From such descriptions, it is easy to understand how the individual points of the compass came to be closely associated with different aspects of spiritual experience. In Native American traditions in particular, the human journey through life is often described in terms of the interplay of five directions. Each of us travels to the symbolic destinations represented by the four cardinal directions at some point in our lives; every journey leads us both away from our center and back toward it.
As by now you will recognize, this model very closely parallels the process by which we can build our capacity for trauma stewardship. For our purposes, the fifth direction is our own interconnected human core—our centered self. Our experiences as we tread each new path will vary depending on who we are as individuals, but we also open ourselves up to the possibility that we can learn from these experiences and they may change us. So when we have our next encounter, we may approach the world differently than we did before. Our center is our guide, and yet if we are living fully, that center will be ever-evolving.
As we do our work, we continually seek strength by finding our center in the present moment. At the same time, we strive to enhance our self-knowledge by focusing consciously and concretely on the basic elements of our lives. The things we learn at the four outlying points of our compass of trauma stewardship will become the tools we can use to build a daily practice of centering ourselves. As we deepen our connection with our center, we tap into our innate qualities of wisdom, free will, compassion, and balance.
The Five Directions offer a description of the world and a set of instructions for making our way through it. They guide a process through which we can create and maintain our well-being, even during the most turbulent times. Honoring traditions from around the globe, we allow each of these directions to assist us in returning to the place where our greatest hope for understanding, peace, health, fulfillment, and joy exists: within ourselves.
You may use the Five Directions in several ways. As you begin, you may wish to focus on the points of our compass only as I have already described them: inquiry, focus, compassion, balance, and centering. In time, however, you may find it helpful to think about the Five Directions using other types of imagery. I will begin the discussion of each direction by briefly invoking some of the colors and elements that are typically associated with that direction. Each of us will take a different path to reach our center. For some of us, it may be more effective to summon the feelings of sustenance that come with the earth, which is associated with the south, than to think rationally about community and compassion. For others, the opposite may be true. The additional characterizations of each direction are intended to expand your options.
As you can see from the illustration on the inside back cover, each direction is unique, yet they fit together to form a vibrant whole. Simply looking at this image may provide a quick visual reminder of what’s important as you orient yourself from day to day. Try taking a few minutes to meditate on the directions, whether you are commuting to or from work, going about your business, or lying in bed at night. This is one way to create a daily mindfulness practice. Of course, you can use the Five Directions as inspiration for rituals of your own.
By moving among the directions and their elements, we are able to create, and most important, maintain, a daily practice through which we become centered. When we are centered, we are in the fifth direction. There will be times in our lives and our work when the water turns into a tidal wave, the fire into an inferno, the earth into quicksand, and the air into a tornado. We may feel overwhelmed, bombarded, off our game, and at a loss, sometimes several times each day. The Five Directions can guide us to regain calm—to once again remember who we are, where we’re headed, and what we need. Being centered allows us to occupy a constant oasis of wisdom, perspective, and integrity, regardless of how out of control everything and everyone around us seems. As we build our personal practice, we can approach our circumstances proactively rather than reactively. With sustained effort, we can maintain the inner resources we need to care for ourselves and to care for others and the planet. This ability is the foundation of trauma stewardship.
In the chapters ahead, I will make various suggestions for building your practice. I offer the Five Directions to those who welcome guidance as they enter a new path. Should you be someone who prefers to keep your mind free as you explore, read on with confidence that your daily practice will evolve in its own unique way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NORTH • Creating Space for Inquiry
We begin our journey in the north, where we call upon the courage and wisdom of the water element. We do this by coming into the present moment—by stopping our mind’s chatter and simply noticing what is around us. We try to create a sense of spaciousness—a horizon as vast as the one we see when looking out across the ocean. From this expansive vantage point, we will ask ourselves two critical questions: “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” and “Is this working for me?” (In order to answer these questions, we will also examine the concept of trauma mastery.)Just as all known forms of life depend on water, the quality of our livelihood depends on understanding our intention in regard to our work.
Why Am I Doing What I’m Doing?
I once saw Jorge Alvarado, a Coahuiltec pipe carrier and Lakota Sun Dancer, work with a woman in a healing Ceremony. He told her, “You are the kind of person who is going to have to ask yourself every day,‘Who am I and what am I doing here?’” On some level, these are questions for each of us to answer. Mindfulness begins with being alert to our sensations in the present moment, and it extends to a larger awareness of what we are doing in our lives. In my experience, however, it is difficult to be fully aware of what we are doing if we are oblivious to what motivates us to do it. Few things are as powerful as knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing. As the 19th-century Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said,“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
When we apply this kind of inquiry to our work, it gives us a framework for understanding our intentions, motivations, and hopes. Why have we chosen to make the effort toward helping or healing such a prominent part of our lives?
