Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers
TRIGGER WARNING -
THIS PODCAST CONTAINS THE STORIES & EXPERIENCES OF THOSE WITH LIVED EXPERIENCES OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE. CONTENT MAY BE TRIGGERING.
Welcome to "Conversations with my Sisters' Keepers," dedicated to normalizing the trauma recovery experience of survivors of complex trauma and gender-based violence (GBV). We bring awareness, share stories, and promote healing-centered conversations for lived experience professionals and allies in the gender-based violence and recovery sectors. By sharing authentic stories and experiences, we hope to break down stigma, promote understanding, and celebrate the self-discovery within healing.
Together, we’ll explore strategies, resources, and insights to support wellness, recovery, and leadership. Join us as we challenge stigma, celebrate autonomy, and normalize the healing journey.
Let’s build a community of understanding and empowerment—one conversation at a time.
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Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers
Sandy Skelaney (Part 2): Technology, Trauma, and How to Serve without Burning Out
How do we maintain our boundaries while still showing up authentically for those we serve? Sandy Skelaney, who's journeyed from frontline advocate to COO in anti-trafficking organizations, offers profound insights into this delicate balance.
On this episode, we touch on the psychological concepts of transference and countertransference. "You're connecting with your projection of what their experience is," Skelaney explains, highlighting how this prevents genuine connection and understanding.
Skelaney leads us to the topic of mindfulness: a practice for maintaining wellness and professional boundaries. She follows with an introduction to her current work with Parasol Cooperative and their AI digital assistant, Ruth, and how this advancement is helping professionals and survivors of human-trafficking alike.
The COO also offers invaluable wisdom for organizations working with survivor leaders and for survivor leaders themselves. She emphasizes the importance of thorough vetting, proper support systems, and clear boundaries.
Try Ruth for yourself or connect with Sandy's organization to explore partnerships that bring trauma-informed technology solutions to your community. Together, we can create spaces where both survivors and advocates thrive avoiding the constant sacrifice of wellness or boundaries.
Welcome to Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers, the podcast where we bring awareness, share stories, and promote healing-centered conversations for lived experience professionals and allies in the gender-based violence and recovery sectors.
I'm Shamin Brown, and together, we’ll explore strategies, resources, and insights to support wellness, recovery, and leadership. Join us as we challenge stigma, celebrate autonomy, and normalize the healing journey.
Thank you for joining us at Conversations with our Sisters Keeper Sandy Skelaney, in your professional journey you've come from frontline to COO. That's quite a learning curve and really explored so many different pockets of anti-trafficking, held multiple different duties so it wasn't even really that you're an advocate and you're growing as an advocate the whole way through. There's these other pieces that you were drawing yourself to and learning from really well-rounded experience and expertise. In that way. Welcome, sandy. We're so happy to have you here with us. Thanks so much for having me.
Shamin Brown:So I'm a feminist therapist, which means that we do use a lot of disclosure when we come from a perspective of Me Too and really lean into that feminist standpoint theory, where we're gathering the information from the marginalized standpoint and the therapist or researcher or practitioner is also coming from the same standpoint. When we think about what is the therapist-client relationship, it's stemming from research and different bodies of work, so I think that it's important to still have boundaries.
Sandy Skelaney:I think that it can be harmful to our own mental health to be overly attached. That's also this transference, countertransference issue.
Sandy Skelaney:And.
Sandy Skelaney:I'll explain what that is, because that's also a big word. The psychological term that basically is that people can identify, overly identify. So a patient can overly identify with a therapist, for example. They'll see in the therapist similar traits as their mother or something like that, and what that does is it causes a fuzzing of the boundaries, in that case transference. So what you see in that case is clients that'll be overly nurturing of you. They get overly protective of you. They'll call you in the middle of the night just to say hi, because they're seeing in you like a family member that they wish they had or some kind of unrepaired relationship. So they act in ways that are not that. There's not that boundary there.
Sandy Skelaney:The flip side of that is that you can also transfer back to them so you can see in them the you that you were when you were 16, you can see in them your niece or you can see in them whoever. You become emotionally attached to them in a way that's different than a professional boundary. You start assuming that you know what's going on with them. You assume you know what's in their head. You assume you know what's about to happen to them. And this is a big challenge that I see and something that I think that survivor advocates or any kind of advocate doing this work especially if you have had your own trauma history of any kind needs to be aware of. They need to be very mindful. You need to actually be able to understand and feel in your body when these things are happening so that you can be aware of them, and because what's happening then is that you're not actually connecting with that other person's experience. You're connecting with your projection of what their experience is or will be or was for you.
