Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  Chronic Exhaustion/Physical Ailments

  I feel like I need a wheelbarrow for the bags underneath my eyes.

  AmeriCorps worker

  There is a difference between feeling tired because you put in a hard day’s work and feeling fatigued in every cell of your being. Most of us have experienced a long day’s work and the reward of hard-earned exhaustion. We sink into bed grateful for our soft pillows and the promise of a sweet night’s sleep. That is one kind of tired. The kind of tired that results from having a trauma exposure response is a bone-tired, soul-tired, heart-tired kind of exhaustion—your body is tired, your mind is tired, your spirit is tired, your people are tired. You can’t remember a time when you weren’t tired.

  “No, not there, please. That’s where I’m going to put my head.”

  This kind of exhaustion is most likely to emerge among people who feel completely overwhelmed by the urgency of the tasks at hand, but it also affects workers who have a balanced sense of what they can and cannot accomplish. Kati Loeffler is a veterinarian and scientist based in China. Her work includes improving the quality of care of domestic animals, working in wildlife conservation, doing veterinary and husbandry training in a giant panda breeding center, providing veterinary care for a black bear rescue center, and working to improve animal welfare and protect natural habitats internationally. “It is difficult to say how much of one’s weariness and compromised energy and the struggle against despair are due to one’s personality and aging body and how much to the toll of one’s work,” says Loeffler. “The extent to which animals suffer, as individuals and as species, due to human activity is overwhelming, and what little the handful of us who are trying to protect them from our own species are able to achieve is so very little and so very slow. Realization of the overwhelming need and pain in the world and our relative ineffectiveness to mitigate it is difficult to cope with.”

  Trauma exposure itself is tiring. As exposure accrues, our bodies and minds will require extra attention in order to become fully rested and refreshed. The situation becomes even more difficult if we get stuck in a trauma exposure response. Our symptoms, like feeling helpless and hopeless or being hypervigilant, are exhausting in their own right.

  One underrecognized factor that may contribute to our level of fatigue is the belief that we have no choice about the work we do. This understanding may be conscious or unconscious. We may tell ourselves that we have no choice because our task is too important—the fate of the planet rests in our hands. Alternatively, we may feel bound to our work without knowing why. For example, it may never have occurred to us that our lives have been shaped by a deep-seated conviction that given our family, our ancestors, our destiny, there is no other work we can do. Even if we think we could change jobs, we may believe that we’re meant to remain in a helping profession. When humans feel obligated, they very often feel tired.

  Additionally, I know that in many fields, a sense of fatigue can become an accepted aspect of a seasoned worker’s demeanor. Many of us are familiar with the “been there, done that” ethos that takes root in workers when they’ve been on the job or in a particular movement for a while. Compared to the cynical, world-weary old-timers, people who are excited and energetic are often seen as young and naï;ve.

  The fresh-scrubbed and hopeful idealism of the new worker starting out may gradually give way to a thrashed, haggard, martyred persona. This persona conveys that you are too cool for immature optimism, that you have been around the block and have seen a few things, and that you are important—and this persona can actually be contagious. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, it’s often gray out, there’s coffee all around, and when everyone says “I’m tired” during the check-in at the beginning of staff meetings, it can be easy to just go along, knowing that if you express any high level of energy at all, you may be accused of being manic.

  I don’t have energy for anything anymore. It literally takes all my energy to get up and try to just walk the dog, let alone do anything else. You don’t even have energy anymore for the things you enjoy doing. Doing anything at all just feels like too much.

  Domestic violence worker

  Finally, we can try so hard to keep from hitting rock bottom that we feel exhausted from the effort. We may be so invested in minimizing and ignoring the many consequences of trauma exposure and proving that we are still up for any challenge that we push ourselves harder and harder. Instead of taking the break we need, we may take on another project or commit to another campaign—hoping that it will give us a boost to overcome our sense of fatigue. It’s helpful to be able to discern if we’re tired because of the accrued toll of many earnest days (or weeks or months) of work or if we are tired because we feel obligated, have internalized a persona of exhaustion, or are fending off that “rock bottom.” Listening to our bodies is a direct way to gain insight.

