(A written version of a presentation given at the February Sonoma County ACEs Connection meeting.)
Sonoma County ACEs Connection is trying out a few new meeting topics to focus on trauma, recovery, and lessons learned. We’re calling this one Personal Stories. Let me tell you quickly what we hope it will do, and then I’ll tell you a personal story to show how this feature might work.
There are three reasons why personal stories are useful and powerful. The first is that people like and learn from stories. People learn in different ways, and Powerpoint presentations aren’t for everyone. The second reason is that we’re hoping to involve more members by encouraging them to share their life experiences and lessons learned. The third reason, well, that’s one of the points of my story, so I’ll save it for the end.
Here’s my story. Shortly after college, I was hired as a Personnel Specialist for the federal government in Washington, DC. You might not think that’s a controversial field, but things like who gets hired or promoted says a lot about the culture of your organization and society in general. In Washington DC at the time, they specifically reflected broader social divisions between blacks and whites, men and women, and the inner city and the suburbs.
The residents of the Nation’s Capital were predominately black, but most of the managerial, technical and specialist jobs in the federal agencies were held by whites. (And a few Asians.) The city residents tended to be hired for lower paid clerical positions and were typically black women, while the higher paid supervisors and managers were predominately white, typically male and lived in the suburbs. Managers and line staff resided only a few miles apart, but lived in very different worlds.
One day I was strolling around the office when I heard a loud argument. A black male employee was yelling at his white supervisor, screaming, “Your ancestors made slaves out of my ancestors! And it’s still going on!”
So, what would you do in this situation? Probably not what I did. I walked between the two of them and said, “Hey, back when his ancestors were making slaves of your ancestors, my ancestors were in Japan, minding their own damn business. So why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”
It was so unexpected that it actually stopped the argument. I took them into the supervisor’s office, listened to both of them, and discovered that the problem was actually something I could fix. His boss had seen a job advertised that he thought the guy was qualified for, and encouraged him to apply. He did so, but was disqualified at the outset, and he felt that he had been set up as a joke. In Personnel, we had records of all the job announcements, and after looking it up, I saw the problem. In the fine print, it stated that only persons in a specific section of the agency would be considered. It was a simple mistake, and at the end, everybody shook hands.
This story got around the office. After all, how often does someone from Personnel actually help you with a problem? However, one day a more challenging problem arose. A supervisor wanted to begin a disciplinary process against a clerk in his office. (For the purposes of this story, let’s call the supervisor Mr. Carr and the clerk Joanie.) He felt that Joanie was a good worker, but she would call in sick two or three times every month. This had gone on for several months and despite repeated requests, she never brought in a doctor’s note to document the illness.
While I was working on the paperwork, one of the Personnel clerks approached me and asked, “Are you working on something for Mr. Carr?” When I said yes, she said, “Is this about Joanie?”
I looked at her and said, “Okay, what’s this about?”
“Do you know why she calls in sick?”
“No, I haven’t spoken to her yet.”
“Her boyfriend gets drunk, beats her up, and she stays at home until the bruises don’t show.”
“Wow, does her boss know this?”
She just rolled her eyes.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to have a talk with him.”
I spoke with Mr. Carr, we both spoke to Joanie, and I never finished the disciplinary paperwork. We urged Joanie to get help.
This story also got around the office. Soon, another woman, and then another came to me with the same problem. It became really painful to hear these stories, especially since after a week or so, they took their boyfriends back. Why weren’t they listening to me? What was I doing wrong?
I know now that this is a common rookie mistake, that big changes in behavior often involve the person failing a few times before a real change occurs. Still, when someone comes to you for help, you feel you need to get involved.
I had no personal experience or professional training in crisis counseling. And I didn’t know what to do or who to talk to. I was not good at setting personal boundaries. One morning, I got up, got dressed for work, and was eating breakfast, when I suddenly started crying. I didn’t want to hear another sad story, and feel like a failure. So, this time, I was the one who called in sick.
I eventually quit my job, moved to California, and spent several years building musical instruments, among other things. After a few years, I figured out my limits and I returned to health and human service work. I recently retired after a few decades of work in Public Health.
So, what’s the point of this story? As we talk about becoming more trauma-informed, you’ll always find some folks reluctant to move forward. Why? They’re probably not worried about failure; I think they are afraid of success.
If you help one person, you might open up the floodgates and soon there’s more than you can handle. You become overwhelmed. You begin to wonder if you’re helping anybody, and you start hurting too. My story probably represents some of their worst fears. I’m a big advocate for trauma-informed services, but I do get why you can’t just change things overnight. We need honest discussions about our deepest fears and concerns. We need serious debates about securing the kinds of ongoing support we need to do our jobs.
Part of the issue is that when we talk about persons with trauma, we usually assume that we are talking about our clients, patients or students. In other words, somebody else. But what about us? Informal surveys of people in the helping professions seem to show they have both higher rates and numbers of adverse childhood experiences than average.
Working with persons suffering from trauma can fuel our own traumas, or have other long-term negative consequences. We give it names like compassion fatigue, or burnout. Groups like ours can provide a place to share concerns and advocate for the needs of staff, so that they can better serve others.
Since the time of my story, some things have changed for the better. Agencies now have employee assistance programs. More people know about domestic violence. But some things have not changed. New staff still get thrown into the deep end of the pool too soon, without sufficient training or supervision. We all try to do the best we can with fewer staff, less resources, and more concerns to check off.
In the best of times, you can’t fix every problem. And this is not the best of times for education, social services or healthcare, what with rising costs, cutbacks and shootings all becoming the new normal. But you can always listen and help folks to feel they are not alone. Human connection is powerful medicine.
At the beginning, I said I would talk about the three reasons why Sonoma County ACEs Connection is interested in telling personal stories. Here’s the third reason. If we seek to make Sonoma County more trauma-informed, we need to model a new kind of behavior, at our workplaces and in society. We need to create safe spaces where it is okay to talk about trauma, to be able to open up about things like the time you screwed up. As I said at the beginning of my story, our internal practices say a lot about us and the society we live in. If we can’t even open up to ourselves, how can we hope to create safe spaces for others? And what about us? Who cares for the caregivers?
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