Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  Another NWIRP staffer revealed how few options people felt they had for slowing down before the closing. She herself felt that “the only legitimate justification for withdrawing my energy at all was to have a baby. I remember thinking that was the only way I’d be able to stop doing what I was doing. Fortunately, I also wanted a baby, but isn’t that disturbing?” She knew she wanted her work life to be different. “When we’re doing social justice work, we are really wanting everyone to live better, not as bad as the worst surviving person. If we really understood what it is like to live in such impoverished conditions, then we wouldn’t be glamorizing it like we do on some level through our work environments.”

  Moore remembers, “We were always trying to reinvent how we did intake. Sometimes it seemed like we were just moving around the problem, but there was always a lot of discussion in the organization and I think that really helped.” Stifter says,“‘Trauma exposure response’ wasn’t in my vocabulary at that time, but I wish it had been. I think I would have been more effective if I had known exactly what individuals were facing, if I had known there were things to look for, and that it has a name.” Beginning with the closing of intake, NWIRP moved in the direction of more moderation. Once moderation was adopted as an organizational strategy, Stifter says, “it seeped through, and when folks came into that culture anew, they had different expectations.”

  She describes her evolution toward achieving balance in her life. “I had lost my own personal life. I had lost a lot of small things along the way. A big turning point was having children and realizing that this isn’t going to work, and the cost is too great. Some of the best things I’ve done have resulted from a focus of, I’m going to do this and say ‘no’ to these 12 things, and that is OK. I’ve seen how fruitful that can be. When I was the executive director of NWIRP, I would go swimming three afternoons a week at the YMCA, and people would remark on this. They didn’t understand how I could take the time away. I’d tell them, ‘I just walk out the front door. That’s all it takes.’ I’d be gone an hour. I’d just go swimming and know that it was OK. All my work was there when I got back. And I was better for having gone.”

  Vicky Stifter is now a pastor at a church in Hood River, Oregon, and we ended our conversation just in time: “Come hell or high water, I’ve made a commitment to go to this yoga class every Tuesday, so I have to go now.”

  Is Trauma Mastery a Factor for Me?

  I miss my trauma.

  Trauma survivor

  As we consider why we’re doing what we’re doing, it may be useful to check in with ourselves about the presence of trauma mastery in our lives. Trauma mastery addresses one way of coping with trauma. For many survivors of trauma, our lack of control over a traumatic incident is one of the most terrifying and unnerving things about it. How much anxiety this causes us will vary from person to person, depending on how much control we feel like we have in life generally. Our philosophy or spirituality or religion may tell us to have faith in a higher power—but still, one of the hardest things about trauma is this feeling of not being in control.

  What humans often do to reconcile this lack of control is to create and re-create situations as similar to the traumatic incident as possible. We seek to turn a traumatic situation in which we once felt powerless into a new situation where we feel competent and in charge. We tell ourselves that this time there will be a different outcome. Or so we hope. This is a sophisticated coping mechanism, and by and large it is done unconsciously. If we are conscious that we are seeking trauma mastery, and if we navigate with insight, mindfulness, and honesty, this mechanism may contribute to our healing. More often, though, our attempts at trauma mastery lack awareness and intention. We act reflexively, attempting to salvage some sense of control. We can end up reinforcing feelings of being overwhelmed or lacking power—at its extreme, unconscious trauma mastery may even increase our risk of physical harm or exposure to dangerous situations. This is obviously to our detriment, and the cycle of attempting to master the trauma is likely to start again.

  It is critical that we explore this process from a place of humility and empathy for ourselves and others. Attempts at mastery are a basic human way of coping with trauma. If we don’t fully understand this, we may end up berating ourselves and blaming those who are victims of suffering. If we are open—and free of judgment—in considering how this dynamic may operate for us and for others, we gain precious insight. Even if we decide that trauma mastery isn’t an issue for us, it’s important to be compassionate when we work with colleagues for whom this may be a factor.

  Trauma mastery emerges in our lives in three primary places: our activities, our relationships, and our choice of work. Let’s start with activities. We may find trauma mastery if we consider where we are most determined to spend our time. For example, someone on a backpacking trip may contract hypothermia and damage his or her fingers or toes. That person may continue to go back to the same area year after year, hoping that this next time, nothing unfortunate will happen. We see trauma mastery behaviors frequently after natural disasters. Nine months after Hurricane Katrina, I discussed this concept in a workshop in New Orleans. One participant said, “Well, that’s really stupid.”After taking some time to gather her thoughts, her colleague Dina Benton spoke up. She said, “You know, if we really think about it, it’s exactly what the majority of us are trying to do in New Orleans right now.” She felt that simply by remaining in New Orleans, she and her colleagues were trying, in part, to regain control over circumstances that had stripped them and so many others of any familiar life or sense of self.

