 Welcome everybody. My name is Diana Shen. I want to welcome all the participants who have joined us for tonight's webinar and the viewers who are watching the podcast. We now have 1,595 people who are involved. Before we go forward, I just wanted to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land. Emerging minds and MHPN wish to acknowledge the custodians of the land across Australia upon which our webinar presents and participates since they're located. We wish to pay respect to elders past and present and emerging leaders for the memories, the traditions, the culture, the strengths and hopes of Indigenous Australia. My name is Diana Shen. I'll be facilitating tonight's session. I am a non-Indigenous Chinese woman with my own social services consultancy and am a cultural consultant to emerging minds. A few words about the webinar series before we get started. This is the fifth in our second series of webinars we will be bringing to you during 2020. You can view previous webinars on the MHPN and Emerging Mines website. Before we get started, just a few points about the platform we're using tonight. You will notice that the webcast platform has changed. Most of the navigation buttons for functions are located at the top right of your screen. To access the chat box, click on the purple button. If you have questions, use the blue hand button and enter your question. Slides and resources available from the light blue download button. Refresh button is the green button with circled arrow. There is also a help button. If you need assistance, you can message red back directly or ring 1-800-733-416. Now getting into the webinar series. In this session, we have a set of learning outcomes that include describing the effects of intergenerational trauma on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families, outlining current research that underlines the importance of cultural competence in all Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal services so that Aboriginal children and their families receive the kind of support that they need. And finally, the third learning outcome is discussing examples of organisational and individual practice that has built trust and collaboration with communities and led to positive outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families. And finally, just a word from all of us. Yes, this is a story about trauma, but it is also about many stories of strengths, hopes and dreams. And finally, I just wanted to recognise the challenges all people are going through in response to COVID-19. We know that there are also others that are being affected much harder ways than some of us. And we just wanted to recognise that and that we are thinking of everyone going through this at the moment. So, one of the things that I wanted to point out is that we've actually had the bios disseminated already with the webinar invitation. In the interest of ensuring we have maximum time for our panellists tonight, I'll just go through the names and skip over the bios. So, we have a wonderful group of women that are involved tonight. First of all, we have Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson. We have Associate Professor Kath Chamberlain. We also have Dr Carolyn, also known as Carly Atkinson. So, welcome all to all of the panellists tonight. We are in a very lucky space to be able to listen to all of these amazing women. But before we get started, given the nature of the topic, we know that this can bring up many things for people and we just want to acknowledge the potential triggers and emotions. And then on that, what I'd like to do in the first instance is to hand over to Carly just to talk us through that we are the approach to this. Carly, can I hand over to you? Dana, and thanks to everyone for joining us tonight. Dana, before we start getting to the yard, I'd like to talk about the general trauma on Aboriginal children's families. It is very important that we acknowledge that when we have these three telling yarns, they'll have the potential to help them understand the truth of things. Now, so, from our own pain and trauma, we're talking truth and also feeling others' pain. Carly, just letting you know it's doing a little bit of cutting out at the moment. So, I might just hand to Judy. Judy, I wondered if you could just speak to this particular slide. Sure. Can you hear me? I'm sorry. Can you talk to it so much better than I can? So, the great slide is important for us to ground ourselves. In grounding ourselves, we take some deep breaths, we release those breaths. I tend to put my hand just sometimes at waist and on my chest and I breathe in five times and I feel the breath going deep in. Then I release. I'm aware that I'm releasing. Whenever it's coming out, I'm aware of what might be happening in my body and I observe as I'm doing that. And then I witness for myself, okay, so I'm not feeling really good at the moment or I'm feeling fine and I'm feeling really balanced feeling how at the moment. I might find somebody to talk to if I'm not feeling too well. And then the healing happens. We continue to do that. So, growth is grounding ourselves, breathing, being aware of our breath, observing what our body is saying to us, including as we breathe in and out. We witness what might come up for us and then we might find somebody to talk to. So, that's our growth as it's a self-care model as Kali put together to manage tricky, particularly when we're running workshops which are pretty hard at times. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Judy. And I'm so sorry, Kali. And actually what I want to mention on that is we are having, we are in spaces where it's creating some technical difficulties for us at the moment around our Wi-Fi and internet connections. Our greatest apologies and we'll do the best we can tonight. So, now I'd like to move on to the session. And before we go on and actually hear from these amazing women, I wanted to first of all introduce a video that we'll be playing from the Healing Foundation. The story of our communities, people and nation, starts a long, long time ago. More than 60,000 years in fact. When our culture and our law first started to thrive, we knew who we were and where we belonged. We took care of each other, our land and our waters. We ate food that made us healthy, lived on country and abided by our laws and songlines. Our families, our children were happy with strong minds and hearts because they were where they belonged. But then, everything changed. Colonization came bringing wars, disease, salmon, violence and the destruction and violation of our cultural laws, sacred sites, families and communities. We would deny our knowledge, language, ceremonies and identity. The very things that tell us who we are and where we belong and our connections with each other and the land grew weak. And then, our children were taken from us. They had their names changed and their identity stripped away. They were told that Aboriginal people were bad. Worse still, they were told that their parents and grandparents did not want them. For years this happened and those children became known as the stolen generations. Our children were denied love and experienced physical, emotional and sexual abuse. This left very deep, very complex and very real wounds, leaving scars that are still being felt personally, socially, spiritually and collectively. In the time when our story started, we were able to parent in the cultural way that has seen our families survive and thrive for generations. Our people were strong and our culture flowed and healed us in times of hurt. But since the trauma of colonization and the stolen