I’ve been looking stuff up about methods for speaking with trauma victims for some scenes in my SU fic, and there’s a bunch of notes in literature about what professionals shouldn’t do when treating a client.

A lot of them say to avoid stressful interventions such as group confrontations, avoid confrontations that are too challenging for the client at their current mental state, and avoid direct confrontations with clients who have a history of being physically assaulted because they may instinctively feel like it’s a prelude to being attacked…

… Whoops.

There was a lot of info on how to get people to be open to talking about their trauma and receiving help, and I don’t want to go on a huge tangent about it, but a lot of it was about providing an environment where the person feels safe and building trust with them, and then giving them the tools to express themselves in a way that they’re comfortable with.

It was interesting to read cause I’ve been thinking of how the gems could have done things differently and tried to address the problem without pushing Steven to go nuclear like they did in canon. I’m thinking a big thing they could have worked on was building trust so Steven could feel safe talking to them, since he obviously didn’t, considering what he said in Prickly Pair. Likely due to bad past experiences when they were having their own issues and didn’t always handle it well in regards to him.

And don’t get me wrong, the gems were trying to help him. They did notice that he was struggling. They told him they cared and that he could talk to them. But I think the problem was that they hadn’t built that trust he needed to feel safe doing so. He even had multiple experiences where he tried to open up or seek help but they backfired on him, like with with Cactus Steven, Garnet, and Greg. They ended up betraying Steven’s trust in certain ways, even if it was done unintentionally. Cactus Steven couldn’t maintain Steven’s privacy, Garnet prioritized teaching him a lesson over listening to him, and Greg ended up projecting his own past issues onto Steven in a way that made Steven feel alienated. All things professionals are told to avoid doing. To be fair, Cactus Steven gets a pass because he was just a sentient cactus who was born like two days ago, but that doesn’t mean Steven wasn’t negatively affected by it, and the other experiences would have added to that and compounded the issue. Then after everything that happened in Mr. Universe when Steven was in a really bad place mentally it was followed up by Jasper nursing the idea that his friends and family don’t understand him and can’t help him.

But I think everyone embracing him, accepting him, and loving him in his worst moments, even when he’s literally a giant monster, is a good way to start countering some of that, and it can allow them to start building a new foundation for him to feel safe and supported in the future.

Anyways I’m having a lot of feelings in this Chili’s tonight.