For even highly trained, perceptive and experienced workers, dealing with trauma on a day to day basis is very challenging.
Studies over many decades have identified the parallel process where trauma kind of, seeps, into staff teams and new discoveries in neuroscience have confirmed it in more recent years.
(It is important to note that it is slightly different to vicarious trauma, which is the trauma that I might experience from, for example, being witness to a serious accident).
When trauma seeps into teams, and it affects practitioners who are tasked with the healing of the very trauma that finds its way in, it can cause the spread of what I’ll call slow panic over a long time.
This, in turn, can lead to many negative traits such as anger, competitiveness, dishonesty etc. and ultimately powerlessness. Powerlessness can cause people to become apathetic as they begin to despair that anything will change. This is not surprising really – it is well known how panic spreads and each person loses a sense of proportion of the problem (and indeed a sense of their own personal power to do something about it) as it takes hold – the overload that I have described already.
Trauma has the potential to be destructive.
Many very enthusiastic and committed people stay in this type of work for some years, getting great experience, and then drift towards other work (very often within the Pillars, actually). While financial security is one reason for this, another factor is burnout from working, unsupported, with people who suffer from unresolved trauma, are continually in crisis, who have very few coping skills to deal with it.
As trauma and its effects are largely misunderstood by potential funders of agencies that support very marginalised people, the acknowledgement of same and development of skills in a staff team to deal with it on a continual basis is a very challenging aspect of initiating any venture that aims to support people who have suffered trauma and include them in determining their own path towards good enough emotional health – i.e. committing to two-way knowledge flow.
So, to sum up, the effects of trauma are continual and enduring, and involve dealing with unresolved emotions of anger, (and sometimes rage), acute loss, guilt, shame, fear, high anxiety levels, and sadness, often unrecognised, unacknowledged and inappropriately expressed, the extent of which can be overwhelming.
At its worst it manifests as behaviour that may be oppositional, narcissistic, egotistical and above all utterly self-destructive.
In the Chapter on Training I will offer suggestions as to how we can protect ourselves and our colleagues from the harmful effects of trauma.