Words&Dirt

Summary:

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s Trauma Stewardship seeks to support helping professionals in their efforts to address and cope with the effects of “secondary” or “vicarious” trauma. Lipsky argues that the “trauma exposure response” often experienced by helping professionals is neither well understood nor properly dealt with by many individuals and organizations. As a result, the helping professions are brimming with burnout and drowning in dysfunction. To ameliorate this problem, Lipsky proposes a model called “The Five Directions” that helping professionals can utilize to create greater resilience, sustainability, and flourishing in their work lives. Written with passion, sincerity, and much-needed humor, Trauma Stewardship opens an important conversation and makes meaningful contributions to the process of finding better ways to help people help others.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• My reaction to this book’s opening chapters was one of gratitude––gratitude that I cannot relate to many of the psychological problems that Lipsky says are commonly faced by those in my field. I don’t feel pressured to work all the time, I’m pretty good with professional boundaries, I’ve never felt like it’s my job to “save everyone,” and I have no problem experiencing happiness, joy, and contentment even though I know there’s a lot of suffering in the world. I do not have the “martyr instinct,” and defending the time and space for self-care in my life isn’t challenging for me. I can’t say that this won’t change in the future, and I also don’t work with clients who regularly experience acute crises, but for the moment I’m not at the dead center of Lipsky’s target audience. That’s not to say that reading this book wasn’t a valuable experience, because it was. I just don’t think it had the same impact as it might for other helping professionals who can relate more directly to the problems Lipsky wants to address.
• “The Five Directions” seems like a decent model for promoting vocational sustainability. Lipsky urges readers to create space for inquiry (North), choose our focus carefully (East), build compassion and community (South), find balance (West), and create a daily practice of centering ourselves (The Fifth Direction). Some of the language is a little loose and none of the concepts is particularly novel, but that’s par for the course in this field. I think most people would benefit from integrating these ideas and practices into their lives, especially if they are starting from a point of extreme overwhelm or burnout.
• My favorite feature of this book is Lipsky’s inclusion of multiple cartoons from The New Yorker in every chapter. This creates a different vibe from other books I’ve read in this genre, keeps the mood light(ish), and serves as a reminder that humor is an absolutely essential part of trauma recovery and posttraumatic growth.
• The text also includes thirteen vignettes written by a variety of helping professionals. These stories provide concrete connections to Lipsky’s theoretical framework and are genuinely enjoyable to read.
• Here’s a list of additional takeaway lessons that resonated with me:
  ––Learn to care for others while still caring for yourself. Strategically saying “no” to things is probably more important than saying “yes.”
  ––Being “fully present” with yourself and with your clients is crucial. It might be impossible to do this all the time, but we should strive for it as much as we can. I would add that this is especially true for talk therapists like me, because the only gifts that we can offer our clients are our words and our presence/attention.
  ––Avoid workaholism at all costs. It will ruin your life and degrade your ability to help people.
  ––The importance of the mindset with which you approach this work can’t be overstated. Your strength must come from internal decisions and values that dictate how you approach and engage with the work. You must be sensitive to but not reliant on external circumstances/outcomes.
  ––The role of helper requires you to maintain compassion and open-mindedness toward people with whom you have profound disagreements. If you find yourself increasingly intolerant of people who live or think differently from you, you are the problem.
  ––Creating a “microculture” of support around yourself will lead to a much richer and more sustainable career. This includes not just supportive individuals (family and friends), but also community engagement, hobbies, and ways of “checking out” and “resetting” when needed.

Favorite Quotes:

When we talk about trauma in terms of stewardship, we remember that we are being entrusted with people’s stories and their very lives, animals’ well-being, and our planet’s health. We understand that this is an incredible honor as well as a tremendous responsibility. We know that as stewards, we create a space for and honor others’ hardship and suffering, and yet we do not assume their pain as our own. We care for others to the best of our ability without taking on their paths as our paths. We act with integrity toward our environment rather than being immobilized by the enormity of the current global climate crisis. We develop and maintain a long-term strategy that enables us to remain whole and helpful to others and our surroundings even amid great challenges. To participate in trauma stewardship is to always remember the privilege and sacredness of being called to help. It means maintaining our highest ethics, integrity, and responsibility every step of the way. (6)

