Beyond Trauma-Informed Care: Centering Race, Accountability, and Healing In Clinical Practice

Background/Purpose:

Trauma-informed care (TIC) has become a dominant framework across sectors, from behavioral health, mental health, and child welfare, to schools, hospitals, homeless services, and emergency preparedness. Globally, TIC guides humanitarian health responses and increasingly informs public health policy addressing root causes of health inequity, including food insecurity, violence, and HIV/AIDS. Despite its breadth, mainstream TIC models were developed without centering the experiences of BIPOC individuals, for whom racism is not incidental to trauma, but a primary and ongoing source of it.

Mainstream TIC's tendency to universalize trauma responses creates a race-neutral foundation for care that inadvertently individualizes BIPOC suffering. In doing so, it overlooks the accumulated race-based experiences that constitute racism, including community and familial violence, financial and housing insecurity, and repeated demeaning or dehumanizing interactions.

Results:

Critical Race Theory (CRT) recognizes that racism is ordinary, systemic, and invisibly embedded in all American institutions; yet CRT has been largely absent from behavioral health theories and care standards. This absence leaves practitioners ill-equipped to recognize or treat the race-based trauma that can be a critical aspect of therapeutic work. Cultural competency trainings and multicultural frameworks, while valuable, are insufficient to equip practitioners with the depth of awareness needed to avoid the privilege traps that harm clients and undermine clinical effectiveness.

Conclusions/Format:

This roundtable will explore key gaps related to race in TIC use with realistic case examples to facilitate discussion, experiential learning, and critical dialogue. Participants will explore the concept of shared accountability, particularly in moments where color-blindness, neutrality, or privilege traps unintentionally produce micro-aggressions and micro-insults. Participants will examine how the factor of race impacts both the client's experience and their own reactions.

Discussion will be organized around three central questions:

1. How do we tolerate and hold space for exploration of charged/ emotional reactivity stemming from a BIPOC client’s experience related to race, including their reaction to the treatment experience.
2. How do we maintain cultural humility and uphold our professional ethics when we are experiencing countertransference to preserve an effective clinical environment?
3. What racial trauma assessment tools and diagnostic frameworks, such as the CoRT and SHARP, should practitioners be adopting in order to treat BIPOC clients within their full lived context?

Practitioners, educators, and researchers are invited to come prepared to be challenged, humbled, and accountable, and to leave with a deeper commitment to the knowledge and growth required to ethically and effectively serve BIPOC populations.