I’m learning that it is incredibly hard to manifest all this in your own life. There is a huge burden of responsibility on the individual to shift things, and of course that’s true—the individual is the first place it starts. Still, it’s very, very hard to take responsibility for my own health when the systems and the culture around me are designed to provide minimal support for health. A terrific example is just trying to find healthy food while traveling. I’ve found it really interesting to try to shift my work patterns. For example, I have to travel a lot, and there’s this expectation that I’m going to turn up even if I have to fly across the Atlantic for just one day. I started saying,“I’m not going to come.” The reaction I initially got from colleagues was anger, and I really had to hold a line on that. They’d say,“It’s important that you’re there, this is urgent.” And I’d have to say, “It’s important for you, and I’ve got other priorities, unfortunately.” It’s hard to reprioritize your health in a context where people think that suicide in a community elsewhere is a bigger problem.
Understandably, people in the center of trauma feel there is nothing more urgent, and in one sense there isn’t. But every conversation is about saving the world, and every conversation is about life and death. I just started saying no, you can’t approach it that way. I had to realize that the world didn’t end because I wasn’t there. I think it’s important to take a step back and ask, “Is it really necessary to be there?” It feels really great to have someone say, “We want you to fly across the Atlantic and be here,” and we all want someone to say that to us, but it’s also an illusion.
We need structures around us that will support us. Instead of working for an organization that can’t provide that structure, I’m starting up my own organization. I’m trying to build in a healthy structure instead of grafting it on later. I’m a really strong believer that the pattern is set at the beginning, and you live in a pattern.
Last year for me got really, really full, and as a result I didn’t have time to just do nothing. One of the things I did in response to that crazy year was I spent a week at home alone. That was hard and it was really, really, really good. It was great just being able to be with myself, to be comfortable with myself, and to allow whatever I wanted from within me to emerge. The first couple of days are hard; we have so much around us to distract us and there’s this attitude we have toward inactivity. It’s a huge privilege to be able to cultivate being with yourself, and it felt really grounding. So that’s one of the things I’d like to do more regularly. I’ve been trying to take three days here and a week there, and I just wake up and see what happens. That generally works well. It’s not a formal practice, but just having space makes a difference. To me, anyway.
Family is also a big part of it for me—being close to family and being in family. Family provides me with a context for a lot of learning and in some ways for building patience. The more we can build patience internally, the more we can build patience for complexity outside. It has been an interesting choice to live at home and deal with my family on a day-to-day basis. I’d noticed that the more my work affected me, the harder it was to be home. I’d turn up for a week after a trip for work, and my parents would say,“You’re not here. Where are you?” I’d say, “I’m right here,” and they’d say, “No, you’re not. You’re not really here.” Ironically, my mom, who doesn’t have any training in counseling and trauma, just sees through this really clearly. She’s been calling this out for a long time. I think it’d be amusing for her that I have had to go through all these experiences and have all these professionals telling me what she’s been telling me for a long time.
It’s indispensable, following these practices of caring for myself. Even if they’re difficult, they’re indispensable. I just can’t do the work I’m being called to do if I don’t. And if I really believe what I’ve been saying about being present in the room, then I have to be present in the room. It’s so easy to rush around and miss half the data. What you need to know is right there in front of you. If you’re exhausted and uncoordinated and rushing around, you’re just going to miss it. It’s just human biology—you’re just going to miss it.
My understanding of the work I’m doing has changed quite dramatically. You have social situations that have not improved for 50 or 500 years, and you need to figure out how to do something different. How do you support groups to choose a different pattern from the one they’re in? I used to think this was about teaching new skills—creation, innovation, etc. I realize now that the work is about creating or opening a space and keeping it empty. What skills does it take to hold a space open so that the wisdom that is already there can come out? How can you be silent and sit with yourself and be compassionate and patient? A lot of what fills space is concern and fear and anxiety, and suspending those habitual reactions takes a lot of work. Slowing down, knowing your own patterns, and knowing what triggers you are a big part of that. On both a personal and an institutional level, people are petrified of empty space. It’s like, fill the space, fill the space. There’s a quote from Jung. Someone asked him, “Do you think we’ll make it?” His answer was always the same: “We will if we do our inner work.”
Is This Working for Me?
My family would tell you that I’m resistant. . . . I know all of this, but I don’t know that I want to change.
Outreach worker helping victims of human trafficking
Once we are fluent in the language of why we are doing what we are doing, we can take the next step: asking ourselves,“Is this working for me?”As the answers to that question emerge, we can strategize about which elements to address, when, and how.
“I don’t mind the whip. Its the cubicles I find demoralizing.”
