I was very aware of the weight of these decisions, and I started giving a speech around the parallel process of child welfare. When you’re a child welfare worker and the chips are down and you’re unlucky and the case goes bad, you’ll be fired whether it’s your fault or not, so our workers’ central experience of the workplace is an experience of betrayal by authority, and we’re working with kids who can’t trust the adults in their life and have experienced a betrayal by authority. There’s a second central parallel process in child welfare, around overwhelm: We try to keep the children safe, but the challenges are so huge and the resources so slim that we’re overwhelmed, and we can’t take care of the children the way we wish. And then we work with families who are overwhelmed and then say the exact same thing about their parenting.
I started thinking about the parallel process and how the culture of the work reflects the culture of the families we work with and how we assume the same habits and same ways of thinking. I began to think about the other pressures, the pressures of trauma and overwhelm and betrayal.
I started really thinking about what it was like to be engaged in trauma and in creating it at the same time, because when you do removal [of a child from his or her home] you’re creating trauma, and while you hope that this trauma is less than the trauma the child’s been experiencing, you’re still creating trauma. So our workers are both the agents of trauma and the objects of trauma, and I thought, why are we doing this to these poor folks?
I used to give a speech in which I talked about what if I were someone who arrived from outer space, and I said, “How do you protect children?” and someone said, we hire 24-year-olds right out of college, give them a month’s training, and then they go observe the most complicated families in our culture, and they then have an obligation to predict the future, and if they’re wrong they’ll carry blood on their hands and they’ll be publicly crucified. And if I heard them explain that this is how they protect children, I’d say you have to be out of your mind.
Atrocities to children are the most disturbing events that occur to us as humans. The culture is so horrified—and we should be so horrified, but we become irrationally obsessed with finding someone to blame, and always the child welfare system is the closest party to blame.
Despite what we know about risk management, there is zero tolerance for a failure, and we think if we spend enough time with the press they’ll understand. They won’t. This is so primal, it’s so deep, that the reporters themselves lose their minds. It’s a shared phenomenon, culturally, and the crowd becomes mad in the wake of atrocities.
The child welfare system is fundamentally a traumatized enterprise, and because it is so traumatized, it can’t learn. When you’re in a state of trauma, you don’t learn. It’s like we’re endlessly in a defensive crouch. I asked myself, “Why is it like this, this system?” Because the objects of this work are so politically weak. They have the least possible claim because they’re thought of as “bad parents,” and so their ability to demand a better system is zero.
Our folks are suffering horrifically because of trauma exposure. Engagement with families who are traumatized, children who are traumatized, and they themselves are both agents and objects of trauma. They are soaked in trauma. This can’t help but have a very, very devastating impact on them as human beings.
The first question I asked is,“Why are we asking them to do this alone? This is crazy. Why aren’t we doing this work in teams?” Then this is how naïve I was: I asked some staff to do a survey of the U.S. in terms of who in the child welfare field nationally is doing this work in teams and how can we learn from them. The answer was zero. I was astounded to find that all 50 states do it the same way we do.
We then had a speaker come from New Orleans, which, even before Hurricane Katrina, was the trauma capital of the nation, and in the course of her talk she said child welfare work is trauma work and you can only do trauma work in teams. I thought to myself, “To hell with it, we’re going to go do this.” We began an experiment in teaming.
There are many models for this. There is the organizational behavior concept that says the work burden should be shared. I’m an attorney and I know that you don’t want one set of eyes making core decisions about facts. That is why we have jury systems, because we know humans see/hear things differently. Also, there is diversity theory, which says several different viewpoints understand things better than one. While it is not formalized throughout the system yet, we have teams in some offices on a pilot basis. I continue to struggle with trauma exposure in the sense of debriefing for our staff. How do you support discussion in regard to debriefing on an ongoing basis? I really want to take care around this issue. Most important is that we do no harm in regard to this, and I know that revisiting trauma without doing essential preparatory work increases the trauma. This is one of the things I’ve struggled with a lot.
I have an hour with every new class of social workers, and I talk about the most important decision they’re going to make: It’s the decision around what you are going to do with the pain in the work. Generally, there are two ways to address the pain in this work.
One is to simply say I have to learn to be less emotionally vulnerable: If I keep being dragged around by my emotions like by a team of horses, then I need to armor my heart. The problem with this is we work with kids and kids have a preternatural capacity to read your natural state, because their survival depends on their intuitively reading the emotional state of the adults in their lives. If you’re emotionally shut down, they’ll know it—the vibe will be different. If you’re going to work with a child whose experience of adults is that they’re unpredictable, dangerous, and disconnected, and if you’re removed emotionally, they’ll experience you as confirming their worst fears. But it’s not only the children who’ll be damaged—you’ll do damage to yourself. You’re going to lose a parent or break up with a partner, and these habits will spill over to your personal life and they don’t work.