Shamin Brown:We need to have boundaries in our everyday relationships. And it's important to be mindful about how the relationship you're building is affecting the people you're building with Personally. I think that can also go beyond the therapist-client relationship.
Shamin Brown:Also, though, to worker, co-worker, mother, son, all of those things, because what ends up happening is, yeah, we see ourselves in them or some version of them, and then we start making assumptions about their lives and imposing our own values. We can see actually organizations doing that when they're creating programming here's the assumed needs and then when the actual needs are not matching with the assumed needs, they're saying you don't belong here, or it's a problem of the participant because they didn't do it right. I don't know. We got to shift, we got to change with relationship, we got to listen. In the context of that work, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity for decolonization, to marginalize populations who come from a different socioeconomic class and have different experiences. When we look at, for example, indigenous practices or African practices, we'll see the Ubuntu theory, which is based on community. The community sings your healing song, things like that. So, again, relational, same thing with Indigenous practices. We're looking at kinship models where we're treating each other as family and creating a community we have to bring communication and share our experiences.
Sandy Skelaney:Yeah, you're telling me this one thing, but I don't believe you because you're clearly a victim.
Sandy Skelaney:I believe that that didn't impact you, because it impacted me right. There's a lot of ways that this can come out, and and you're making some very good points, because, yes, I think that the Freudian type of old white man therapy, I think definitely can use a little shaking up. That's true, but it's also very fine tuning that needs to be done with. There's community, there's counseling, there's diving deep into trauma. There's a reason counselors, advocates they have this kind of role where they can have a more conversational back and forth type of community building, and therapists are supposed to get really deep. If you're providing trauma therapy, you're digging into some deep traumas therapy. You're digging into some deep traumas. You're entering this very raw exposed space. Anything that you put in there that shouldn't be there has a chance to corrupt it right, and so that's why therapists have very strict ethics about how they perform their therapies. Sometimes advocates try to dig into those very deep places of trauma too in the conversations they have with people they're working with.
Sandy Skelaney:At times I've seen it work fairly well.
Shamin Brown:Have you been one of those advocates or have you been on the other end?
Sandy Skelaney:Yeah, look. So, for whatever reason, young women like to talk to me about their stuff. I come across as somebody that won't be rattled by hearing like the worst story you can tell me.
Shamin Brown:Right, yes.
Sandy Skelaney:Like, I won't be judgmental, it's not going to shake me, I'm not going to cry. I've seen survivors we've worked with talk to volunteers or talk to somebody and share some powerful experiences with their trauma with them and stuff. And then the person the advocate or whoever it is that they're talking to, that's supposed to be in that professional role, starts crying and breaking down right, which is not matching the person who's telling them the story. It's overwhelming. The person who's telling the story and then the person who's telling the story and then the person who's telling the story, who is their experience, has to turn around and take care of the person they're talking to and manage their emotional reaction.
Shamin Brown:Which is there's therapeutic experience, if it's handled properly, because there's an opportunity to check in with clients and say, if you have self awareness: "this is what we've talked about, this is how we talked about it. This was a response they provided. How did this feel for you? Giving them an opportunity also to reflect on experiences that they've likely had in communities with other people that haven't created the space for them to process it. Again, I think, like, rupture and repair is really important in all relationships because it's an opportunity to check in and it's if you're creating the space for people to say: "let me know what doesn't feel okay and what does. I'm saying that they have an opportunity to go back, if they have enough self awareness. They've been triggered. They had this moment where they made a mistake. They go home they reflect on that. They come back to that client and say: "that wasn't appropriate. Then that's good because that teaches the clients too that they get to make mistakes.
Sandy Skelaney:f the appropriate way to respond after that happens. You made a mistake, you're human. It's a learning experience for everybody. That would be the appropriate response to that, but it can also cause damage to the client.
Shamin Brown:Absolutely.
Shamin Brown:Maintaining wellness. . What are some thoughts around maintaining wellness for you?
Sandy Skelaney:Mindfulness has been a lifesaver for me, and by mindfulness what I mean is a mindfulness practice and a grounding in what we call equanimity. Nothing is ever truly good or truly bad. It's how we see it. Even bad things have a powerful positive aspect to it, if you can find it. My grandmother died of pancreatic cancer, but in the time leading up to her death I was going up to help my mother take care of her. I've never had such a powerful experience of bonding with my own mother, of caretaking with my grandmother, having that ability to lie in bed with her, hear her tell me she loves me. I felt those things were really positive things that would never have happened if this bad experience didn't happen. And so being able to see situations for what they really are, the full understanding - not just the stuff that's triggering you, not just the stuff that you want to happen, the good stuff, but the whole thing, because everything's impermanent. All your feelings are impermanent, all your experiences are impermanent. You're going to grow.
