Recognizing Trauma Triggers

The line is that you are looking for a change, not a diagnosis. You are not deciding what happened to her or what she has. You are noticing that this part of the conversation is different from the rest of it and adjusting what you do next.

What that looks like in practice: a voice that flattens, sentences that stop halfway, a sudden switch to very formal or very short answers, a camera turned off just after a particular subject, a session cancelled straight after one that touched on paperwork about her arrival. Any of these can mean something else entirely. That is fine, because your response is the same either way and it is not intrusive.

The response is to slow down, drop the topic without ceremony, and put something ordinary and concrete in front of her instead. Do not say you have noticed she seems triggered. Do not ask what happened. If she wants to bring it back, she will.

Some subjects come up predictably in guidance work: the journey, documents and dates, questions about family left behind, medical examinations, anything that resembles an interview. Knowing that in advance means you can warn her before a form needs filling in rather than discovering it halfway through.

The one I was slow to spot was the appointment letter. A woman I mentor was fine talking about her asylum case in general but could not open official post, and I read it as disorganisation for months.

That is a good example of why avoidance is easy to misread as unreliability, and it is worth saying openly because the misreading has consequences: it changes how a case is written up and how the next worker treats her.

Two things to add. Rates of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety are higher among refugees and migrants than in host populations, and WHO notes that women and girls on the move carry a higher risk of depression and anxiety, so this is common rather than exceptional. And there is a practical fix for exactly the case you describe: open the post together, in the session, with her deciding what happens next. Doing the frightening task once with another person present is often what makes the second time possible.