TRAUMA STEWARDSHIP: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO CARING FOR SELF WHILE CARING FOR OTHERS - LAURA VAN DERNOOT LIPSKY & CONNIE BURK

While this book has yet to reach the pretty insane level of popularity that THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE reached (and it still appears to be gaining mainstream popularity) this book is getting a lot of attention from the general public, wherein “trauma” has transformed into a prominent concept and way of understanding oneself and the world, as well as people who, like me, work in the bathyal zone and are around this stuff, for real, all the time. I’ve been doing trauma-adjacent stuff, as my job and in my personal life, since I was 18 and working on Chicago’s South and West sides, witnessing things like a 13 year-old learning their 3 year-old brother had just been killed (to name one example of dozens I’ll never forget). I’ve been injured on the job, in incredibly traumatic and stressful situations, and still have phantom pain (clearly psychological in nature) in the injured areas, I’ve been assaulted and threatened and witness to violence in my personal life as well. All that’s to say that this subject is important to me. For reasons that it would take an entire other essay to get into, I do think of myself as resilient and calm and “built for” this sort of work and I intend to do it until I pass, and this is something that is important to me and that I think about all the time. There’s a lot of terms for what this book is about, trauma exposure response/vicarious trauma/secondary trauma/compassion fatigue/burnout, etc. I tend to think of it, as I wrote above, as being in the bathyal zone, the area above the abyss. There isn’t much light and gazing below you into the abyss (which will play you by gazing back) is ill advised but sometimes unavoidable. For example, when clients here at the homeless shelter I work at mention something to me about their childhood that connects them to one of the foster kids I used to work with, and I see the uninterrupted conveyor belt of misery our society condemns certain people to, and feel like I’m talking to the same person at two points in their life, the abyss opens up (or grows within, whatever metaphor you prefer) and spending time in that space certainly comes with long term consequences. To pivot metaphors, maybe it’s more like working exposed to low-levels of radiation all the time. It’ll catch up. All of that’s to prelude to saying that I found this book pretty unhelpful. I’ve got a few issues with it. The first has to do with the ways in which this focuses on the individual and puts the impetus to not burn out on all of us individually. She says as much when she writes, “on one level, this is the only thing we can ever really control - ourselves.” Or when she addresses the very real issues of overwork in this field by writing, “Negotiate a sane schedule before accepting a job, and renegotiate your current agreement if need be. Surround yourself with coworkers who will support you as you stick to your agreed-upon hours and take time off. Be a positive force in your workplace.” This is pretty insanely disconnected from what this work is really like. Has she really worked in a short-staffed high-stress places? I’ve literally lost a job insisting I be allowed to take a vacation I had put in for months previous but they wanted to cancel due to staffing issues. At my current job I’m a Union Negotiator and it’s a constant fucking fight to do anything that improves worker quality of life. So I’m not sure she understands that the problems in the field are not the result of workers not being good negotiators of their schedules. Likewise, she doesn’t address the ways in which the trauma-burden is uneven in these institutions. Specifically, almost everywhere I’ve worked (Americorps, Peace Corps, nonprofits in both the USA and abroad, etc.) has been set up so some small number of people do that client-facing and thus soaking up the vast majority of the second-hand trauma, are subject to intense burnout, and are paid the least by a lot. They couple this with another class of people who “manage” and “oversee” the programs and don’t deal with clients or the public and certainly don’t do the really hard stressful stuff. They typically have high-level degrees and a clear discomfort dealing with the traumatic messy stuff (since they get no practice, or worse, they are constantly telling you about some practicum they did for 6 weeks 15 years ago in grad school, the last time they were hands on). She also doesn’t address the ways in which we, as trauma stewards (her term, I’m not into it) are part of systems that do traumatize and hurt people. This is most egregious when she talks about cops (there is a whole insane section about a cop recalling her attempts to get the other cops to mediate then tries to invite Thich Nhat Hahn to speak with them) who yes, deal with secondary trauma, but dish much more of it out than they take in. Perhaps their vicarious trauma is rooted in being a bad person who’s causing harm? Obviously, this is an easy call with cops (they’re clearly doing more harm than good and I care very little/not at all if some of them feel bad about it) but I’ve worked with the CPS system and the American public school system(s) and other large bureaucracies that crush up lives and hurt people. Where’s the line with that stuff? When is trauma fatigue rooted in the deep knowledge that you’re abetting something monstrous in your day job? If these things are going to exist anyway, is it your obligation to join and try to improve or are you just lending legitimacy to something you know is wrong? I think about his stuff constantly, and I know the people I know in this business do too, but Libsky isn’t interested in these questions. She wants you to mediate and get back to work. Which is basically where this book ends up. The formatting here doesn’t help. Lipsky interspaces the text with New Yorker cartoons that are vaguely on topic but the effect ends up being that the text appears like a H.R. person’s cubicle, covered in cleaver work cartoons. And like an H.R. person, the suggestions here are anodyne and commonplace. Do stuff you like, stay connected to the reasons you do this work, do yoga, etc. I guess I was hoping for something about how to structure this work better. How to build systems and ways to arrange the world that don’t rely on the people actually doing the work constantly engaging in endless self-care so they don’t fall into endless depression. Disappointing. 3 vicarious traumas