Cindy Shrigley, a pioneering social worker serving Sarnia for nearly 40 years, has recently been recognized with a Local Distinguished Social Worker Award by the Ontario Association of Social Workers (OASW) for her service to the community and beyond.
The award is presented yearly to one recipient in each of the association’s regional areas, with Shrigley representing London and area. The award recognizes her contributions and commitment to leadership, advocacy, and innovations in social work that have benefited her colleagues and her community.
“It hit really deep in my heart,” said Shrigley when asked what the award means to her.
“I think that her earning the Distinguished Social Worker Award is likely long overdue,” said colleague Jenna Willman, an affiliate therapist who works at the treatment centre founded by Shrigley. “We are lucky as a community to have her at the helm of the Centre for Trauma and Stress to bring the deepest, most transformative kind of healing to our community.”
“A lot of the work I do is sort of quiet,” said Shrigley with a humility that her colleagues are quick to highlight. “It’s just being part of something that’s evolving.”
“I find it incredible that somebody so smart and so gifted has not a trace of arrogance,” said another colleague, Jackie Turner, who had nominated Shrigley for the award. “She has a gift for creating spaces that provide safety and allow all of us to do our best work. She's an absolute delight to know.”
Shrigley is at the forefront of new trauma processing therapy techniques in Canada.
She received her Masters of Social Work, a degree in clinical social work, from Michigan State University. “I took an interest in studying trauma during that time,” she said.
She worked locally at the hospital as part of the first Critical Incident Stress Debriefing team that aimed to prevent post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in first responders, and provided trauma education on Indigenous reserves.
After a community disaster when asbestos-related deaths hit Sarnia in the late 90s, Shrigley was instrumental in helping to expose the problem and develop multi-level supports to address the disastrous impacts. She bore witness to people’s lived experiences and provided support to a research study led by Dr. Jim Brophy, a world expert on occupational disease. Cindy was a strong advocate for the establishment of an Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers in Sarnia and was the first social worker affiliated with a worker-focused clinic.
As her career progressed, Cindy entered private practice and was a pioneer of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy community in Canada, being one of the first to be trained in it here.
EMDR originated in 1987 and it targets ways that the brain processes information. It involves processing traumatic memories while engaging in side-to-side eye movement or other bilateral stimulation.
Cindy has worked with complex trauma clients, including those with extremely challenging and complicated experiences of severe and sadistic abuse who have struggled to find healing. She continued to educate herself on advancements in science that are relevant to how the brain responds to trauma.
This led her to connect with Dr. Ruth Lanius at Western University of London, and subsequently with a new psychotherapy called Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), developed by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Frank Corrigan. This therapy works by targeting the body’s response to shock and trauma. It focuses on slowing down and opening to change the neurophysiological sequence which persists when traumatic memories are triggered.
Shrigley was one of the first therapists in Canada to train in DBR and is currently one of the first consultants in North America. She continues to advocate for and contribute to the research into this groundbreaking therapy.
“At a local level, I’ve been trying to bring on people who have that same interest in really treating the reason at the bottom of all our symptoms,” said Shrigley. “At our centre, we feel really concerned about the mental health issues locally, the high rates of drug problems, suicides. What I’m teaching to the world I want us to have here too.”
She estimates that in Sarnia we now have more DBR trained practitioners per capita than anywhere else. It has always been her vision to build a highly specialized team that can be at the forefront in the treatment of trauma. She hopes that they can be the first to treat youth with DBR when such protocols are developed.
Shrigley admitted that she has kept very quiet about DBR locally, as the evidence base was being developed and wanted to ensure her clinic had the capacity to treat requests. “I feel we’re at that point more and more now where I just want the community to know about this,” she said.
“Cindy is always looking for ways to better understand trauma and healing and bringing that back to our community,” says Jenna Willman.
“For Cindy there is so much more to the work than healing the wounds, neutralizing the negative,” said Jackie Turner. “She believes in the full regeneration of the person's spirit, in the restoration of who the person is deep down inside themselves, in their ability to return to who they were always meant to be.”