Transcript
Alis (00:03)
Nip in the Bud is a charity that works to support children’s mental health by working with mental health professionals of the highest standing, producing free, short, evidence-based films, podcasts and fact sheets to help parents, educationalists and others working with children to recognise potential mental health conditions.
Today I’m in conversation with Svetlana Shek-Ramsey. She is Brighton-based counsellor dedicated to supporting children and young adults. Svetlana is passionate about advocating for and helping young people overcome adversity and reach their full potential. Svetlana collaborates with several youth charities in Brighton and West Sussex.
Her approach focuses on accepting each individual as they are, creating a safe environment where they feel heard, respected and valued. As an integrative counsellor with a particular interest in trauma-informed therapy, Svetlana has extensive experience working with young refugees and asylum seekers who suffer from poor mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder. In today’s conversation, we talk about trauma-informed systems and processes and how schools and teachers can better support children who have experienced trauma. We especially discuss young refugees and asylum seekers and how we can prepare our schools and our classroom approaches to support this specific cohort. Thank you for joining me, Svetlana.
Svetlana (01:38)
Thank you for having me.
Alis (01:40)
Can we start off our podcast chat today with you just giving a little bit of your story or backstory and what you currently do.
Svetlana (01:49)
Yes, of course. Well, I’m currently a therapeutic counsellor and I came into this work by nature of my second career, I guess. For the previous 20 years, I worked in music marketing, so I promoted live concerts and events. And then I reached a stage where I felt I wanted to do something more fulfilling to me, personally fulfilling and I started exploring what that might be. And a conversation with a friend actually one day, she was like, well, you’d be quite interested in counselling, haven’t you? And I was like, yeah, I have, but I hadn’t really seen it as a possible career. And then the two of us sat and Googled courses and I found an intro course and then, yeah.
I remember walking in, was like a Sunday afternoon and just walking into this classroom, having not been in any kind of classroom for many, many years. And so many light bulbs that was just like, yes, this is it, this is what I want to do.
Alis (03:07)
What tell us about some of those light bulbs? What was it that drew you and made you realize this was what you were supposed to be doing?
Svetlana (03:15)
It was having an understanding of… mean, perhaps weirdly, even through the music business, there’s some very interesting characters and you kind of see some patterns of human behaviour, especially on tour when people are confined for long amounts of time. And the light bulb moments were understanding that there are patterns and links and sound reasons for why we behave in the way that we do. And then there’s a step beyond that, that however stuck we feel that there is a next step should be that we be willing and wanting to take it. And I guess really understanding fundamentally the impact of childhood and how enduring some of those aspects can be right through all stages of our lives. Yeah.
And I guess that the judgment and the set assumptions that we make and really being reminded of how much people are bringing, you whenever we’re in room, whether it’s with one person or five people, for me, there’s multiple people because we all bring in so much and this inherited and generational stuff that we all bring with us. And so that was just fascinating.
Yes.
Alis (04:44)
I was going to say it’s what’s so interesting from a layman’s point of view is I’m hearing you say that and I’m thinking, I can feel all those different voices in my head of different ages of me and different people who would have said certain things that I might have identified to.
Svetlana (05:02)
Yes, absolutely. And when people are at a loss or facing challenges or difficulties and we can get caught up in, you know, why is this happening or why me? And actually, you know, I always think counselling doesn’t provide a magic potion and actually it can be quite difficult work.
But the magic that unfolds is this understanding that’s already there, but without giving ourselves that space to really answer those questions of why is it happening? Why now? Why me? We might never get to the magic. And that’s where the next step comes, because with that awareness and the understanding, you then see the choices and the possibilities that…
Are there when we feel quite stuck we just think there’s none and through that process so you kind of have to go back a bit to understand why you’re where you are now but with that difficulty because obviously not it’s not always pleasant to kind of relive or go back into things but the gold or the magic is that you then it opens up a part of possibility instead of just being frozen in this stuck place.
