part and take responsibility for that therapeutic relationship and help them then feel emotionally regulated and safe enough to think and learn effectively. I feel like I've- 

00:31:06 Hallie: No, I love it. I love what you've shared because I know when we think of like trauma-informed care and people think, oh my goodness, I need to learn something new or I need to do something in response to finding out that my student had this. And I love that you shared it like instead all students could benefit from this. Like you said, we don't know what goes behind closed doors. We don't know what they've gone through. They might not even be willing to share it. So we need to just have these practices as part of our just regular toolbox for everyone and just know that it can benefit everyone. And if they go through something, it'll help them even more.

00:31:46 Mary: Exactly. When you think about the sorts of, you know, the trauma-informed practice principles and, you know, some of the examples, everything, it's just good practice. It's just good practice that if we think about how we would experience therapy ourselves, what would help us almost regardless whether or not we've experienced trauma and adversity, but especially if we have, but even if we haven't, it's still going to help us. So we need to then think about that for our students.

00:32:19 Hallie: I love that. If someone is not feeling safe, how might that be presented? Like what are some signs where, and that's something you can be like, oh my goodness, that's why they did this or that's why they reacted this way. Like what are some signs where someone can be like, oh, I need to be mindful that I might- 

00:32:34 Mary: Or kind of when do I shift tack and everything. Prolonged stress and trauma alters our stress response systems. It increases our threat sensitivity, reduces our capacity for regulation when we're overwhelmed. So when the nervous system is focused on survival, our prefrontal cortex basically goes offline, it shuts down. And so higher level skills such as reflection or working memory or language processing, self-regulation, et cetera, are compromised. 

00:33:04 Mary: Communication obviously is part of that, whether that's receptive language, narrative, emotional recovery, but any aspect of communication is likely to be compromised when the nervous system is in that kind of fight, flight, freeze state. Communication difficulties then might fluctuate depending on the person's perception of safety or their experience of stress and the context they're in.

00:33:28 M :Trauma also affects people's personal and professional relationships. So we might see heightened mistrust or hypervigilance to threat, or you kind of think, oh, they're really overreacting. It's like, well, yes, but why? Or difficulty forming therapeutic alliances. So thinking about specifically about kind of what that might look like in a school session, it could be, as I say, really fluctuating difficulties or overreactions to small things, or they might, you know, you might hear a door slam in the background and they might jump because they're on that hypervigilant high alert. 

00:34:05 Mary: They might use I don't know as a stress response. They know they have to respond, but they can't process it at the moment so I don’t know. So it's just, I don't know. Their narratives might be really disorganized because they don't have the executive functioning abilities at that time to kind of order it in a sequence that you'd expect. They might have pragmatic breakdowns when they're more under pressure. They might avoid speaking tasks. They might shut down during assessment. And then, you know, people are like, oh, they're non-compliant. Or they didn't want to do the assessment, et cetera. It's like, but why?

00:34:40 Mary: So yeah, whenever you see labels such as non-compliant or unmotivated or attention seeking, et cetera, I would be thinking, okay, what's going on for that person? They're really, really negative labels. Let's shift from that to thinking what's going on for that person and how can we adjust what we, as a kind of school system, but with, you know, speechies are part of that, do to help with that. So reframing it, I think. 

00:35:09 Mary: And as a speech pathologist, I think we're often having to advocate for our students to be better understood by other people who are working with them. And I don't mean better understood as in like speech intelligibility necessarily, but for their needs to be better understood. And even though we're not psychologists and we're not trauma therapists, every therapy session is an opportunity for us to reinforce safety and empowerment and giving them voice and agency. 

00:35:38 Mary: And every time we create predictability and offer choice and notice and build on their strengths or sharing power with them, we're making communication safer for them. And every time we are speaking up in a team meeting or supporting a young person to have a voice for themselves, to advocate for themselves, we're helping them be better understood so that as a whole team, we can be that adult that is standing up for them. And that's when our therapy is gonna be most effective ultimately.

00:36:06 Hallie: So I always end my episodes with a joke since it builds rapport and connection and SLPs can use it with their speech students. What kind of bug is in the FBI?

00:36:16 Mary: Oh, I don't know, but my five-year-old son loves bugs. So I'm gonna be writing this down. I don't know. What kind of bug is in the FBI? 

00:36:22 Hallie: A spy-der.

00:36:24 Mary: Nice. Nice. I'm gonna use that. Thank you. Thank you very much.

00:36:30 Hallie: Take credit for it. It is fine. I didn't make it up. Thanks to Google. It gave it to me. And if- 

00:36:38 Mary: Do you want my son's favorite joke? 

00:36:39 Hallie: Let me hear it. Yes, please do.

00:36:41 Mary: Okay. What do you call a sad strawberry? 

00:36:44 Hallie: A blueberry?

00:36:45 Mary: Yes!

00:36:46 Hallie: Yes!

00:36:47 Mary: You got it! He's like, he's five. 

00:36:50 Hallie: Okay, berries. I had to think on that one. That was a good one. I love it. 

00:36:54 Mary: He is five, yes. It's a good joke. And he loves it when people laugh. So he loves it. Telling jokes with kids is great.

00:37:01 Hallie: It's almost like, what's a spy's favorite shoe?

00:37:04 Mary: Oh, I don't know.

00:37:06 Hallie: A sneaker.

00:37:07 Mary: Oh, we don't use that word here, you see. Yeah. 

00:37:12 Hallie: That's okay. 

00:37:13 Mary: Hallie, why did the banana go to the doctor?

00:37:15 Hallie: I don't know.

00:37:16 Mary: Because he wasn't peeling well. 

00:37:19 Hallie: Okay, I like that one. You guys are getting like five jokes this week, guys. Ba-dum-xhing. Thank you so much. This was so amazing chatting with you. Until next week, everyone, stay out of trouble. 

00:37:30 Mary: Bye. 

00:37:36 Hallie: Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk. It means the world to me that you're tuning in each and every week and getting the jolt of inspiration you need. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at my website, speechtimefun.com. Don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. See you next week with another episode full of fun and inspiration from one SLP to another. Have fun, guys.

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