"I believe I have access to power that my ancestors have left for me, and it's in my marrow. I can access that power when I need to dig down deep and save somebody or hide," said Connie Burk, co-author of Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. "When I realized how much myself and other people I cared about were relying on that deep-marrow power just to get through the day and make peanut butter sandwiches, I understood that wasn't sustainable and that was not where our best work was going to come from." Burk was a leader in the anti-violence movement at the time she recognized how trauma exposure was affecting the movement to end domestic and sexual violence.
The book, written by Burk and Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, a pair of South End residents, is meant for people in caregiving roles who are exposed to trauma. Trauma Stewardship is considered a staple among resources offered to students in mental health, social services, and social change work. The book, originally published in 2007, has just been revised and updated. "The topic of how the trauma you work with can impact you is less discussed in classes for students pursuing work in mental health," said Andrew Nelson, a mental health counselor who attended one of van Dernoot Lipsky's workshops in early September.
The number of people experiencing trauma today is increasing. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that more than two-thirds of adults experienced at least one adverse childhood experience before age 16. Internationally, 70% of more than 65,000 respondents to a World Health Organization study said they experienced lifetime traumas.
The Emerald spoke to van Dernoot Lipsky about what the new edition covers. The revised book will be in stores in late September.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
YK: What made you want to go into the line of work of social change?
LvDL: My mom instilled a deep sense of social justice and environmental justice, and how to help repair the world. It was modeled through how she lived her life. Then when I was 10, she was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, and she lived for three more years. Going through the experience of losing her, trying to figure out how to live in her absence, was extremely traumatizing. I think that planted seeds for what came next.
I started [social change] work formally in my first year of college. Then, after I'd been working for more than 10 years on intense cases of tragedies, my stepfather-in-law asked me if my work had gotten to me. We were on a family vacation in the Caribbean. We'd hiked to a cliff on an island with a gorgeous view, and I wondered out loud how many people might have jumped off the cliff to kill themselves. In my mind, I was already working out where the helicopter would land and where the closest Level 1 trauma center was. That was the day I began to realize that my exposure to other people's trauma had gradually changed me. My heart was breaking over and over again with cases at work, and I was raging against systems in our society, becoming intolerant, opinionated, and exhausted.
YK: Tell me what trauma stewardship is.
LvDL: Trauma stewardship is about how we stay present for what's unfolding in our world in a way that we can work to metabolize what's coming up, and then ideally transform that trauma. It involves work on not only your personal nervous system, but the collective nervous system — of our neighborhood, region, and society. If we don't tend to this collective nervous system, we can become saturated with the overwhelm and trauma over time, and ultimately we'll start rupturing, meaning we're not able to engage in our day-to-day, personal, student, or professional lives in a meaningful way, and we can lose our health.
YK: Tell me about trauma exposure. What comes to mind immediately is people facing combat or working on intense social work cases, but you write about caregivers too.
LvDL: What's been striking over the 40 years I've done this work is how ubiquitous both overwhelm and trauma are now.
When we look at manifestations of trauma exposure on the continuum from "overwhelmed" or "maxed out" to what's diagnosed as trauma, [the number of people] who have these experiences are more widespread. If you're at home caretaking for somebody or are working as a librarian, or in ecology — fields of work that you might not originally think of as high trauma exposure — or maybe you're not in these fields but [are] tracking what's happening locally, nationally, internationally today, there's a significant amount of trauma exposure that people are navigating in these activities. Of course, if you're in the military, it's going to look different than if you're in a nonprofit or if you're taking care of a loved one at home, but [there's] a lot of overlap in manifestations of these activities when somebody is exposed to overwhelm and trauma over time.
Manifestations could look like feeling like you're not doing enough and need to do more; having difficulty empathizing; being intense, rigid, or controlling; noticing your health is breaking down. If you can relate to any of that, I want people to understand they're not alone.
YK: In your book, you cover how caregivers can have trauma exposure and how communities with fewer resources, or women and people of color, can be more impacted. Could you talk about that?
LvDL: Caregiving takes a lot of energy, whether it's [for] your siblings, your children, your parents, or others. Additionally, the U.S. isn't known for a strong suit in formal or informal support for people providing caregiving. By and large, resources hardly exist for caregivers, so they become isolated and don't have the resources they need to show up in the way they might want to for their loved ones. This also falls disproportionately along gender, class, and racial lines. People from historically marginalized, underserved, oppressed communities are more impacted by the lack of support.