Sandy Skelaney:I survived something so many years ago that my whole life is my experience. My whole life outside of trauma is the massive part of my life. This happens, for even if you're in trauma in the moment. This is the understanding of the situation. It's impermanent. There's all this other stuff in life that's going to happen and there's all these other things that have happened.
Sandy Skelaney:We get these stimuli from the external world and then your brain processes it without you being aware of it. That's when you're feeling your stomach get clenched up, you're feeling your vagus nerve is firing, you're getting a headache, you're feeling averse, you feel like you want to cling to it because it's a good feeling, or you feel like you want to push it away because it's causing negative. All of those things are feeling sensations that you're experiencing in your body. So we're actually reacting to those sensations. That's what we do on a normal basis, and it happens so fast that we're not aware of it. A mindfulness practice, which is oftentimes meditation or counting your breath and things like that, is just about being aware of your present moment, intentionally and non-judgmentally. So you're just taking in what's happening inside and outside my body without judgment and just looking at it for a second Can you give a recent example of what that looks like in actual practice, just for the audience.
Shamin Brown:If you might just explore a recent challenge that isn't too deep mind you, and how mindfulness was applied in that moment, or if there's more than one way that you would do that, then share that.
Sandy Skelaney:My favorite tool that can be looked up on YouTube or whatever it's called, the three-minute breathing space, say you have a difficult person in front of you, somebody that's just yelling or appearing aggressive or whatever. What you're feeling initially is you're either fight, flight or freeze. That's almost unconscious, and so we see it all around us. We see people are constantly on social media outraging.
Sandy Skelaney:I have to say that I apply mindfulness every single day every time I look at my social media and I'm writing a response to some terrible political, anti-immigrant, anti-lgbt or whatever it is going on the social medias and I'm like and I'm writing something back and then I stop, I catch myself, I take a few breaths. I say what is this situation for what it really? There's a person that's afraid that has probably clicked on too much clickbait. They're getting videos and content basically targeting them, feeding to them, pushing to them. So it's going to be more extreme, more misinformed, because the ideas are trying to capture your attention. Social media is like the anti-mindfulness they're trying to hijack your brain to get your attention and they're doing it by creating the illusion of danger where there isn't any or where there's very little, for example, this anti-immigrant stuff that's happening right now.
Sandy Skelaney:Research has consistently shown across the board for years American citizens are far more likely to commit violent crimes rape, murder, violent theft, all of these things than undocumented immigrants. Per capita, you're way more likely to be assaulted by somebody, probably if you're a woman and somebody that's a citizen. They're using that fear to get attention. Whoever is using it. There's not one person. It's a reinforcing loop now, but the algorithms. If you're clicking on a little bit of that. You're going to get more and more of that, because that's how the technology is coded, because they're just going to be giving you more of the things that are capturing your attention, and that fear of being raped by an undocumented immigrant becomes very strong. And then now, every time that somebody is from outside of the United States which is where I am your fear center in your brain is firing and it hijacks your ability to think logically but impacts your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that thinks, that can weigh it out and understand it. And so it is an intentional act, it's a mindful act to be able to see content that's posted and then actually think through, take a few breaths and say one who's posting it and why? Where is that coming from? If they're afraid of something, they've been hijacked by the algorithms. That's a big deal. And then, secondly, do I need to react to this? What do I need to react to? What's important for me to react to or not? What's the important message? Is this going to change anything or is this just going to create more conflict? That's going to suck up my time. It's going to suck up my mental space and my emotional energy.
Sandy Skelaney:A mindfulness practice. It's like working your muscles, weightlifting for your muscles. You actually have to meditate or do things that train your mind to be able to be aware of how your body sensations and what's happening in this moment. So you're not checking out, you're not disassociating, because you're stressed and you're like I'm going to dissociate. So you're not checking out, you're not disassociating, because you're stressed and you're like, oh, I'm gonna dissociate, I'm gonna write back, I'm gonna react. That's how we do it, right. We keep mindlessly reacting because we're outraged, because what we're seeing is affecting us personally. We feel attacked, and so that person posting is afraid and feeling hurt, attacked, unsafe or whatever, and that's why they're posting. And then I'm feeling that way because I'm reading this and I feel like the whole world is anti me, and so I'm going to be reacting. The way that you combat that is you take a pause.
