Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  If we are to remain physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy, however, sharing the pain cannot translate into soaking it all up. The energy of pain must be kept moving. If all the struggle and hardship we witness accumulates and takes root, it will grow so large that any light we have within us will be obscured. Uprooting this accumulated anguish is much, much harder than preventing it from taking root in the first place. Jack Kornfield says, “What has been entrusted to us, and what do we do with it? It’s simple. When we possess [others’ sufferings] in an unhealthy way, we worry, we’re caught, and we’re neither at peace nor free. Since it all changes, it’s guaranteed that it’s going to change, we need to discover a capacity to let go, a graciousness of heart.”

  For many of us, this concept may require some radical reframing. Letting go may sound like being passive or going limp. The thought of relaxing our grip may fill us with fear. You may be someone who was raised to believe that action = movement = growth = survival, and so when you think of stillness, you may come up with the equation stillness = surrender = powerlessness = death. Although eventually you may want to question these associations, it is not necessary to abandon them overnight. We are talking about moving energy not necessarily through stillness per se but through a mindful and disciplined approach of detoxing, cleansing, and putting our burdens down. Some can do this using rapid actions such as running, while others move toward the equation of stillness = awareness = connection = action = life. Those people may practice focused breathing, meditating, walking, gardening, chanting, and so on. As Thich Nhat Hanh said to a student who asked just how much she needed to slow down, “You never see us monks running. We walk slowly. It’s too hard to be present when you’re moving quickly.”

  So we talk about moving energy through as a way to keep ourselves at our optimal level. One way to move energy through is by conscious breathing. It may come as a surprise to many of us that attention to the breath is central to keeping ourselves in a state of balance, yet every ancient tradition has as a critical element mindful and deliberate breathing. Native Americans have held Sun Dancing and sweat lodge Ceremonies for centuries; Tarahumara Indians have run as a tenet central to their well-being; East Indian traditions have practiced yoga since the beginning of recorded time and, more recently, have held focused-laughter gatherings. Meditative traditions all over the world have developed techniques that sharpen the mind’s awareness and cultivate insight using one’s own breath as the primary guide. Breathing is the one regular, life-sustaining process we can always observe within ourselves. It is evidence of the present moment rising and passing away. It is a constant reminder that everything, including our own lives, is subject to a universal law, the law of impermanence. This perspective can free us to realize the myriad choices we have to live harmoniously, with deeper awareness, in this life.

  The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud. . . . Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told.

  Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

  When I was in New Orleans facilitating trauma stewardship workshops after Hurricane Katrina, I had the privilege of working with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund. Many of the city’s residents had been left with a pained, hollow look in their eyes, but at the Relief Fund I met two women who stood out because of their radiance. Kimberley Richards and Kanika Taylor-Murphy are community organizers, activists, and educators. Neither was in New Orleans when the storm hit land and the levees broke. Both survived the trauma as first responders. One lost everything but her brick house in Picayune, Mississippi. Both continued to live with ample subsequent trauma exposure as they worked with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, as well as other organizations, family members, and friends, in an effort to rebuild New Orleans.

  I had the opportunity to inquire what they had done to care for themselves that was helpful. Kimberley Richards said, “For a month after the storm hit, I wasn’t doing anything to take care of myself. And then I started getting sick, like in my head. Since then I have walked every morning for an hour or two. I’m joined by about seven other women now, and we walk through the neighborhoods and I breathe. It’s hard because my oppression tells me if I have that time, I should be helping other people. My oppression tells me that if I’m up that early, I should be writing a grant. But I keep doing it, I keep walking.” Kanika Taylor-Murphy said that practicing qigong and walking with Richards and their comrades were what allowed her to keep on keeping on.

  Billie Lawson has spent her career on the front lines of trauma as well as immersed in trauma debriefings throughout the state of Washington. She creates cues throughout her day simply to remind herself to breathe deeply. Each time her phone rings at work, she takes a full inhale and exhale before she picks up the receiver. It’s an exercise she gets to perform frequently!

  Other ways of moving energy through include working out, writing, singing, chanting, dancing, martial arts, walking, and laughing, just as long as these activities are done with mindfulness. One colleague who works with bombing victims in northern Iraq as part of a Christian peacemaking effort said, “I like to do emptying exercises—meditation, deep breathing, touching nature, and thinking about how I am not keeping or holding on to anything.”

  1. Stand or sit in a comfortable position. As you raise your hands above your head, breathe in. As you lower your arms, breathe out. Do this 20 times, slowly.

  2. Commit to walking or running or wheeling or biking outside for five minutes during every hour that you’re working. During this five minutes, focus on breathing in deeply and breathing out slowly. Notice anything beautiful around you and breathe that in as well.