generations, we have not been able to heal in the same way. And we have unknowingly passed this trauma on to our children through sharing our sad stories and having them witness and experience our pain. This is known as intergenerational trauma and we see symptoms today in broken relationships, disconnected families, violence, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. But this is not where our story ends. We still have strong minds and hearts and we still know who we were and where we belong. By creating safe and strong communities together, supporting our families to be free from pain, returning to our culture and building a strength of identity, we can stop the cycle of trauma and bring about positive intergenerational change. So that we can continue to thrive for the next 60,000 years. There are simple things that we can all do to help heal our trauma. Visit healingfoundation.org.au to find out more. So that was the video from the Healing Foundation. Now I'd like to go back to the panellists and start our group discussion with all of them. So from that video, we started to have the question of intergenerational trauma being touched on, the impacts of that, but I have a question for you all to start with. Can you talk more in depth of the impacts of intergenerational trauma on our people? Judy, I'd like to hand over to you first to start that discussion. Thank you, Dana. In all the places where I've worked on suicide, friendly violence, child remuneration, child harm, children being served in schools and more particularly in prisons, I've learned by listening and by just being aware that I'll learn deeply and I've got a couple of stories I want to share. I was an ethnic queer person in Queensland. A young fellow had been brought in just in seconds to life. He had apparently murdered two people. He had her memory of it. So we were sitting together and I wanted to open the conversation and I said to him, what's the most remember in your life now? It's an open question. It could be a negative or positive for whatever. I was just hoping to be able to open the conversation. And he said, my mum had a car when they drove me away. And I immediately assumed, so this is an assumption, story here as well, that he was talking about his recent sentencing and then being brought out to the prison. And so we started to talk a bit more and I started to hear more deeply. And then I came up with that who remembered. He had no memory, no memory at all of the murder that he denied he committed, the two murders. And Judge, when he talked, he had a very clear memory of the two years old child looking back through the car as the authorities took him away from his mother standing behind the car crying as he was driven away. That was his clearest memory. But he had absolutely no memory of what he had done to bring him to that prison and denied that he'd done anything. I wanted to then expand that a bit more. So there's a generational impact between the mother and the child in the authority cities, including into the lives of people. But I also learned in a time when I was working in Rockhampton in a workshop and there's a woman who had been in a psych unit for some time and her husband had looked after her and got her out and she came down to my workshop and she had an insight and this is the story of what she shared with me. She remember being out of the mission and she was standing with her dad and she said she was holding his hand. She was about seven years of age and she had the biggest hand. She said that was her big memory. She was holding his hand and then the mission manager called him over and he walked both of us. And when he got to the mission manager, the mission manager said in a very harsh voice, Jack, when you come and stand before me, you look down. You do not look at me, look down. And my uncle said and my dad's hand started to tremble. I could feel this big man with this big hand and his hand was trembling and he looked down. She then said that in the work we were doing that she'd realised it's a recognition and he started to work outside and every so often he would have a rage where there would be domestic violence and he would act out his rage on her mother. And she said her insight was that the fact that he couldn't express his feelings to that mission manager, except the body holding it, was then taken out in the family later on when they left the mission. What I wanted to talk about therefore is the pent-up tension across generations when we transfer one behaviour, one memory down to another and it becomes distorted sometimes those memories and we're not sure why. I understand now that the child being given away at two years of age had an intense fear and a brokenness inside him which stayed with him for the rest of his life and Jack he had no memory of what he did later on. The incredible rage and fear that the man who's starting the mission, kind of the mission manager would have felt is grown man and feelings to anger he couldn't express his anger and un-expressed anger made forces into rage. This week I read that in the work that they're doing in trauma in extreme trauma situations that a lot of the children and I'm seeing this in the school now the children who have a reason to have a fear don't feel it they have no capacity to name feelings and they will jump immediately into rage and the rage is just acted out. So shame then follows afterwards. My aunt told me how her father then lived with the shame of his domestic violence. The shame becomes embodied and the outcomes and this is clear evidence, research evidence become in health, substance issues, suicide ideation and we then become locked into the fight like free. We very rarely can get up into the deep feeling place of being able to name those feelings and we kind of get up to the neocortex the sinking place and the feeling in the sinking place is the place where we can make good decisions. That then leads us across generations. I could talk a lot about walking home to places where people in their feet have felt the massacre site and the stories of the massacre site and the shame and the fear is still embodying that place and it's into the body of the people I've been with. I'm not sure if that's what you wanted to me to write but I wanted to share two stories to also show how listening can open our understanding more deeply. Great, thank you so much Judy. Now as part of this I know that one of the key impacts is also around labelling and I wondered Carly if you could talk us through a bit of that. Yeah sure and hopefully everyone's hearing me clear now I've had to move to a different area outside so I'll just let you know in here. Following on from what Mum was talking about one of the legacies of intergenerational trauma is labels. The labels that have been applied to our minds. These labels actually cascade down generations onto our kids. They allow potentially individuals and organisations to hide their may or may not be on spot and certainly these labels contribute to the process of intergenerational trauma in our community across Australia. Within our Weally workshop we can see that shed light on the impact of labels from an intergenerational trauma. It's a powerful way to embody the impact of labels that labels can have on us. Each of our students have done it slightly differently to make it pretty much the same. Essentially what happens is the workshop is actually warned that this can be triggering but with it you know there's a lot of family in that and also that applies to everyone in the webinar tonight. How we conduct these duties we first need to draw an outline of a woman and give her a name and put her on the