systemic traumatology werkstätte℠

The systemic traumatology werkstätte℠ is a worksite to explore, share, nourish, and creatively enable agency to mend BodySelfs and hone our capacity to relate to others and the world in fresh and new ways.

You may wonder about apprenticing and –– maybe even more so –– about Systemic Traumatology Werkstätte (work site.) let me share a bit why this wording is my contribution to the linguistic trauma commons.

My father was a master machinist and exquisite toolmaker. He founded a small crafts business in 1960. I was four years old. From then on, quite literally, I grew up in my father’s Werkstatt (work space) –seen below around 1982– the year my father died, after battling leukaemia for five years.

As was common in Germany, in some places to this day, our traditional craft household was tended to, in tandem, by my father, my home-crafts trained mother, and my widowed maternal grandmother. Home life, work-life, playing, and growing up were closely intertwined. So close, that in a matter of moments I skipped from our kitchen to our work (and for me play) space.

Daily rhythms of shared meals and collaborating on tasks, while maintaining individual responsibilities. In short, being part of my family’s home and team-based economy was inseparable from growing up as a child within that system. It gave me an embodied knowing of a system’s complex workings.

This environment afforded me ample experiences of smells, sounds, textures, and relational exchanges. The sound of occasional screeches from one of the lathes, sights of smoke puffs above the milling machine, and the distinct, ubiquitous, smell of bohrmilch (drilling emulsion) can,  to this day, easily be summoned.

The same goes for other Werkstätte memories: my father’s washing of hands, way up beyond his elbows, before he would come inside for meals. It was all but ceremonial. I loved watching his deft ablutions, thorough drying, and methodical emphasis with which he hung back the blue checkered towel.

Neighbours, visiting with my father for a mid-afternoon word and a village farmer dropping off a pair of pruning sheers to sharpen, was as common as the nervous bustle of a project that needed to be finished in time. The former was interesting to hang around for, the latter suggested to wisely get out of the way.

why is this important?

the site (Stätte) where metals were transformed into mechanical tools, parts of machines, and sharpened to the finest precision, is deeply embedded in my implicit and explicit BodySelf. What’s more, the Werkstätte was filled with materials and tools that I was welcome to use. Many creative projects nourished my artistic talents, leanings, and skills, simply by way of exposure to that place.

Blue checkered memories, made up of smell, touch, sound, and sight, live in my body right next to trauma scores (to be shared elsewhere). They ground my visceral reception of  traumatization in a room, in my own and other’s bodies, and in the bodies and lives of my change seekers. This immersive past –socially as rich, as it was tragic– laid the foundation for my continuously expanding and maturing awareness of the biologic, gnerational, societal, political, and historical entanglement of all trauma.

Radiologist Richard Gunderman suggests in 2009 that “a master [has] developed recognizable personal styles of practice, like the style of a great artist or composer [and welcomes] novelty as an opportunity to reexamine their assumptions [allowing for] new ways of thinking.” Three decades of professionally apprenticing with trauma challenged me into developing a ‘recognisable personal style of practice’. I offer and share my style  in Systemic Traumatology EVENTS passionately. Albeit, ‘mastering trauma’ is –for this professional and personal trauma expert– a contradiction in terms.

I invite you to join me in a variety of event formats to apprentice with systemic trauma.

traumatization is complexly systemic, so is the mending of trauma wounding

let’s do it together

Reference: Gunderman, R. (2009) Competency-based Training: Conformity and the Pursuit of Educational Excellence Radiology: Volume 252: Number 2. doi: 10.1148/radiol.2522082183