Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

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In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, David and Ruth offer a very personal look at relationship dynamics when one partner is a survivor. In response to a request from a survivor to explore this topic, David & Ruth share their personal challenges and rewards of navigating historical abuse. What does living with and partnering with a survivor really look like emotionally and behaviorally? How does one learn to honor and respect the emotional implications historical abuse has inside relationships?
Ruth and David talk about

• how David learned about and honored the impact of Ruth's earlier abuse in their relationship and co-parenting
• how Ruth's openness about her trauma and her advocacy for the voices of survivors has deepened and enriched David's work.
• strategies for both survivors and for those who live, love and work with them about how to navigate trauma, trauma content, trauma emotions and trauma behaviors in a healthy and responsible way that improves trust and collaboration.
• how David's personal internal work assisted him in learning the principles of how to partner with survivors

This discussion is truly the place where personal meets professional and is an intimate behavioral look at how partnering looks and feels in relationship and in practice.

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

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In this second installment of the multi-part minisode series on worker safety and well-being, Ruth and David explore the important topic of workers being targeted by domestic violence perpetrators. In a few minutes , David & Ruth discuss different ways workers are targeted including:

• Manipulation, intimidation and bullying
• Threats of or actual lawsuits and complaints lodged with managers, professional boards, or courts
• Implied or real threats against family members
• Stalking (online or in real life)

Ruth & David also discuss how misogyny, racism or other forms of discrimination can be factors in the targeting of workers.

David & Ruth finish the brief episode with specific suggestions about basic safety and support strategies that agencies can put in place to respond to the behaviors of perpetrators. These include:

• Explicitly widen out the concept of worker safety to include intimidation, manipulation, not just explicit threats or acts of violence
• Make this wider definition of worker safety a regular part, preventative (not reactive) supervision in cases
• Ensure that staff that handle client complaint or review boards are educated around coercive control and pattern based assessments
• Performance reviews and human resources procedures need to be consider the impact of threats and intimidation on a worker's performance

About the worker safety and well-being minisode series
The goal of the series is to address the critical issues of worker safety and well-being as a critical aspect of domestic violence-informed systems. This is a series for frontline staff across child protection, mental health and addiction, courts and other systems. We hope it will validate their experiences. This is also a series for human resources managers and organizational leadership. Setting policies and procedures to address worker emotional & professional safety in the context of domestic violence cases is essential to creating a domestic violence-informed agency.

Topics in the series include:

• When workers are targeted by the perpetrator of one of the clients
• The connection between worker safety in engaging perpetrators and mother-blaming practice.
• When workers are being targeted by their own perpetrator (through the workplace and at home)
• When workers own experience of abuse are triggered by their work with families
• Managing your own fears, as the worker, about the safety of the family.

Listen to the introduction to the series
Read the Safe & Together Institute’s white paper on worker safety
Take an online course on worker safety related to domestic violence

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Intervening with perpetrators, who are the source of the harm to child, partner and family functioning, is essential for domestic violence-informed systems. In this episode, David & Ruth talk about the third principle of the Safe & Together Model which focuses on intervening with the perpetrator to reduce risk and harm to children.  The conversation covers:

• the importance of a broad defintion of "accountability" 
• how micro -practices around language and documentation are the foundation of accountability in a  domestic violence-informed  system 
• how tradition definitions of perpetrator accountability can contribute to racial inequity in the response of systems 
• how practitioners can increase their capacity to keep the focus on the perpetrator and change (and away from a "failure-to-protect" approach) 

Join us on January 13-14 2022 for our fully virtual Europe/North America Safe & Together Model Conference .  Go to our website and check out our events page to learn more and to register. 

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In this episode of "Partnered with a Survivor," David and Ruth dive into the huge topic of professionals and their emotional safety and trauma as it intersects with working domestic abuse and child maltreatment. As professionals we all bring experiences and bias into our work, and some of those include our experiences of abuse and violence. Addressing the benefits, challenges and nuances that brings to our work is part of doing the work and increases safety and retention of workers. How does trauma and the judgements we make or the protective patterns of behaviors we adopt impact us in our daily work? Challenges for engagement, documentation, retention and the health and well being of workers are addressed from this lens of what we bring with our own experiences into our professional lives. How trauma needs to be addressed to create sustainability and safety for workers and better outcomes for victims and survivors. Ruth speaks about trauma overlaying on to our experiences both professionally and personally and that part of creating a safe and comfortable professional disclosure is creating a culture which keeps perpetrators and their choices in our view as the cause of that trauma. David & Ruth discuss how important it is to create organizational and system cultures that give permission for professionals to explore those experiences and their effects on their practice without judgement and with the acknowledgment that not all trauma impacts us negatively but can help us bring a sense of empathy and create a safe space for those who we work with. The book Trauma Stewardship by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky is highlighted as a resource both for individuals, professionals and systems.

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."