Karen Laing, IBCLC, AMT is a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher with a background in reproductive health care. As a practitioner over the last 25 years, Karen has cared for families as a trauma-informed perinatal educator, a Board-Certified Lactation Consultant, and as a midwife. As an organizational leader, she is the founder and CEO of Birthways where she has played a role in creating innovative maternal/child service models incorporating perinatal education, home-based doula care, lactation services and perinatal mental health programs. She and her team are currently working to build the Okkanti platform, a transformative application that tackles disparities by providing care coordination, digital health tools, health education and access to maternal health supports. As a teacher of mindfulness and caregiving, she has taught and mentored providers throughout her career and is the creator of the Compass of Mindful Caregiving, 6 Qualities of Embodied Mindfulness, and 40 – second Compassion Initiatives, toolkits such as the Cup of Kindness for family caregivers and a number of programs designed to improve the ways we take care of one another. She founded WisdomWay Institute in 2017 to better share the tools that support improved safety, respect and compassion in care relationships while preventing burnout.
Karen believes that systemic change involves many facets, but that we can begin with our moment-to-moment interactions.
Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) foundations establish that qualities such as trust, respect, compassion, and self-regulation on the part of the practitioner are essential to creating the conditions that would translate into ‘safety,’ ‘trustworthiness,’ ‘mutuality,’ and ‘choice.’
But how do we develop these qualities?
In many ways, we have an ideal in our imagination for this quality of personhood that ‘delivers’ trauma sensitive care, but we often fail to explore how exactly one cultivates and maintains an approach that is not just ‘informed’ but embodied.
By briefly reviewing the history and limitations of trauma-informed care and exploring the emerging themes at the intersection of trauma-healing, social justice, and somatic studies, we will define Healing Informed Care (HIC) and what the framework asks of us in our care roles.
As we learn the ‘what’ of healing-informed approaches, we will uncover the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ Participants will emerge with a practice map for building skills that not only make Healing Informed Care possible, but skills that support meaningful self-monitoring and self-care, critically important to buffer against stress and burnout in these professions. By building an intimate and compassionate awareness of our own patterned responses, we unleash the potential to better understand and to attend to the bodies that we are in, and to naturally build ‘beloved community’ where safety, dignity and care are more readily available in service of healing.
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