Shamin Brown:Mm, hmm, I call that pin with my clients. Actually it's so interesting. It's pause, inhale notice.
Sandy Skelaney:That's so interesting. It's pause, inhale, notice. That's mindfulness practice. You take a few breaths deep and you notice your breathing and then you become aware of what's happening in your body. You become intentionally aware of how your stomach's feeling, how your throat's feeling, all of those things, and then you can assess from a different perspective. This is how I'm feeling. What is my thinking? I'm feeling hurt. Why are you feeling hurt? Why is that nobody, person that you don't care about able to hurt you? So that comes from something deeper. So you can take it real deep if you want, because that's all part of therapy later. But there's a reason why you're reacting. You can feel those things, you can name those things. You're not trying to stop that, but you should be aware that's an impermanent feeling. Maybe it got triggered by this thing.
Shamin Brown:I like to think of our emotions as cues, cues for change, cues for possibility for responding, reacting to something. What is that emotion telling you? Sometimes I'm worried that I'm not going to have enough money for such and such. All right, great, now you can start a savings plan. It gives us information to work with. Unfortunately, when we are not able to practice mindfulness in good ways and regulate ourselves and become self-aware, we're actually just using that information to inform our next action, instead of to really inform our relational actions, our future actions, something that is going to move us towards an outcome that is not harmful for ourselves or others.
Sandy Skelaney:And if you want to respond, if that issue is something that's important to you in general, there might be better ways to focus on that, to get your message heard, and then you can control the narrative. So now you're taking it from a point of not having any control and just reacting like an amoeba right, like we're just react, react. We don't need to do that. We can just reframe it and say I'm going to use my feed and I'm going to create this educational content or whatever, and I'm going to do it in a way that I can control, that I feel safe with. And that's different.
Sandy Skelaney:So that's social media. If you're in front of a person, you take your little pin break, you can leave the room if you need to, or you, just right in front of them, pause, take a few breaths. You don't need to fill every space in the conversation. You don't need to fill up the time. You don't need to react every time somebody says anything. You can actually sit there for a minute and then you can have a thoughtful response that's compassionate towards you but also compassionate and empathetic towards the other person, because maybe now you've gotten a little bit of insight. That person might not have been acting great, but it's probably not about you.
Shamin Brown:With what's going on in the States. How does that affect your wellness at work and at home? Because it's not just like oh, this job is hard and it affects my wellness. Sometimes it's like my partner is a terrible human being and now I got to go to work and feel like this or, in your case, like society is crumbling.
Sandy Skelaney:I really credit my mindfulness practice for this. From the way that I can respond to this stuff Now. It's very scary in a lot of ways because I feel that there's a lot of people being hurt. My heart is going out to the people that are very impacted in this very short-term moment, 100%. That said, we're doing a lot of outraging also, and so it's confusing time. How much are we supposed to be flaring up right now? And so it's confusing time. How much are we supposed to be flaring up right now? And so what's happening is the new administration comes in. This is part of their strategy to completely demoralize the other side, to completely make us feel 100% defeated. That's the goal. They're also going to push as much boundary as they can to see what they can get away with, to see how much they can push, to see how much they can change.
Sandy Skelaney:I've been lucky enough to be in the public affairs department. My expertise right now is public administration, government basically. So I understand that all the things that are being said, that they're being done right now, are not necessarily going to be policies that can stick or that may or may not stick, but we don't know yet. For example, there was a immediate pause on funding for victim services. I think that there's useful information out there that says okay, if this is a thing, if they're being paused, this is going to be the possible consequences to be prepared for this. That's useful information. But what's really hard to see and to witness is let's get really super outraged about this. It's going to affect all these victim services programs. It will, it would.
Sandy Skelaney:But if you look at it realistically, congress has already approved this funding. They've already approved these mandates and these programs and things like that, which means that they can't, by law, actually just take it away like this. That's not going to happen. It's going to get challenged in court, maybe down the line.
Sandy Skelaney:If, for some reason, the Supreme Court just wants to green light absolutely everything that happens right now with the new administration and their executive orders and all that stuff, then that's going to be problematic. I can't imagine that it's going to be as extreme as we think. In that way it's scary, but I'm more concerned about the mental health of the people doing the good work, because we're going to burn out if we keep reacting all the time to everything, and that's what they want. And, by the way, the pause on funding. That was one day and they rescinded it yesterday. They realized you can't really do that. It's so important for us to try to think with a clear mind as much as we can during these times, because a lot of these things are not going to stick, or they're not going to stick in the way that you think, or they're going to just take a long time in court. Let's prepare ourselves for the big battles, the long haul.
