Using Culturally Responsive Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Practices to Support and Empower BIPOC Students

The Impact Of Stress And Trauma

Stress is optimal up to a point, and all stress originates as survival coping. As noted in the Yerkes-Dodson law, there is a relationship between stress and performance, and there is an optimal level of stress corresponding to an optimal level of performance, but when arousal is very high or very low, performance tends to suffer (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). When a person has an experience in which stress reaches a critical level, a robust emotional response is activated. This response changes the choice of a behavioral response acutely. It also induces lasting alterations that change the response of the individual to a variety of future experiences. When pathological, it compromises one’s ability to cope later with daily challenges (Richter-Levin & Sandi, 2021). Moreover, there is a point where our experiences move beyond optimal and begin to negatively impact our daily functioning and well-being.

Acute stress or shock can lead to trauma, an emotional response to an event that can happen to anyone and at any time (APA, 2022). Whether a traumatic event occurs once, multiple times, or continuously, the effects of trauma can manifest emotionally, mentally, physically, socially, or spiritually (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). A traumatic event can be anything that overwhelms our coping abilities. Such an event can shift the stress response from adaptive to maladaptive to toxic. It can launch the body into a state of fight (becoming aggressive and/or arguing to be right); flight (running away/fleeing a situation or changing the subject in a conversation); freeze (becoming incapable of moving or making a choice in the moment or moving to a shutdown state); or fawn (trying to please a person to avoid any conflict and/or looking to others for how to feel in the situation) (Fonseca, 2020).

This threat-based mindset can materialize in several ways when the student is reacting to an event with school leaders and teachers at school. For example, after an event that a student perceives as challenging, they can strongly and relentlessly assert that the school staff is wrong, and they are right (fight); state that they wish to change the subject or leave the space (flight); refuse to engage in the conversation or just stares at the staff (freeze); or try to appease by saying that the adult is right without further details (fawn). Ultimately, it is not the experience itself that is stressful or traumatizing but it is the emotional response to the experience that determines the type and outcome of stress or trauma that happens to the students. Moreover, although traumatic events happen outside of a person, trauma happens within causing a loss of voice, choice, and power that comes out as a reaction and not just a memory. Furthermore, there is a range in intensity, duration, and recurrence of traumatic stressors in students’ lives from negative life events (e.g., parental divorce, illness, or bullying) to matters of victimization (e.g., physical, emotional, or sexual abuse) to natural or human-made disasters (e.g., pandemic, hurricanes, or house fire) that can contribute to them exhibiting particular behaviors (Greeson et al., 2014; Stokes et al., 1995). Mostly, it is important to note that trauma can manifest itself differently in each student.