Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  Anger and Cynicism

  When you see the suffering, when you experience it yourself, it’s very hard to not want revenge.

  Harn Yawnghwe, pro-democracy activist and director of the Euro-Burma Office, Burma

  “Obviously, behind all the jolliness there’s a lot of rage.”

  Anger is a common feeling among those trying to do right in the world. One may feel anger at the sources of injustice, at the treatment from one’s organization, or at the clients themselves, to name a few. One may experience a hot, reactive anger or more of a cold, slow anger. Anger is complicated because the majority of people in our society have not been raised with good information or skills for managing it.

  For most of us, anger is still primarily associated with times in childhood when bad things happened to us or when we had few concrete skills for channeling our feelings responsibly. How many of us feel like it’s okay to feel angry? Do we know how our anger looks and feels to others? Do we know what’s actually at the root of our anger? Do we know how to work with our anger and resolve it in a productive way that does no harm and instead results in creativity and positive change?

  We can also look at anger from a framework of systematic oppression. From childhood on, there is often rigid socialization around anger: who is allowed to feel angry, who is expected to be angry, which groups are seen as angry people. These social norms most often fall along the lines of gender, race, and socioeconomic upbringing. For example, boys may be socialized to believe that feelings such as sorrow or fear may be more safely expressed as anger, while girls are often taught that it is socially acceptable to express just about any feeling except anger. In time, both boys and girls may lose their capacity to recognize or even experience the full array of their emotions.

  I have all this anger bottled up inside of me, and I feel like I can’t let it out. I wouldn’t know what to do with it, and I feel like it’d be too much. So it is just inside of me, and I can’t hold it in anymore.

  Child protective services worker

  We may be unaware of our anger, even when all of our loved ones, colleagues, and clients have to tiptoe around us. Years ago, I was asked to give a keynote speech on trauma stewardship to a large gathering of U.S. Air Force personnel. When we began talking about anger, I encouraged the participants to do a bit of homework once they left the conference. I asked them to connect with a loved one whom they trusted and say to that person, “Tell me about my anger. Help me understand what it looks like, feels like, sounds like.” I reminded them to not be defensive and to listen with an open heart and mind. There was widespread laughter. I said, “Hey, it’s just a suggestion. Try it out.” Several years later and thousands of miles away from that laughter-filled conference room, I was setting up to do a trauma stewardship workshop. A man who turned out to be in the Air Force approached me and said,“You know, I attended your talk several years ago and there was that section when you spoke about anger. When I got home, I asked my wife if she thought I was angry and what my anger looked like to her. It has completely changed our relationship. I actually think that I now have a sense of my anger.”

  If we are not comfortable with our own anger, our clients may find it impossible to process their anger with us. And there’s another concern—we frequently take our anger out on people and animals and situations that are not connected to what our anger is actually about. They become our scapegoats.

  Often when individuals try to deal with their anger honestly, directly, and in a good-faith way, it can be so unnerving for those around them that they may be viewed as “a bitch” or labeled intimidating. I am reminded of my father-in-law, who visits frequently. I often have the opportunity to hear him talking with his colleagues over the phone. Born and raised on the East Coast, he is able to communicate his various levels of anger effectively, without being passive-aggressive, pretentious, or needing to apologize for being straightforward. For me it can be unsettling; for him it’s just Wednesday morning back East.

  “But she’ll come down evntually and sh’ll come down hard.”

  I’ve heard many people say, “I’m not an angry person. We’re not angry at our workplace. We don’t have anger issues,” and then they talk about how funny they are and how they’re a cynical bunch. While anger is a natural feeling and in and of itself does no harm, cynicism is a sophisticated coping mechanism for dealing with anger and other intense feelings we may not know how to manage. Its undercurrent is anger, and yet it is often witty, quick, sharp, easy to laugh at, and incredibly alluring. Responsible humor is one thing, but cynical humor used to avoid dealing with feelings of anger is another. When cynicism is our main mode of humor, it can warp our sense of the world around us. As a character created by the American actress and comedian Lily Tomlin said, “I find it very hard to keep my cynicism up to the level of reality.”

  Inability to Empathize/Numbing

  I feel emotionally asleep.

  Executive director of an interpretation-services nonprofit

  An inability to empathize with others, or feeling numb, often happens as a result of one’s system being overwhelmed with incoming stimuli. Jon Conte, a professor of social work, clinician, and one of the forefathers of trauma exposure theory, says it is as if you are a sponge that is completely saturated and has never been wrung out. One can only take in so much.

  “Are you sure you’re not confusing manic-depressive with awake-asleep?”

  A pattern we often see is that people will get to a state of numbness, and their body and spirit and psyche will naturally try to regain a state of feeling. By now, we may have numbed out such intense feelings that any hint of experiencing them again, or of having any kind of a strong emotional response, may be scary or distasteful or leave us feeling out of control. We may find ourselves crying at a television commercial or yelling at our dog or having feelings that are real and yet not necessarily congruent with the situation at hand. One colleague said, “If I let myself feel this, I don’t think I’ll be able to pick myself up off the ground.” And so we often welcome back the numbing and may even seek out ways to deepen it.