Alis (06:27)
Tell us about where you’ve landed. So you’ve come into counselling and that was a really beautiful way of sharing how you’ve got to where you are and your thinking around the magic that that therapeutic work can bring. Tell us about your current clientele, why you’ve landed where you’ve landed.
Svetlana (06:49)
Yeah, I guess there are a couple of reasons. Working with young people, children and adolescents, young adults, I guess I hadn’t quite realized what a passion, how important that was going to be for me. I didn’t set out thinking that was going to be the way I was training as a counselor. But I realized that my interest was giving young people a space to be heard. And also something about that early intervention that hopefully can give them access, that they can fall back on counselling at any time in their life having had hopefully a positive experience. And that actually some earlier intervention could possibly prevent some further impact down the line.
And so while I was training, I thought, okay, well, I’m not a qualified counselor as yet, but I really want to move out of marketing and events into something that’s more aligned with what I’m studying. And I looked up for a number of places that I thought either as a placement or somewhere that, you know, I could apply. And the Hummingbird Refugee Charity here in Brighton.
Just spoke to me, young people, a really specific group of people that are very unheard coming here labeled as a refugee and then the umbrella. So that really spoke to me. And they had, at the time when I found the charity, they didn’t have any vacancies. And then some months later there was a role for a support worker. It wasn’t something I had done before. And I remember spending hours and hours thinking, well, how the hell am I going to make my CV that has…
stadiums and arenas and marketing qualifications. How am I going to make this relatable? And obviously my counselling and by that stage I had been doing some placements. I’d been a bereavement support counsellor while I was training. So I did have, I’d become a parent. So was lots of things that I could draw on my own personal experience. So I remember just pouring everything and basically just saying, you know, the face of it, reality I don’t have like for like, but I bring in a lot to this. And I thought if only I can get an interview and I can tell them and I can show them my passion. Unfortunately, I did get an interview and fortunately I was able to express that, yeah, you’ll have to teach me lots of things about systems and how it works. But I feel very confident that I can be with somebody, I can do the role.
And so luckily they offered me the role and I was with the charity for just under four years. And I guess that really in that time, whilst it wasn’t a counseling role, I was working what I would consider therapeutically, trauma-informed work. And it solidified my passion for young people wherever they’re from and whoever they are. And so I guess that was a real, yeah, I can’t now imagine having done the training without having done that work at the same time and the benefits to both. So that set me on the course of, well, three things, youth, the refugee experience, and that really called for more deeper trauma-informed work.
And so that kind of made me have to really think about the way I was being with people. Because we don’t always know, people have a sign saying I’ve been traumatized. So it was really kind of like, what does trauma informed really mean? How do I actually be this as a person rather than step into that? You know, I don’t believe you can step into being trauma-informed, you have to be that. So yeah, that experience gave me those three things of knowing, right, this is where I want to be.
Alis (11:26)
Trauma informed is a bit of a buzzword in schools at the moment and I think parents are hearing it as well. Could you tell us a little bit about what that actually means? Could you summarise that for us?
Svetlana (11:37)
Yeah, yeah, because I think that’s a really good question because I also asked myself that, you know, I’d done lots of training on trauma and being trauma-informed and what does that actually look like? And I think it’s not, it’s a way of being, right? It’s a way of approaching our work with young people, the systems, rather than it being, step into this room and we’re trauma-informed in here, but the rest of time we’re not.
So being trauma informed is the way that we respond to young people and it’s understanding the impact of trauma. So when we see people that are actually disassociating, it’s not because they’re not concentrating or they’re lazy or they’re not interested. It’s because it’s a trauma response and they might be being triggered by the surroundings. So I think it’s about having that awareness of what the impact of trauma, because that’s what’s manifesting.
We might know somebody has had a difficult experience, that they have suffered trauma, but what we’re not necessarily understanding is, how’s that reflecting in their behaviour? How’s that showing up? And being trauma-informed means that we understand the way that trauma can come across. Because it’s not that somebody’s going to break down every two minutes. It’s not as overt as that. It can be that they disassociate.
