Step 2: Make a trauma kit
In Depth
In the chapter, “How to Make a Trauma Kit” in Feminist Making, Doing and Sensing, Alyson Patsavas describes an exercise in “making” that everyone can undertake: namely, to create a kit that is small enough to travel along with you to class or to wherever you tend to gather with others.
In the chapter, “Access Priming” in Feminist Making, Doing and Sensing, Margaret Price describes access as a practice which involves three key points:
the experience and expertise needed to understand and provide access to specific disabilities;
the newness needed to open up new starts and beginnings;
the intimacy of relationships, whether long-standing or fleeting.
This activity, “Make a Trauma Kit,” is a way to bring Aly’s project together with Margaret’s account of access priming.
A DIY trauma kit is user-centred, personally curated, and concretizes resources in tangible form, as Aly explains. As we know from the close readings in step 1, a trauma kit “curates objects to comfort, soothe, and ground their users in moments of distress.”
This means that making a trauma kit as a practice involves an anticipatory answer to the question: “What brings you comfort, care, and joy?”
It’s also an index of each person’s own bodymind needs: the specific ways that each of us can find grounding, especially in moments of distress or pain.
Making a Trauma Kit
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What brings you comfort, care and joy? There’s no wrong answer to this question.
Since we are exploring these queries in the context of making a trauma kit, consider constraints that seem pragmatic and instructive (small items will fit more easily in a kit, for example).
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What would you like to include in your kit? What is meaningful and grounding?
What might provide comfort in moments of dissociation, flashbacks, sensory overload, and everyday experiences of fracturing?
What is soothing to you? Are there specific scents or textures that bring you comfort? Is there a weight or a feel that you enjoy?
Experimenting with objects is part of this activity; enjoy noticing what objects (small, easy-to-find objects) come to your mind as possible artifacts for your kit.
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How does making your kit enable reflection? What does the making of the trauma kit open up for you, in terms of seeing, knowing, feeling?
These questions can turn into broader conceptual questions, like:
what shifts for us as thinkers, when we linger less on the measurable effects of therapy or treatment or some other intervention and more on the process of making and the knowledge it generates?
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How does your trauma kit connect you to your own history, or to key relationships in your life (past or present), or to embodied movements in your daily life that are not always recognizable, or some other example of what Aly is calling “systems, people, and/or contexts”? See how specific you can be.
In the chapter, for example, Aly, reflects on a coffee bean in a trauma kit: “By pulling one coffee bean from the bag, it takes on new meaning. It is at once a synecdoche, a representation of hundreds of shared cups of coffee, and a reminder of taking breaks, easy quiet with chosen family, and the strong taste and smell of a good espresso.”
What item in your trauma kit might serve as a synecdoche for you — and what is it actually representing, do you think?
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Curating can be a solo activity, as in the case of our DIY trauma kits. Curating can also be shared: just as we anticipate what objects might soothe and comfort us, as part of our trauma kits, we also anticipate what needs others might encounter.
Margaret Price calls the kind of curation that emerges out of such anticipation “access priming.” It’s an unfolding of care, offered by someone who is responding in advance to potential needs, in ways that are not overwhelming (as Margaret puts it) but rather a reflection of “the specific and material assumption that I [or someone] would have needs in the first place.”
Can you imagine specific curation-practices you might enjoy designing and offering to someone else, now that you’ve experienced the comfort that a trauma kit can provide? What access needs are you recognizing in advance, with these curation-practices?
Remember that Margaret describes access priming as offering and waiting, as holding space until a need arises.
How is your own imagination helping you to discern ways to offer, wait, hold space, and respond to needs?
Let’s remember that Margaret points to experience and expertise as one of the three nodes of access priming: is your DIY trauma kit a way for you to tune into your own experiential knowing?
As we learn from Alyson Patsavas’s chapter, there are entangled relations between our bodyminds, our feelings and experiences with trauma kits, and the structures that we inhabit.
Aly writes: “For me, naming trauma as trauma helps to deindividualize mental distress by locating bodyminds in relation to systems, people, and/or contexts that harm us.”
Here’s a set of five queries, drawn from Aly’s chapter, that can culminate in a reflective essay or facilitated conversation.