Trauma Stewardship Read online

  This kind of behavior can have the same kinds of consequences as pouring fuel on a fire. No one steps in and says,“Let’s slow down and think about this: What could be going on here? How else can we look at this? What have we forgotten to consider? What would be most helpful?” Instead, workers may escalate a volatile situation by making assumptions, passing judgment, talking about things they are not sure of, or engaging in any number of shortsighted behaviors.

  Inability to manage complexity can show up in larger societal movements. This was true of the domestic violence movement as it sought criminal penalties for people who batter, for instance. For what seemed like very good reasons at the time, its leaders limited the complexity of their response to domestic violence. Connie Burk explores this issue further in her account of the domestic violence movement’s reliance on the criminal legal system, “A Question of Complexity,” which begins on page 74.

  I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

  Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinese-American writer, author of The Woman Warrior, and National Humanities Medal honoree

  The inability to embrace complexity may be familiar to you if you have ever experienced primary trauma. Your individual need for the concrete elements of reality becomes paramount. Making room within yourself for all the complexities and gray areas is too painful and seems cognitively impossible. When we’re rested, in a good space emotionally, and on our “A” game, we know that the world is a complex place; we know that seeing things through a flattened and reductionist lens does not serve us. And yet we live in a polarized civic universe: Our legal system is adversarial, as is our two-party-based political structure. We have zero-sum power systems embedded throughout our public institutions. You can only vote for or against. You can only be found guilty or not guilty. You can work for an initiative, work against an initiative, or be completely apathetic. And in the recent era of American politics, you’re “either with me or you’re with the terrorists.”

  What we see happening, then, is an internalization of binary structures that may at times work for large-scale governance but are almost never effective in the causes, predicaments, and relationships of everyday life. Most situations cry out for people to honor and understand the complexities of the situation.

  This is challenging to put into practice. Embracing complexity doesn’t mean that we should abandon the critique of cultural and social institutions that is so essential to social and environmental change work, nor does it mean that we should become complete moral relativists. We have an obligation to call out environmental racism, date rape, abuse within the prison industrial complex, and so on. And yet we misuse this responsibility to prophetic critique if we objectify and simplify what is happening.

  I received a copy of a letter written by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh to George Bush, then the president of the United States. In 1967, Thich Nhat Hanh was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. for his efforts to end the Vietnam War. His life and work have provided a shining example of how we can continue to seek common ground, even with those who have ravaged our lives with violence. This letter is a powerful example of an attempt to change a situation while understanding its complex nature.

  Dear Mr. President,

  Last night i saw my brother (who died two weeks ago in the U.S.A.) coming back to me in a dream. He was with all his children. He told me,“Let’s go home together.”After a millisecond of hesitation, i told him joyfully,“OK, let’s go.”

  Waking up from that dream at 5 am this morning, i thought of the situation in the Middle East; and for the first time, i was able to cry. I cried for a long time, and i felt much better after about one hour. Then i went in the kitchen and made some tea. While making tea, i realized that what my brother had said is true: our home is large enough for all of us. Let us go home as brothers and sisters.

  Mr President, i think that if you could allow yourself to cry like i did this morning, you will also feel much better. It is our brothers that we kill over there. They are our brothers, God tells us so, and we also know it. They may not see us as brothers because of their anger, their misunderstanding, their discrimination. But with some awakening, we can see things in a different way, and this will allow us to respond differently to the situation. I trust God in you, i trust the Buddha nature in you. Thank you for reading.

  In gratitude and with brotherhood Thich Nhat Hanh Plum Village

  Letter courtesy of the Deer Park Monastery Web site

  A QUESTION OF COMPLEXITY

  Criminalization and the Movement to End Domestic Violence

  When U.S. second-wave feminists began organizing against domestic violence in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was still legal in most states for a man to rape his wife, and only a handful of states had serious criminal consequences for wife battering. Husbands and lovers beat their partners with impunity—secure in the knowledge that the consequences, when there were any, would be manageable. The pain and suffering experienced by women beaten by their partners was minimized and denied. Women were told to be better wives. Men were told to take a walk around the block and cool off.

  Advocates dedicated themselves to ending violence, and they knew that women’s experiences of abuse would have to be taken seriously in order to make change. In U.S. courts, criminal offenses are viewed as harms not only to the victim but also to the entire society—that’s why criminal cases are filed as The State v. John Doe, not Jane Doe v. John Doe. Women in the antiviolence movement believed that domestic violence and sexual assault would have to be acknowledged by the state as harms against society that should carry severe criminal consequences before any real change could happen.