  The body naturally employs a complicated mix of hormones and chemicals, sensory cues, and external stimuli to manufacture feelings. Feelings alert us to danger, aid in speedy decision making, focus our attention, and calm us down. We can override this system—that is, “numb out”—by amping up the production of feelings to the point that one is basically indistinguishable from another, or by shutting down the mechanisms for registering these feelings.

  It goes from those “oh my God” moments when I used to read files to now they’re just another file. You never wanted to get to that point where you lose that “oh my God” moment because these are really, really horrible things I’m reading.

  HIV/AIDS caseworker

  Numbing is not difficult. We live in a society and often work for agencies with innumerable mechanisms that encourage numbing. We have all experienced the urge to numb ourselves. As one conservationist and natural resources educator who works in Latin America and the Caribbean shared, “Conservation is a difficult field to be in. Your senses are flooded by knowledge and feelings of loss. You work with people who are constantly fighting and constantly feeling like they are losing. I myself am much moodier than I used to be. I have to drink sometimes, especially when I am away from home working. I’m not much of a drinker, but it helps numb my feelings when they make me anxious about how it isn’t reconcilable.”

  Alcohol and over-the-counter, prescription, and street drugs are among the best-known tools for turning up the volume or shutting off the system. Similarly, overwork and overscheduling may cause our bodies to secrete adrenaline, a hormone that keeps us alert and racing around but may block our awareness of the feelings underneath. Dependence on caffeine and sugar may help us to feel better temporarily, but they also numb us to feelings of fatigue or craving.

  My children say I don’t play with them anymore. I don’t sing anymore, I don’t laugh anymo
re.

  Family law attorney

  In New Orleans I had lunch with Dina Benton. She is an extraordinary woman who lost her entire home in the hurricane and spent months driving around in her car, which was full of rescued possessions and her dog. She was one of the first civilians to return to her neighborhood after the storm, and several months later she got her job back with the Audubon Institute. She is now part of the team that will remain at the zoo, caring for the animals, should there be another severe storm.

  When we met, Dina described the last 10 months of her life in a very even, rational way. As we were preparing to leave the restaurant, she ordered a cup of coffee and turned to me and said, with complete sincerity, “You know, that is one thing that I know is really different since Katrina. I drink around 14 cups of coffee a day now, and I never even drank coffee before. I have no idea why I drink so much coffee.”

  Whether from the rush of the amazing save or from a triple shot of espresso, once you know what it’s like to be fueled by adrenaline on a consistent basis, it’s hard to go back to a more measured and natural emotional state. We find that workplaces often adopt a very harried pace even when there’s no crisis. Action for its own sake keeps people moving, makes them superficially productive, and limits their capacity for reflection about their lives. This becomes seductive, even to workers, because we can confuse being amped up, attending to crises (some of which we create), and having a sense of being needed with being fully awake, living life, and being effective. It is interesting to hear what happens to people when they begin to slow down, pay attention to themselves, and take care of longer-term, root issues in their lives. Scott Douglas, an attorney and director of a volunteer legal services agency, shared this story with me recently:

  My partner and I both work for social service agencies; I run a volunteer legal program and he works with at-risk youth. We live in a huge old house with a great big yard, and we love puttering about, planting, pruning, and painting. However, there are always a million tasks to do on the house and yard, and anytime we’re in any danger of running out, we make up new ones. Let’s rip out this patch of lawn and reforest it with native conifers! That sort of thing.

  A friend of ours lives across the street. One weekend morning he was leaning against his front door drinking coffee. He watched us scurry around like industrious squirrels hauling dirt and clippings, moving ladders, hanging laundry, mowing the lawn, planting flowers. Finally, he just shouted at the top of his lungs, “STOP DOING THINGS!”We were dumbfounded. What would that look like, not doing things? What would we do instead? What would happen to all the things we were not doing if we weren’t doing them?

  Workers have frequently told me about taking seven-day vacations and being sick for the first five days from an adrenaline crash. One person described having a panic attack “if I have more than two minutes alone in my apartment.” A colleague once shared a story about how he and his wife, who had a managerial role at a hospital and who worked almost incessantly, took a vacation. For the duration of the week, she was unhappy. When he finally asked what was going on, she said, “You can’t take me away for a week, strip me of all my coping mechanisms, and expect me to enjoy myself.”

  To allow ourselves to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

  Thomas Merton, American Catholic theologian, poet, author, and social activist

  Addictions

  I look at my watch and see what time it is and how long until I can have a glass of wine. I mean, somewhere in the world it’s got to be cocktail hour.