wall. Carly, can you hang on for one moment? Sure. Just for a moment I'm going to hand to Judy because the sound is going again. I didn't want to stop you though because I know people really want to listen to you but I'm just going to go to Judy just for a moment and then come back to you again. Judy I just wondered if you could continue a bit about what Carly was saying and then I'll come back to Carly again. I'm really sad about this because Carly's got such a good story there. We asked the participants to put it on the sitting screen there as you can see. Labels, names of people are being called as they remember that comes down to their own generation and it might be the label of being this bad child or a student or children that I've been working with and they have very deeply responsive energy here and there towards the labels they've got. So Carly was describing the groups putting the labels up there on the body of a woman and then all of those words, those labels, the words that they've heard are they being called themselves and then they take the labels off and I'm sure that Carly was going to describe them either replace them with other words, positive words and they will either push the label instead of being negative into a bucket of water and smush them all up as they go away or they burn them in an extent. In both cases, in one case we're kind of late naming what people have been called as they've heard but I could use quite a few of them which are really negative to hear and be placing those with positive words on what we feel we are but making sure that we don't carry those labels with us when we leave our workshop. Well, shock me with the number of labels. Thank you. What I'll try to do is go back to Carly again and see if we can have her continue. Carly, are you online? Can you hear me? Thank you so much. This is a little bit funny, it's like a comedy show as I'm moving around the place trying to get the connectivity. Thank you for being patient. I did hear when Mum got up too with that explanation of the labels. Another thing we do in it too is when both labels go up on the wall and some of them are just as Mum's stating and you'll see on the slide there's this troublemaker dumb with no hope, sleigh, liar, bad mother. I mean, they're a horrendous thing. And interestingly, every time we do this activity these types of labels come pretty much every time. As Mum says, we pull those labels off the wall and we go and burn them but we usually have which takes on the ground under the woman where the label has been put up on the wall and there are seeds on the ground that represent our new growth baby children. And so those labels, all those names they pull down and they land on the baby. They're the messages that pass on. But before we go and burn the negative labels take the seeds of children off the wall and ensure that we're only burning the negative labels at the end which is really important. But if you look at the second slide and Mum talked about it a little bit this is really important. When we start to brainstorm the positive label seeing the power point then the rate changes, you know? So we're like in Australia, you're the glue, you belong you're the grown, wise, kind and the power, you're like a leader, matriarch, role model resilience is our queen. I'm a proud black woman. I think that's really important to take people out of that space but what it shows is that we clearly need to change the narrative. Come up with the where of the labels we hold and pass on as it certainly contributes to the intergenerational trauma. And I think that through generating our own awareness we can all start to change the narrative. Thanks very much, Carly. Thank you both, Judy and Carly for that. I now want to move on to Kath. Kath, I wondered if you could now talk us through the psychological, physical, social and emotional impacts that you've seen in relation to the impacts of intergenerational trauma. Okay, thanks Dana and hello everyone and thanks Judy for that lovely, really rich story and Carly for those really good examples of labeling. So as a midwife, you know, I've found it really important to understand what's going on with trauma. This is all relatively new to me in the last couple of years and looking at working families, you know, I really think that understanding what is happening is as important as understanding any of the physical parts of caring for families but understanding, you know, what's going on. So I just wanted to share some of the key points that I've found the most interesting, you know, and helpful for me over the last couple of years on my learning journey working with these amazing women. So most of the research around trauma in the past has been done around war and post-traumatic stress disorder and I think, you know, lots of us were familiar with hearing about that. Over the last couple of decades, you know, we've been getting this increased understanding that it actually has been much of the trauma that people experience. That's a lot earlier than that and for many people in childhood. And the complex trauma or intergenerational trauma that people talk about is related to repeated traumatic experiences where separation is really difficult. And the World Health Organization has finally formally recognised the cluster of distress symptoms here which is a little bit clinical but just, you know, these are probably things that I think all of us can relate to. So having trouble with essentially complex trauma is a relational trauma. So having those interpersonal disturbances and troubles. The negative self-concept which really talks to labelling that Carly was just talking about now and having problems with regulating emotions in addition to those other feelings or a sense of threat of avoidance and re-experiencing the trauma that we know about from traumatic stress disorder. Dana, thanks for doing these. Thanks. So when you think about complex trauma, it really is around two conflicting survival mechanisms. So there's the defence or fear mechanism and all of us, we have these fright, flight and freeze responses that are absolutely essential for our survival. And also with children, we're really dependent on our caregivers for a long time but really attaching and having a good relationship with our caregiver is also important. But when the fear responses are activated during early childhood, that can cause an internal conflict and it can cause internal confusion and we think that it's one of the really key things causing the ongoing problem that we're experiencing in trauma. Next, Dana. So we know now there's so much research coming out around the physical impact of trauma and you'll be able to download this off the website if you like but it's just everything's part of the body. It's not just a mental, psychological issue. It really is every part of the body and you can feel that when you're feeling those triggerings but why they exercise as the carly and during that period really early and why it's really important to help to regulate it. And talking about the importance of advise and physical strategies as well. Thanks, Dana. So from our Aboriginal perspective, you know, their impact on our physical, social and emotional well-being, they really impact every single component of our social and emotional well-being. This is essentially relational trauma. It's impacting on our connection that we know is really important. And here we've just overlaid training from the Blue Knot Foundation which I'm sure many of you have been involved in and the impacts that they're outlining. They're training on to our emotional and emotional well-being model and you can see that