A Trauma-Informed Way to See Beneath the Surface
By Dr. Erlange Elisme, DSW | Behavioral Health Consultant | Trauma-Informed Leadership Strategist
A behavior referral form has a box for what the child did. It has a box for the time, a box for the location, and a box for the adult who witnessed it.
It has no box for who was awake at two in the morning with the baby. No box for the notice taped to the refrigerator. No box for the grandmother whose blood pressure has been climbing since the placement. No box for the fact that reading aloud in front of twenty-two peers is the most humiliating ninety seconds of this child’s week.
The form collects what happened. Then the system responds to what happened.
If you have ever wondered why your behavior interventions work for most students and fail completely for the handful who need them most, this is the reason. The form was never designed to see the thing that is actually driving the behavior. And a system cannot respond to what it has no way of recording. This is what trauma-informed behavior management actually asks you to change. Not the consequence. The assessment.
The Same Pattern, Different Buildings
In a school, the child is labeled defiant.
In an emergency department, the patient with poorly controlled diabetes is labeled non-compliant, and she is on her fourth visit this year.
In a behavioral health clinic, the veteran who misses appointments is discharged for lack of engagement, which means the service ended his care because he had the condition it was treating.
Three settings, three vocabularies, one mistake. Each system observed what was visible, drew a conclusion about character, and acted on the conclusion.
This is not a failure of individual compassion. Most of the people filling out those forms are tired and doing their best inside structures built to manage what breaks the surface and move on to the next case. The problem is architectural, and it costs everyone in the building.
The person learns that being seen is dangerous. Every disclosure has been followed by a consequence, so the safest move is to give nothing away. What gets recorded as guarded or resistant is often an accurate risk assessment.
The strengths stay submerged. Nobody documented that the ten-year-old could soothe a screaming infant, because there is no field for that. His competence went unrecorded and therefore, institutionally, it did not exist.
And the staff burn out. Managing behavior you do not understand is exhausting in a way that understanding is not. Frustration accumulates, expectations quietly lower, and the relationship becomes adversarial without anyone ever deciding that it should. If you are a teacher, a nurse, or a caseworker who has felt that hardening happen in yourself and hated it, that reaction makes sense in the context you are working in. It is not a character flaw. It is what happens to people who are asked to care for what they cannot comprehend.
Beyond Mountains, There Are Mountains
Roughly ninety percent of an iceberg’s mass sits below the waterline. The part that opens the hull is the part nobody charted.
There is a Haitian proverb, dèyè mòn gen mòn, beyond mountains there are mountains. It is usually spoken about hardship, one difficulty giving way to the next. It also describes exactly what an honest assessment finds. You get past the presenting behavior and there is more underneath. You get past that and there is more still.
The I.C.E.B.E.R.G.™ Method is built on that reality. It is how I have thought about this work across three decades of school social work in South Florida and Metro Atlanta schools, and I am naming it publicly here for the first time. It is built for the practitioner standing in front of a dysregulated child at eight in the morning, with no time to consult a manual.
Beneath the waterline sit six things. Nervous system state, which sets the range of what is possible before the person has a thought about it. Attachment history, which tells the person what adults are for. Embodied memory, which arrives as sensation and posture rather than story. Cultural identity and worldview, including beliefs about what illness is and who is permitted to know about it. Intergenerational trauma, and the intergenerational resilience carried in the very same lineage.
And the sixth, which most iceberg models leave out entirely: unrecognized strength.
This is the distinction that matters most. Nearly every trauma model that uses this metaphor maps pain below the surface. Behavior on top, wounds underneath. That is half the picture, and it is the half that keeps a person permanently defined by what was done to them.
The artistic eye is below the waterline too. So is the nine-year-old’s competence with an infant. So is the grandmother’s forty years of knowing precisely how institutions treat families like hers. Those are not consolation prizes to mention after the deficits have been listed. They are load-bearing. Healing gets built on them, or it does not get built.
This is not sentiment. Research on post-traumatic growth after racial trauma finds that recovery turns on identity transformation, on replacing the story handed to you from outside with one generated from within. The strengths below the waterline are the material that replacement is made from.
What the Body Is Doing While You Are Talking
Stephen Porges’s polyvagal work describes three broad nervous system states. There is the state of safety and social engagement, where a person can take in information, tolerate correction, and stay in relationship. There is fight-or-flight mobilization, protective and metabolically expensive. And there is shutdown, which is what the body does when mobilization has already failed and there is nowhere left to go.
A large proportion of the fibers in the vagus nerve, commonly estimated at around eighty percent, carry information upward, from body to brain. The body is reporting more than it is receiving. This is why a calm, reasonable explanation delivered to an activated nervous system does not land, and why the adult delivering it so often walks away feeling ignored.
Two things follow, and both are practical.
Behavior above the waterline is frequently a state, not a choice. What gets written up as defiance is often mobilization. What gets written up as unmotivated or checked out is often shutdown. The same child receives two different labels for two different survival strategies, and neither label describes anything he is choosing.
And safety is not a decision a person makes. It is a physiological state, and for most of human development it is borrowed from another nervous system before it can be produced alone. A regulated adult is not a nice addition to the intervention. The regulated adult is the intervention.
The History Sitting in the Conference Room
Individual trauma does not occur in a vacuum. Historical trauma describes cumulative wounding carried across generations, resulting from events aimed at an entire people. Racism-based traumatic stress describes injuries that accumulate whether or not any single incident would meet a diagnostic threshold.