James Mooney led Native American Ceremonies for individuals struggling with a broad range of life’s challenges. People flew in from around the country to work with him and his wife. The Ceremonies lasted all day and sometimes all night. People would sit across from Mooney and describe their lives and specific situations. He would tend to his burning sage and cedar and listen. Then he’d look up at them and ask, “Does that work for you?” He posed the question casually, but like Jorge Alvarado he was actually cutting through all the surface layers of a person’s situation: the helplessness we feel under the weight of not-rightness in our lives, the dishonesty we perpetuate within ourselves to resist the risk of change, the ways we contort our true selves to conform to perceived, often distorted ideals. Really he was asking, “Who are you? Please get honest and connect with your heart.”
For Mooney, the more simply you spoke, the more honest you were. When I first started working with him, I answered his question with a long, convoluted, hyperintellectual response. He looked back calmly at me and said, “Sweetheart, I have a third-grade education. I can’t understand anything you’re saying.” And so I’d try again, and again, and again. And it was only when I was able to muster the courage to be totally honest with myself and with him that my answer became intelligible, because it was from my heart and not from my head. What I was saying finally made sense.
Somewhere along the way, many of us doing work we believe to be of great value to society find that it’s really not working for us. It can be very hard to admit this. At one time in our life, certain actions and choices may help us to survive or serve our well-being. Then, as we evolve as people, we often come to realize that these behaviors—which we thought were essential to us—are no longer in our best interest. It can be incredibly difficult to change, because these patterns may be a part of our identity, and we’re likely to have relied on them extensively. Still, as a qigong healer once told me, “This is no longer helping you. This is only harming you now. Are you ready to put this down?”
I have found that it is critical, when asking yourself this question, to be free of self-judgment and to try to be honest in your assessment. Remember that the effects of work on our lives may show up in very small or extremely large forms. As you try to open yourself to
the truth, frame the question in various ways.“Does it work for me? How does it work for me? Why does it work for me?” And once you’ve answered these questions, more will follow: “Am I doing my work with integrity, given all this? Are my reasons for doing this ethical?”
I have heard many people say that they embrace their work in part because it reinforces a worldview they have clung to over time. Upon exploring her trauma exposure response, an advocate for victims of human trafficking remarked,“Actually, I think this work has just made what was already there in my personality much more extreme.” Similarly, a public interest attorney said, “I’ve never been a glass-is-half-full kind of a guy, and this work has just reinforced my cynicism.” The echo effect is compelling, but it often reinforces pain and negativity. It can be a hard cycle to break.
On the other hand, work provides many people with a means to fix what they see as broken in the world. It can be a relief to find like-minded colleagues who will work toward a shared goal, especially when that goal involves rectifying injustice. Many of us are raised in communities where the social norms encourage us to minimize conflict, disguise suffering, and ignore disparity.
While the rubble of the World Trade Center still smoldered, then-president George Bush implored us to go shopping as a testimony to our nation’s resolve. Not to grieve, not to be kind to each other, not to reflect deeply and humbly on the series of wounds and tragedies that preceded the hijackers’ confoundingly violent and hopeless attacks, not to pitch in and make a difference in our own communities, but to shop. While this comment has often been remarked upon, it remains a shining example of how distracted and numbed-out our culture and governance can become. It also indicates how alienating it can be to work for social and environmental justice. For many people, it can be crazy-making and lonely to see that there are tangible causes of suffering, but at the same time to be surrounded by people who are committed to obliterating any such awareness from their—and our—consciousness.
This is in part what was so mind-blowing about the early years of feminism in the United States. At last, all the unnamed things that women had experienced as a result of centuries of sexism were given names, explained, and made visible. For a time, no one needed to feel alone or crazy anymore. It is similar to how former U.S. vice president Al Gore may feel in the present day as he champions the cause of global-warming awareness. He explains in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, “You know, there are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem.”The film shows how, in the midst of a global climate crisis, his path is truly working for him and bringing him a great deal of hope.
Striving to make the world a better place, then, works for some people because they can find larger structures and movements that allow them to enjoy life while also tending to what needs tending. It is similar to the inspiration and sustenance that you may feel when someone like Noam Chomsky or Ray Suarez or Vandana Shiva or Barack Obama gives voice to something you care deeply about. It can help balance other responses to your work, which may be along the lines of, “Oh, that is so depressing! How do you do that kind of thing?”