it impacts on our connection to our spirit, to our body, to our mind, to our family and our community and you still don't have enough Aboriginal resources but we're sure that it will help us on our connection. Thanks, Dana. So now that we're in this COVID-19 world, I think we can safely know what epidemiology is by looking at the sort of epidemiology of all means. So when we have all those impacts at an individual level, but all of these impacts on us collectively as a community as well, we're seeing that really, really clear in the research now. So in that beautiful video that the Hearing Foundation put together, we know that the prior to colonisation would have this trauma that historical violence leads to the violence that more children are exposed to today. The living conditions that people are living in tend to make things worse rather than better. And all of this we know from the adverse childhood experience of studying leads to increased health risks and problems and they also mean that things like health promotions and disease don't work as well. And a really important time for counteracting this is the transition from becoming a parent. That's when we really get the intergenerational... So that can be a time when it can be increasingly difficult and a really, really tough time for parents. It's also a really important time of healing and we set the parents a lot at that time. So it's obviously also a really critical time for the parents. So we're seeing at the moment this sort of compounding intergenerationalist thing and that is something that we all need to work together now and I think we can't... Thank you, Dana. Great. Thank you so much, Cap. We're now going to move on to some other questions of the panel and the first one I'd really like to ask everyone is around cultural competence. So I know it's important. It's a word that gets thrown around sometimes without any depth of explanation. So I want to reclaim the question for professionals. What is the thinking, the knowledge, the ways of being? They need to bring, to walk alongside families experience intergenerational trauma. Judy, I wonder if I can hand back to you first to consider that. I love how you refined it. It's great. One of the first things that we have to do is get rid of our ego. Unfortunately, universities kind of say that they are graduating culturally competent workers, but we cannot claim to be culturally competent unless we are able to sit quietly with, be present with others so that they feel safe when we're working with them, when we're with them. They'll come to us because they feel safe. And it's really important to... I'm going to say this again. I've just come back from the church where I saw somebody who behaved in a very abusively incompetent way in the way she spoke to a young, other woman who really wanted to do something about something that was important and she started to lecture him publicly. She showed a level of incompetence. So did he feel safe in the room where we were when this happened in the workshop? No, he didn't. Did he feel that he was being respected? No, he didn't. Yes, he was physically safe, but emotionally and spiritually and socially. He wasn't because he was being lectured publicly. I guess part of what we need to be thinking about is how we engage with people. So I talk about massive cultural safety and cultural... The total institute talks about cultural security, feeling secure in myself as a Aboriginal woman and that young man, feeling secure in himself as a young man who wanted to go and help other young men, who didn't need to have a lecture. But I also want to start to think about how they feel they are. So I'm going to talk about being culturally fit. That means that we have to continually look at ourselves in the way we're engaging. And I want to bring it back to my dad, Mr Taker's, his kids down surfing. And he would teach us safe practice. He would show us where the first lifesavers were in the flags. And he would tell us that when we went to Main Beach, where I grew up, I grew up in Southport, that we should always go into the surf between the flags because there would be somebody there looking out for us. So as kids we got in and we learned to surf and we thought it was great fun. And I felt safe because it always means somebody who says it's making sure that I knew what I was doing. But one day, I'd like to suggest that I got a little bit smirk and I looked at my sword and I'm using a marble here. I saw somebody out on the surfboard and I thought, I'd love to have a go at that. So I wand off and I get a surfboard and I paddle out over the other side of the breakage. And then because I've seen other people do it, I stand up on the surfboard and I really didn't know a lot about what I was doing. I came to the braces and the braces took me up and I went right down under the water and smashed my nose in the sand. And when I came up, I thought to myself, I am never doing that again. Now I see a lot of people come into our community who have a dive, they fall off the surfboard, they hit their nose in the sand and they come up. And they say, I'm never going to go to work with that moment again. Or they start to denigrate the people they're working with. So being culturally fit, whether we're Aboriginal people or non-Aboriginal people, allows us to go into a really heavy situation when we're working. We may not be able to stand up on the surfboard straight away, but we're watching and we're listening and we're being respectful and we're trying to ensure that the people that we're with feel safe with us. And we find out by listening that things are maybe not good in that community or a little bit better, but we're capable of working with the community in a way where we're not denigrating them, putting labels on them. So I guess then, and there's another terminology here I'm going to introduce, but I think it becomes efficient of being in situations where, and I've seen, I've seen a lot of people do this, doctors to me, social workers, workers who want to go and save the world. They suddenly start to feel incompetent because their services are not welcomed or not reading the news and then they become unsafe. And they're certainly not competent in the way they respond to the community's needs. So I'm just going to go over that. Cultural competency is generally what universities say they graduate students with. We need to work very, very hard to become culturally safe, create an environment where people feel safe, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually where there's no source of challenge on them in who they are and what they need and the Toto Institute talks about culture security, a dimension of human security that has been neglected in how we work with each other. And I'm now saying, you know what, I also need to be culturally fit because working in situations that is beyond anything I've seen in my 77 years, things have changed under the impacts of generational trauma and the drugs that are hitting our community. So I need to be fit and be willing to go back in and keep on having you go and not judge other people. Make how I describe competency, safety, security and being fit in the work I do. