January is National Mentoring Month, an opportunity to reflect on how mentoring relationships are critical to everyone’s development, especially those with early life experiences of adversity and trauma.
A volunteer training activity in the Free Arts organization best illustrates mentoring’s reach. It asks trainees to trace their hands on a sheet of paper and, on each of their five fingers, list the name of someone who has served as a mentor, either formally or informally.
To my knowledge, no participant has ever been left with a blank sheet, even if it took a few minutes of reflection. Familiar names on the list of previous mentors are former teachers, coaches, extended family members, colleagues, supervisors and even artists and celebrities via their art form.
By design, some mentoring efforts create relationship opportunities for vulnerable people. At Free Arts, the populations served are children, teens and families who have experienced abuse, neglect, exposure to domestic violence and periods of homelessness.
We believe that mentoring matters because it is in the context of a relationship that vital conditions are met for people to identify skills, strengths and values that can help guide their lives and provide meaning.
Growing evidence shows how important the acknowledgment of adversity and trauma is to the overall success of serving vulnerable children and families. Lived experiences with adversity and challenging social environments can severely limit someone's access and readiness to enter any vital relationship.
To buffer these adversities, mentoring must take on a trauma-informed lens and promote vital conditions for growth. Here are three examples from mentoring organizations:
The first vital condition for personal growth through adversity and trauma is belonging to a healing-centered community. To this end, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs notes that the foundation for this community is physical and psychological safety. This includes creating shared agreements on how people interact, providing details on things that affect them, acknowledging complicated feelings and accepting people while recognizing that their so-called “problem behaviors” are a form of communication from people with critical unmet needs.
This type of community is a refuge in a sometimes-chaotic world; some can find it with family, close friendships, and even social or religious communities. However, circumstances leave many people without connections to supportive communities.
Mentoring organizations have a unique opportunity to create this type of community.
A second vital condition is self-expression. Mentors and participants at Free Arts experience transformation through the arts. Expressive arts allow participants to gain a new view of themselves while they find and share their voices. Further, they gain an opportunity to pursue growth by developing interpersonal skills, self-regulation skills and confidence in achieving personal goals. Through group-based mentoring, self-expression connects participants with empathic adults trained to understand how adversity and trauma affect young minds and bodies.
The third vital condition is empathy. In the mentoring relationship, the mentee and the mentor can share experiences that validate and attune emotional states, soothe strong feelings and provide companionship along the journey to healing and well-being. When reflecting on the importance of prior mentoring relationships, it is often very telling to identify the levels of acceptance, encouragement and acknowledgment in the relationship. Indeed, trauma-informed concepts such as these have always been part of human relationships, and the emerging science of human growth only confirms their power.
Imagine the impact on all of our social institutions if more ordinary citizens were willing to acknowledge that well-being is a function of achieving these vital conditions of growth.
Communities, schools, workplaces and the political sphere all have opportunities to respond to the unmet needs of others because, in so doing, we recognize our own needs, too. Through a trauma-informed mentoring lens, others take a familiar shape, one deserving dignity, respect, safety and the opportunity to grow — just like us.
Editor’s note: Matt Sandoval is chief executive officer of Free Arts for Abused Children of Arizona, a Phoenix-based nonprofit serving children and teens who have experienced the trauma of abuse, neglect and homelessness. Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.
