Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  I focus on what I was able to do that day. I focus on what went well, what changed, what moved, and what I was able to do. And the rest, the rest I leave behind at the end of the day.

  Pediatrician in a community health clinic

  In the field, reframing may take different forms. Sometimes it means concentrating on what’s in front of you, and sometimes it means stepping back. If one client dies, you may need to remember all the others who have lived. If it is the world that seems overwhelming, it may be better to concentrate on individuals. Street Yoga is an organization in Portland, Oregon, that supports homeless youth and the providers who serve them by teaching yoga, meditation, and wellness classes. When it came time to write a new mission statement, they took great care not to strive for something that would leave them perpetually feeling like they weren’t doing enough. Even amid the overwhelming reality that homeless youth face, they have found a way to focus on something that is, indeed, within reach. It reads, “Street Yoga is working to ensure that every person is at home in their own body, their own mind, and their own community, and that no one is ever homeless again.”

  Resourcing, as it’s called in the field of somatic experiencing, is a concrete way to work with focus. If you feel either suddenly or chronically out of balance, you can regroup by remembering your “resources”—the moments, people, places, and experiences that engage your parasympathetic nervous system, which is primarily engaged during times of rest. You might call up an image or memory that brings you peaceful and joyful sensations, for example. You might also take note that there is no immediate crisis: At least for the moment, the earth is not shaking, court is adjourned, surgery is over, the grant application is done, and so on. If you allow yourself this break, your system will begin to calm and regulate itself. Your heart rate slows, your breathing gets deeper, and the adrenaline slowly subsides. As you notice this, remind yourself that you can come back to a place of homeostasis.

  It can be as simple, yet helpful, as the technique that a skilled practitioner shared with me when I was describing my distress over a persistent cough. Instead of concentrating solely on the discomfort near the front of my chest, she said, “Let’s bring your awareness to your back. How does the back of your chest feel? What about the other lung, how does that feel?”Through such mental efforts, we can achieve increased calm and balance. The more we practice coming into the present moment and focusing on our internal and external resources, the more skills we will have to care for ourselves when we experience either acute or chronic stress.

  There is great power in understanding that we can change the way we interact with circumstances in our lives, simply by being intentional about where we put our focus. Daniel Siegel and Jack Kornfield, one a scientist and the other a Buddhist monk, are beginning to teach this as they combine the latest in brain physiology research with the oldest of mindfulness practices. They explain that the way you pay attention activates parts of your brain in very specific ways, and that this brain firing actually leads to structural changes in the brain itself. In other words, there is a real likelihood that with time and practice, a temporary, intentionally created mindful state will become a lasting mental trait. However small the ways in which we bring awareness to where we’re putting our focus may seem, they can lead to large changes in our experience of life. William James, a pioneering American philosopher and psychologist who was trained as a medical doctor, said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

  Several years ago, Seattle’s Environmental Home Center burned to the ground. A wonderful resource for renewable, sustainable, and green building products was destroyed, at least for a time. The postcard that the company sent out after the fire, which appears below, illustrates an enlightened approach to the hardship.

  1. Think of a challenging work situation. Write down three things that make it challenging. Write down three things that you appreciate about it. Look at your lists and ask yourself, “Where am I more likely to focus and why?”

  2. For one day, commit to paying attention to the running commentary in your mind. Is your mind in the habit of seeing the glass as half-empty or half-full? Are you able to reframe things as half-full, or do you feel an investment in seeing things as half-empty?

  3. Find a mirror, stand in front of it, and look at yourself. Notice the first three things that come to mind. Would you classify them as positive, loving, kind things? If not, try again.

  PROFILE HELEN HOWELL

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  CURRENTLY: Attorney/consultant

  FORMERLY: National delegate and chair of Washington State Obama delegation, distinguished practitioner in residence at Seattle University’s School of Law, legal counsel to U.S. Senator Patty Murray, special assistant and deputy staff secretary to President Bill Clinton, vice president for public policy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, deputy chief of staff for Governor Gary Locke of Washington.

  My sister and I have had conversations about why we’re doing what we’re doing; why we have this real-life fantasy that work is something that is supposed to be enjoyable and meaningful. I think it came from watching my father go off to work each day. As children, we thought he was going off to play, because he liked what he did so much. [Helen Howell’s father, Lem Howell, is a longtime civil rights activist as well as a renowned personal injury attorney in Seattle.] I think that explains a lot about my unduly high expectations about what work is to provide in one’s life. I have all these criteria that my work must meet. It must be stimulating and challenging, and it has to matter. I need to feel like I am making a difference, that I am contributing to making the world better.