Shamin Brown:What has helped you most in your professional journey? Sandy, you talked a little bit about wellness and some of the challenges there social media, governmental changes all of the fun things. What helps you the most in your growth as a professional?
Sandy Skelaney:I'm infinitely curious about the world, about how it works, about how people work, about growth. I'm a problem solver and a strategist. I actually rank really high on problem solving and strategy in various tests that I've taken. I'm not going to be the person that's just going to be the better and better version of the one thing that I am.
Shamin Brown:That's not going to happen.
Sandy Skelaney:Hey, I'm too old for this, I'm too old to go back for my PhD. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in those limitations. I just think that if we want to see and participate in the world and make the world better in any little way that we can or grow for ourselves, we just keep learning, keep growing, keep exploring, keep trying to solve the problems of the world, trying to figure out how to do that.
Shamin Brown:Keep going and keep growing. I like it. Go for it. I want to ask you, what are you doing now in terms of your career, but also programs and projects? Who is Sandy Scalini today? What is the work that she's doing and how could people help? How can people support that work?
Sandy Skelaney:I'm really excited right now to be introducing the work that my organization, Parasol Cooperative the work that they're doing with the technology. I consider myself like a bridge between all the advocates. I have a lot of relationships and partnerships that I've built up over the years and so now I'm circling back around to everybody and I'm saying, guys, we need to get with the picture. There's a hundred ways that you can be abused online. Every client that we work with pretty much has experienced some kind of digital threat or digital harm using through their devices or in the online space. Threat or digital harm using through their devices or in the online space, and advocates are just not trained in how to work on technology issues at all. We need to level up the game. I absolutely love being a part of the organization where I'm on the product teams helping to do user testing, helping the technologists to understand how people would actually use it, how advocates would use this tool, how survivors would use this tool. What I'm talking about is Ruth. Ruth is our generative AI digital assistant. You can engage on our website for free with Ruth and that's just going in and having conversation and Ruth helps you identify and navigate situations of abuse like domestic violence, human trafficking. Technology facilitated abuse and can do everything from helping you just guide you through identification, validating what you're going through and what your feelings are steps to take to get out of a situation. For example, steps to take if you're curious about how to collect evidence so that you can maybe, down the line, be able to put the charges up against your abuser. Maybe not now, Right. There's all these little tiny case use cases for this technology, but you ask questions in a conversational way and it responds to you in a trauma informed manner. It's survivor centered and built and doesn't collect any user data. We don't need to train the AI. You don't even need your email to get into it. One of the things that I really love is introducing it to advocates, because they can learn how to create digital safety plans. How do you stay safe? Where's your money? Where are you keeping your stuff? Where's your go bag? Who are your safe people?
Sandy Skelaney:We know how to create these safety plans working with people in the field, but we don't really know how to say I think I'm being cyber-stalked. How does an advocate know how to sit with a survivor and tell them how to go through their phone and determine whether they're being cyber-stalked and what steps to take to mitigate that and which apps they should do two-factor authentication on, and things like that. We don't really have a great understanding of that, and so the tool that we've created in a trauma-informed way, can walk survivors or parents or advocates or pretty much anybody through the process of creating a plan, asking you about your devices, asking you where your compromise and vulnerabilities might be and what to do about all of these things, how to identify if somebody's got a stalkerware on your phone, whatever it is. The feedback that we've gotten from so many people already has just been amazing. In fact, several people have said that they've gotten better advice from our technology than they have from actual human beings. That's awesome.
Sandy Skelaney:It's important for us to be connected to humans, but what I see with this tool is that this is like a force multiplier for advocates. You put our tool together with an advocate and they can create information in 90 plus languages without even having to know the language. Give them information about abuse and things like that in whatever language they want it in. They can be very fluent in all the digital safety stuff and it's instantaneous information for them. This is a new world, right. There's extortion, there's deep fakes, there's all kinds of stuff going on and we need to deal with it. That's what I'm really excited about right now.
Shamin Brown:I love that. Yeah, I liked it. I shared it with a couple advocates and experts and they got some positive feedback. They were definitely impressed by the content and how it responded to their questions and the accuracy of a lot of the information that was provided. I'm a resource sharer. I love to connect people, places, things.
Sandy Skelaney:So that's my happy place.
Shamin Brown:So Parasol is doing some other things as well with organizations around gender-based violence, or has done. Can you share the cold notes of some of those things, those programs?