I encourage people to be honest with themselves about why they are currently engaged in their work. Start with the simplest of questions and see where they lead you. What gets you on the bus in the morning? What keeps you showing up at the community meetings? Perhaps it’s because you have an important contribution to bring to your field, or perhaps it’s because you don’t know where your résumé is on your hard drive. Maybe you desperately need the health insurance, or maybe you’re terrified of change. Maybe you’re hoping to achieve trauma mastery, which we will discuss later in this chapter. Regardless of the answer, checking in with yourself about why you’re doing what you’re doing can make all the difference in understanding that you have a choice.
Could this be why I’m doing this work? Because my people are so often the ones being put away in the prison complexes? There’s a story in my family of my grandmother, who was not able to get out of her rocking chair, but she pistol-whipped a white policeman with a pistol she kept with her, because he came to arrest my uncle for a crime. My uncle had been home the whole day washing clothes by hand at the side of the house. He’d been there all day, but this policeman came to take him, and my grandma beat the officer until he left. It’s always stayed with me, that story. It’s always been in my mind.
John Brookins, former Black Panther; prison reentry specialist, Village of Hope; director of men’s ministry, Freedom Church, Seattle, Washington
Being clear each day about “Why am I doing this work?” requires opportunities for reflection. As we discussed in chapter 2, some organizations adapt to the crises they address in their work by adopting a crisis mode in their organizational structures. Such organizations may have created working cultures that penalize reflection and reward plugging along. You may have to make a commitment to persevere with reflection even in
the face of opposition or a lack of understanding from your organization and colleagues.
If you start to waver, remind yourself that reflection is a powerful antidote to the helplessness we may feel as a result of trauma exposure. Amid the trials and tribulations of our work, it is possible to lose sight of why we’re doing what we’re doing. When we carve out the time to contemplate our intentions, we renew our connection to the needs and desires that have shaped our experience. We remember that we can take action to alter the course of our lives. This will help us to alleviate the sensation of being tossed around in the waves of uncontrollable and overwhelming events.
“Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re inviting all this duck hunting into yom-life right now.“
1. Before starting your workday, take a moment to literally stop in your tracks and ask yourself, “Why am I doing what I am doing?” After you hear your answer, remind yourself, gently, that you are making a choice to do this work. Take a deep breath; breathe in both the responsibility and the freedom in this acknowledgment.
2. Regularly consult with someone about why you are doing what you are doing. Choose a trustworthy, supportive, wise person. Ask this person to listen attentively and provide you with feedback. It is critical to not be isolated in our work.
3. Regularly write down why you are doing what you’re doing, what your intention is. Keep it somewhere. When you feel yourself going astray, return from that client consult, staff meeting, or board retreat and find your written intention. Remind yourself what it is about for you, and what it is definitely not about.
PROFILE THE NORTHWEST IMMIGRANT RIGHTS PROJECT
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) is an organization that has worked for over 25 years to advance the legal rights and dignity of low-income immigrants in Washington State by pursuing and preserving their legal status through legal representation, education, and public policy. NWIRP serves all nationalities, including low-income immigrants from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, and Africa. When I worked with NWIRP on issues of trauma stewardship in the 1990s, its culture seemed special and wonderful. The tremendous dedication of the workers and unending compassion they held for their clients was palpable every single time I went there. It was, and remains, a very special place.
For as long as it has existed, NWIRP has handled heart-wrenching and urgent cases, many of which literally involve life and death. By the mid-1990s, however, it was no longer able to handle the full volume of calls. The attorneys were juggling so many court actions that they began to fear they’d botch some client’s case and be sued for malpractice. At the end of their rope, they instructed the intake staff to start turning less needy clients away.
Donna Lewen, who worked with NWIRP as the coordinator of the domestic violence unit for seven years, shares, “When I picture that decision, I remember the look in the eyes of the frontline staff, who were the ones to take the calls and hear horrendous story after horrendous story about people who were facing death and desperately needed legal help. They would have to say, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t take any more cases.’ And where could you send them? There was nowhere else to send most of them. It was overwhelming for the intake staff to have to say this to people.” The workers began to disintegrate under the burden.
The situation became untenable, and after much input from the staff, NWIRP’s executive director at the time, Vicky Stifter, made an exceptionally difficult decision: NWIRP would shut down its intake entirely. Until they could resolve the problems, they would not accept any new clients. It was an effort to “save a sinking ship,” Stifter recalls.
“We were taking on more than we could handle, and we were all going down.”
Stifter felt it was her responsibility as executive director to step in and ease the crisis for her staff.
