As a kid, I was often accused of lacking common sense and being stupid or lazy. The world was presented to me as a series of dichotomies: you’re either right or wrong, smart or stupid, good or bad. But despite feeling like a good kid, I was frequently told I wasn’t. In recent times, I’ve realized how little room those binaries left for empathy, which often exists in those murky, shifting areas outside of absolute certainty.
Trauma can look like many things, but in almost all cases, it changes the brain. It reorients us toward survival, often without our conscious permission. Think about it this way: the brain stem, at the back of our necks, controls basic life functions, and as you move over the parietal lobe and towards the frontal lobe, the brain progressives from the primitive, instinctive parts that scream ‘fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop’ toward the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning, reflection, and connection live. Trauma reactions activate the instinctive survival part of the brain, which in turn shuts down the reasoning part of your brain. Empathy – from others or from ourselves – helps reopen that pathway. It tells the brain it’s safe enough to return to curiosity, connection, and choice.
Learning empowers us to effect change. It lessens the sense that we are at the mercy of a cruel, senseless world and allows us have agency – a sense of control that trauma often erodes. Everything we learn is necessarily different from what we already knew, so learning itself involves change – and what benefits survivors of trauma is specifically having the power to decide what that change is. It can mean changing our circumstances from traumatic ones to empowering ones, our experiences from shameful ones to empathy-driven ones, and our fear into understanding.
Recognizing this has shaped how I approach tutoring, because I know from lived experience that learning only really happens when people feel safe – not just physically but emotionally safe to guess, to be wrong, and to laugh at mistakes.
So, I pay attention to the small things that shape that environment. I avoid using red Xs to mark incorrect answers. Instead, I’ll circle a question in a cool, calm color – something that says let’s take another look. Then I’ll ask the student to walk me through their thinking. I want to know what made sense to them, where their reasoning started to veer off course, and what patterns we can spot together. That kind of conversation only works if the student trusts that they won’t be shamed or shut down.
Humor can lower the defenses that trauma triggers. It helps learning feel playful instead of threatening or onerous, and it helps students relinquish perfectionism in order to access the kind of flexible, curious mindset that both critical thinking and healing depend on. I’ll use games or puzzles to spark curiosity and reengage parts of the brain that might otherwise disengage under stress. And when a student opens up – not just in understanding the material, but in confidence – that’s when I know we’re doing something more meaningful than just solving equations or parsing sentences.
I’ve come to see just how vital taking a trauma-informed approach to teaching and learning is. Trauma doesn’t just make it harder to pay attention – it can distort how we interpret everything. It can make us more vulnerable to manipulation, more likely to internalize shame, and less able to solve problems or imagine alternatives. If nothing else, I want students to imagine and realize utopian solutions to real-world problems.
Critical thinking, often treated like an academic skill, is for many of us a survival tool. It’s the part of the brain that asks, ‘Wait, does that really make sense?’ It’s what allows us to recognize logical fallacies, resist gaslighting, and call out coercion. But empathy is what creates space for curiosity. When we care – about ourselves, about others, about the consequences of a decision – we think more clearly and with more integrity. Empathy gives us the power to step back from someone else’s story about us and say, ‘That’s not who I am.’ Learning to think critically, especially when your brain has been shaped by trauma, is a hopeful act of defiance.
So, when I teach, I try to remember that every student carries things I can’t see. I try to make room for their nervous systems as well as their curiosity. And when I learn, I try to hold compassion for the version of me who couldn’t focus and instead internalized shame. They are often parallel processes. Thus, I see learning as not just a matter of grade point average and entrance exam scores; learning is about being human in a complex – but wonder-laden – world.