Sandy Skelaney:We do have a client relationship manager software, so a CRM that we built for a victim services organization specifically and that's called Safe Connect, and that one it's still pretty new. We're just launching it with our first organizations now. So we are looking for organizations small organizations to onboard and we're giving a lot of support to be able to do it at no or low cost.
Shamin Brown:So can we define small? And also, is it US folks that you're looking for, or from anywhere across the world?
Sandy Skelaney:We're primarily focused on the US, but I don't know if there's some Canadian organizations we might be able to work with them, just because probably the language capability that it's in English right now.
Shamin Brown:And how are we defining small? When we say small organizations, it's in English right now?
Sandy Skelaney:And how are we defining small when we say small organizations? So right now, in this phase, it's like our beta phase. I don't think it would be a good idea to download a thousand records. We're just starting out, we want to get it out there, we want to be able to test it and make sure it's working the right way, get your feedback and also provide that kind of one-on-one support with you to make sure that it's serving your needs. If you're working with a hundred clients or something like that, that's probably fine. That's a good, that's a good size. And I think there's a lot of organizations that are kind of we're using Excel or we got Salesforce, but we have no idea why the hell we did, because it's so confusing and difficult to use and we only have a hundred clients. There's organizations that don't really have the funding to be able to afford like a full CRM and they're still just trying to like piece the pieces of notes together and things like that Nonprofit organizations only, or also for profit, that you would work with?
Sandy Skelaney:I don't, I don't think it matters as far as who uses our CRM, but as far as the extra kind of financial support that we would give for you to have access to it for a year, that would be available for nonprofits.
Shamin Brown:And is there any incentives? Maybe is what I want to call it I'm not sure you probably have a better word for me than that but related to engaging lived experience companies, organizations, things like that.
Sandy Skelaney:I'm also head of partnerships, so if anybody wants to get more involved with what we're doing, is interested in learning more, wants a quick demo, anything like that, just shoot me an email and we can schedule a time. We're really very collaborative. We're very interested in collaborating. Especially, we have several discussions going with large organizations about how they're going to use our AI integrated into their work, either internally or on their websites, things like that, maybe as a collaborative thing where it fits into somebody else's technology that they're also developing.
Sandy Skelaney:There's a lot of different ways that we can talk about partnerships. We absolutely 100% would love as much user testing as possible. Try to break it and as survivor lived experience experts out there, the voice and the understanding and the insight from you is so important. That said, we also understand that we are on shoestrings right now and so we don't at this moment have a fund to be able to fund and pay for user testing. So right now, it's just, if you're curious and you want to try it out, please give us some feedback on the submit feedback form, because it will be really helpful. But the intention is that we're going to be able to actually fund survivors and lived experience experts to be able to help do more robust user testing on our technologies as well.
Shamin Brown:So some of the ways that folks can become engaged with you is through user testing, directing some more funding your way exploring partnerships. Funding your way exploring partnerships, whether that be embedding the apps on their websites or looking at alternative ways just various partnerships.
Sandy Skelaney:We have our CRM, we have the AI tool. We also do training on digital safety, outreach and events presentations, conferences, like the whole thing that everybody does.
Shamin Brown:And how would someone get ahold of you if they wanted any of that?
Sandy Skelaney:Go onto our website and connect with us through our website. Perfect Love it Thank you, it'll come to me. It'll come to me yeah.
Shamin Brown:We talked a little bit earlier during this interview about organizations, some of the challenges that present themselves in implementing trauma informed practices, but also some of the successes and some of the changes that you've been able to make and ways that you've attempted to support not just lived experience staff but other staff within your organization, creating those safe spaces for people. What advice would you give to organizations that work with survivor leaders? I have a lot of advice to give to them.
Sandy Skelaney:I think we've established that majority of the people that are going to be working in victim services organizations have experienced trauma of some sort. So the whole organization should be geared to be trauma-informed, like we were talking about in the beginning, and I think that's super important. I think if you're working in the anti-trafficking field, it is important to bring on survivor leaders, lived experience experts. One of the errors that organizations often do is just kind of we'll just hire anybody who's a survivor because we have to check the box. That can be very challenging if people are not in a space where they've been able to heal enough from their own traumas, and this goes for really anybody, to be honest, that works in the organization. But I'm saying it specifically for trafficking because I think that hiring managers, people that are doing the hiring, will maybe overlook a lot of red flags, because they just want to check that box.