  As the Trauma Center in Boston, Massachusetts, writes in its literature for law enforcement officers: “Physical complaints are very common; the body keeps the score.” Back pain, migraine headaches, body aches, clinical depression, high blood pressure, and other ailments may be symptoms not only of physical distress but also of the accrued consequences of trauma exposure. As I continue my work with trauma exposure, I increasingly hear stories of people for whom the physical impact has been severe. Dozens of workers have told me about newly diagnosed health concerns, including stress-induced diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cancer. A common theme is that they are being urged to take a leave from work by their doctor and yet they’re having a hard time doing it. Recently I worked with a chemical dependency counselor who had no history of heart disease in her family. She told this story: “I grew up in an alcoholic family where at age seven I was responsible for my younger siblings. So when I am asked to do something, I am committed to doing it. At my job, a colleague left, and I was assigned her workload—temporarily, they told me, but a new hire never came on. Several weeks into carrying two full-time caseloads, I had a heart attack at work. When I came back to work after recovering, my agency was restructuring. When they delegated our new caseloads, mine was the exact same number of cases as before. I went to my supervisors and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ They apologized and took away half of it, leaving me with the caseload for a full-time plus a part-time position. I tried to do that. Six weeks later I had my second heart attack. And it was only then that I was able to be clear that I can only do my job, and my job alone. But it was really, really hard for me to admit that.”

  “And the dim fluorescent lighting is meant to emphasize the general absence of hope.”

  A DREAM REALIZED WARREN BROWN

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  After graduating from Brown University in 1993, Warren Brown worked as a reproductive health educator in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Los Angeles. However, he soon became frustrated with the required curriculum, which did not answer the questions his students asked. He decided he wanted to combine a law degree with advanced public health training, so he went back to school. After his graduation from George Washington University in 1998, Brown took a job litigating health care fraud on behalf of the federal government for the Department of Health and Human Services.

  Meanwhile, he pursued his personal passion for creating cakes. On New Year’s Eve, 1999, he resolved to start selling what he baked. He maxed out his credit card to buy an oven, a double-door refrigerator, and other basic equipment. For the next 10 months, he maintained an exhausting schedule of full-time legal work followed by three to five hours a night in the kitchen. He quit his HHS job for good in 2000. Two years later he founded CakeLove, which features all-natural confections made from scratch, and which has repeatedly topped readers’ polls as the best bakery in Washington, D.C. Brown has attracted a wealth of media coverage, even appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show , and in 2006 he was named the capital’s Small Business Person of the Year. Brown continues to pursue his entrepreneurial spirit by opening additional stores, expanding the product line
, and hosting Sugar Rush on the Food Network. He frequently speaks to young students and rising entrepreneurs about business development and finding one’s passion. The following lessons for living were drawn from the testimonials he includes on his Web site, www.cakelove.com.

  Law school was a grueling period of endless projects and paperwork. I felt like I was losing connection with myself. Early on in the program, I was compelled to ask,“What makes me happy?” Asking myself this was key. It helped me take control and salvage my graduate school experience by setting aside time to do good things for my soul. Looking back, school wasn’t the enemy; it trained me to focus. And even though it felt like a creative straightjacket at the time, I funneled loads of extra energy into very satisfying creative moments. Together, they got me to my passion.

  Something forced me to face and examine the question, “If not now, then when will I make my move?” I felt like I was bobbing: not going under, but also not going anywhere. My mind and body wanted to express themselves, but, in adjusting to life in D.C., I just did not see a venue from which to perform. After a year of grad school, I realized I would have to create my own world of satisfaction.