  Despite vocal misgivings from many in the field, the domestic violence movement oriented itself toward a criminal legal response. The urgency of the approach was repeatedly reinforced as women fleeing to domestic violence shelters shared horrific stories of violence at the hands of their husbands and partners, and conveyed devastating experiences of being dismissed or ignored by law enforcement and the courts when they tried to reach out for help. Some of the initial community-based responses to battering were abandoned as the apparent need for a criminal response began to eclipse other perspectives. In the years that followed, the movement brought the full force of its political and organizational will to bear on creating and sustaining a criminal legal response to domestic violence as the primary antiviolence strategy.

  Thirty years later, in an enduring testament to the courage and dedication of its organizers, the movement had made great strides toward achieving its goals: Public awareness of the issue had skyrocketed, replacing a lethal history of silence about family violence with one of growing openness. Spousal rape is illegal in all 50 states, every state has felony domestic battery crimes, and most states have criminal courts dedicated to family violence. Issues of policing in response to domestic violence have been on the national agenda for over a decade. Meanwhile, even as the apparent victories mounted, another story was playing out across the nation. The United States increased its prison population from 300,000 in 1977 to over 2 million in 2005 (U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ], Bureau of Statistics). The number of people under correctional supervision (parole, probation, jail, prison) was over 7 million in 2005—up from fewer than 2 million in 1980. According to the U.S. DOJ, at year-end 2005, there were 3,145 Black male prison inmates per 100,000 Black males in the United States, compared with 1,244 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males, and 471 white male inmates per 100,000 white males. Prison rape, HIV infection among incarcerated people, and other prison violence have escalated to a national crisis.

  As the prison boom continued, efforts originally intended to protect people from violence and oppression became increasingly enmeshed with the criminal justice system. Shelter programs began to cooperate more and more with law enforcement and prosecutors. Some survivors who were reluctant to participate
in prosecution came under greater scrutiny and pressure. In the past 10 years, domestic violence survivors have increasingly faced arrest and prosecution as a result of policing practices and battery laws that inadequately understand the experience of domestic violence. People of color, immigrants, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have expressed their fears about the danger of overreliance on the criminal legal system. People in these communities have long been the targets of biased policing and harsh criminal prosecution or deportation.

  For many in the domestic violence field, the concerns of survivors and marginalized communities came as a surprise. “How could criminalizing domestic violence possibly have negative consequences?” they asked. The majority of advocates were still fighting tirelessly for the vicious assaults against women to be taken seriously as a crime. To most of them, the virtues of the strategy were self-evident. Criminal penalties were clearly “right.” It felt easy to dismiss the cautions and concerns of people inside and outside of the work.

  Still, there were chinks in the armor. The negative consequences of an exclusive emphasis on criminalization had been meticulously documented and compellingly argued for years. Beth E. Richie laid out the intersections of racism, prosecution of poor Black women, and domestic violence in her groundbreaking book, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (Routledge, 1995). Tillie Black Bear, director of the White Buffalo Calf Woman’s Society in South Dakota, and the women of Mending the Sacred Hoop in Minnesota demonstrated the connections between the forced removal of Native American children and the rise of family violence on reservations. For decades they argued for the restorative-justice tactics of health care, economic development, alcohol and drug treatment, and reparations instead of longer prison terms. Advocates working in lesbian and bisexual women’s communities in Seattle collected evidence to demonstrate that, in one year, over half of the lesbian survivors who had come into contact with the police had been arrested. These advocates argued for more community-based solutions that did not rely on prosecution and incarceration. South Asian, Eastern European, and Pacific Islander immigrants articulated the connections among harsh and confusing immigration policies, the increase in the trafficking of women and children into the United States, and their experiences of abuse.

  Attorneys called for greater assistance in civil legal issues, since domestic violence survivors are far more often caught up in civil matters like custody battles than they are in criminal cases. Still other activists showed how the movement’s immersion in an adversarial legal system was dehumanizing people who batter and costing us opportunities for grassroots community involvement. As advocates spread the message that people who batter are fundamentally criminals, friends and families become increasingly hesitant about getting involved. As a result, it grew harder to undermine the isolation of abuse.

  In these critiques, people were calling for greater complexity in our thinking and our work. In the domestic violence field, as in almost every movement to make justice and stop human suffering, the urgency of the need can narrow our view and disorder our priorities. We can convince ourselves that the harm we are trying to end is so bad that the details of how we stop it don’t matter.