  We can also look for trauma mastery in relationships. As one colleague of mine said,“It got to the point where I didn’t have friends anymore, I had a caseload.”You may have heard others in your life (or perhaps yourself) say,“I married my brother” or “I feel like I’m dating my mother.”According to Linda Mooney, a medicine woman, Native American spirituality regards this phenomenon as no accident. Instead of feeling confused and victimized by the challenging people who appear in our lives, her tradition teaches, we need to claim our role in inviting these people in. Mooney says we call into our lives the teachers we most need to learn from, and these teachers will reappear in person after person until we finally absorb the necessary lessons. This philosophy goes so far as to say we choose the families we are born into. Whether or not this is a belief you can adhere to, it can be invaluable to reassess the problematic people in our lives as teachers instead of tormentors. We can gain great wisdom if we acknowledge that we play a powerful part in our relationships. We can ask ourselves, “Have I been here before?”And if so,“What do I have left to learn?”

  Although firsthand experience with trauma leads to personal suffering, it can be sublimated into social or artistic action and thus can serve as a powerful agent for social change.

  Bessel A. van der Kolk, clinician, researcher, and teacher, Boston, Massachusetts

  Finally, we often see trauma mastery in our choice of work and careers. This dynamic is one of the reasons why people stay in “helping professions,” for example, even when they foresee a career of low-paying, difficult, and poorly resourced work. Some people feel driven to work in a field that is connected to an earlier trauma in their life; consciously or not, they intend to master the haunting echoes from a previous time. It may be the mother whose postpartum depression has lifted and who now leads support groups for new parents, the drought survivor who now champions international aid for regional water-well projects, or the law enforcement officer whose father was killed in the line of police duty. Someone reviewing incoming master of social work applications once told me that every single personal essay she had read to date cited a traumatic history as a primary factor in the applicant’s decision to attend social work school.

  Indeed, there are many leaders whose choice of their life’s work was informed by trauma mastery. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter is an example. A professional boxer who was falsely convicted of murder
and served two decades in prison, Carter is now a prominent advocate for those who are wrongly imprisoned. His hard-won wisdom and consciousness about what motivates him have helped him to make the world a better place. My own father’s journey is also one of such reconciliation.

  My parents were divorced at the time when my mother died of cancer, but they had previously been married for 20 years. My brother was 16 and I was 13. My father was self-employed, with a fulfilling career in public relations. Decades after my mother died, a PR assignment brought him in contact with a hospital program that was intended to help the children of people with cancer. Not long after his first meeting there, my father closed his public relations practice. He created a foundation dedicated to supporting children whose parents have cancer. He has worked on this issue nationally and internationally, and he has even compiled a book on the subject. Every day he brings a fierce passion and stunning commitment to his work. This commitment may best be understood by reading the dedication page in his book:“With love to my two great (grown) kids, Craig and Laura. I wish I had done more.”

  Some who are contending with trauma mastery as a dynamic in their work may find it difficult to separate what is now from what was then. Whether it is the refugee from Darfur, Sudan, who finds herself working for refugee rights or the child-abuse survivor who becomes a prosecuting attorney, people who have chosen a life’s work based on trauma mastery will know in their bones that the stakes in what they do are exponentially high. Their expectations for themselves and others may be untenable and destructive. Continuing to explore all the ways trauma mastery may unfold in our lives personally and professionally is the first step toward awareness. Compassion for ourselves is critical. By developing a mindful and deliberate practice to heal from trauma, we take a proactive step. Around the world, we have countless role models—people who have been effective in repairing the world while still in the process of repairing their own hearts.

  Sometimes the trauma we’re hoping to master is so outside our reach that we work to heal ourselves by reconciling our pain in a distinct, yet related, effort. A colleague of mine was doing research on nonhuman primates and other large mammals deep in the rain forests of West Africa when a civil war broke out and disrupted his work. When he returned, he was unable to continue his work with animals, but he found another way to promote healing. “I don’t know how to reconcile the past, but I suspect my reconciliation strategy is to merely move forward in seeking to do good works. Last summer I led a team of three ob-gyn surgeons to conduct several dozen obstetric fistula repairs at a rural hospital. No doubt, some of these were gynecological trauma due to the extreme forms of sexual violence inflicted during the war. For certain, the lives of several dozen women—total strangers to me—were transformed. This is what I mean by moving forward. I have come to believe that to get to the future, your path must pass through your nightmares. My time in West Africa taught me that lesson.”

  1. Consider to what degree trauma mastery may be a factor in your work. As you ask yourself why you’re doing this work, see if there are any historical wounds that motivate you.

  2. If you think that trauma mastery is one reason you are drawn to your work, assess how else you are attending to this original trauma in other areas of your life. Are there additional ways to support your healing, thereby decreasing your potential dependence on your work in this regard?

  3. Consider the people you know, either personally or through the media, who have thoughtfully attended to trauma mastery as it applies to their work.

  PROFILE ZAID HASSAN

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  CURRENTLY: Facilitator, writer, founder of Reos Partners, author of a book in progress on active responses to the destruction of cultures.

  FORMERLY: Worked with Generon Consulting on long-term projects involving sustainable food supply chains in North America and Europe, child malnutrition in India, and aboriginal relations in Canada.