  In an effort to find satisfaction, I listened to myself. I asked myself questions and listened to my responses. At that time, my questions were all over the place, really scatterbrained. I tried to let everything that even hinted at being a response find its voice. Over time, this voice manifested itself in different ways: cooking, drawing/writing, gardening, yoga, etc. I tried as many new things as I could.

  One of the most difficult hurdles I faced in understanding how to vent my soul came during a summer internship in law school. I abruptly left the internship after only four weeks of work. I’ve always had mixed feelings about leaving: I didn’t want to fail to complete a job, but I wasn’t happy and saw no hope. While figuring out whether to leave the position, I turned to drawing as therapy. One of my drawings was a self-portrait—a young man with an ashen gray face, blue lips, reddened eyes, and wilting hair. Bleak and miserable for sure. Drawing this image was clear and convincing evidence that something was terribly wrong. The next day, I left the internship.

  Of course, friends and family were shocked that I quit, but many people congratulated me. How odd, I thought. I wasn’t so sure why I should be congratulated for leaving a position, abruptly at that, and moving on to nothing except soulful self-indulgence. They saw me taking a step towards something that would make me happy. But I wasn’t sure I could see what made me happy. I only saw what didn’t make me happy. It turns out, of course, that half of knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want.

  Perhaps part of that experience demonstrated to me that it is possible to leave something without an absolutely fixed idea of what the future will hold—as long as you are following a passion toward a productive end. It was a difficult lesson, but perhaps one of the best yet. I relied on this experience four years later, when I planned my exit from practicing law to develop my cake business.

  Confident that my world would not collapse if I took matters into my own hands, I made some resolutions. I believe in making resolutions—practical ones that have merit help me. I allow myself all the time that I need to identify and understand what a resolution should be. I work to maintain and revise former resolutions so that I’m consistent and not constantly reinventing myself.

  In 1999, I was struck with tremendous clarity in developing a set of resolutions: direct yourself to greatness; answer your calls; answer to yourself. This became my mantra, a meditating chant, a testament to end each day with, or juice to push myself further. This was the same year that I resolved to start baking. I wanted to expand my knowledge and skills in the kitchen. Measuring my triumphs and tragedies in the kitchen was easy. Coming to grips with the “big three” was a bit more of a challenge.

  DIRECT YOURSELF TO GREATNESS. Sounds a bit haughty, maybe? It’s not meant to. It’s about obeying priorities. I envision my idea of success, and just as if my body is a puppet, my mind is the puppeteer that commands my body to act and make the vision happen.

  ANSWER YOUR CALLS. Literally taken from an effort to stop evading phone calls in a period of my life when I felt morose and antisocial, this precept is really a commitment to venting my soul. Lending an ear to my inner voice, my id, the kid in me, my instincts. It’s a commitment to not abandoning the hope and expectation that I have value—and I’ll see it when I direct myself to greatness.

  ANSWER TO YOURSELF. To thy self be true. At some point during graduate school, I became passive. I began waiting for events to happen rather than making them happen. Eventually I realized that I could continue asking myself what I want out of life for the rest of my life but not experience the main event: feeling alive. Once I refused to ignore the fact that big chunks of my life would slip right by if I didn’t seize control and move, I began to discover my passion. I took a leap and threw cake parties. This is how CakeLove started. I hosted cake open houses to launch and publicize my business in its very early days. I knew I had a knack for baking, I enjoyed hosting parties, and I wanted to survey a crowd for support of my venture. It was not easy to put myself out for review by the public, both for a critique of the quality of my baking and for an assessment of the viability of my plans. Many people told me I was crazy to leave law to bake cakes. And most did not understand what kind of cakes I planned to market. But my legal training helped me identify a ripe market niche as well as develop solid recipes. I felt like I was on a mission to bring together everything I had ever learned. It was very difficult, but I also loved it.

