Leading the Way in Trauma Resolution Training

Learning in Relationship

Our Commitment to First Nations Partnership and Reciprocity

Restoring Resilience’s relationship with We Al-li has grown through time, encounter, listening and trust.

Through our relationship with Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson and Associate Professor Carlie Atkinson, Ash Dargan and the We Al-li community, we have been invited into a deeper understanding of what it means for different knowledge traditions to meet: not through one absorbing, translating or correcting the other, but through dialogue, humility and a willingness to remain present to both resonance and difference.

We recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of this land and honour the sovereignty, cultural authority and living knowledge held within First Nations communities. We acknowledge Country as teacher and the place of story, ceremony, movement, yarning, kinship and community in understandings of trauma, healing and renewal.

We also recognise the ongoing consequences of colonisation and the ways professional institutions determine whose knowledge is recognised, whose voices carry authority, who can access training and where resources flow. Restoring Resilience holds access and privilege within the professional trauma-training field. For us, acknowledging this carries a responsibility to consider how that access can be shared and how learning and resources can move in more than one direction.

Reciprocity and two-way learning

Our partnership with We Al-li is grounded in relationship, reciprocity and respect.

We understand reciprocity as each of us being willing to enter the learning spaces of the other. First Nations practitioners connected with We Al-li will have pathways into Somatic Experiencing® training, while members of the Restoring Resilience Somatic Experiencing assisting team will undertake We Al-li training.

This is more than an exchange of training places. It is a commitment to being changed through relationship: to listening deeply, locating ourselves, examining the assumptions within our own practices and meeting another knowledge system without taking possession of it.

We Al-li retains cultural authority over its knowledge, Storywork, practices, materials and the boundaries around how these may be shared or used. Somatic Experiencing, GROW and Relational Proprioception™ retain their own lineages and integrity. Where these ways of knowing meet, we seek to create space for dialogue and shared inquiry without merging them, placing them in hierarchy or reducing either to a collection of techniques.

Our intention is to practise a form of Two-Eyed Seeing: allowing different ways of knowing to stand alongside one another, each bringing its own depth, wisdom and perspective, while remaining open to what becomes possible in the relational field between them.

Our funded training commitment

As one expression of this partnership, Restoring Resilience will provide three fully funded places within every new three-year Somatic Experiencing training cohort delivered in each state.

These places will support First Nations practitioners connected with We Al-li to participate in the complete three-year training. We Al-li will hold the relational and cultural leadership in identifying and inviting the practitioners for whom these places may be most meaningful.

The funded places are held within our partnership with We Al-li and are therefore facilitated through that relationship rather than through a public application process.

At this stage, this is Restoring Resilience’s funded training commitment. It is part of a broader relationship that includes cross-training, shared learning, ongoing dialogue and the continued development of ways for First Nations knowledge and leadership to be present and influential within the trauma field.

An ongoing commitment

We do not understand partnership as something established by a single statement or completed through one initiative. It is something enacted over time through how we listen, how decisions are made, how cultural authority is respected, how resources are shared and how we remain accountable to one another.

We enter this relationship knowing that alignment and difference can coexist. We seek to meet each other through shared humanity without collapsing the histories, responsibilities and knowledge traditions that shape where each of us stands.

Our commitment is to continue moving forward with humility, openness and care—allowing the relationship itself to guide what is asked of us and what may become possible together.