Friends General Conference

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Trauma-Informed Practices for Friends

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Friend Lisa Graustein created this document to help Friends process and respond to the trauma of the corona virus pandemic.

Overview of Trauma-Informed Practices for Friends

 

This document is a summary of some of the practices that I have learned in my 20 years as a trauma-informed teacher in Boston. I am not a mental health clinician or counselor. I have made some suggestions for how these practices can be applied to Friends. ~ Lisa Graustein, NEYM, April 25, 2020. Feedback to lisa@neym.org; this document can be shared.

 

This document is organized as follows:

 

A.   Definition of trauma.

 

B.             Explanation of how Covid-19 is creating trauma.

 

C.             A list of the ways that trauma impacts us and how we can respond to address or mitigate the impact. The impact is underlined in each paragraph and the key strategy is bolded.

 

Content: There are no graphic details or information about specific traumas in this document. Several times, death and dying are referenced, but with no more detail than in this sentence.

                                                                                                                                                           

 

A) Trauma is understood to be events or circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten the physical and/or emotional safety of a person, and that have lasting adverse impact on one’s cognitive and mental functioning and physical, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. Two people can experience the same event and one may experience it as a trauma and one may not. Two people can also experience the same event as traumatic but how that trauma manifests in each person can vary hugely. Trauma resides not just in our psyches, but also in our physical bodies at the chemical, synapse, and cellular level. Traumas, particularly those unnamed or unaddressed, compound each other. Many of us do not talk about our trauma publicly, so we can often feel like we are the only ones experiencing trauma or are alone in having an earlier trauma triggered.

 

B) Covid-19 is a collective and individual trauma. Even for those of us who will remain healthy, we are living with a fear  - the perception - of becoming sick and dying. All of us know people who have or will die from this disease. Many of us have also lost many things that help us maintain our physical, social, and emotional well-being. Because some Friends have some security and are healthy, and can see others whose suffering is much starker, we may not be fully in touch with the depth of what we are feeling and experiencing. Other Friends are experiencing trauma on multiple levels as financial, physical, and other forms of well-being are lost, and we are overwhelmed and may not be able to be fully in touch with the depth of what we are feeling and experiencing because it is so much.

 

C) Trauma manifests in many different ways for different people. However, most ways we have learned to make spaces safer for people who have experienced trauma work widely for everyone. Here are some best practices from teaching that can support Friends through this time:

 

1.              Trauma is often unpredictable & creates realities we don’t expect. We can be consistent, predictable, & preview what will happen, how it will happen, and who will be involved. For example, hosting virtual gatherings at the same time each week, starting and ending things on time, or having one e-mail at a set time/day when we will announce deaths. If we are sharing hard information, to name that ahead of time either like I did above or by saying, “I am now going to talk for 5 minutes about how the disease is impacting 4 people in our meeting. . . .”

 

2.              Trauma slows our cognitive processing, makes us more forgetful, sends us into flight/fight/freeze mode, and keeps us focused on meeting our most pressing need and diminishes our ability to hold the needs of others or recognize other needs we have. Start gatherings not just with silence but with something that gets us connected to our bodies and each other: breathing together, stretching together, holding our hands up to the screen, sharing a word each to describe our physical/emotional/mental selves, etc.  When we are about to share new information or a decision that impacts people, to offer some reasoning and context: “In order to keep our community safe and because, as Friends, our practices center the good of the whole or those most at risk, we . . .” Understand that we will often have to repeat things and keep written communications short and visually clear. Aiming to write at an 8th or 9th grade reading level also makes written communication more accessible (you can set-up your spell check to automatically give you the reading level of what you have written; this document is at a 9.4 grade reading-level, the high end of what we want to aim for.)

 

3.              Trauma erodes our capacity to form relationships and to feel good about ourselves. We can focus on relationship building and explicitly expressing unconditional love. This means actively being in communication through different forms, affirming what people are experiencing and feeling, never comparing people or situations, and providing opportunities for people to see themselves positively reflected. So, instead of ending a pastoral call with “hang in there,” we can say things like, “What you are going through sounds really hard and exhausting. I hear how much you are working to do X and what a good job you are doing of Y. You are really important to me and our community.” When we share about something being cancelled, we might say, “We know this is hard news to hear. Before you keep reading the rest of this e-mail, take a moment: How is this news landing in your body? What is your breathing like? What are you feeling as this information sinks in? Even though we can’t be with you in person, we know this is not easy news to hear and want to support you.”

 

4.              Trauma keeps us in negative/fear/loss loops in our internal monologue. We can offer ways and companionship for shifting those loops to positive ones. We can offer hope about the future and care for the present. This is not just a “this too shall pass,” but rather acknowledging what has been lost and offering not a replacement, but a new orientation: “We are so sad not to be able to meet to do X as planned. We know how much Y and Z mean to many of us. We will be able to do X in a year or two. Until then, we are working on ways for us to still be in relationship and to nurture our spiritual lives. We can’t recreate X weekend. We will have four opportunities over the next month to do Y, parts of  Z, and A, which we haven’t had the chance to do before.”