  3. Initiate a co-counseling type of relationship with a colleague or friend whom you can call on regularly. Agree to counsel each other, if only for five minutes. Let your friend start the talking and listen attentively with a calming presence. Then it’s your turn. Say whatever is in your heart and mind, moving it out of your system, while your partner in the exercise listens attentively for five minutes. Repeat frequently.

  WHY HUMOR HEATHER ANDERSEN

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  CURRENTLY: Founder, HumanSource consulting; named plaintiff for marriage equality lawsuit (Andersen v. Washington State, 2006).

  FORMERLY: Author of a dissertation on humor and leadership; Clinical director, Hospice of Seattle.

  Humor has the ability to help you shift perspective quickly. It can be much like psychotherapy, only faster! Humor opens up some little door that lets you see yourself and the situation in a bigger picture. And sometimes it’s that little door that can save your life.

  I remember years ago I was very depressed with suicidal thoughts. I was on the freeway and I decided I just wanted to end it all then and there. I saw a huge truck coming up behind me, and I decided that I’m going to turn into it and let it kill me. Then I thought, maybe I should just look at the guy and see who I’m going to have take me out, you know, just connect for a second and look at him. I noticed, then, that the truck he was driving was a Darigold Dairy truck, and I thought,“Only you, Heather, would have something as wholesome as a milk truck take you out.”And I started laughing, and it kept me from swerving in front of him, and I was able to reach my work, go inside, and call my therapist. As an adult, that was when humor literally saved my life.

  Humor also cracks you open in a way so that you can be healed, too. I grew up in a crazy, chaotic household; humor was a way that I could move adroitly through it. I could protect myself with it. I could use it to fend off a parent’s bad mood or a crazy situation. I could be the clown. I knew that if I could get my parents to laug
h about something, then they would ease up.

  When I was 15, I started working in a nursing home full time after school, and there humor was a psychological defense. We laughed so hard there, about so many things. I remember this one shift when I was cleaning up the body of an old gentleman after he had died, and this small TV was on across the room. I can still remember the Pepsi commercial that was on, with their theme song of “Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation!” Seeing that dead body right in front of me and these young, healthy, come-alive-you’re-in-the-Pepsi-generation people running in the background made me laugh out loud. I was able to see the juxtaposition and it was protective. It took me out of the moment and gave me the emotional and psychological distance I needed to deal with what was at hand, and to do my job well.

  The in-group humor we’d do a lot of times. These are times when you take the power away from whatever psychological situation is threatening you and reduce it using humor. It is such a fine line to do it respectfully. The humor always needs to preserve the human dignity of the person and yourself. It’s where you talk about one of your own foibles rather than about the patient. It can allow you to keep moving through, because while somewhere in your head you’re saying,“This is psychologically stressful,” you are also thinking, at that very moment, “I can hardly wait to tell them this at the morning break.”That allows you to get through the next bit with that patient. It’s like what the American author and radio personality Clifton Fadiman says about a sense of humor: “What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one’s own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke—and that the joke is oneself.”

  It was a similar thing when my brother died. The funeral home staff was about to zip up the body bag, and I said, “Don’t zip it up all the way,” and my brother’s wife then introduced her dead husband to the mortician. The humor I found in introducing a dead body to a mortician gave me enough distance so they could wheel him out of the house, and I was able to stay present with my family in a deeper way without being totally absorbed in the sadness of it all at that moment.

  I have that comic vision—as the American psychologist and therapeutic humorist Steven Sultanoff describes it, “A way of perceiving the world that allows us to be receptive to the humor around and within us.” I don’t know if it was genetic or I developed it; I imagine it came from both the nature and nurture routes. But I do have it and it has been one of my greatest assets in life.

  I remember when we were in the courtroom for the Supreme Court hearing on the marriage equality lawsuit, and it was so incredibly intense. I noticed that there were two men sitting behind us holding hands, and I thought to myself, “I didn’t think they were gay.” So I started eavesdropping, and they were praying that God would strike us down and that we would be taken to the fires of Hell! I almost laughed out loud thinking how the two men would react if they knew I interpreted their hand-holding as gay men there in support of us. That helped ease some tension for me; it got me out of myself and my ego so that I could see in some way the larger absurdity of it all.

  I love to quote Leo Rosten, the Polish-born American educator and humorist: “[Humor is] the affectionate communication of insight.” In my humor research with leaders, I found that there were leaders who felt “affectionately encountered” when I’d use humor with them. Most people in leadership positions, and I would say most of us in general, do not have a large repertoire of humor techniques—humor is an untapped resource. Many of the leaders in my study used negative humor—like sarcasm, which is more used for controlling others and drawing boundaries; or making fun of or shaming others. What’s so important with humor is the intent and the feeling behind it. It’s such a reflection of a person, in that you can tell so much about a person’s values and psychological well-being by how well and how often they use humor. Some years ago, I was leading a grief group with a number of nurses who were working with families who had lost a child recently. Yet, somehow we were able to bring humor into the group, and the members were able to laugh a great deal despite all the tragedy they bore witness to. Eventually one of the supervisors overhearing the laughter coming from our conference room said, “That doesn’t sound like a grief group to me. I’m not sure they still need to meet.” Clearly she didn’t understand the tie between grief and humor.

