Our vision, mission and values: why we're here

Another core group session has passed and our community is growing: returning folk, folk we haven't seen for a while, folk we've never met before. The range makes the work all the richer and we love it.

Speaking of range - it feels like a good time to be reflecting on where the precise need for RAT came from. There are loads of theatre companies, community groups, arts-in-health charities, that work with in some way marginalised, disenfranchised, traumatised groups of people. Many of these organisations are utterly brilliant: they change our cultural landscape, they save lives. So what do we need another one for?

These organisations typically group people together either according to the nature of their lived experience (e.g. domestic abuse, homelessness, the criminal justice system), or of the symptoms that have developed out of their trauma (e.g. addictions, eating disorders, depression). This specificity can be crucial, especially when someone is still in the throws of the problem and needs really practical advice, or to focus on tackling dangerous coping strategies before they do them serious harm. Building a reputation as experts on an issue that is widely recognised as a societal problem can also make it easier for people to know how to find you - whether for help for themselves, or to commission you for pieces of work.

Nevertheless, this comes with limits, especially as people move out of immediate or emergency need and onto making discoveries, decisions and setting directions for their lives beyond their trauma. When your creative life, source of care, social circles and identity are built around the experience that traumatised you, or the symptoms that came from it, it can be very difficult to see anything about yourself as separate from that context. There is absolutely nothing wrong with continuing to care about people who have been through very similar things to you, to want to give back, and to continue to find solace in those spaces. But having the chance alongside that to explore post-traumatic growth with people from totally different experiences, and find that you get each other in the same way, can really fit more pieces into the puzzle for a lot of us.

It’s the factor of “getting each other” that makes all survivor spaces so valuable. Trauma rewires the brain, and for many of us, it makes huge, palpable changes to how we see the world and relate to those in it. There is enormous pain in this - but also enormous potential to inform and influence how survivors are supported, welcomed and valued in society, and the social and cultural changes needed to prevent avoidable traumatisation in the first place. By bringing people together as survivors, we work from a place of vulnerable strength, and can make the case for trauma-conscious cultures everywhere - not just when working in homelessness, or recovery, or abuse, or other circles of specific experiences.

And that’s how it has to be. Because we can never know what experiences are held in any space we occupy - so it isn't enough to be trauma-conscious when we know that somebody has experienced this or that. When one advocates for trauma-conscious practice as a service for a specific group of people, it can easily be perceived as something only needed when working with that specific group of people. But trauma-consciousness is a way of life, and one that only survivors can truly lead.

Many reading this will rightly be thinking, the diversity of experience I am talking about can be found in existing survivor spaces as well: an ex-millionaire and a care leaver can both experience homelessness; someone leaving prison and someone fleeing domestic violence can both be in addiction recovery. Some migrants arrived yesterday and have nothing but the clothes on their backs; some have been here for decades and have built a stable life. But, when measuring need according to the experience, some survivors may become higher priorities for certain types of support than others - and although this can be legitimate, it can also foster hierarchies of trauma that separate us rather than unite us (“you aren't sleeping on the street, so she’s more homeless than you”; “you weren't born with your condition, so he’s more disabled than you”; “you were abused decades ago, so they're hurting more than you”). Trauma is not mathematical or linear or quantifiable in this way. As survivors, we all have times when we urge to give and times when we need to take, and the timings of these shifts are often totally illogical. By serving survivors, purely as survivors, we can honour that.

Finally, by specifying no further than “trauma survivors”, we can support people without demanding that they wear the cause and/or results of their trauma on their sleeves. We don't censor this information if people want to give it, but we don't demand it either. We know very little about the backgrounds of some of the survivors we meet, yet by communicating with them through creativity and metaphor and play, we quickly feel we know them very well. It is communication on this level that allows us to sense each other as equals, that stops us wanting to compare ourselves competitively, that highlights our shared goals and our shared respectful curiosity about our differences. This is the realm in which minds can be changed and we re-evaluate what we consider to be possible. It’s the realm of post-traumatic growth - and the realm of the most impactful theatre.

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With that, I am proud to present you with the vision, mission and values statements on which our core group agreed in our last session:

Vision

A world in which trauma survivors are

the authorities on our own pasts,

the agents of our own futures,

and artists for our collective present.

In other words: we are working towards the end of survivors being questioned on their experiences. The end of survivors told the limits of what they are capable of in their lives to come. The end of being spoken for in the survivor stories that get told on our stages. The normalisation of listening genuinely, asking the right questions, encouraging ambition, and handing over the microphone.

Mission

To equip and platform survivors to lead

on how stories like ours are portrayed,

and found creative languages

through which our skills, talents and unique perspectives

can be admired, respected and sought after.

In other words: we want to give survivors the specialised support that many need, and that traditional arts training and creation spaces don't provide, to find their artistic voices with greater joy than suffering - so they can sustain their artistic and activist presence to the point where various sections of society actively want to work with us on the issues that matter to us, rather than seeing survivor engagement as a tokenistic virtue signal.

Values

Integrity,

Compassion,

Respect,

Affirmation,

Courage.

We commit to practising what we preach, and owning up to it when we fall short of that. We meet people where they are, actively avoid making assumptions, and believe that all are approaching us from a good place until we have reason to believe otherwise. We assume that survivors can do things rather than assuming they can't, and are enthusiastically open to the different versions of achievement that will come out of that. We do not shy away from the work that needs to be done, even if it is the hardest work to get off the ground.

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With these in place, we can pursue co-creation with a solid foundation that will keep us on track at all times, even with many voices at play.

Wish us luck!