Possible Actions:

• Design curriculum to help learners recognize and explore middle-ground and learn more about how to learn and their own patterns of learning.
  
  
• Emphasize forms of recognition of progress which help learners to see the value of daily work, ego portfolios.
  
  
• Support learners to understand the role of routine and guide them in creating their own routines which work for them.
  
  
• Experiment with a mentor program so that learners can support each other in the process of staying in for the “long haul.”
  
  
• Provide support for learners in crisis and support groups to help learners look at their sense of themselves especially as their identity shifts.
  
  
• Conduct class or group discussions on the role of “failure” in learning, to help make visible that learning requires making mistakes. Encourage learners to establish a new relationship with making mistakes and to define for themselves what success looks like.

Trust and Boundaries

Trust, or the attention required to assess whether it is safe to trust, is another of the issues which workers and counselors spoke about as taking up energy and impeding the learners' presence in the program. One worker suggested that the energy expended to check out whether a person was trustworthy added time to the learning process. A survivor described the problem as more profound:

The first thing I learned, in a long list of strategies to survive my childhood, was not to trust anybody. The second thing I learned was not to trust myself. (Danica, 1996, p.17)

If you cannot trust yourself then you cannot figure out whether to trust others because your gut or instinct is not to be relied upon - so you cannot know who to trust and who not to trust. You can also have problems with knowing whether to I trust your own sense of danger. Therapists used the term hypervigilance to refer to the level of alertness that survivors may use to observe the tensions in a room. Many survivors I interviewed spoke of this alertness as valuable and argued that if such sensitivity could be learned without the pain usually associated with it, it would be a wonderful asset.

Herman talks about how the lack of trust that a survivor may feel can lead eventually to abusive interactions:

Herman seems to assume that the therapist always has benign intentions and that the survivor is wrong in her judgments. However, her words do alert literacy workers: to continually question whether we are being trustworthy, and whether our behavior in any way replicates abuse because we have authority.