To Collect or Not to Collect: A Poll, a Piece of Paper, and the Matter of Trust

There is something disarmingly simple about a poll: a slip of paper, three boxes, a quiet checkmark. It sits at the intersection of data and intimacy, a device used equally by governments, market researchers, and—on this occasion—a life coach leading a trauma-informed workshop for workforce professionals.

The question was not what to ask. That part was easy.When conversations get heated, what pattern do you notice in yourself? What does your body do before your brain catches up?What do you wish you could say or do, if safety were guaranteed?

No, the question—the real one—was what to do with the answers.

Handing out a poll in a room of frontline case managers is not a neutral act. These are people who spend their days inside the tension: between job seekers and eligibility requirements, between what’s needed and what’s funded, between trauma and the systems designed to fix it. So when you ask them to name their automatic response to conflict—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—it’s not a theoretical exercise. It’s yesterday. It’s this morning. It might be happening now.

And so, the facilitator wonders: Should I collect these? Should I ask them to share?

The obvious answer, in a world governed by data and deliverables, is yes. Collect the papers. Compile the responses. Add a slide with a pie chart showing that 38% freeze, 27% fawn, and 12% would like to disappear entirely into their cubicles. But the obvious answer is not always the right one.

Because here’s the thing about trauma: it doesn’t like being put in a file folder.

When you ask someone to track their stress response—when you invite them, even gently, to look beneath the polished surface of professional competence—you are asking for trust. You are asking them to notice the part of themselves that clenched up in a meeting last week, or in a kitchen five years ago. And unless you’ve built a room that feels safe enough to hold their vulnerabilities, you have no business collecting it.

So the better answer—the quieter, slower, more radical one—is this: Let them keep it.

Let them circle in silence. Let them fold the paper into quarters and tuck it into their pocket. Let them make meaning of it later, when they’re alone. Because in trauma-informed spaces, agency is everything. And the smallest way to honor someone’s agency is to let them decide what to do with the story their nervous system is trying to tell.

That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. You can invite reflection. You can say, “If anything surprised you, you’re not alone.” You can ask what it felt like to answer those questions. But the poll itself? That’s not yours to analyze. It’s theirs to hold.

In the end, what looks like a simple facilitation choice becomes a microcosm of the workshop’s deepest lesson: People are not data points. They are living systems, shaped by rupture and repair, deserving of space to pause, notice, and choose.

Sometimes the most trauma-informed thing you can do is to hand someone a pen, give them a quiet moment, and then ask for nothing in return.

Much love and respect,

Magdalena