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Judy. Carly, what would you say are the things that professionals need to be bringing to this work? What's your views about that? Yeah, look, it's very similar to what Mum's saying and I certainly refer to cultural fitness that makes sense. Because what it does is it requires a really strong personal and professional development focus. There's a lot of the training, and I know this happened to me at uni around professional development and it doesn't really focus on that personal development. And essentially, if you don't do the work on yourself, we don't know and must think who we are and we don't unpack and reflect on our own privilege, our own biases and perhaps even our own trauma that leads onto the people that we work alongside. And how we do that is through regular distancing and reflection and practice. And if you don't do that, it's really all academic experiences like the labels that I talked about earlier and Mum talked about continue to happen. Can also say and reiterate what Mum was saying. It's also the responsibility of organisations to ensure that staff are culturally important for them to work alongside our people. It's not fair on the worker that's being sent out there, but it's certainly not fair on the community and the people there are attempting to work alongside. Sir Carly, as I think I heard you say, it was really around that importance of making some level of personal commitment. It's about thinking about spending the time on your own development as well as learning from training. Absolutely. Both of those things are essential. Yeah. Essential, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Carly. And Kath, I can now hand over to you now to talk a little bit about holding space in response to this question. Yeah, thanks, Dahlia. I'm just going to draw on the collective wisdom here of a really fantastic workshop that we had in our spring. Judy and Carly were a part of as well in 2018 where we really spent the whole day with a whole bunch of predominantly non-professionals and others to talk about what needs to happen if people are going to be holding these really sensitive discussions. What are the really critical elements that need to be in place before anybody starts talking about intergenerational kind of work? Families around intergenerational trauma. And these are the main points that came out of that workshop. So the first one was the real importance of emotional safety as well as cultural safety. They've really been cognisant of all those triggers and the issues that we're talking about. Talking about trauma brings up and actively managing that. We did a lot of fun stuff during the workshops to help manage a really practical strategy to it, just like using play dough and clay and dance and things like that. People talked about how having relationships and trust were absolutely century before having any of these discussions and listening to people and being able to help by having relations and relationships and trying to underpin all that really critical. There was a lot about learning those cultural methods of not just sort of being in people's faces about things and talking really directly, but really going on the cultural wisdom and using those methods like yarning and letting the conversation, feeling being with the conversation and letting things emerge, listening really deeply with the dairy that Juliet would be able to really talk about. The importance of being really skilled as well and holding the space. I think being able to do that really well is a really, really good job. People really emphasise the importance of respect and caring and compassion and I know we bandied those words around but in the context of trauma they are really, really important. We can't put that in the mouth. Often when you ask people what was important about the discussion, but they said they felt careful and that the people were nice. Sometimes I think as a health professional we, you know, with my duty, they can feel incompetent but just being respectful and caring and compassionate does a lot more than it is actually doing a lot and just to really recognise how important that is. And the final thing is just really trying to be positive. I'm not polyamorous about it but the importance of really, you know, drawing on people's strengths and dreams. Thanks, Dana. Thank you so much, Kaz. I just wanted to go back to Judy and have a follow-up question for you. You know, it might be, you know, I can't say that, you know, people should just get over this. You know, we're talking about this trauma, just get over it. I was interested in your response to that. I guess I'd like to respond to that by an experience I had in the Northern Territory in Catherine just recently. We were in this group and there were some GPs in the group and we were doing genograms or lots of chimps. They had the choice. And two of the senior medical people were really affected by their genograms. One of them decided to see the pattern that had been part of her family's history in her genogram. And she was really quite emotionally distressed because she realised and put it publicly that she had lived most of her life choosing to live away from other people and choosing to live out and work out in remote communities where she didn't have to engage with people because of the four generations of trauma that was in her own family that she'd never recognised before. So at one level, this woman who came to my deceased from one of the British colonies had a lot of privilege and she'd managed to get her degree and then become a doctor but she was also carrying a lot of pain. And so therefore she had isolated herself. The other doctor on the other hand was male and he realised, she said, I realised that I fit in with surgery and a medical man will come in and I'll have a drinking problem. And I will say, even if you keep drinking, you'll gain to damage yourself physically even more than you are now. And he then looked at us all and said, and didn't you know how to go home and I drink a bottle or two of wine? I can't focus or cope. There's the things that I know that are in my life. He again had a level of privilege because he'd had the opportunity to go to university and get a degree. Getting over it means accepting all the things that have happened in our life and that includes the levels of trauma that we all live with. So it's not just an original story of getting over, it's a story in Australia generally of getting over. The white privilege that holds people into a judgmental or a non-aware state that they might have brought from the country or it might have come from the prison halt. Getting over it means that we, in this country now, with the coronavirus, some of us are happy to be in the privilege of a healthy living where we've got a garden and we can isolate ourselves and be safe and other people just don't have that. They may be homeless. They may have been a Vietnam vet or a returned veteran who, a Mac and Stan who is homeless at this moment and that's happening a lot. There may be a school teacher who's not broken too well. It's not just about additional people getting over it. It's about all of it. All of us starting to look at and address, seriously, with intent to address the trauma that is generational and part of the Australian psyche and the way that we live together. So I just wanted to reiterate that in the two cases that I wanted to name, it was two very privileged people who actually were DPs who suddenly realised that they hadn't got over early childhood trauma, but they were coping with it, one by drinking and the other by living in isolation out in the community. So thank you, Sam. Thank you very much, Judy. Now we're going to move on to the next question but I just wanted to make a quick point before we do that. We really appreciate people having a chat, but we were just wanting to make sure that if you do have a chat conversation, please ensure that it keeps respectful. We'd really appreciate that. Thank you, everybody. Okay, so I'd like to move on to our next question. Now this is really about what you