What’s the alternative? I talk a lot about the second way to respond to the pain of this work, and that is by encouraging resiliency and the ability to get back on your feet. I also talk about the work of Bill Beardsley. He says there are three steps to resiliency: self-reflection, relationships, and action. You know you’re going to feel overwhelmed in this work and in life, especially nowadays—the question is, what do you do with it, and can you recover from it or do you go into an ongoing state of overwhelm?
When I talk about resiliency, I share this story of going to give a keynote talk, and it was right after a child whom we were involved with had died. I was really disconnected from my body and felt incredibly weird during the talk, and I just couldn’t shake this feeling. I was really off. Afterwards, I sat down and wondered what was the matter with me. Once I was still for a few minutes, I felt this huge grief come up inside of me, and I felt intensely sad. I turned to my friend who I was sitting with, and I told him how I was feeling and how I’d been so confused and so upset about this case. This was a good friend, and he said some comforting things to me, and we sat there together. Part of what is important about relationships is that although the grief and pain that has filled the entire screen of my consciousness doesn’t disappear, it does become manageable. I can remember that there is support and caring in the world as evidenced through my friend. The bad feelings do not disappear, but they are pulled back to their appropriate proportion, and I can see that while this is definitely part of a picture of my life, the tendency I have for my feelings to overwhelm me is reduced.
I can come back to myself by taking these three steps of self-reflection, being in relationship, and action. Through these steps, then, I remind myself that I’m okay. I’m fine, in fact. I’m just a sad person who is feeling pain. It’s not about how to kill the sadness, but to size my feelings so I can manage them and come through them and experience all the other things in life as well as these intense feelings of pain.
We need to know this to help our chi
ld welfare families understand this. The ability to model resiliency is crucial. It’s what we need to do for ourselves and for our child welfare families. We also need to be able to ask ourselves, “What is the trauma that I witness hooking in me?” Every child has the experience or that emotion of abuse or neglect. Every child has the experience of a caregiver yelling at us unfairly or being really distracted and we feel abused or neglected, so we all know the emotion of abuse and neglect. We need to be aware of how the trauma hooks into our own experience. This needs to be explicitly addressed. I want those who have this experience to be okay with that and be aware of it, because otherwise it’ll hook you and drag you around and you won’t know what’s going on. If you have some awareness, then at least you can understand what’s happening by the emotion that comes out of your vicarious experience. We need to continuously be asking ourselves,“What in this pain is connecting to what in me, and where is that original pain coming from?” We all know that those of us who do this work disproportionately do this work because we’ve experienced this ourselves.
First thing, you have to be aware of what your emotion even is. It’s like with the story I told earlier: Until I let myself feel this experience of grief, I’m just a very distraught human being. The first step in managing the pain is acknowledging it. Then we can connect with others and take action.
It’s important to acknowledge that it’s not as though organizations that have been deeply traumatized always want to come out from under this trauma. To heal, you have to come out of it, but sometimes they want to stay in it, and they can be very ambivalent about changing. In our situation we have both sides of this ambivalence. We have workers who think, “We do God’s work and no one will understand, but that’s okay because God will, so I’ll just stay isolated.” For me, that’s where I get my secondary trauma: from that defensive crouch and the isolated worker. It’s like that parable of the frog at the bottom of the deep dry well where it is slimy and disgusting and dark and filled with scorpions and snakes, and the frog has learned to jump from rock to rock and live in fear and survive it all. One day he looks up, and in the sunshine at the top of the well is another frog, who looks down and says,“Hey, you should come up here. It’s beautiful up here. We’ve got a lily pond, we can catch flies, and we eat all day—it’s blissful up here.” The frog at the bottom of the well says, “F--- you, that’s not reality.” In our efforts, we’ve had both wonderful acceptance and deep ambivalence and real resistance. That’s a fairly startling discovery for me.
We have this addiction to all the things we’ve become habituated to, even though we live in this untenable situation . . . same as the families we work with. It’s more disturbing for me to see it in staff, because for them it’s not very far from the bottom of the well up to the lily pad, but it’s because they’re so habituated to their circumstances. Also, we in child welfare carry this “rescuing the child from the family” fantasy, which is so horrific and so deep in the culture. The world has no idea what it bit off to chew when it decided to take up child welfare. It’s the most complex work that we do, certainly that we do in state government, and the public has no comprehension of it.
Every organization I’ve ever worked with in my life has been troubled. If you asked the workers, “How serious about this task are you?” if you’re lucky, 75 percent of your workforce would say they were serious. In child welfare, it’s 99 percent of your workforce. We have huge debates, people are damaged by it, but nobody says, “I’m just sick of this task. I could not care less.” The commitment to the task is very intense, and there is very little cynicism about the task.