For Haitian, Black, Brown, immigrant, and refugee families, this is not background context. It is in the room, in the chair, at the table.
A grandmother who has learned that when an institution calls, someone leaves, is not being difficult when she gives short answers in a conference. She is being accurate. Reluctance to disclose is frequently memory rather than resistance, and any assessment that reads it as resistance has misread the single most important thing in the file.
This is why cultural humility functions as a clinical requirement and not a courtesy. There is no finish line where a practitioner becomes competent in another person’s culture. There is only the practitioner who keeps asking and the practitioner who stopped.
The Seven Pillars of Trauma-Informed Behavior Management
Those six layers are what a practitioner is looking at. The seven pillars are what a practitioner does about it, and they are where the framework gets its name.
They are not steps to complete and check off. They are load-bearing, and they depend on each other. There is, however, an order of dependency: exploration cannot come before safety. A person asked to disclose before safety exists has been interviewed, not helped, and the body knows the difference long before the mind can explain it.
I — Invite Authentic Connection Connection is the entry point because it is the only door the nervous system will open. A demand for relationship is a contradiction in terms.
C — Create Safe Space Safety across five dimensions: physical, emotional, cultural, relational, and procedural. Correction happens in private. Processes get explained before they happen, including the ones with bad news in them.
E — Extend Positive Regard Shame is a nervous system event, not just a feeling. Positive regard is the counterweight, and it has to be specific to be believed.
B — Be Fully Present Attunement is not the same as attention. A dysregulated adult cannot lend regulation they do not have, and everyone in the room can tell.
E — Explore Beneath the Surface Wondering rather than diagnosing. Why questions demand a justification the person usually cannot give without incriminating someone they love.
R — Recognize Whole Stories The struggling reader and the artist. The disruptive student and the caregiver. All of it, held at the same time, not deficits followed by one redeeming detail.
G — Generate Trust Through Understanding Trust is not extended. It is accrued, in small and boring increments, and it is spent quickly when a promise breaks.
The Grandmother Who Kept Her Coat On
Javon is a composite. No detail belongs to a single child.
He was ten, in fifth grade, and had been sent to the office nine times in the first quarter. Reading below grade level. Rarely turned in homework. Two words appeared in his file more than once: defiant and checked out.
His grandmother came to the conference on a Tuesday afternoon. She sat with her purse in her lap and her coat on, and she kept the coat on for the entire forty minutes.
Nobody noticed. Nobody asked.
A person who keeps their coat on has already decided how long they are staying.
Nothing surfaced quickly. Nothing was going to.
What moved first was the adults, and it moved in increments so small they were almost embarrassing to report. Correction left the classroom and went out into the hallway, where the audience was gone. A regulation corner appeared in the back of the room, available to anyone, so that using it cost him nothing socially. The counselor told his grandmother she would call on Thursday. She called on Thursday. She did that for eleven weeks, and for most of those eleven weeks nothing appeared to be happening.
His grandmother took her coat off in the fourth meeting.
Then, slowly, the rest of it came. He missed his mother and had decided not to say so, because saying so seemed to hurt his grandmother and she was already tired. Reading aloud was the worst thing that happened to him each week, and refusing was cheaper than failing in public. He was up most nights with the baby, because his grandmother’s back was bad and someone had to walk the hallway. He was good at it. He knew how to hold her so she would settle.
And he drew constantly, on everything, and he was better than anyone had bothered to notice. His teacher started bringing the drawing into his reading work instead of confiscating it out of his margins.
Here is the part the marketing version leaves out. Javon still struggled with reading at the end of that year. He gained ground, but he did not close the gap. The baby still cried at night. The family’s housing remained precarious.
What changed was who he understood himself to be, and who the adults understood him to be, and the number of times a year he was removed from a room where learning was happening.
What This Framework Will Not Do For You
Safety in a relationship does not replace safety in a home. A regulated nervous system does not pay rent. Housing, food, medication access, and income are not adjuncts to healing work. In many cases they are the healing work, and the relationship exists to make them reachable.
And a framework that explains behavior can always be misused to explain away the conditions producing it. An organization can adopt trauma-informed language, train its staff, feel considerably better about itself, and change nothing structural. The child is still hungry. The caseload is still eighty. The discipline policy still removes the same children from the same classrooms at the same rate it did last year.
Understanding a person’s iceberg without changing the water they are swimming in is not trauma-informed practice. It is a more sophisticated way of leaving them there.
The organizations that make this work are the ones that protect the time. Presence is not possible in a fifteen-minute slot. Follow-through is not possible when the caseload makes follow-through a fantasy. Leadership either creates those conditions or it does not, and no amount of staff training substitutes for that decision.
In Haitian rural tradition, a kombit is the practice of neighbors working one family’s field together, then moving to the next, and the next. The load is not divided into individual portions. It is carried collectively, and it moves. Men anpil, chay pa lou. Many hands, and the load is not heavy.
Any healing framework that places the entire weight of recovery on one person’s shoulders is working against something older and more sensible than itself.
Dr. Erlange Elisme, DSW, holds a Doctor of Social Work with doctoral-level specialization in Advanced Trauma-Informed Leadership and Practice from Barry University. She is the founder of Elisme Consulting Services LLC, where she trains clinicians and leaders across healthcare, education, nonprofit, and faith-based settings. She does not provide therapy.
To bring the I.C.E.B.E.R.G.™ Method to your team, schedule a discovery call at elismeconsultingservices.com.
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