Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care

About this book

This is the third in a trilogy of books that chronicle the revolutionary changes in our mental health and human service delivery systems that have conspired to disempower staff and hinder client recovery. Creating Sanctuary documented the evolution of The Sanctuary Model therapeutic approach as an antidote to the personal and social trauma that clients bring to child welfare agencies psychiatric hospitals and residential facilities. Destroying Sanctuary details the destructive role of organizational trauma in the nations systems of care. Restoring Sanctuary is a user-friendly manual for organizational change that addresses the deep roots of toxic stress and illustrates how to transform a dysfunctional human service system into a safe secure trauma-informed environment. At its heart The Sanctuary Model represents an organizational value system that is committed to seven principles which serve as anchors for decision making at all levels: non-violence emotional intelligence social learning democracy open communication social responsibility and growth and change. The Sanctuary Model is not a clinical intervention; rather it is a method for creating an organizational culture that can more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and socially derived forms of traumatic experience can be addressed. Chapters are organized around the seven Sanctuary commitments providing step-by-step realistic guidance on creating and sustaining fundamental change. "Restoring Sanctuary" is a roadmap to recovery for our nations systems of care. It explores the notion that organizations are living systems themselves and as such they manifest various degrees of health and dysfunction analogous to those of individuals. Becoming a truly trauma-informed system therefore requires a process of reconstitution within helping organizations top to bottom. A system cannot be truly trauma-informed unless the system can create and sustain a process of understanding itself.