 

5.              Trauma is disorienting, makes us feel incompetent, and disconnected. We can offer Friends time to focus on ways we are competent, are connected, and keep things simple. We have strong practices in our tradition to draw from. Culturally, we tend to highlight people who are doing the amazing or big things and have forgotten, sometimes, to highlight the importance of the quiet elders, the place-makers, and the deep prayers. When we think about the wide range of how each of the Quaker archetypes of minister, elder and activist can show up, we have a lot of ways we can be of service and connected to each other. We need to share more stories of our past and present that illuminate the ways Friends are being faithful. Some of us leave the home and serve others, some of us care for and elder others, some of us pray and hold in the Light – all of these are needed and each of us can do something. Helping Friends remember this, offering practices for how to do this, and sharing the stories about this interconnection can help us feel oriented, competent, and connected. Setting-up a daily 10-minute prayer time invites us to care for each other from where we are and to access that care, on a spiritual level, for whatever we need.

 

6.              Trauma takes our power away from us and makes us seek control. This can come out sideways, can show up in passive aggressive behaviors, and can toggle between being emotionless to extremely emotional. Being a public leader means having a lot of feelings, anger, and critique of how one is using power directed at you. Clear and consistent communication, acknowledgement of feelings being expressed (explicitly or implicitly), questions, and follow-through will help Friends. Those in leadership having dedicated time to process the impact of what they are receiving is really important. For some, this will be check-ins and venting, for others it may be scheduled breaks for movement, prayer, or just crying/raging.

 

7.              Trauma always involves the loss of something and, therefore, grief. Our society has not prepared us well to process and be with grief and many of our practices around grief are not accessible to us right now. Grief slows us down, confuses us, exhausts us, and is cumulative. Whether we can consciously access it or not, grief impacts our minds, emotions, bodies, and spirits. Therefore, we need practices to help us feel, process, and move through our grief that engage our minds, bodies, emotions, and spirits. Friends have strong practices for engaging our minds and spirits, but we have grown away from practices that fully engage our bodies and the full expression of hard emotions. We have folks among us who can help us do this. We need to name these aspects of grief and offer ways for Friends to be with and process our grief.

 

8.              Trauma makes us feel isolated, less than, and uncreative. We can remind each other of our love for each other and God’s love for all of us. We can not express this too much or too often and we can express this is a myriad of ways – talking, art, music, images, reaching out, prayer, and so much more. Centering the question, “What is God’s invitation to us?” encourages stepping into that unconditional love, focusing on our interconnectedness, and opens the space for creativity.

 

9.              Trauma makes it feel like it was our fault. It wasn’t and isn’t our fault! However, this feeling combined with our culture of shame and need to always have it together, means we often deny the depth of what we are feeling.  We can offer each other space to really name and express what we are feeling. We can ask, “What’s really hard right now?” and then listen fully, affirm both what is hard and what someone is doing to navigate the hard stuff. We can model not having it together all the time, we can make space for messiness.

 

10.  Trauma is hard and confusing and often causes us to act in ways we don’t like. We can offer each other grace, be gentle with our disappointment (in ourselves and others), and practice active care. This doesn’t mean that we don’t get to say “stop!” or “that’s not Ok!” Rather, we say those things but hold the person and the behaviors a bit apart. We can always ask for a different set of behaviors or change in how people are acting, while at the same time affirming the people involved. We can also start to watch for the trigger or thing that sets us off and either ask other people not to do that thing around us or work on a plan we can follow when that thing happens so we can care for ourselves without doing harm to others (or ourselves).

 

11.  Trauma takes the joy out of life. We can make space for joy, for celebration, for silliness. Because many of us are feeling a lot of hard feelings, we need to name explicitly what are spaces/times for sharing the hard things and what are the spaces and times for sharing the joyous. Instead of asking for joys and sorrows together at the end of worship, we can say, “Let’s take some time to hear sorrows and prayer requests.” Then do that, create a transition of breathing together, shifting physically, and invite a sharing of joys and prayers. It means we offer programming that is explicitly for sharing joy and fun together. We explicitly affirm the need for all of us to have some spaces of joy. This is not a denial of the reality we are in or those who are suffering, but a way we make space for the fullness of our emotions and the need to feel all of them, not just some.

 

12.  We can’t undo trauma, but we do get to heal. What we are experiencing and how we feel right now will not be how we always feel. Trauma research has shown that the people who can best access healing are most often the ones who can identify someone they can tell about their experience, someone they know will believe them. We can be those trustworthy people for each other. We can offer each other compassion and trust that we are each speaking our truth. We can affirm what is shared with us and remind each other that we can heal and we can heal together.

 

 

Our Faith is strong and our Quaker fore-parents survived plagues, displacement, death, and many forms of trauma. We have spiritual practices and ancestors to call upon and learn from. Our community is deep and we can support each other, with God’s love, through this. This is also a time of tremendous potential to bring about the Beloved Community. The work we have been called to is not on pause, rather, we are being given a new reality and clarity that requires us to accelerate our pace of change for and growth towards the world God envisions for us.

 

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