ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to help people in helping professions other than psychotherapy services to consider how to support disclosures of non-recent trauma and abuse from adults in their own particular work settings. By considering what we can learn from examples of work with children and young people for whom the trauma comparatively recent, we can see more clearly how people carry on through and after trauma and what might get in the way of sharing these experiences. Through the use of examples of children and young people's disclosures of abuse, we can develop understanding of how we can support people to tell others what has happened to them. The chapter will apply psychotherapeutic principles and practice to other professional settings and roles and will comment on interpersonal communication as well as interacting with other organisations and institutions in the field. It will discuss the difficulty of working with the unknown and the known-but-unspeakable past and how we may need to gather fragments of traumatic memory over time rather than consider disclosure as a single event. It also considers how common it is to experience people with unprocessed trauma's changeable presentation as confusing and how too rigid thinking can bring doubt and mistrust into a relational dynamic. The chapter gives examples of how we can trust that boundaries informed by psychotherapeutic principles in our professional relationships will start the process of creating safety and trust necessary to support survivors. It considers how shame can interfere with communication around trauma and describes practical ways in which we can support ourselves to be better prepared to help and to support ourselves. Through examples of children's use of play and metaphor the chapter recommends ordinary ways that difficult topics can be explored with some psychological distance for adults.
