Revolve Recovery’s Trauma Ecology Integration Model (TEIM™) developed by founder, Georgina K. Smith, PhD

Why TEIM™ is different and necessary:

TEIM™ (Trauma Ecology Integration Model) doesn’t just treat trauma as a diagnosis, and it also takes a step beyond the models that recognize more expansive trauma systems and transmissions. It works with trauma as a dynamic ecology. While it works with powerful modalities like Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, neurobiological, somatic, and experiential therapies, it expands the scope of healing.

TEIM™ maps not only the internal system of the individual, but also the 3 orbiting ecosystems of harm. These orbits include the primary and compounding wounds, the relational patterns and adaptations created to cope and survive, and relational, institutional, systemic, generational, and environmental forces. It creates more room for context, time, and motion in one model. This allows for deeper safety, less shame, and more accurate interventions that respond to the full reality of an individual’s trauma ecology. It also allows for healing to be understood as a process that doesn’t live solely in the individual, but in relationships, communities, and collective environments. The TEIM™ model helps create relational containers where healing is witnessed, supported, and sustained, not in isolation, but in connection.

Here’s some examples of what it looks like in practice:

1. Orbit-aware relational dynamics:

When a client shuts down in group therapy, for example, we don’t just name patterns  like ‘avoidant’, and we expand beyond parts work. Through the TEIM™ lens, we also ask what orbit of harm this pattern belongs to. This kind of shut down may be connected to a childhood environment where visibility and needs expression weren’t safe, and may be perpetuated within systems (generational and institutional) that reinforce invisibility, as well as current trauma satellites that spin out of orbits, hitting the person with a narrative that may echo and distort the lived experience of someone’s trauma. This reinforces that need for self-protection from sustained harm. We can still use attachment work and parts work, but within an ecological frame that sees the pattern as a relational survival strategy in motion, shaped by past and present dynamics, sustained across time, and embedded in layered systems of relationship, culture, and environment. This ecological view allows the group to become a living space for collective healing, not just individual exploration. The group doesn't just talk about rupture and repair; we work on co-creating safety, healing, and choice in the layered atmospheres around it.

2. Naming trauma atmospheres:

When a client presents with fatigue, shutdown, or ‘lack of motivation’, we don’t immediately interpret it as resistance. TEIM™ helps us ask what trauma atmosphere they are living in. That may include cultural messaging, institutional biases, inherited family narratives, etc., or it may be a trauma satellite that occurred that very day. We want to understand the context of the satellite and what orbit of harm it activated, and where the spiral is moving. This allows honoring that these responses are not dysfunctions but rather attempts to cope, and also helps the client address regulation challenges through each orbit, which may be unique in their own needs. Many reactions are in fact resourceful adaptations to systemic harm. Interventions become about shifting their environment needs, addressing systemic difficulties that may be existing in the present, and resourcing the nervous system to assist with their internal and external recovery work, not just reframing the thought, managing the symptom, or staying unilaterally in efforts to self-regulate. It becomes about creating shared safety, through relational, communal, and structural support, thereby expanding options for co-regulation.

3. Echo Ladder work:

Instead of simply identifying triggers and building regulation skills, TEIM™ introduces the Echo Ladder. This helps clients notice how a current spiral may echo relational, cultural, or generational harm. Rather than ‘managing a reaction’, we track the echo. This brings more coherence and builds capacity for self-compassion and integration. It means we’re not just helping people feel calm in the moment with the assumption that typical grounding strategies work for trauma survivors, we’re helping them resource their nervous system, along with tracking and transforming the deeper relational and systemic patterns that keep cycling through their bodies, relationships, and environments. In TEIM™, this is the work of metabolizing internal and external motion, not just managing symptoms. This supports a vision of healing as movement toward wholeness within both self and collective story, where pain can be named, held, and transformed in relationship, not alone.

4. Orbit Map for Integration:

Rather than just preparing a discharge checklist or summarized after care plan or summary, clients co-create an Orbit Map. This includes mapping their primary harm, secondary relational patterns, and tertiary systems that continue to echo harm. Together, we explore what they’ll need to maintain coherence, integration, connection, and protection in their next environment. This is not just a transition plan. It is a relational and ecological integration plan. Healing here is not seen as an endpoint, but a relational capacity, a way of moving through life with awareness, support, and the ability to repair and connect. This is where community becomes a sustaining force, not a background detail.

5. Staff use of TEIM™:

TEIM™ also changes how clinicians hold the work. We ask:

What orbit is this part responding to?

What atmosphere is shaping this response?

What systemic, cultural, or institutional elements need to be named and addressed?

How to honor and care for our team and our own well-being as clinicians, recognizing the emotional weight of the work, and creating space for inquiry, debriefing, safety, compassion, and meeting  regenerative needs.

This framework helps staff hold more context, reduce shame, and support clients in a way that aligns with safety, stability, and trust, while practicing and modeling this as a co-regulating team and relational container. The model itself becomes a kind of healing community, offering space not only for clinical intervention, but for mutual care, relational integrity, and systemic awareness.

Summary

IFS is a powerful modality that maps the internal system and offers a transformative path to shame deconstruction by helping clients identify and relate to protective parts, unblend from their survival strategies, and ultimately unburden these parts, allowing for the healing of exiles.

The practice of EMDR helps establish stability and safety; access and reprocess traumatic memories (when client is ready and sufficiently resourced); and transform  negative core cognitions by supporting the development of adaptive beliefs.

TEIM™ holds the larger orbiting field. That includes the internal world, but also the external conditions, generational dynamics, relational choreography, institutional harm, and cultural messaging. And tracks and addresses its orbital movement and manifestation through time.

This ecological approach gives us more integrative precision in treatment strategies, more compassion, and more permission to honor the full picture of trauma. It helps clients step into healing with more agency and less fear and shame. It invites healing not just as an internal shift, but as a movement through community, across time, and toward collective restoration. It makes room for nuance and complexity. And it helps us shift from seeing symptoms as pathology to understanding them as patterned protection within an ongoing trauma ecosystem.

TEIM™ is not just trauma-informed and trauma-focused.

It is trauma ecology literate.

TEIM™ understands that while  healing requires individual engagement and effort, trauma cannot be fully understood or transformed without attending to the ecosystems it lives in.