  The movement to support women’s self-determination and end family violence started down the path to criminalization with the intention of seeking justice and creating a societal stake in women’s safety. By paying too little attention to the complexities of the issue, it found itself floundering in an ever-urgent, perpetual-crisis maelstrom of criminal legal response. The work required to build and sustain this response consumed most of the movement’s resources, diverting energy away from community-based strategies that took into account the limits of a criminalized response. As a result, the movement inadequately addressed the concerns most expressed by survivors—breaking isolation, building community support, meeting children’s needs, and fostering economic stability.

  Minimizing

  I minimize with myself. If anything happens, I’m like, “Well, I didn’t get shot, so what do I have to complain about?”

  Community organizer

  I was working with the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans 10 months after Hurricane Katrina. Its programs include the zoo, the aquarium, and multiple learning centers and parks throughout New Orleans. A gentleman who had been dedicated to caring for the animals during and after the storm had eventually gone to visit his sister on the East Coast. He was walking with her on a city street when they encountered the body of a man who had fallen from high scaffolding and died just as the medics arrived. As they continued on, his sister admitted that she was extremely unnerved at his lack of reaction to what they’d just seen. “How could you not be shaken up or show any emotions?” she asked.

  He told me,“On the one hand, I felt like I should explain to her, and on the other hand, I felt kind of defeated. I thought to myself, ‘She can’t understand, she won’t get it.’ I’ve seen so much in these past 10 months that I just don’t feel much deeply anymore. I didn’t know how to communicate that to her so she’d understand.” He said he could not imagine what would have to happen for him to experience strong feelings again.

  People who bear witness to a range of human experience may become increasingly inoculated to others’ pain. We may start out being moved by each person’s story, but over time it may take more and more intense or horrific expressions of suffering to deeply move us. We may consider less extreme experiences of trauma as less “real” and therefore less deserving of our time and support. “Minimizing” occurs when we trivialize a current situation by comparing it with another situation that we regard as more dire.

  Minimizing is not triaging and it is not prioritizing. This coping strategy is at its worst when you’ve witnessed so much that you begin to downplay anything that doesn’t fall into the most extreme category of hardship. While you may still be able to nod and do active listening and feign true empathy, internally you are thinking something like, “I cannot believe this conversation is taking 20 minutes of my time. There wasn’t even a weapon involved.”

  “Listen, pal, thdy’re all emergencies.”

  It takes only one extreme situation to get us started on minimizing everything else. Again, minimizing is not setting priorities in our work, it is the experience of losing our compassion and ability to empathize because we are comparing others’ suffering or putting it into a hierarchy. We may also begin to minimize when we feel saturated to the point that we can’t possibly let any more information in. Instead of being able to experience the given situation for what it is, we minimize what we are hearing or seeing. We do so in a desperate attempt to avoid hitting our breaking point. We are literally at capacity.

  This phenomenon is frequently a factor in creating a negative organizational culture. If only the most extreme cases deserve attention or get respect, then it behooves us to experience and express things in the most extreme way, right? Related to this, if we are voicing our irritations, concerns, and even legitimate critiques in very escalated ways, it is difficult for people to come to us with a complex response, and soon everyone may wind up taking sides. For example, if a worker says, “I feel like my boss just beat me up,” it’s much harder for anyone to talk through the specifics of the conflict than if the worker had said, “I do not feel that my objections were taken seriously, and I felt like I was being railroaded into agreeing to this task.”

  Finally, comparing leads to competition. If it takes something extreme to catch everyone’s attention, well, we can meet that challenge! We may pump up the drama, or we may want to mine for the extreme in a situation so that our caseloads or issues seem more legitimate. Then we can have the prestige of being a person who handles the “real” stuff and who works for an agency that really “gets it.”

  Many people report that minimizing causes great distress in their personal lives. For example, your partner comes home from work and starts to describe his hard day, and you respond, with teeth clenched, “
Really, honey? A hard day at your dot-com job? Sit down, and let me tell you about people who have hard days.” Or your children pour out a story about something that upset them on the school playground, and you reply, “You should be grateful you get to go to school and have a playground at all. Do you know how few children around the world have playgrounds to play on?”

  One family caseworker told me this story involving her five-year-old daughter. The child approached her mother for help with a mild, yet sincere, grievance about her father, only to be met with this explosive response:“You’re lucky you even have a father. Every day I work with kids who don’t have a father. Have never met their father. Don’t even know what a father is!!!” Mortified at her sudden and impassioned outburst, the caseworker tried to undo the damage with her daughter but found in subsequent weeks that it had made an impression. Her daughter would repeatedly ask her,“Mommy, do you think that little boy has a daddy? What about that little girl?”

  There may come a point when you feel as if nothing, ever again, will engage your empathy. A teacher once told me that she’d had days when her children would begin to complain about something and she’d retort, “It’s not Auschwitz.” That would be the end of the conversation.