  I must enjoy it, though, because I keep doing it. I have had a series of very intense, time-limited jobs, the kind that consume one’s whole life. While it was very, very exciting, I was miserable personally. Then you look up and seven years are gone. It takes a pretty profound toll on you when you’re unhappy. I have tremendous capacity, and I got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from my work. I could have gone on working like that for years, but I had some kind of realization that this can’t be it ...work can’t be it alone. There has to be more to life.

  I used to think that you weren’t working unless you were totally spent, unless you walked in the door and crashed on your couch. But then I went to work in the governor’s office. There were people there who were completely devoted and dedicated, and they also had to catch their carpool shuttle at 4:30. I’d look around and think: It’s not even lunchtime. Where’s everyone going? Why am I and my one colleague the only ones here? What’s our deal that we’re still here? Once I had my daughter, I realized that maybe I could do other things in my life. Maybe I could be a parent. If you are going to be who you want to be as a parent, you clearly have to have some energy at the end of the day.

  A turning point for me was a few months after my daughter was born, when she developed a respiratory virus. It was shortly after I returned to work. She was hospitalized for three days, and while I think I made one call to the chief of staff at the time, I didn’t do anything else, workwise. There was no you should do this or that, or you need to do this and that—none of it. This far outweighed anything else, and everyone I worked with understood, and nobody put any pressure on me. But more significant for me was that I was totally present and right there, and for once I didn’t have to assess what my priorities were. It just happened. I was totally present, and that was really amazing to me. I came to understand that I had a capacity I didn’t know I had, which was to completely suspend my work life. And from there I came to understand that not everyone works at 110 percent capacity, and that maybe it’s not normal to operate like that. I had been very unrealistic about that. It was a flash point for me to recognize that I’d been living life in a way that was super-intense.

  I was raised like a lot of Black kids, where I internalized that you have to be twice as good to get half as far and that I have a responsibility to others. The belief that to whom much is g
iven, much is expected. I also grew up in an immigrant family with a father whose life was a Horatio Alger story. And I watched my mom, a martyr who remains the most radical person I know in terms of her political beliefs, but who struggled to take care of herself personally. I grew up internalizing how my parents had been impacted by the British colonization of their homeland in Jamaica in the West Indies; they were preoccupied with what is and is not appropriate and what one should do. Plus for Dad, between the navy and the law, life was full of rules. And I grew up continually reminded of how blessed and lucky I was, given all the suffering in the world. I have internalized this stuff, this sense of what I should be doing to contribute to the world, to the point that it is who I am. Sometimes I get tired of feeling like I’m endlessly searching, and I wonder what my journey is about. In my heart, I believe it’s about arriving at a place where I feel that I can realize my greatest potential, but that’s quite a recipe, I suppose, and I don’t know when it will be enough.

  As an African-American woman, when I talk to people, I don’t get any automatic credibility or assumptions of competence. And the things that I work on aren’t valued greatly by society, so already I’m living in a world that doesn’t respect what is important to me. There is a feeling of being ultimately undervalued, but I worry about moving into that area of feeling persecuted. And the work itself, in the advocacy world, it’s tough. It’s difficult to make the decisions you have to make knowing the large-scale impact they’ll have on the lives of others. There is tremendous responsibility involved. And then there are the value dynamics and conflicts that surface. Even with coalition partners, we don’t always or even often agree on what is best for our nation, the people of the state of Washington, women, low-income people, or people of color.

  I have carried that weighty baggage with me. But you’re not going to complain. Intense in my family was when something was dire. A real problem when my dad was growing up was when you didn’t know where your next meal was going to come from or when you lost your mother at the age of 10. Then when you work for the president of the United States, you see his schedule. He was booked from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and then he’d be reading a book or two on top of it. He was working even harder than we were, so it was all OK. It’s such important work and we have only so much time. You’re always carrying it. It’s continual. Even when you’re off and if you’re watching the news, you’re thinking about what the plan will be and what that means for tomorrow.

  What Is My Plan B?

  I was always dreaming. Dreaming, dreaming, always dreaming. Those weren’t easy times, but I never stopped dreaming.

  Rollie Dick, an American schoolteacher and principal for 40 years who retired to Mexico and opened a restaurant with local townspeople

  When we realize the degree to which we can determine our focus, we may also open to the possibility that we have more options about how we structure our lives and work than we may have thought. To deepen this awareness, I often encourage people in my workshops to dream up a new vision for how they might conduct their lives. In other words, to create a Plan B.

