When visitors come to see us at our new base in West Ham, they often tell us how ‘safe’ and ‘welcoming’ it feels. This makes our hearts sing – especially because we have put eight years of evolving thinking and practice in to creating and maintaining a calm, accepting, nurturing environment. Here’s how……..
At the Magpie Project, we are acutely aware that mothers and their children often arrive in crisis, carrying significant trauma and anxiety.
We recognize the effects of trauma on our mothers, including being emotionally withdrawn, tearful, hypervigilant, and carrying pain that makes it difficult for them to trust or settle.
Babies (minis) often display signs of strained or dysregulated attachment with their mothers, such as dissociation, being unusually quiet, lacking facial tone, hyperactivity, and facing developmental delays or issues.
When we see a large number of people, many of whom are feeling anxious or desperately looking for help and support – the environment can become heightened or febrile quite fast: Our first christmas in 2017 – we threw far too much at our party – too many events, too much chaos, too many presents, too little warning! It was messy to say the least – we learned that anything unexpected – both scarcity and abundance can prompt anxiety stress.
Trauma-Aware Practice
Learning to work around trauma was a priority when we set up our project. In what we still see as a miracle of a meeting in 2018 we met an incredible psychologist.
With their kindness and careful attention we began a deep and wonderful collaboration to develop our trauma-informed practice, ensuring that we created a safe space for both mothers and their children.
This beautiful human – who we still work with today – helped us to evolve a charity-wide approach that includes transparency, offering choice, setting and maintaining boundaries, and working within a framework of unconditional positive regard for anyone and everyone we come in to contact with. That includes those who we are sometimes pitted against – front line workers in the housing and social care sectors.
Psychologically Informed Environments
We moved on from trauma-aware practice – which can sometimes feel uni-directional and something that professionals are still ‘doing’ to those using their services – to explore psychologically informed practices.
The approaches around Psychologically-informed-environments involve critically examining the beliefs, assumptions, and power dynamics that staff and volunteers bring to the space, and working to mitigate their effects.
What was revolutionary in this approach for staff and volunteers was the fact that it becomes possible to see how our own attitudes, levels of energy, core beliefs, assumptions and agendas are affecting our every interaction either for the better or the worse. It meant we could see our work at relational between two human beings in equity rather than one ‘professional’ interacting with a ‘service user’.
Towards a somatically-informed approach
We soon realised there was still work to be done in “holding the space”—ensuring that everyone who came for help remained calm, and maintaining an atmosphere that was authentic, positive, and safe. This is when we turned to Louise Klarnett, our dance artist-in-residence, for assistance with something that was difficult to articulate at the time.
We wanted to learn how to co-regulate as staff and volunteers with both mothers and children, and how to model co-regulation between mothers and their children. Our goal was to break the cycle of escalating anxiety and activation that sometimes threatened to overwhelm the space when mothers arrived feeling anxious or angry.
The first step in this process was for Louise to lead training for staff and volunteers on how trauma affects the body. We learned that trauma manifests in the body in different ways, such as pain, depression, or anxiety, and we became more attuned to these physical signs.
We also discussed how, as staff and volunteers, our own embodiment could help others regulate their nervous systems and create a place of calm. We introduced the principles of creating safety through polyvagal theory, which helped us understand how, by regulating our own systems, we could co-regulate with others and foster a sense of safety within an “organisational collective nervous system.”
Louise combined her expertise in craniosacral therapy and dance drawing on Steve Haines’ theories of trauma and embodiment to create a grounding exercise for the group. It invites participants to be curious, playful and imaginative and we began practicing each morning before sessions. This standing exercise, based on the OMG mnemonic, included:
- Orient – Louise led an improvisational structure that invited the group to observe their own body, the people around them, the space itself, the environment beyond the building, and imagined places in nature.
- Move – Participants were encouraged to move their major muscle groups in an undirected and free-form way.
- Ground – We invited the group to explore shifting their body weight off balance, then to find a sense of groundedness through the soles of their feet being fully in balance, imagining roots growing into the floor, connecting to the foundations of the building, and reaching into the earth.
We added “Breathe” to the mnemonic, inviting participants to place their hands on their body, observe their breathing without changing it, and take a moment to “land” and arrive in the present moment—ready and co-regulated as a team to face the day.
Accessing calm any time in the day
We encouraged our people to use this grounding exercise whenever they encountered “big energy” during the day, through a simple OMG/Breathe visualisation.
This daily practice is now often led by different people, including Louise, our Play Lead, and our CEO. They are able to improvise and adapt the practice based on the energy in the room and the realities of the day ahead. This practice is constantly evolving, drawing on Louise’s ongoing development in other areas of her professional work.
In the context of the project, the practice is brief—taking only five minutes—but its impact has been profound.
Since we began this practice, we have noticed that “flashpoints,” or moments when the project felt unsettled or tense, have become fewer and further between. Staff have gained more confidence in holding boundaries with mothers who are agitated, anxious, or distressed.
Visitors to the project – pretty much always describe our environment as “safe,” which, for us, is the most important foundation for every other interaction, intervention, co-creation, and moment of play that takes place in the space.