are seeing, all of you. You know, what are you seeing in your work that is making a positive difference for families, children and young people? And I mean this in individual practice or at an organisational level. What should we do more of? So that was a really long question, but I wonder if I can start with Carly first to talk a little bit about what you think is needed or have you seen that's positive and what should we do more of? Thanks, Carly. Dana, the work that I'm seeing that is really making a profound difference and I know Mum will look at this when she has to making a real difference in individuals and as I said in individual practitioners and organisations where there is a focus of moving beyond being trauma-informed and into being trauma-integrated. And what I mean by that is when individual workers integrate trauma knowledge into their own life. As I was saying before and I know Mum was saying too, doing your own healing work is irrelevant and that helps people that we work alongside to integrate that knowledge into their own life. Make it importantly to organisations to integrate knowledge throughout their policies and procedures and the work they do with other relevant organisations in a significant way. I really think that only when we see that happen that true authentic transformation that we talk about is going to happen. More such things, programs that are really positive and some of the things they have in common, they have strong creative art, nature-based, cultural, both which importantly involves the whole family and then also the whole community. They're designed and led by our mob and they're making a positive approach to programs all over Australia that have similarities. So essentially any activities that are repetitive, rhythmic, culturally relevant or relational, can be talking about and respectful and rewarding that they all contribute to healing and also most importantly, regulating. So the question is, what should we do more of? Well, I'm thinking more of those things. More truth-telling, more healing, more storytelling, more dance, more art, more song, more ceremony and more connection to nature. Thanks so much, Carly, and I think there was some key points that I just wanted to highlight out of what you said. I think the first thing I really heard was, I think it was very powerful statements, I want to reiterate this for our listeners, is about the difference between just having one, you know, to get to trauma-informed, to then to trauma-integrated. I think that was a really powerful statement. Some other points that I felt were really important that I heard that you just said is how we can do things where our people are leading those things and we're doing it in ways where we have not only healing, music, rhythm, all sorts of things that can connect with our community and the things that matter to us seem to be the most powerful things. Did I highlight those key things in the right way, Carly? Yes. Thank you, Dana. Great, thank you. I wonder now if I can go back to Judy. You know, what are you seeing in your work that's been making a positive difference for families, children and young people in individual practice or at an organisational level? Well, I want to talk about those individual responses to pain and the organisation's capacity to change. So I'm going to talk about children in school, children who for many reasons have been expelled or succeeded from other schools. So I come to a special school for children who are really... They're called bad kids, the community, the non-evident community labelled them as bad kids. And then the children settled in because the school principal believes that we just love children. We see the good in them and we just love them and we give them opportunities to experience themselves in that way as well. And then the community school principal would make a point of calling parents. And the parent, in many cases, the response... Oh, this is so-and-so school, so-and-so principal, I'm just calling you and before that she could say any more, the parents would say, what is the little thing done now? And then the principal told me, no, I'm really to tell you that little Billy has just had the most wonderful day or week and he's done this and this and then with the silence on the other end of the phone and then you hear crying. And then you hear a parent say, that is the first time anybody has ever said anything good to me about a child. Can I come up and see him one day and then the parents start to drop into the school? So what I'm talking about here is a person who decides to start to see goodness back to parents who are living in bad news when children are in crisis and the family is in crisis and just going there to change and the parents started to drop into the school offered to produce some cooking and things like that. There are two things I want to finish with. All children need to be seen, to be heard, to be known that they are loved and that they are understood. All children. And all people, whether they're parents, practitioners, the school teachers, doctors, lawyers, all of that kind of they need to hear, to listen. And then they're hearing and listening to start to think and they will start to understand what we're working with and the needs of our community. There's some beautiful stuff happening in our community. I've spent four weeks and six months in our spring with the women and what I saw is women who cared for each other. I spent time out of the school and I just sent a thing off today to the United States so it's a book. And I reported the story in a Western New South Wales town with the middle of winter with freezing and I turned up at the school and a little fella came to school with his nurses on a fancy little t-shirt and a pair of shorts and that sort of thing. And I knew the family and I knew how hard it was for them. But I thought, my goodness, this child, they breathed them tough out here. It was freezing. There was ice on my car window. The next day, there were children from that school who had pretty much as much as he had turned up at that school for him. So I guess what I'm wanting to talk about here in the beauty of who we are is that sometimes in the toughest times we can actually bring good things to us. Like the teachers who just made a phone call to tell a mother who's told me that her little fella's doing OK and the children who are to bring warm clothing for her little fella who's family couldn't afford warm clothing for him in the winter. There's a lot of things out there. You should just look at them and see them and name them and know them. Right. Thank you very much, Judy. I'd like to go back now to Kath if you could talk us through what you're seeing that's really positive for individual organisations. Okay, thanks, Darnable. I'm predominantly working in maternity care services, and there is quite a lot happening there. I think going back to what Carly said about trauma-integrated care, I think that's really, really important. It's something that we need to learn a lot about. I think the first thing is to recognise services, recognise things, trauma that has been caused in those services. The healing really starts trick-telling. But there is a lot of really good work going on around the birthing in our community models of care, and there's some fantastic things being done in WA with Rhonda Murray, there's the birthing in country there, and a vet's role, and the team in Queensland. They're setting up really fantastic models of care in partnership communities, and also here in Victoria. Teams of midwives that are community-led, they're drawing back on a lot of that traditional wisdom