It was easier for me to do it from afar than it would have been for an individual who had to hear the stories directly. When individuals in an organization are left on their own to make limits, and they’re the ones who are confronting the person in trauma, face to face and over and over again, it’s impossible for them. It’s incumbent on the organization to make these decisions.
The hope was that [closing intake] would allow folks to be more solid individually and collectively and to feel some of that incredible stress diminish. I wanted to protect people from their exposure to trauma as an organization. It was an incredibly difficult decision to make, and when you see these people coming to you in need, it’s heart-wrenching to not respond. But we all knew [that keeping intake open] wasn’t going to take us anywhere good, and even if we did take on more cases, we still weren’t going to meet the need out there. We needed to be as strategic and healthy about it as possible.
There was significant internal conflict before this decision was made. The frontline staff found it hard to contain the helplessness they felt; it was easier to be enraged and blame others on staff for not doing everything they could. For their part, the attorneys knew they could no longer responsibly manage their caseload in the current state of the organization. Yet some of them wanted to blame intake—if intake had been screening clients at an optimal level, they speculated, maybe the closing could have been averted.
Lewen recalls, “It was unclear how long we were going to stay closed, and the longer the closure was extended, the more demoralizing it felt to me. You’re still so underwater and trying to get your bearings. The organization is far over capacity, so everyone’s working bad hours, and that whittles away at you. You make it a little more manageable, and yet you’re still exhausted and still recovering, and now you’re leaving at 6 p.m. instead of 7 p.m. It was amazing to realize that we were still so busy and we weren’t even accepting new cases. How were we ever doing it before, and how were we ever going to do it again?”
She continues, “We started working on a plan based on the reality that we could not do everything. We started asking ourselves, ‘How are we going to do what we do as well as we can? How are we going to protect those whose job it is to turn people away?’ I remember thinking, ‘Let’s not fancy ourselves as the only place that can assist these people.’” Stifter echoes this.“We’re called to do something somewhere, but it’s self-aggrandizement to feel like I have to take it all on and take care of everyone,” she says.“So part of it is the humility of realizing this is my piece, and I want to tend to this piece the best I can, but I’m not in charge of the whole garden.”
In time, NWIRP would make a number of changes to streamline its operation. It hired an outside consultant to assist the staff in coming up with a long-term plan. It started orienting clients in groups rather than one on one, created more print materials, and limited the hours and days of intake. It also developed a phone system for providing initial information to potential clients. Rather than asking the intake staff to redirect clients in person, NWIRP began stating its policy via an automated voice message. Lewen recounts, “We asked ourselves,‘Is it a meaningful use of resources to have a live person on the phone turning people away? Is it ethical not to have a live person doing this?’”
The reality of closing intake was hard. Some community leaders and organizations were supportive, while others were judgmental and even disgusted. Lewen wrestled with the criticism but also remembers thinking,“We are part of a much larger and troubled judicial system. Why am I feeling personally responsible for our foreign policy?”
Jonathan Moore, a paralegal who was an accredited representative at NWIRP for 16 years, was told that the closure had harmed NWIRP’s reputation as an agency.“It was very demoralizing to think that this could be perceived as undermining the very heart of our work for social justice,” he recalls. “For those who had the direct contact with the public every single day, the intake workers, it was very harsh to experience people denouncing you.” Stifter too describes how awful it was to deal with community members who could not understand NWIRP’s intentions. The closure was “not widely accepted. I don’t hold it
out as the best strategy, but I do think that figuring out how to not get overloaded is critical, and when you can’t, then sometimes the only response is to stop entirely.”
While the decision to close intake was hard, Lewen says, “things were meaningfully different as a result. I just remember feeling a sense of some relief and some quiet. There’s a feeling of futility when you’re up against as much as we had been. There’s this constant clamor in your head, which is filled with the desire to help others and the painful knowledge of what you can’t do, and it never goes away. During that time, we were still working like crazy, but now we could focus less fleetingly on each person. You’re not combat-lawyering anymore. You’re not internalizing crises all the time. We had the space and sanity to reflect on what we were doing instead of what we weren’t getting done. I think it helped reduce the clamor in our minds. And still, it always felt urgent to open back up our intake. Even if closing intake felt like the responsible thing to do, nobody felt OK about it.”
Moore says,“I remember when you had to do a removal case from the beginning to the end of the hearing. It’s pretty labor intensive and you really want to do a good job. You’re doing it all on your own, and so there’s this tension between doing the cases you have really well and doing more cases, and of course your loyalty is to the people you’re actually representing. You can’t prioritize an obligation on a case you haven’t taken, but still you think about it. You want to document everything on your cases and maybe you’re doing too much, but you never know. You have to judge when what you’ve done is enough and when you could take on more. And that’s hard.”
Trauma Stewardship Page 16