I am enormously supported in my work by my own spiritual practice. Also, my wife is an organizational behaviorist, and she introduced me to various forms of group dynamics work, including the Tavistock Institute and A. K. Rice’s work, which studies and reflects on the covert emotional life of organizations, particularly in relation to authority. The work they do is deeply connected to issues of spiritual practice for me, because much of this is around ego and other quasi-mystical notions. Bessel van der Kolk worked with Bishop Tutu in South Africa, and he says there are a variety of ways that humans manage trauma, and in most of the world it’s through bodily movement, often dancing or other things music related. One small portion of the world where trauma is not dealt with that way is Northwest Europe. The tradition there is alcohol. Van der Kolk talked about when he’d attend the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and they’d open up the hearing in the mornings, and it’d start with Tutu singing and then everybody singing, and then they’d dance and after a period then they’d stop, hear a few witnesses sharing unbearable stories, and then Tutu would sing again and dance and then take a few witnesses so that at each step they were managing until they couldn’t bear it or hold it any longer, and then they’d sing again and do some sort of bodily movement.
We’ve begun using Circles in our work. We talk about how explicit to make the spiritual dimension at the beginning of the Circle, but we have a Circle keeper and we talk about creating a sacred space and each person can decide what that means for them. We have sometimes substituted staff meetings with Circles, and we have used Circles with our families as well. We’ve used them when we’ve done race work in an effort to support people in feeling safe and to have an ability to speak from the heart. We have a few offices that have been trained in Circles based on First Nation practices, and we’ve been trained by this phenomenal organization in Boston that does youth development work called Roca.
As far as how I take care of myself, I find it quite fascinating that this work, in a way that no other work I’ve done has been, is a constant test of how centered I am. If I’m not centered, I am jarred immediately. The work itself becomes a kind of gauge of my spiritual or psychological state. I don’t really care whether you think of these issues as spiritual issues or psychological issues. I’m interested in trying to develop an organization in which the concept of spiritual growth or psychological growth is understood to be essential to the leadership of an organization. There is no question that you need to be engaged in self-reflection and growth. How can I develop a public organization that explicitly holds that as a value in leadership?
This work keeps me in touch constantly with where I am spiritually or psychologically. Whichever way I understand it, it keeps me in constant touch with when I’m out of kilter or not centered. When I’m not able to be myself in an authentic way, I feel a jarring sense in the organization, and that pushes me to a spiritual practice or psychological practice that gets me re-centered. Ultimately they’re inextricably related. Also I am involved with Learning as Leadership in California, which provides leadership seminars within an immensely powerful individual psychological framework. So this combines with the very powerful group framework that derives from the Tavistock workshops I have done, and also combines with my own spiritual framework. I move among all of these.
If I did not have my spiritual practice, I’d be crazy. Either the way the world thinks of crazy, or the way that most people in power are crazy. My wife does not have a spiritual practice, but we have found ourselves in the same territory even though the language we use is very different. For both of us there is something about deep learning, whether spiritual practice or whatever you call it, that seems to be essential to keeping ourselves able to do what our best selves aspire to do. That relationship with my wife has been crucial. We have a sense of a common task, a sense of a shared task.
Additionally I have a rule that my family takes a month every summer to go to an island in Greece and disappear. I also believe that part of my responsibility is to continuously survey the world in all its various dimensions. If I only do this work all the time, I will greatly limit my capacity to lead the organization and have a larger vision. I am also a deep believer in letting yourself stop thinking about stuff. Take yourself and your mind to a completely different place, and in that process your creativity for bringing solutions to child welfare will increas
e.
I’m busy. I make myself too busy, I overtask, but not around work. I don’t have a television, and that’s really important to me. Some of that is about not having internal and external chatter all the time. I also have an 11-year-old and we have a pretty quiet home. We take our time with things, and I cook a lot because I find that a wonderfully healing and helpful activity. I have an irregular meditation practice, and I do yoga regularly. I consciously resist being a workaholic.
1. When your day begins, close your eyes, take several deep breaths, and ask yourself, “What is my intention today?” If you have small children or loud chickens demanding your attention before you are conscious, ask yourself this while feeding your children or gathering the day’s eggs, but create an intention for the day.
2. At the end of your day, before sleep overtakes you, ask yourself, “What can I put down? What am I ready to be done with? What don’t I need to carry with me for another day?” Put it down, and don’t pick it up again the next day.
3. Designate a day of rest. Whether you identify it as Shabbat or the Sabbath or simply a day off, designate a weekly day of non-obligation for yourself. This will serve to remind us that if we are truly to reconnect with ourselves, work and creation must stop. Our day of rest will also remind us that who we are as individuals and as members of society is about our deepest essence and not about what we produce during the week. In addition to your day of rest, allot some time for yourself each day when you don’t obligate yourself to anything, but instead give yourself total freedom to delight in one of your favorite states of being. Be present with this for however long you are able. Notice how you feel when you free yourself from obligation and allow yourself to be centered within.
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