I encourage you to remember that nothing has to change in the world for us to transform our own life experience. This may be difficult to accept––we may be committed to repairing society on multiple levels, and we may think about our work in relation to large questions of justice, equality, and liberation. We may feel that if we focus on ourselves, we are abandoning our mission. The truth is that we have no authority over many things in our lives, but we do control how we interact with our situation from moment to moment. If we allow our happiness and sense of success to hinge on things outside of ourselves, we will wait for our well-being indefinitely. (14)

For many workers, it is difficult to perceive a clear line between the personal and the professional. Obviously, this is not the case for everyone whose work and personal history overlap, but there is often a correlation. To be an effective trauma steward, it is important to know where our own self ends and another’s self begins. This can be a hard distinction to maintain even when we are working with other adults, who, whatever their difficulties, are clearly separate people with agency in their own lives. Ironically, it may be even more challenging when we are working with populations that seem particularly defenseless––young children, for example, or abused animals or endangered species. When we speak up for people or creatures or environments that are unable to speak for themselves, we may gradually lose the ability to distinguish their voices from our own. If we don’t pay careful attention, our feelings of identification and responsibility may increase to the point that we experience their anguish in a debilitating way. In the long run, this can diminish our ability to be effective advocates. We can sustain our work with trauma only if we combine our capacity for empathy with a dedication to personal insight and mindfulness. This is difficult terrain to navigate. (20-1)

For many of us, the elaborate architecture we build around our hearts begins to resemble a fortress. We build up our defenses, but the trauma keeps coming. We add a moat, we throw in some crocodiles, we forge more weapons, we build higher and higher walls. Sooner or later, we find ourselves locked in by the very defenses we have constructed for our own protection. We will find the key to our liberation only when we accept that what we once did to survive is now destroying us. And thus we begin the work of dismantling our fortress, releasing the crocodiles back to their habitat, and melting down the weapons to recycle into plowshares. Rather than fend off life, we slowly train ourselves to open our hearts to everything that comes to the door. (43-4)

Addictions can be particularly compelling for those whose work 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 experiences 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. But we are less equipped to deal with it than we would have been originally, because we invested in addictions instead of in sustainable coping skills. (110-1)

By moving among the directions and their elements, we are able to create, and most important, maintain, a daily practice through which we become centered. When we are centered, we are in the fifth direction. There will be times in our lives and our work when the water turns into a tidal wave, the fire into an inferno, the earth into quicksand, and the air into a tornado. We may feel overwhelmed, bombarded, off our game, and at a loss, sometimes several times each day. The Five Directions can guide us to regain calm––to once again remember who we are, where we’re headed, and what we need. Being centered allows us to occupy a constant oasis of wisdom, perspective, and integrity, regardless of how out of control everything and everyone around us seems. As we build our personal practice, we can approach our circumstances proactively rather than reactively. With sustained effort, we can maintain the inner resources we need to care for ourselves and to care for others and the planet. This ability is the foundation of trauma stewardship. (146)

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 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 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?” (168)

If we are able to be compassionate toward those we passionately disagree with, we can be incredible students throughout our lifetime. We will greet each mistake or hardship we encounter as an opportunity to learn, and we will understand that we can learn just as much from another’s path as our own. Since we know firsthand what it’s like to fall down and slowly get back up, we can easily extend our compassion to others who do the same. Compassion provides us the breathing room we need to keep on keeping on. It also allows us to evolve: When we lack compassion, we become significantly stifled in our ability to connect with ourselves, with others, and with our lives. (198-9)

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. (216)

While my mother’s death and my baby’s birth were not experiences that lasted indefinitely, their legacy has. In these moments of becoming a mother, I was brought to my knees, and on some level, I have never gotten up. I can still micromanage and be controlling and live in fear with the best of them, and yet I was able to find a center again, something I thought I had lost with my mom. For me, being centered has come to mean being able to call up that place of humility, gratitude, and trust innumerable times each day. It is what guides any mindfulness I’m able to muster, and it’s where I return when I am most challenged.

And this brings us, finally, to the fifth direction. The four directions ultimately lead to the fifth. This direction leads us inside to our core, where we center ourselves, and then, gracefully, leads us back out, renewed in a way that allows us to engage with the outside world at our best. (229)

Rating: 7/10