And that’s very often the ones that can be labelled with those, you know, or they can’t concentrate, or they’re not listening, or they’re not paying attention, or that when they become really triggered, they need to leave the room, or that they can become the other side of, you know, not breaking down, some of that aggression that can come out, because they’re sensitive. And so it’s just, I think it’s actually, like I said, a way of being and understanding that what we might see on the surface, but understanding what could possibly be going on on the inside.
Alis (13:36)
So there’s a level of training that you would hope professionals have that would enable or empower them to go a little bit deeper than the surface behaviors they first see. But beyond that, you’re suggesting that actually we should have trauma-informed systems and processes and policies.
Svetlana (13:48)
Yes. 100 % I mean yes in all of the systems because you think that people are going to implicitly know that and they don’t you know we actually need an approach and we need to have frontline staff trained to be trauma-informed so that when they are dealing with young people in whatever aspect you know it’s the fact that when we come across systems and the amount of information that needs to be divulged on the first meeting and then you’ll never see that person again and then you make a call or you go and have another appointment and you’ve got to divulge all that information again and understanding what it is like, so what information is pertinent at each stage of this process. So really simple steps that can actually make a significant difference for a young person who is suffering with trauma, who may not access help because they don’t want to keep having to tell their story on the off-chart and then be saying, actually we’re not the right department or we can’t help you. And they’ve just actually really opened up because of the nature of the forms and possibly with people around the privacy. just, yeah, I think it’s, we can’t expect people to know these things. It requires systems to be trauma-informed and therefore staff to be trained to become trauma-informed.
Alis (15:11)
Thank you. That really clarified it a bit more for me. You said that you work with refugees and that’s where the Hummingbird charity has led you to refugees and to young people and children. What, if any, would you say are trends that you see with this cohort of people?
Svetlana (15:36)
Yeah, I mean it’s that, it’s the knock-on effect of war, famine, natural disasters, the trauma that they are having to flee their homes and then arrive in a country that has complex and often hostile immigration rules and systems, again those non-trauma-formed systems.
Quite often, refugees with poor mental health, refugees, are five times more likely than the local population to suffer with poor mental health. There is the potential, now, the trend of survivor’s guilt that they’ve come alone, they’re missing their family, they may have witnessed some horrific things happening to their family, or they may not know what’s happened to their family, they may have been separated on the journey or they may have had to flee on their own. that trend of then having to try and understand a whole new culture in a very difficult way for, you know, lots of people here, the systems can be really confusing and the pathways. And for somebody from a totally different culture with a language barrier is significantly hard.
Alis (17:03)
Is there any advice that you would give to schools who had a population of refugees on their role to help with those initial stages when they come into a school and then beyond those initial stages?
Svetlana (17:19)
Yeah, definitely, because schools can be hugely helpful, you know, for the obvious fact of the importance of education and the pathways it then presents, but also because they can help children, newly arrived children, form community and consistency to have that. So they can be hugely beneficial. And again, it’s that, if the school, there’s a whole school approach to welcoming refugee children and ensuring that they have the best experience, then if it comes down, you know, if it’s a whole school approach, it’s more likely that the individual teachers will achieve better results with their refugee and asylum seeking children.
So it’s things like trying to ensure that interpretation services are provided if possible.
And again, having some understanding of where a child’s come from, the circumstances in which they’ve got there, and understanding or having that appreciation of the combination of not being able to speak the language, the complete culture shock, and dealing with trauma. So then to be…whilst this is hopefully going to become a really enjoyable experience at the beginning, it can be terrifying to go into a school and be completely overwhelmed. So providing some extra provisions in terms of understanding what the child’s experience may have been, how they are able to communicate and ensure that they’re understanding what’s being expected of them. And I would say linking with organisations that work with refugees.
So for instance, Hummingbird does some outreach work where they will go into schools and colleges and spend time with the teaching staff to do some training about what the refugee experience is like. And that’s from personal experience. That’s after collecting feedback from children and young people of what that experience of going into education here in the UK is like.