Sandy Skelaney:There's also a sense of that. We want to understand that this is somebody in a healing journey and so we also want to support and so where's that line between where somebody is in the healing journey, where it's actually disruptive and more harmful to clients, and to the staff and to the team and to everybody, team and to everybody, or where it's just a process that can, with the proper support, somebody can end up being a very empowering individual on the team.
Sandy Skelaney:You can't always predict. There are some serious mental health issues out there that I have encountered where teammates have tried to sabotage our team because it's a mental health issue. It's not like you're doing a psychological test before people show up, but it can be incredibly damaging. I think that if you're hiring in any kind of organization that's working with victims of trauma, you really need to have an understanding of whether your staff is grounded, whether they align with your values around how you work, around being trauma-informed in the workplace, around whether they are able to effectively work in teams if they're going to be overly triggered or crossing boundaries or having transference and counter-transference happening, and so you really need to do maybe extra training on that, extra mentoring on that. How much of your story is helpful to the client and how much of it becomes too much about you. Those kinds of questions are not always easy to answer and it actually requires mindfulness on the part of the storyteller, because you're supposed to be picking up on the cues the non-verbals about when this is maybe like a little helpful tidbit, or maybe when you're making it about you Mentoring any staff member. Really, that's working with clients, working with survivors of trafficking.
Sandy Skelaney:There have to be discussions. How were things handled in this particular case? What kind of conversations did you have with your clients? How did you feel about them? How could it have been done better? Those kinds of conversations are very rare, intentional conversations about sharing personal stuff with clients. How is this?
Shamin Brown:done in a way that can be managed effectively and empowering.
Sandy Skelaney:How can this work? How do you know when you're feeling triggered and what are the strategies that you can use to help yourself while you're working in this Training, supervisory support, mentoring, being very intentional about creating policies around media using survivors, survivors. Speaking to the media, I can't even begin to tell you how many times I see social media accounts where organizations post pictures of survivors, even if their backs turned and stuff, and I'm just like no, we shouldn't be asking them for anything, because if we're helping them, then we've already created a power imbalance in the relationship. They may feel like they owe us, or they may be trained to think that they should owe us through their upbringing or whatever, and they might even feel grateful and want to give back because they feel all this overwhelming gratitude. None of those are good reasons to share your story.
Shamin Brown:Yeah, I agree and what I'm hearing, those are common concerns amongst survivor leaders who are new in advocacy. You spoke about not hiring any survivor leader to just check the box, but I think one reason that organizations might do that is because those folks haven't yet developed their professional voice, their professional values. They're not going to self-advocate. They don't have the same boundaries. They're much more malleable. It's much easier to get someone to say what the organization needs to be said when they don't have yet their own fully formed thoughts, ideas, beliefs around this issue. They're still growing, they're still learning. I think another piece of this, though, is when we think about the term survivor leaders. Again, I do not just mean folks that are exiting. I am a survivor leader. You're not helping me when I come to work for your organization. I've helped myself.
Shamin Brown:When we think about survivor leaders on that continuum from maybe still being actively engaged in that lifestyle, but participating in certain research and other initiatives, to being your own self-sufficient founder of whatever right. We've got folks like Rachel Lloyd. We've got folks like Cassandra Diamonds in Ontario that run their own organizations that serve people. They are also survivor leaders, so it's something that I think is like really valuable to think about how are we defining survivor leaders? Because that might be why some of those gaps are missing in the workplace as well. Perhaps because they're professionals, they're not survivor leaders. We don't see them that way anymore, and so then we don't always provide the right supports for them. Because, yes, absolutely, survivor leaders that are in early care. We want to see them have pre-employment, we want to see them have informed consent. We want to make sure that we're respecting dignity, worth and respect. But what does that look like later on for survivor leaders? That's. My next question for you is what advice would you give to survivor leaders?
Sandy Skelaney:In my experience of kind of supporting survivors and also being a friend to any lived experience experts, I think that speaking out publicly is a much bigger decision than people actually give it. So my advice would be, if you're intending to come out in public and declare yourself as your identity, as a survivor doing this work, you don't have to. I've worked with survivors. I've had former clients that ended up working with us as advocates. Never and I protected them inside the organization from being identified as a survivor. They just did the work. They just did amazing work with the clients that we had. So you don't have to, don't ever feel like that's your only value, because it's not your only value and it's not going to be your biggest value value and it's not going to be your biggest part of your identity when your life, many years from now, it's going to be so much more than just that. And so why limit yourself to that, to your story? I just feel like a lot of survivor leaders or lived experience experts maybe limit themselves and they tell their story and that's it, and I think that's maybe a part of the healing process to see that they have more to give. But the other piece of that is that there's a real consequence of being out there. It does follow you around. People do underestimate you. They won't hire you for other jobs. Listen, even being in the field as not identifying as a survivor leader, being in this field long enough has meant that I've been basically pigeonholed in this field. Right yeah, jobs outside of this field, because it's like this is it, this is what you're good at. Don't limit yourself to that.