and knowledge about how better to prepare them. The other thing that I think has been really exciting and positive has been starting to get more involvement in that, and that is absolutely critical and something I've been missing for a long time, and it's really, really essential, but with that it's really starting. I've just put up this slide here. We did this project that we're working on, called Healing the Path by Nurturing the Future with Carling and Judy. We looked at parents' use and experience of maternity care, to serve the word during pregnancy birth and the same little example of birth. And the interviews with 351 parents we then talked about with Aboriginal parents here in Australia, well, and a lot of that same thing. We enforced. Parents really just talked about the importance of time for a fresh start with changing roles that are going through. I think everybody has identified with a lot of these. The importance of being connected to each other, how important it was to have that kind of care, and the importance of having choice and empowerment and creating safety. And there was this analogy of parents wanting to re-weave a future from complex trauma, but pulling together the broken strands of the power to weave something together that's stronger for themselves and their family and the way that we can do that. And yes, some of the models that I've seen here in Australia around birthing on the country that involved them to trauma-based care, really looking into problems and lots of innovation in the community, which is exciting. Yeah, great. Thanks, Katherine. I wondered if I could sort of go back to something that you said earlier, which was really around the importance of, I think, what you mentioned with dads being involved. Yeah, I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about, if you can, about the ways that's happening? Well, there's not enough of it, obviously. And I think, you know, in maternity care and in parenting, men have been excluded, and that has been particularly a part of colonisation as well as Aboriginal dads in particular. You know, we all know how bad that has been and the way that Aboriginal men have portrayed. And, you know, we've seen, this is such an important time for people who have experienced childhood trauma to recover from that, and we do see that women recover better than men, and I think part of that, we've seen that in the longitudinal studies of people that have been through used-in detention, and nearly a severe trauma type, that women seem to actually recover a lot better during the parenting transition, and men, I think, a part of that is, you know, cause of all the problems that have been going on. So there are some guys that are starting to lead them, obviously this is a men's led thing, but also just about trying to make us aware of the maximum inclusive of those dads. Does that answer the question, or do you want to...? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Cass. Judy, I just wanted if I could come back to you again. I just wanted to check in with you to see if there's any specific programs or areas that you want to touch on that you think are particularly positive? I'm really excited about the way we're doing the children now. I've had the long-time children in our future, and it's taken us nearly eight, nine years to break into... breaking down the barriers that the children have been labelled as bad kids. You can see, you know, that people have just assumed that a lot of education is sitting up and saying, we want to know more about this, and I've got six months to work in the community, and if it works, then they're going to put it across New South Wales schools. I'm excited about that because it's taken us a long time to stop the labelling of children as bad children, and understand that that's what I said before, you know? When we see a child, we hear a child, and a child knows that it's loved, then we know that we're succeeding and know that they've understood. Everywhere I've been, in every place, in every part of Australia, when I've reached on suicide, I see the child who has not heard. When I'm sitting with somebody in a prison, I'm hearing the story of the child who has not been heard. So the kinds of programs we're doing now are focusing on children's needs and building that capacity for children to feel good about themselves. That's important. Some of the people who are now getting on through year 11, 10, 12 and going to the university is amazing. And those young people are going back to their communities, and I can think of two. It's the state who qualified as doctors to work in their own community. They're the kinds of things that excites me. If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to thank you all the way at a time, because I know that you've had trouble with these sounds tonight. But yeah, there's some really good things happening out there, but I just want to say this to finish what I want to say tonight. Sometimes you don't get to the good stuff until you've saved in the hard things. The hard stories, the painful stories, take us to the healing. You just can't jump across it. Leave it as that. And, Judy, I wonder if I could follow up with that, because I think that's a pretty powerful thing that you just said that I'm sure people are interested in. You were talking about that sitting with the hard stuff. Can you just talk a little bit more about that, because I'm sure they'll be interested. I've got two terminologies. Symptom is history. So I go into a community, and I'm starting to see things that don't look so good. And there's already an unpackage. I'm sitting in a community. And I'm thinking of a particular community that asked me to run a workshop. And we were three hours into the workshop. And one of the senior people stood up and said, we've got to talk about child sexual assault here in this community. And that sounds like a negative, but it wasn't. It was a powerful statement. And we spent the rest of the three days unpacking that. And that community has moved on tremendously from that now. So what seems like a negative? Finding the stories. Feeling the feelings that are part of those stories. Starting to feel that we can do something for ourselves. Understanding that. For those of you who like to read, there's an absolutely amazing thesis by a fellow called Gavin Morris. And it's about a truth telling in a community in the Northern Territory. And then the decision, which is set up what he's calling an ancient university, a place where people can come and learn better ways of living together. But the truth of the week is powerful. It's painful, it's shameful, and it's powerful. Because people are owning the generational impact of trauma that are now in their lives today. That's what I think is exciting. When we're owning our own stories and doing something about it. Thanks so much, Judy. We're coming very soon to a close. So I wanted to make sure that I do give all of our panelists the opportunity to do a final set of key messages that you'd like to give to people. So I'd like to first hand over to Carly. In summarising, in reflecting on what we've talked about tonight, Carly, what are some of the key messages you'd like to leave with all of our participants tonight? Probably a number of things. We go through them. What I was saying before about organisations and individuals needing to provide and start to get at this concept is trauma integrated services. So moving beyond trauma reform is a really important one. That's what Mum and I are certainly talking about and getting to know each other. So doing that work on it, it really does make it easier for us to see if we walk