Practice #4
Understand Trauma & Build Emotional Skill
Meet the emotional moment by understanding the ways trauma impacts key membership, and clarify how the organization addresses and holds that trauma.
People come to our organizations with deep wounds caused by separation, disavowal, exclusion, abandonment, disposability, violence, and death. Enmasse, people are experiencing social exclusion, a process of rupture that detaches people from one another and larger institutions, preventing them from living a full life. For some, a need for belonging has been tenuous since before birth.
We cannot expect trauma to be “solved” or “absent” or “fully held elsewhere” before we engage with our members.
Educate staff and leaders on how trauma impacts people’s actions, behaviors, and beliefs. Use an understanding of trauma to demonstrate and build supportive emotional skills such as self-awareness, discernment, adaptability, and principled struggle, in order to support healing.
Risk
When trauma is unaddressed or ignored, we are neglecting a key reality and experience of many of the people that come to our work. Trauma can manifest in our organizations in many ways, including:
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- Attachment to certain aspects of a group’s culture or practices;
- Fearing activities that could lead to rejection;
- Overestimating connection with people of the same identity background OR underestimating the possibility of connection with others;
- Over reliance on separatism or political purity as a way to avoid discomfort;
- Strategizing with an “all or nothing” approach;
- Heightening the severity of conflicts, making all things seem urgent.
Without understanding, support, and skills development, traumas and violences can replicate themselves into culture in our groups and broader movements.
Historically, our movements have underperformed at recognizing and addressing the impacts of trauma. Similarly, as a social movement left, we have yet to reckon with how to hold space for trauma caused from movement spaces themselves. This under accountability has left us underdeveloped in this practice.
Opportunity
While every organization cannot be expected to be the primary site of people’s healing, organizations can define their role in their members’ healing journeys. When organizations can demonstrate and develop emotional skillfulness (how we understand ourselves, treat each other, and move the work forward), our groups will be better equipped to share power, form sharp strategy, and maintain sustainable, invested leadership.
If capitalism fragments people, organizing can support people to tune into their inherent wholeness.
Challenge
If people are used to unbelonging in their lives, they will likely struggle with this feeling in our groups. They may even believe it’s not possible to belong at all.
As social structures and institutions continue to crumble, the ‘all or nothing’ approach to belonging and healing has an even stronger grip. People may believe that all of their healing needs should be met in one space, or that ‘belonging’ to a space means always feeling good in that space. Practicing this aspect of belonging also means relying on practices of purpose and boundaries, and making clear what is possible within the limits of the organization. It’s not about every single person being healed, or every single person being a healer. It’s about addressing the material needs of the membership in the unique way each of our groups can.
Assessment Questions
Can staff members and organizational leaders articulate how cycles of violence impact members?
Do members understand that emotional skillfulness is an important aspect of doing the work in the organization?
Does the organization have fluency in the emotional skills that best support your organizing? Are there deliberate trainings and practice opportunities to build these skills?
Implementation
Map the emotional landscape of your community. Identify key traumas, going to the source, and work to understand how those traumas manifest in actions and beliefs. Where necessary, consult and build with movement-aligned healers to bridge understanding.
Train staff to balance challenge and support with members. Staff should understand how to build trust through curiosity, push at peoples’ growing edge, create opportunities for debrief and feedback, and affirm where transformation is taking place.
Encourage regular self-reflection on personal patterns, reactions, needs, emotions, self-perceptions, limits, and capacity. Ensure that people are able to recognize their feelings, and, where appropriate, connect them to a broader moment or purpose.
Support people across the organization to create sustainability, healing, and crisis plans, and identify resources within and outside of the organization to nurture that healing.
Evaluate emotional skillfulness throughout the organization, and plan to create ways to practice key skills where necessary. These skills can be incorporated into existing meetings, campaigns, committees, or gatherings. Skills may include:
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- self awareness – understanding one’s own thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs
- emotional discernment – ability to decide when to share feelings and thoughts, holding and letting go when needed
- adaptability – returning to center when methods, plans, or practices change
- conflict mindfulness – choosing when to engage in conflict, and understanding why
- principled struggle – engaging in thoughtful disagreement or dialogue with others for the sake of political clarity
- strategic visioning – guiding decisions for the future without pessimism or unanchored optimism
- balancing individual needs and collective purpose
- principled and direct communication
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