Serving Those Around Us

One of my favorite parts of this class was learning how to serve those who came to share with us. Trauma is not an easy thing to talk about, and it has so many long lasting effects - effects that are different from person to person. Each person that came to speak with us had a different outlook on what had happened to them and a unique way of sharing their story. It is an extremely vulnerable to thing to do what these incredible people did. As a class, we did our best to serve them by making them feel comfortable in the space - I think that's the best thing you can do for someone who is telling you something difficult. We tried to do this by listening intently to everything they had to say. Another way that we learned to serve them was to ask questions about their lives after they shared with us. It seems to make a person feel so much more comfortable to know that people really do care enough to ask, and it takes them out of the hot seat a little bit when others have follow up questions after the person finishes sharing a traumatic experience. Lastly, we worked hard on the monologues to try and do these stories justice. We wanted to respect the speakers who came into our class, so we took hours to prepare for this performance and do our best. Hopefully the guests felt served through this process, because we definitely were blessed by their stories.