inside. Another point is to be courageous and to break through telling. You know, it's uncomfortable, but if we can hear what we need to hear, it's certainly going to help us and whoever's telling their story moving forward. Relationships are critical. Learn how to nurture them. Stories save lives. Learn to listen deeply. You know, you hear from when Mum talks to teats through stories and things that help them inside. Thankfully, it makes it real. Two other points. Cultures can be strong. And importantly, it regulates some of the critical importance. And the last thing I'll say is nature deals. So any activity that involves being inside, discovering and learning about the amazing world we live in is always a good thing. Thanks so much, Carla. And I just wanted to reflect on it. There was still a little bit of cutting out, so I just want to make sure the messages are clear that people are hearing. So I think I really heard that trauma-informed to trauma-integrated. You also talked about the importance of nature and getting out there, being in our beautiful world. So important even now, even more important now. You talked a bit about that reflecting on relationships and the importance of how we build those. And you also talked, and I'll come to Judy to talk a bit more about this. You talked about discomfort and feeling uncomfortable as a key thing to be able to work with. So I will jump to Judy for a second. That issue about discomfort, feeling uncomfortable. Can you talk a little bit more about feeling discomfort and feeling uncomfortable and being able to embrace that? There's two levels or layers of that. First one is the discomfort I feel in myself. And maybe sometimes also feeling a little bit inadequate when I realise the state of the pain is a threat. And how do I respond to it? The other discomfort is when I'm with a child or a mother or a grandmother or a dad, granddad, and I'm aware of the pain they're carrying, the stories they hold. I was standing in front of a man not so long ago who had sucked on the rest in his life and he desperately wanted me to understand him. And he started to talk about the pain he was carrying and suddenly he pulled his shirt back and he put his hand on the big scar that was on his chest where he'd been stabbed. And he wanted me to feel his pain and see his pain too. So the discomfort is that we can't just get over this little bit of us. The discomfort is that we have to stay home. We have to do that. So we can't just get over the generations that came down after the massacre, after the trauma removal, after the mission, after the things that have happened and it just doesn't all just go away. So I'm going to go back to the things that I put up with my hand over and over again. This hand says that I have to work to create safe places for people. And if it's me, and it's me being able to sit on the floor with somebody and be safe when they want to talk, that's good. And then I help them find those stories and those stories can be painful and shameful. Not just to hear, but for them to tell. But it's also painful and shameful in the way that Australia is letting things happen. And know that under those stories are deep feelings. And those feelings can be feelings of all those words just to champagne, anger, district, whatever, but they're there. And then we come back to managing the feelings, feeling okay, knowing that we'll be okay in that. Because under all of these are layers of loss and grief. And we know that there's a way through that, particularly in Aboriginal ceremonial processes. Loss and grief stands to music, making sense of stories, until we can reclaim our cultural and spiritual identities. I've seen that as adults, and I've also seen children who will draw and paint. And when they tell you the stories, you have to stop because they will need to tell you the sad and bad stories before they can come to the good stories who they are in their artwork. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Judy. And Cass, just handing over to you now. Was there a final key message you'd like participants to reflect on? I guess as a sort of researcher in this area, I just really would like to emphasise how much knowledge, sophisticated knowledge, particularly around intergenerational trauma there is in communities. This is my... But I feel like when I often read the western research around this area, it feels... Yeah, it's very detailed, but in some ways a little bit primitive. And then when I... Judy and the others that have been working in this area for a long time and, you know, if I'm lucky enough to talk to elders, but kind of have the knowledge as well, the understanding just seems really sophisticated. And I think this is something I really encourage people in our community to really own. And I think, you know, not only is this going to help art and our kids, but I really do think this is something. You know, this is your community, which could mean a lot more about really sophisticated and fighting, I think. Thanks so much, Kath. So I think what I'm hearing is that what we can learn from Aboriginal communities couldn't benefit other communities too, because of that sophistication and that tradition and that ceremony, et cetera. Yeah, I think we've got... Yeah, we need to realise how good it is. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Kath. Well, we're nearly at the end now, and I just wanted to thank all of the panellists. I knew that I would be so delighted, and it would be a special opportunity for me as well to listen to all of you. So on behalf of all of us, I wanted to thank you so much for everything you've said and you've shared tonight. Thank you. There's a few final things that are facilitated I have to do before we close off tonight. So basically just to let you know that there are resources that are available for you and at the light blue icon on the top right of the screen. It would also be really great if you could complete the survey, an exit survey and provide feedback. That's at the yellow icon on the top right. Just wanted to let you know that the next webinar in our series will be on the 29th of June, and it is engaging children and parents affected by child and sexual abuse. The next HPN webinar is Monday the 18th of May. Tips and strategies in using technology for mental health consultations. And just finally, just a few things around the partnership regarding MHPN and emerging minds. This is a co-produced webinar between MHPN and emerging minds for emerging minds, the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health Project. This project is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child Youth Mental Health Program. And MHPN supports the engagement and ongoing management of practitioner networks where clinicians from different disciplines meet regularly with other mental health practitioners. Tips, resources, build local referral pathways and engage in CPD activities. Due to the current environment, most MHPN networks have been postponed. However, some are organising online meetings. So feel comfortable to contact MHPN to learn more about joining your local practitioner network. So you can also integrate your interest in this in the exit survey as well. So in final, I'd like to say, and before I close, once again to the panelists, thank you to all the participants and thank you for your patience with some of our technical difficulties. And I'd also like to acknowledge the consumers and carers who have lived with mental illness in the past and those who continue to live with mental illness in the present. Thank you to everyone for your participation this evening and keep safe during these times.