Sandy Skelaney:The other thing when you're speaking in public, if you're on stage keynote presentations, whatever people want to give you hugs after, they want to love on you, all of those things.
Sandy Skelaney:Everybody's got their different experience with that, I'm sure, and how you react to that.
Sandy Skelaney:Personally, when I see that, I get very cringed out because a lot of times they just feel like they can come up and hug you and touch you.
Sandy Skelaney:What I see oftentimes happening is out of politeness, the boundaries aren't being set, that survivor leaders are just doing it, but I can see in their face that they really don't want to. Or they get these questions asked of them that are personal and public, and I can see that makes them uncomfortable and that they're trying to hedge around it and try to figure out a way to answer the question and I just think that, being very clear that those boundaries are so important, and that's totally OK. I want you to feel like you can set that, because it's OK to do it and you should do it. And you should think very carefully about what you will say, what you won't say, before you give any kind of talk or interview or anything. You give any kind of talk or interview or anything, and how you are going to stop questions or how you're going to get around questions that you don't want to answer, how you're going to navigate that before you're in the situation.
Shamin Brown:Yes, yeah. So, knowing the risks of disclosing, making sure that you're informed, making sure that you're prepared and you know what you're comfortable speaking about in advance and what you're not having boundaries and embracing your inner fire, is there a message of encouragement or guidance that you would give to folks who are still fairly early in their recovery journey?
Sandy Skelaney:No, the work that you have to do is the hardest work and also the one that we want to avoid. No, the work that you have to do is the hardest work and also the one that we want to avoid, and a lot of times, the avoidance of that work is masked by helping other people, by wanting to go out there and talk about what happened to you, by wanting to rescue all the other girls.
Shamin Brown:And I think that that serves as a distraction from actually doing your own healing.
Sandy Skelaney:So make sure that your timing's right to invest in helping others and really just take the time to learn and love yourself before you do that? Is that what I'm hearing? Healing is also helping other people, but far too often helping other people replaces your healing, and it can't, it shouldn't do that, because then you're not going to do the other person any good either.
Shamin Brown:I've had a lot of bosses that haven't disclosed any real severe, extreme, violent, gender-based type trauma, but they're carrying something and they're carrying it into the workplace and they're carrying it into their relationships and they're carrying it in their bodies. You can see it, you can hear it in their tone of voice, you can see it in the way they self-regulate and the way they manage stress, and that and it affects the people that they're working with and the people that are relying on them for safety, and oftentimes with complete lack of awareness about it. Even being there, we don't see that self-awareness and that focus on personal wellness in order to become professionally effective and profound. One of the things we like to ask folks at the end of our interviews is if there's anyone that you want to give a shout out to. We would love to celebrate our sister's keeper.
Sandy Skelaney:I have. I've known so many people that deserve a shout out in my in my years in this field, honestly. But I'm going to give my shout out to Shanika Ampa, who runs Guiding Light Outreach. I've just seen very few people be able to do as much as this woman can do, honestly. She's a survivor leader. She's a phenomenal speaker.
Sandy Skelaney:She has worked in several different organizations as survivor advocate. She runs her own kind of very small nonprofit to raise awareness, to do, and she does a lot of presentations with youth and kids. And she's a nurse. She has a big family. She's basically done so many things with her life and in this field I also feel like she can use more support for her organization. Shanika is very real, very amazing person, very fun to be around, energetic and filled with passion and able to communicate and cross all these different bridges with different types of professionals, which is oftentimes very hard for people with experiences of trauma to do. Right like she can easily navigate in and out of law enforcement spaces, in and out of hospitals and health care settings. She's fierce and somehow manages to be able to take care of people but also run her business at the same time, so it's very inspiring. I think that she needs more funding for her organization.
Sandy Skelaney:I think, that's because of it. It's very grassroots. She's a blessing for our community. I think that piece of it it's very grassroots. She's a blessing for our community.
Shamin Brown:Awesome. Thank you so much for that shout out, for sharing a little bit information about her, and thank you for your own story and your own time today. And thank you to the audience for joining us at Conversations with our sisters. Keeper Sandy Scalini. We're really happy to have you here, sandy. Thanks for having me.
Sandy Skelaney:It was a pleasure.