  Like most of the exercises I suggest in this book, developing a Plan B can be both powerful and unsettling—to you and the people around you. As I was completing a workshop on trauma stewardship for a gathering of heads of independent schools in the Pacific Northwest, one gentleman raised his hand and said, “I have to be honest. Part of me is sitting here thinking about how quickly can I get you to come train all my colleagues back home. And part of me is thinking that you are the last person in the world I want to set foot on the school campus. I can’t afford to have everyone I work with leave. If they have too much opportunity to think about their options, they might decide to do something different.”

  Having a Plan B reminds us that what we do is an act of free will. Plan B could involve a career change, a new place to live, a fresh approach to our current work, or a different life altogether. It may be frightening to consider any departure from what we know. But even if we never go ahead with our Plan B, the mere act of considering alternatives may create an opening to broaden our conception of our life’s work.

  While it may be difficult to envision a Plan B, it is a practice worth trying. We can be so overwhelmed by logistics, minutiae, and the perceived constraints in our lives that we can see our work as a burden, an imposition, something being done to us. Through creating and re-creating a Plan B, we come to understand that it is we who make the fundamental choices about the work we do. While there is great responsibility that comes with this understanding, there is tremendous freedom as well. We always have options to change what we do, where we do it, or how we approach the work at hand.

  “Selective breeding has given me an aptitude for the law, but I still love fetching a dead duck out of freezing water.”

  This knowledge may serve us in profound ways. As Viktor Frankl writes,“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

  There are smaller psychic rewards for having a Plan B as well. When you share dreams with colleagues and loved ones, their attention may remind you that life is filled with possibilities. A coworker may bring in an article on gardening for you, or a friend may pass on a report about expatriates living in South America. These are gifts that remind you that your core self is not what you do for work. Rumi, the 13th-century Persian jurist, theologian, and poet, wrote, “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”

  In the late 1980s, Mike Ternasky helped found H Street skate-boards. While he built a successful company with several friends as business partners, they had a saying around the office: “If this thing doesn’t work out, we’re gonna do Plan B.” When Ternasky grew restless at H Street, he did indeed get rolling with Plan B, which created a team of top riders and “took the skateboard world by storm,” as the company’s Web site put it. While I often encourage people to think about a Plan B far from their current field of work, I appreciate the degree to which a Plan B, even as it applies to our current work, can help us. A Plan B does not need to be a completely different lifestyle; it can be as subtle as a change in our attitude and the way we approach our existing commitments.

  It may be helpful to remind ourselves that the change we want in the world is not tied to any given profession. Moreover, we as individuals cannot be either completely limited or fully actualized in any one job. Each job is only one of millions of tools that can be used to achieve the larger goal. If I am fixing something, and for a while I need to use a hammer, no one will say I am failing if later I pick up a screwdriver. When we undertake a repair, we expect to need a whole box of tools. As we work, however, many of us come to think of our jobs as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to institute the change we seek. We become very attached to doing that exact work in that exact place. We worry that if we stop doing that job (using that tool), we will be forced to give up on the project of repair altogether.

  It is counterproductive to think about various fields in terms of hierarchy or competition. It is a legacy of oppression that tells us we are “selling out” if we don’t work for a nonprofit or stay on the front lines doing extreme work. We don’t need to collude with the impoverished imagination that would have us believe there are only certain ways to contribute to the betterment of the world.

  As Connie Burk has said, “I have discovered that at my core self there is a will to compassion. I’ve been amazingly fortunate to have a job where the connection between my paid work and this will is very explicit. But when I stop doing my current work, I will not be exempt from the task
of right action. No matter what I do in the future, I will need to maintain that connection between what I do each day and my core will.” As the work of the 19th-century American philosopher and abolitionist Frederick Douglass teaches us, compassion can be more than just a reaction to others’ suffering. It can be proactive, something that you do as a matter of conscious choice.

  Getting to know what our deepest will is in life can help us hugely in developing a Plan B and C and D.

  “Have you ever considered another line of work?”

  1. Ask yourself, “If I weren’t doing this work, what would I love to do?”

  2. Generate a list of five things you can do over the next five weeks to help you get closer to realizing your Plan B.

  3. Tell three loved ones about your Plan B and ask them to encourage you in that direction at least once a month.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SOUTH • Building Compassion and Community

  To the south we call upon the peace and renewal that come from the earth element. By developing a microculture of supportive friends and family, we create an environment that sustains us, just as the earth does. By being compassionate to ourselves and others, we ground ourselves. This is where we come out of isolation, tap into the core energies of Mother Nature, and tend to both our individual and collective health and wellness.

  Creating a Microculture

  Nearly every Sunday I get together with my family and we have soul food. My aunt is retired and she starts cooking early in the morning. Sometimes you can find four generations gathered together to share stories of our past and present. Over a period of time I started to notice that my workweek just seemed to flow better because I was starting Monday happy and relaxed.