So I would definitely recommend that schools reach out. It’s not expected that they necessarily have this knowledge on top of everything else. But there are places that do. speaking to those and utilizing the skills of other children to foster familiar language or just helping. The buddy systems quite often they’ll do with new children anyway, but just really thinking about are there other children in the school that speak the same language and to generally create a climate where refugee children feel welcome and you know if there is a really good equalities and diversity policy that will encompass refugee children. So I think it’s about yeah not just accepting refugee children and thinking that job done, we’re going to, you know, how are you going to really invite them into the school community and how are you going to make sure that they really feel a part of that community.
Alis (20:38)
That’s really helpful. it’s not expected for every school necessarily to know all of this, but if they do start to have just one child, but a community of refugees, then to do the work to find out and actually reach out to charities such as Hammam.
Svetlana (20:54)
Yeah, because actually it’s okay to not know, isn’t it? know, and schools are so busy and teachers are so under-resourced, so absolutely. So then yeah, use that expertise locally because after all school, you know, it’s about the community, so definitely.
Alis (21:11)
Yeah. What sort of things might teachers see? So behaviors or again, maybe looking at trends, what could they expect to see from a refugee child? So I suppose what I’m asking here is any long term effects of being a refugee with poor mental health and with trauma. So as a charity, we’re about recognizing and responding, what would be the things that teachers could recognize that a child or young person is not?
Svetlana (21:44)
I mean, by the very nature of being a refugee or asylum seeker, we can understand that they have been through a traumatic experience. I think it is the… And also the journey to the UK can be equally, if not more traumatic than what they’re escaping from their home country. So what we can see, and I think, you know, quite often…
schools might say things like, but they’re so quiet and compliant. And it is actually recognizing that they’re quite often in the flight or freeze response, that their nervous system is very dysregulated. And sometimes that poor attendance or that lateness, and it’s understanding that actually quite often they don’t sleep. Sleep is, I would say, one massive factor for the young people I work with is flashbacks, So they can quite often appear very tired because they are. And so it’s understanding. So again, I think that trauma-informed response of it’s, you know, having some compassionate curiosity about why is this child not able to attend as regularly, why are they not able to stay awake, why are they not able to arrive on time, and not assuming just because they are quiet or appear compliant that all is okay. I think it is that.
And being mindful of how much noise, loud noise and how overstimulating a school can be because of some of the trauma that they’ve already experienced. So things like going into the canteen can be extremely traumatic. And so quite often they won’t eat. Understanding their living situations, you know, again, whether they have access to regular meals, the uniform policy, quite often with the girls, you know, if the schools haven’t really sort of thought those things through sanitary products, they don’t have access. Some of them are living in hotels where these are not given, if they’re not with foster families, it can be the choice between food or hygiene and sanitary products. So again, think if they’re, as you know, I would imagine that teachers are quite attuned and used to picking up, but I think with this population they can appear as very polite and compliant and so it might require a little bit more gentle prodding before that they are able to actually divulge what’s really going on for them.
Alis (24:54)
Thank you. You talked a little bit about what teachers might be able to see and recognise and I think it’s summing up is taking a real individual response, so trying to get to know the child and the child’s family if the family are there, so that you can take that individual response. It sounds to me as if it’s not one size fits all with this population. They’re all coming with very different stories.
Svetlana (25:22)
Definitely. Yeah, and I’m really glad you said that because I think that’s a really important point to highlight that the refugee experience is of course very individual and depending on the circumstances of their asylum, know, quite often if there’s a war going on in that country, we will very, you know, be very much in the media, we might know, but there’s long historical countries that have faced genocide for many, many years that people aren’t necessarily aware of. And then there is more individual things that are going on, whether they have been persecuted because of their race or their sexual identity. So, you know, quite a lot of the LGBTQ community that seek asylum and they come from countries where they have had to leave because of their sexual identity. And so coming here. There’s some psychoeducation about the fact that actually we don’t have that and they can be more free to live their lives. And even though they’ve sought asylum, they still might be trying to hide that side of them. So it’s really important to understand that people’s reasons for seeking asylum do vary a lot. The circumstances and the journey they’ve taken vary. And I think we can get caught up in just this label amongst many other labels I appreciate. And actually one when we stop and schools stop and teachers stop as individuals and we meet somebody else as an individual we’re much more likely to be able to respond to them.