Isolation is one of the most damaging things when it comes to anything related to trauma and oppression of any kind. You can be around a lot of people in a small apartment taking care of somebody and still feel alone. When we experience isolation, it can quickly turn into a spiral of feeling tired and guilty for thinking the best part of your day is when your child's asleep, or you rage at your child, or you might feel guilty for feeling relieved if somebody you care about becomes hospitalized because you can get a small break. The amount of guilt, shame, dread, and sense that you're never doing enough can be intense, and that can fold into a lot of fraught grief and loss. This can be overwhelming and traumatic for many people.
YK: Your approach to trauma stewardship opens up the framework for who experiences trauma exposure. What would you say to people who wouldn't consider themselves as exposed to trauma because they don't work in fields known to come in contact more with trauma, like a medic or domestic violence survivor advocate?
LvDL: With many professions, people don't identify with having exposure and just don't feel like they deserve to take up space around it. They minimize their experience. I appreciate when folks say, "Look, I'm not an attorney trying to help somebody stay alive on death row, but here's what I'm experiencing, and I do feel overwhelmed, and maxed out."
We can have context, perspective, and gratitude for the benefits and privileges we have, but we don't have to minimize [our experience]. Minimizing is when we put suffering in a hierarchy. We minimize within ourselves, with our loved ones, colleagues, and others.
Examples could be you get a flat tire, and you think, "Oh, this is such a drag," and then immediately you're like, "Who am I to complain? I have a roof over my head. I shouldn't be complaining." You don't have to minimize your experience. Another is if your kid comes home from school and wants to talk about their hard day, and you tell them that there are kids in the world who don't have the opportunity for education, so you become the person that no one goes to to say they had a hard day.
Another piece of this dynamic can be internalized oppression, the myth of feeling like we're not enough, which translates to feeling like we're never doing enough. "My circumstances aren't bad enough that I should say anything about this or do anything about this. So I'm just going to keep my mouth shut, put my head down, and suck it up." These responses aren't helpful, constructive, or sustainable.
YK: Once you acknowledge the trauma exposure that's manifesting in your life, what are some ways to approach navigating it?
LvDL: There's nobody I work with who's got a lot of time, energy, capacity, inspiration, or resources, so we try to keep ways to work with it simple and accessible. We help people understand that a few tweaks in one's choices every day can make a very big difference. We invite them to think about making practical, everyday choices, like limiting unnecessary exposure to what can jack up your nervous system, and being more mindful about how the news is consumed if you're on social media. Being mindful about the relationships you're in: Are they edifying or eroding you? These are things that don't cost money to do. We offer questions to ask yourself as you approach this.
If exposure is part of your life, we talk with folks about concrete, accessible, and practical ways to be able to metabolize individually as well as collectively. An important piece of this is for people to understand what they deserve in their schools and workplaces in terms of the conditions that are ethical and integrity-based, what it means to be in a school that is sustainable and to be in a job where you have the resources and the support you need to do the job you've been given to do.
What we know about humans is that a sense of belonging is imperative. And in that belonging, it's important to have meaning in one's life. What that sense of belonging looks like, and what meaning means, is very personal, and it's different for everybody. The good news is, given all the pain that's coursing through the world right now, there is no shortage of ways to be able to show up moment after moment, day after day, and help make the world a better place.
YK: You've been involved in social change work for four decades, and you initially wrote this book 20 years ago. What are some takeaways on this topic over the past decades?
LvDL: While there are a number of things that have improved societally and systemically and structurally, I can't overstate how much pain and hardship and suffering there is locally, nationally, internationally. People's exposure to that and at younger and younger ages is creating a legacy that's absolutely unsustainable and causing a lot of harm. We're only beginning to see what some of that long-term impact is, whether it's caused by what's happening with the climate, or post-COVID, or with this ongoing escalation of structural supremacy and systematic oppression, or with democracies dissolving.
I'm trying to help folks have empathy and compassion for themselves as this continues to escalate and get harder. There aren't enough cultural resources to match how to navigate this. We hope that trauma stewardship will be one resource that people can count on to help them find a way through.
Got an idea for a South End story you'd like to see us cover? Let me know: Yuko.Kodama@SeattleEmerald.org.
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