  Plain and simple, passion is a commitment without condition. It requires intensity for caring about something without regard to difficulty. It’s a lot like love. Passion has meant finding myself happy baking cakes at 1:30 a.m. at the end of an 18-hour day, or occasionally smiling while scrubbing cake pans because it means business is still growing. It is a choice to take a chance where the work is left to you. Everything about passion can be hard at times. But the benefits and rewards for indulging it simply cannot be measured. Both the good and the ugly experiences I’ve had have helped me grow, and for that I am thankful.

  And that’s what finding a passion is all about: you. Do you want to fast-forward to the answer? Try not to. The best parts of life are in the roads traveled to get to your destination. That’s where you struggle and that’s where you laugh. Be in the moment and enjoy it. Taste life. Taste what interests you. Listen to yourself and the world around you. It’s a slow and tedious process where being patient helps a lot. Take your time to be sure of what you want. Then work like hell to get it.

  Being passionate is about recognizing what makes you happy, focusing on and learning about it, and, ultimately, doing it in the name of your own satisfaction and pleasure. It’s not self-centered to lead your life in a direction that satisfies you. It’s necessary to feel at peace. Prioritizing your passion means that you carve out room in your life to explore and understand it. Once you understand yourself and what you care about, you’ll be in closer touch with your life and the others around you. For a while others may see you as aloof, but once you arrive at being in touch with your heart and soul, others will find inspiration in you to do the same.

  How did it work for me? I explored my interests, developed them, listened to feedback, and kept going. Now my career is my former side interest and I love my job. Once I gave priority to what makes me happy, my life very naturally evolved into CakeLove. In April of 2000, I pushed too hard in too short a time span. It was too much, and on a seemingly random Tuesday in the very early morning, I lost the energy to keep going. Alarmed, I called my parents and told them I couldn’t move my limbs. They would work if I really concentrated, but I could hardly focus on breathing. Confused, tired, and desperate, I called my wonderful neighbor, Karen, and asked her to drive me to the emergency room. At discharge from the ER, the doctor said to me, “You’re fine, but you’re not 15 anymore. You’re suffering from exhaustion. Slow down.”


  I didn’t think exhaustion could happen to me. But it did, and I felt the effects of that episode for months. Fatigue would set in and tell me loud and clear to “stop, rest, and sleep.” But don’t worry, these days I’m much better about keeping a close eye on how I’m doing, and I have plenty of help at the shop! In living my passion, when I wake up, I’m all go. I’m spiritually amped—ready and willing to dive into the satisfaction I get every day from baking.

  Inability to Listen/Deliberate Avoidance

  I leave my voice mail box full.

  Nurse

  When avoidance is a regular habit in your life, the highlight of your workday is when you don’t have to do your job. When you go on home visits, you knock softly, you fervently hope that the jeep won’t be repaired so you can’t visit the research station, and you pray for inclement weather so you can have that long-awaited snow day. While voice mail was a good tool for avoidance, text messaging and e-mail are even better, since they provide that much less human contact.

  “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?”

  Now and then, when you get an unexpected break in your day, it makes sense to delight in the time and space that opened up—after all, perhaps you really are in one of those challenging positions where only if something cancels could you possibly get your stats done or your reports completed. And yet it is important to be aware of avoidance, because it can indicate that you are heading toward a much larger problem.

  Avoidance often shows up in people’s personal lives. You choose not to answer your phone. You go out with people less and less—and if you do, it’s with a specific group of folks who “get it,” or else it’s with people whom you’re confident will engage with you only superficially. Many people start feeling overwhelmed by their personal lives and lose energy for those things that once brought them joy: friends, family, yoga, sports, dancing, art, going out in general. As one attorney who did low-cost family law work recounted, “I never answer my phone at home anymore. My son got upset with me and said, ‘Mom, what is your deal?’ I said, ‘No one I work with answers their phone at home.’‘That still makes you crazy,’ he told me.”This is one of the signs of avoidance: If we let others get close to us, it’s often others who are avoidant at the same levels we are, so we feel justified in our behavior and don’t see it as problematic in the least.