Alis (27:01)
Fantastic, thank you. Have you got any success stories that you could share with us? Stories of children and young people that you’ve worked with that have settled into schools and have found that community feeling that you talked about?
Svetlana (27:15)
Yeah, fortunately I do and I think that’s why the work is so rewarding because quite often when they arrive they will talk of feeling very hopeless. There will be a lot of suicide ideation, a lot of self-harming and we try and work with them to build on the resilience that they already have, that they’ve got here.
They’ve made a journey that even as adults we couldn’t imagine doing. And so we try and get them to recognize how far they’ve come, how much resilience they do have. And by having somebody shoulder to shoulder to really advocate for them and tune into it, what it is that they’re hoping to achieve.
Yeah, they can do it. And so I’m trying to narrow it down because I’ve got a number of people who are now about to start university, having come with absolutely no English, struggled to consistently attend school, and grasp, and then have gone on to do really well in GCSEs.
A levels or access courses, whatever stage that they’ve come in, whether it’s starting with ESOL and the various different routes to actually get to university. I guess with Hummingbird, what was really wonderful to see is when it came full circle and quite often the young people that had come to be supported later on came back to offer support.
And one has gone on to become a doctor and now comes in and volunteers at the homework club. So there’s some real, real wonderful success stories because the children and the young people, they have it in them, of course they do. And it is actually with some nurturing and some time that really draws that out.
It’s not that we’re giving it or anyone’s doing it for them. They still have to put those hours in. But actually knowing that there are people around them that believe in them and that there is a way to do it, then the success stories do come.
Alis (29:46)
What would you say is the most important element of those success stories? Is it community? Is it nurture? Is it resilience? Is it that feeling that people believe in them and have their back now? What do you think? If you could narrow it down so that school professionals could think, right, let’s try and get these bits right so that we can support. What would you say you’re
Svetlana (30:16)
All those things you listed are of course important and I think, you know, I constantly talk about community because actually that’s the bit that holds us each up. You know, that’s the bit that if I’m flagging having community is a bit that come on we can do this, you can do this. The inner resilience is there and through that, shared experiences. know, charities like Hummingbird that do provide a community, a family away from home. So even though, you know, on a Monday they’ll have a social club and they might be 30 to 40 young people and most of them don’t speak the same languages and then you realise you don’t need to speak the same language all the time to communicate and have fun and then quite often one young person will say to the other, like, what school do you go to? What college do you go to?
And that suddenly, and then they’ll open the pathways to each other. This is how I did it. And this is that. So guess, yeah, community, I would say, is a really, really big factor because the isolation is the most damaging. So if you can create a community where they feel welcome, and that’s why school is so important, because obviously that provides that for all children. And so if that can include refugee pupils, then they’re much less likely to fall through the gaps.
Alis (31:47)
That’s brilliant. I think that’s a really lovely way of concluding and something I agree with. I think it’s easy enough to take away. So thank you. Thank you for your time today. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation and are able to take something interesting and positive away from it.
Our podcasts are sensitively produced and give evidence-based information, whether from academic research and experts in their fields or from lived experiences. They are created to help others spot early signs of distress and may require further monitoring and information on how to follow up and get help. Learning about child mental health and understanding how to recognise potential disorders is an important first for everyone caring for children and young people. Please visit our website nippingthebud.org and go to our Where to Get Help page for organisations which can provide both support and further information to help you and those you care for. Any specific links that we’ve spoken about today can be found in the show notes.
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See you next time.
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