  Humor gives me physical and psychological energy; as I have become more open and alive, my laugh has changed. I laugh really loud now, from deep in the belly, and that’s a good thing. Physiologically that gives you an internal massage of your organs. It’s absolutely part of my every day. Improvisation is such an important thing to be able to use as well. The big thing with improv is that you never refuse an offering. Through improv you’re able to open to what is and work with what you’re given. Watch people who use humor well; they are usually folks who say yes a lot to others and to life.

  In my dissertation I created a model of humor use—the Andersen Humor Model. As part of it, I say that your use of humor has to match with you as a person (ego appropriate) and it has to fit the environment in which you’re working (eco-appropriate). When you make a snappy rejoinder and you realize that it didn’t align with your values, or you realize it was not the right time or right place, then apologize. You start being more aware and making sure your humor aligns, but you still continue to take risks. Simultaneously, we need to educate ourselves to be sure that our humor is not oppressive or offensive in any way. We all have a responsibility to stop oppression that is couched in humor, and people in leadership positions are responsible for making sure their policies reflect this.

  Steven Sultanoff has some great articles where he writes about humor strengthening our physical and psychological immune systems. Biochemically we are affected by humor and the release of immunoglobulin when we laugh. Additionally, humor helps us regenerate our psychological immune system and helps us alter how we feel, think, and behave. One aspect he talks about, which I love, is in the humorist and cartoonist James Thurber’s expression,“Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.”Those moments of realizing “It wasn’t funny at the time!” are an example of what Thurber and Sultanoff mean by that. While humor in no way reduces the seriousness of a traumatic situation, according to Sultanoff it can later “lighten the load of coping with trauma and aids in the healing process by offering perspective and assisting the client on the path towards recovery.”

  Margie Brown, a recognized teacher and artist in biblical humor in the U.S., describes humor this way: “Humor happens when two worlds collide. Something unexpected has to happen that jolts you up and out of the normal pattern, and then you start laughing. Humor is the synapse between the regular and the surprising. Every time we laugh, we are making a leap between two worlds.”

  Gratitude

  The air feels so nice right now, it just feels perfect.

  Hurricane Katrina survivor, after returning to New Orleans from her evacuation to Austin, Texas

  One of the ways that we can consciously create a sense of balance in our lives is by cultivating our sense of gratitude. Locating something to be thankful for at all times is an essential part of trauma stewardship. It is yet another way that we can reframe our circumstances through mindfulness. Remind yourself that while the suffering may seem endless, so is what we have to be grateful for; it just might be less obvious and take a more creative approach to find it. An example of this is the practice of welcoming the difficult people in our lives as “teachers,” which we discussed in chapter 8, as part of our investigation of trauma mastery. Viewing our most challenging relationships as our teachers can help make bleak times bearable. It also roots us in humility and graciousness, which is much better than arrogance and indignation.

  “I couldn’t disagree with you more. I think yours is greene.?”

  I encourage organizations to weave gratitude time into their staff meetings. After the processing and hashin
g and debriefing, set aside some moments when workers can honor what is going well, what they are truly grateful for. Many workplaces have shared with me that they keep morale high by creating systems, formal or informal, that allow workers to praise and thank one another. Such systems could include a bulletin board where people can be anonymously acknowledged, an employee-of-the-week lunch, or simply a culture where people thank each other routinely. Che Guevara, the Argentinean-born Marxist revolutionary, said, “Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

  Our acknowledgments to those who help us to be who we are can go such a long way. As the author and AIDS activist Alan Gurganus wrote, “One day on the subway, I stood reading how Reinhold Niebuhr, when asked to define Sainthood, answered, ‘The spouses of saints.’” Even as we try to hold it together at work, our personal relationships often begin to suffer—whether they are with friends, partners, children, or other family members. Making an effort to hold our intimate connections in a space of gratitude is an important step.

  In our work, too, few things can sustain us as well as gratitude. In Mexico, I met a man who was in large part responsible for the conservation of sea turtles in the Playa San Francisco region. When I asked him if he felt thrilled by what he’d accomplished, he shook his head slowly.“You know, for the first five years I just kept trying to turn it over to someone else in the community so I could leave and go do other things. The next five years I was resigned to staying, but I was resentful and wished someone would come along to take it over. Finally, for the last five years I’ve accepted being here, and I really appreciate what we get to do day-to-day.”