It takes courage to admit that our work may no longer be working for us. A friend and colleague of mine, Zaid Hassan, is often invited to help improve social situations that are entrenched and detrimental. He attends to them, sometimes for years, until some transformation can take place. He has served a broad array of those in need, from orphans in India to AIDS victims in South Africa to First Nations communities. He told me about his efforts in Canada, where he tried to address issues of suicide, substance abuse, and domestic violence. On his flight home to London, he finally took the time to catch up on the e-mail that had been accumulating for weeks: “And there I read in an e-mail that had been sent two weeks prior that a friend of mine’s brother had killed himself back home. I sat there reading it and could not believe that my friend had reached out to me during this time of such pain and I had not been available to him, even as I was working for a solution to decrease suicide rates halfway around the world. I decided right then that I never wanted something like this to happen again, where I would be too consumed by my work to attend to a friend in need.”
When we gain insight into the why of our work and we find specific parts that do work for us, it can feel like a tremendous gift. As John Brookins, now a prison reentry specialist and a men’s ministry director, shared,“I’m right where I want to be. I wish I had been here earlier, but as a Black Panther I was too angry to undo racism. Now, with some more age and maturity, I can really be present with my work in the prisons. I think to myself: ‘I can do this. We can do this. This is possible.’ I’m right where I want to be.”
Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, focuses on the task of finding a calling that serves us while we serve others. He says that understanding what one is meant to do is worth the hardship that often surrounds the seeking: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.... If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, thereby joining the parts more firmly together.” So while the exploration of “Is this working for me?” may temporarily increase our load, in the long term we will be more stable as a result of addressing the question.
1. Brainstorm five ways in which you think what you are doing is working for you.
2. Take three deep breaths and review your list. Assess to what degree those ways are or are not in your best interest or the best interest of those you serve.
3. Create a list of five ways in which you would ideally see your work benefiting you and those you serve. Compare the two lists.
CHAPTER NINE
EAST • Choosing Our Focus
As we move to the east, we call upon the new life and enlightenment of the fire element, which is revered in many cultures as the keeper of truth and originator of all energy. We ask ourselves where we’re putting our focus, and we expand our range of possibilities by imagining a Plan B. We gain a new sense of freedom by understanding that we have the ability to shift our perspective. When we open ourselves to inspiration, we may also rediscover our passion. This is the perfect moment to be honest about what we are able to accomplish in our existing job and what our options might be.
Where Am I Putting My Focus?
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust, French intellectual and novelist
Being conscious of where we are putting our focus can teach us that we have incredible freedom in how we choose to interact with our lives. I was reminded of this during recent travels in Mexico. I attempted to learn how to surf and now realize why, for the majority of surfers, it is a religion, a philosophy, a way of life. Awestruck, I suddenly understood surfing, or our ability to ride the waves, as a metaphor for life.
You’re out in the wide-open ocean, hoping to catch a wave. You can be annoyed that the sets are so far apart and the waves are breaking from the wrong direction—or you can choose to notice that the sky is blue and the sun is out and you’re with a whole group of strangers who are loving the waiting. Then the waves arrive, and you have no control over them. Wave after wave comes, in surfing as in life, and you don’t get to decide what they look like or how they break or how far apart they are. What you do get to choose is which wave you try to catch, which wave you are going to focus on.
When you pick a wave, you try your best. Sometimes you ride it all the way in and it’s sublime. Often you ride it for a time and you fall off, sometimes very hard. In that moment, as in life, you have a decision to make. Do you focus on the seconds that you stayed upright, rejoice that there will be another wave to catch, feel blessed that you are in a position to try for a wave at all? Or do you belittle yourself for not being strong enough, curse the wave, blame another surfer, or tell yourself that
if the board handled differently, you would have had a different ride? It is always up to us where we place our focus. It is this choice that will determine, ultimately, what our ride is like.
May I have a tiny umbrella in this Ernie? I’m on vacation.”
This teaching is shared throughout the world. The Indian doctor and spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra describes life as a series of scenes revealing themselves; in every moment, we decide where to place our attention. Focusing on negative, painful, troubling events can become habitual. It takes discipline to raise our gaze; look away from our accustomed pain, anxiety, and worries; and truly see the world through different eyes.
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter once said to Lesra Martin, “It is very important to transcend the places that hold us. . . . When I started writing, I discovered that I was doing more than just telling a story.... Every time I sat down to write, I could rise above the walls of this prison. I could look out over the walls all across the state of New Jersey, and I could see Nelson Mandela in his cell writing his book. I could see Huey. I could see Dostoyevsky. I could see Victor Hugo, Emile Zola. It’s magic . . .” No matter how uncontrollable and torturous our external world may be, we remain sovereign over what we focus on. We can change our lives by reframing our experiences.
Trauma Stewardship Page 18