  Human rights advocate

  A colleague once told me that she had worked for an understaffed domestic violence program where the only acceptable reason for refusing to drop everything and come back in for a crisis was having had a few drinks. Alcohol, the organization reasoned, might impair the worker’s discernment.“As a result, when the volunteers took over for the night, there was a sort of pell-mell rush as each staff member raced home to start drinking before our phones began to ring for help. Only drunk were you off the hook.”

  “Boy. I’m going to pay for this tomorroui at yoga class”.

  Of course, this is an extreme example. The point is that people can find themselves using drugs, alcohol, and other distractions to check out—both from a job’s expectations and from internal messages. For some people, this tendency to numb out—whether by rushing home to drink or plugging into another violent video game or simply cultivating the ability to ignore your body’s aches and pains—can graduate to addiction. There are many resources for help, and addressing the consequences of trauma exposure can help to lessen the fear of encountering the world in a feeling and present way.

  An addiction is an attachment so strong that it persists despite our understanding of its potentially destructive nature. There are the classic addictions: drugs, alcohol, food, sex. But we can also be addicted to the rush of adrenaline—it’s so tempting to stay wired when the alternative is to slow down enough to feel what is going on within and around us. There are so many ways to get hooked. It can be helpful to ask ourselves, “What am I most attached to? What do I count on to help me numb out? What would I be really resistant to giving up in my life?” As the eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar Shantideva once said,“We shrink from suffering, but we love its causes.”

  I smoke two cigarettes whenever I leave the clinic. That’s when I started smoking.

  Health care worker

  An intriguing example of this is overwork, which for many of us becomes an addiction. It keeps our gaze down and our attention glued to our next step. We don’t shift our gaze to observe the full range of what is in front of us. It can be hard and unpleasant to turn away from the sense of urgency we feel at work to focus on our personal life, where we may be held accountable as a peer, a community member, a partner, a parent, a son, or a daughter. Although people may not recognize it, the decision to work more and attend to their personal lives less is often a choice. One transitional housing worker shared, “My family is a real drain on me. I remind them that there are other people they can call on and other places they can go for support. I have enough to take care of with my work.”

  Our ego is a related addiction we often overlook, at least when it is linked to our culture of productivity-based identity. Many new stay-at-home mothers and fathers feel this when the rush of their work and its ego-boosting elements drop away. They’re at home doing a job that is incredibly important to the world, and yet they feel as if they’re not doing anything important at all. This experience is reinforced by a mainstream view that says, “We are what we do” and get paid for, not “We are simply who we are.”

  “I’m slowly weaning myself off employment.”

  Addictions can be particularly compelling for those whose work feels absolutely too intense to integrate. I once heard the word equanimity defined as “having space within for everything.” Our internal space must be expansive enough that we can sit with the sorrow in life even as we can feel the miracle of it all. When our work is overwhelming, we can feel so overloaded that we don’t have room for the pain and suffering of those we serve. What we have witnessed can feel like it is breathing down our necks, desperate to find shelter inside of us. As individuals and as a culture, we can become addicted to escape. When we believe that we lack the inner capacity to deal with our reality, we may seek out objects, activities, or relationships that will help us to perpetuate an illusion about ourselves, numb us out, or otherwise give us distance from overwhelming feelings.

  While perhaps the things we use to block our experience are effective in the short term, over time we require more and more of them to effectively numb
us out. At some point, the barrier we’ve tried to create against feeling our emotions is no longer adequately fortified by our addictions, and it ruptures. In comes everything we’ve been trying to avoid—but we’re less equipped to deal with it than we would have been originally, because we invested in addictions instead of in sustainable coping skills.

  Grandiosity: An Inflated Sense of Importance Related to One’s Work

  Throughout the hospital, the only social workers who connected so strongly with their work, as if it was their total identity, were the ER social workers. They are the only group that if you asked them, every one of them would say, “I’m an ER social worker.” It was their whole identity.

  Hospital administrator

  When work becomes the center of our identity, it may be because it feeds our sense of grandiosity. This can be particularly challenging to acknowledge. Many people get hooked on involvement in others’ lives: solving their problems, becoming a powerful figure for them, getting increasingly attached to the feeling of being needed and useful. The same dynamic may apply to people who are working with animals or the environment. If our work is breathtakingly important, so are we.

  I have found that this form of grandiosity often keeps people in their work much longer than is perhaps best for them. You think, “Who else will do it if I’m not here?” or “I can’t possibly leave, they’re relying on me.” While there may be some truth to this, it gets problematic when we’re not firmly grounded in a larger reality. We need to acknowledge the value of what we bring without making our work be all about us. Once we cross that line, it can be difficult to come back. We can lose an accurate sense of our individual capacities and limits as well as our actual interdependence with others working in our fields. One animal activist said,“I am endlessly impressed by the stamina of some of my fellow animal rescuers. Although in some I recognize the telltale signs of the familiar rescuer messiah complex—the distracted movements, the permanent worry lines.”