  Ithink the place to start is with context, which for me is in my family more than anything else. Coming from a family where we’ve been refugees forever, I’ve grown up with this sentence in my head that no problem is really a problem. Ever since we’ve been kids, being upset about a problem or despairing or being depressed has just been a no-no. We were raised with an attitude that no problem is so big that it should be overwhelming, and for the longest time that was never really called into question. I think the last five or six years of work have made me really look at this.

  My ancestors’ and parents’ history is part of my personal history, and every day I realize how much it’s shaped the work I do. That might seem obvious, but it hasn’t been obvious to me. Both sets of my grandparents lived in Calcutta and moved to East Pakistan in 1947 when Partition happened. That was the largest mass movement in history. It was a traumatic event, and our family lost everything in that move. And then in 1971 there was civil war between East and West Pakistan, and then my family was on the Bangladesh side and they had to flee to Karachi and again had to lose everything in the process. And then my family lived in the Middle East in the 1990s, and we basically had to flee from there in 1992 because my father had a disagreement with one of the local rulers. It has become a strange pattern, and we’ve carried a mindset or a set of beliefs that has come with those experiences. I haven’t fully been able to explore what it all means or how it has affected me, but I know that it’s there. I can see it through the mist, but I haven’t cleared the mist away.

  Working with Generon [a consulting firm that addresses intractable social issues around the globe, where Hassan worked at the time of our interview] has exposed me to situations that are very complex and stuck at one level and increasingly traumatic, so the work I’m getting increasingly involved with is around primary trauma. How secondary trauma and trauma stewardship come up is that we work with organizations where people have this suck-it-up attitude. So as an organization we in turn work incredibly long hours and have an incredibly demanding lifestyle of being on trains and planes all the time, and while we’d have the conversation about what is life balance, it never really resolved itself. For me the clarity came during a project in India, where I was working on malnutrition. In India as a team we re-created the sort of internal culture that Generon had. It was the hypermasculine work ethic of you never complain, you work 10 times as hard as you have to, and you never stop to pay attention to that culture and what it’s doing to you. We re-created that in the culture of that project, and everyone became exhausted and wiped out all the time. The more tired people were, the less capable they were of dealing with complex issues in any way. The last day of this one series of three weeks was the single worst day I’ve ever had, workwise. It broke down in the group and it broke down amongst us and it was just awful.

  I was debriefing that experience with one of my colleagues, and I was telling her about how we take people on nature solos where they go out into the woods alone. I told her how one of the guys had been gone for an hour in his tent and then couldn’t be there alone, and afterwards we found out he’d had a really difficult childhood and teen years and a very traumatic past that he’d never dealt with. She asked, “What provisions have you made for folks when trauma surfaces at a psychosocial and at a personal level?” I realized we were just really lucky that nothing bad happened with this man. Her response was, “You can’t have someone commit suicide on your project,” and that really shook me up. I realized that we were unprepared and how much that was a reflection on our culture. I reflected a lot on India and how different it could have been if we’d paid attention to health for all of us. So for the last year I’ve been working on consciously building in processes for health and wellness.

  At Generon, we knew what health and wellness processes were for, but only intellectually. In India, our thinking totally shifted from “These are dispensable practices” to “These are indispensable practices.” If we want people working with empathy and care and to do this well, we have to build in practices around health and tra
uma. One thing that is becoming more and more important in our group work is the idea of embodiment—how do we embody in the space and in ourselves what we are doing? The problematic paradigms we work with manifest themselves in the physical all the time. You can work with them on the linguistic level—by talking about them—or you can work with them on the physical level. I’m interested in how we can shift these nonverbal paradigms that are the cause of systemic problems. If you have a certain policy that doesn’t work or if you have a bunch of buildings that don’t have windows, they are literal manifestations of what people believe are important and not important.

  Another way is you actually shift the physical and see what impact that has. This is the idea of embodiment on the physical level: How do we carry ourselves, and how do our beliefs about health manifest in the room? It’s a pretty uncomfortable thing for people to look at. In my experience, people are happy to look at anything that is outside the room. It’s easy to look at problems in other communities, other practices. But to shift and look at ourselves—to look at how we are contributing to this in the moment—that takes a lot of courage and a lot of will. We typically think of systemic change as something that is happening far away from us. But things don’t happen out there, they happen in the room. We just don’t see them.

  One experience I had came when we were doing a skit around people’s lives in a community as part of a course. One of our colleagues teaches bodywork and dance, and she sprang up and said, “Let’s look at what is really happening here.” There was a guy standing up lecturing a group of people who were representing the community. She pointed out all the dynamics just in the placement of people’s bodies. That was just a real insight into how power manifests in the room as a result of how we use our bodies, and how changing this can actually shift the power dynamics. One of the things we’re tying into is that these power dynamics give rise to symptoms. “The system is perfectly designed to produce the results it does”—I keep hearing that quote. The frustrating part for me is that when you have a system that is producing a lot of trauma, people focus on that trauma, and there’s very little attention focused on the source. What is this system that is churning out so many people who are suffering? I know there are not infinite resources, but if we could put even 10 percent of our resources into what is generating trauma, then we could make a difference. Otherwise, I think we’re all going to just get overwhelmed.