Safe Spaces, Sharp Objects | Trauma-Informed Care In The Piercing Room
For me, piercings have always been incredibly significant moments in my life. They have helped me connect with my body and gender identity, feel at home in my skin, reclaim my body from past trauma, learn the limits of my strength and bravery, and push past them. Piercings have healed deep wounds in my soul, taught me bravery, strenght, patience, and compassion, and brought me beautiful lifetime connections. I wanted to share how these experiences influenced my life and what piercings meant to me in relation to my trauma and healing. This started out as a blog post that transformed into a Patreon, which quickly became something longer than even that. The more I wrote, the more I realized there was to say on these subjects, which are incredibly near to me as a trauma survivor and a piercer. I thought about my own experiences getting pierced, many of which were extremely healing, but some of which were honestly retraumatizing. I thought about my own experiences as a piercer, and the ways I was able to show up for and connect with clients to create more empowered experiences. I also reflected on times when I failed clients.
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My large takeaway was simply how much information was lacking from formal education in piercing about trauma-informed care subjects. There is one standout class for piercers from Jen Brockman (shoutout Jen!) which is incredible, K Lenore Siner's great guide for tattoo artists, and the wonderful Charlyne Chiappone discusses trauma-informed care in suspension, but for those who are unable to attend in-person events or the occasional online offering, there is little accessable, and less of it piercing focused. For many of us, bedside manner is not a large part of our apprenticeship, or part of it at all. And if it is mentioned, specific trauma-informed care modalities are not discussed in depth. The goal of this book was to combine the trauma education and reading I've been doing over the last few years with my knowledge and experence in the piercing industry, and create an accessable resource to help piercers, apprentices, front of house, studio management, and even clients, feel more empowered in the piercing room.
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To pull from the book itself-
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"After thirteen years of piercing professionally and six in therapy for my own Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I realized that despite doing the best job I could trying to provide these healing experiences, without any formal training, education, or framework, my work could be better. So I set about learning more on the formal structures of Trauma-Informed Care and how I could implement them both in my piercing room and in my own life, to create a more effective and healthy way of moving through a world filled with trauma. After putting this framework into practice, I’ve noticed a much higher instance of positive and emotionally healing client experiences, a decrease in my own stress levels in the piercing room, and a greater ability to honor my own boundaries in the studio. I decided I wanted to collect and share this information in one place to help others who may benefit from implementing the same framework in their piercing practices.
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The purpose of this book is not to tell you how to work, how to pierce, or how to live. Rather, it is to encourage you to consider the often complicated, interwoven intersections of vulnerability, power, control, trauma, interpersonal dynamics, and intersectionality that exist within piercing, and get you to think of how we navigate these intersectionalities in a way that causes the least amount of harm for your clients, your coworkers, and yourself. There is no “one-size-fits-all” in piercing, and this book is included in that. I encourage you to take what resonates with you from this and leave whatever does not behind. There will be as many different approaches to piercing and to creating safer spaces as there are piercers. This book is not designed to be a set of rules, regulations, or guidelines, nor am I presenting this information as inherently “right” and any other approach to piercing as “wrong”. My goal is to encourage an evaluation of how to minimize harm, in all its forms, in our work, and how to foster empowering experiences within the piercing room. This is a book written by a professional piercer, who is a survivor of trauma themselves, who has caused trauma themselves, and who has no formal training in mental healthcare. What I do have is my own lived experiences, decades in therapy and attending workshops and classes, and a passion for this industry and the people in it. I am sitting down with my personal experience, the limited formal education I do have, a love of research and reading, and a desire to create accessible resources to help my community grow and do better. "​
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It would be rather silly to write a whole book on accessibility and informed practices and then lock that education behind a paywall. So, the PDF of the entire book is available here, for free. While written with industry professionals in mind, it is written in a way that may also benefit clients, and the goal is for this to be accessable to everyone who is passionate about piercings.
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DOWNLOAD "SAFE SPACES, SHARP OBJECTS" PDF
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If you like what you read and want to support my writing, if you are a physical media geek, or if you just like reading a physical book, you can purchase the print copy here.
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