Creating the Conditions, Part 2

How our own life creates a model for others

There’s this inside joke between coaches and therapists that clients choose themes. Without conscious intention, people will come to us to talk about whatever is challenging them. And it’s often on the same theme. One week will be all about boundaries. And the next, grief over one’s father. Clients don’t know each other and they don’t know our personal histories. But they are always connected. When we first saw this process, it felt magical, remarkable, and also so common as to be ordinary. Then we realized it was the secret sauce to inclusion building. This is because people heal in connection.

Lately, the connections abound. Everywhere we turn, people are talking about “creating the conditions.” Those exact words have been uttered, unprompted, by several people we work with in the last couple weeks alone. Some have been speaking of dynamics in their organizations that have created the conditions for dysfunction. Others, like us, have spoken of creating the conditions for diversity, equity, and healing. In either case, it’s clear that a theme right now is to identify and examine the underlying systems that trouble groups and make togetherness, and the productivity that comes with it, difficult to achieve and sustain.

Our method gets at the core of this difficulty, and it’s fundamentally pretty simple. Discrimination of all sorts is a traumatic experience, and trauma disrupts connection. Reestablishing connected relationships is what heals a group. This means that building inclusive communities is always relevant, regardless of our political or historical moment. 

Yet, figuring out what’s getting in the way and how to tackle it can feel anything but simple. The disruptive pain points often seem vast and insurmountable: the accreted history of centuries of racial injustice, for example; the sheer amount of legislative barriers to equality for people who are transgender; or the fear and distrust that comes from generations of economic instability. These are not, however, unmovable. In this post, we’d like to walk you through our practice of creating the conditions for healing and inclusion by telling you the story of a student, whom we’ll call Thomas, and his college, our client.

Thomas is the first in his family to go to college. He's also the breadwinner in the family since his father died suddenly last year. He has to be home at night to take care of his younger siblings and fits in his coursework around his work schedule. His family is from Honduras. They moved to the United States when he was five. As the oldest child, he was responsible for translating, filling out forms, and helping his parents navigate life in a new country from an early age. From a trauma perspective, we know that Thomas has had experiences of overwhelm, grief, and responsibilities that outweigh his ability to respond, especially when he was a child. As a first-generation student, we also know that he has the momentous task of imagining a life that differs from what members of his family have known.

People who work to create an equitable culture often fear being invasive. How much does Thomas have to share with you for you to be able to help him, and thereby to help your community be more inclusive of him? Fortunately, without delving into the precise details of Thomas’s life, we can use what we already know about trauma’s impact on his current experience. For example, he might have feelings of perfectionism related to always needing to get things right. He might have a hard time identifying his own needs since he routinely had to be a caregiver, even as a child. Grief over losing a parent can intensify feelings of perfectionism and pressure to provide. Moving between two worlds culturally, especially if one culture is routinely diminished as inferior, can also be overwhelming. Thomas carries a variety of hardships that might prevent him from flourishing. Our client, the college, can’t take away the events that have made Thomas’s life hard, but it can create conditions that allow for resolution and transformation. 

When we view diversity and inclusion work from a trauma-informed perspective, it allows us to identify community-influencing factors that might otherwise go unnoticed. Trauma’s impacts often exist outside our conscious awareness; they are both physical and psychological; and they limit our capacity to imagine better futures. For someone who has experienced a deep feeling of unsafety in their body, such as a child who realizes they know more about how to get along in their culture than the parents who are supposed to be their caregivers and protectors, having even a small need can be a trigger. It signals the need to be perfect in order to hold the world together. It might trigger a feeling of despair and exhaustion, as if they might as well give up. It can elicit anger with thoughts like, “why do I always have to take care of everything?” Such reactions regularly become a barrier to inclusion: even the most well-meaning people will have difficulty including someone who is scared, exhausted, tired, and resentful. 

In our inclusion building work, we intentionally create cultures that help individuals unlearn what trauma has taught them. It helps the community thrive, and it starts with the individual. Most importantly, it doesn’t have to be Thomas who starts.

We incorporate practices shown to help us rewire, connect, transform, and imagine different outcomes. We educate organizational leaders about what we know works: connection heals; conscious envisioning changes our understanding of what's possible; and bodily awareness can encourage a process of co-regulation. Organizational leaders who learn and practice these skills become a source of resolution. When community members practice these norms together, their organization’s fundamental culture becomes one of healing and transformation.

When the individuals who comprise a system are strategic and skillful about seeking connection, we can rely on organizational cultures to do the work that an individual member needs. Perhaps most important of all, once someone starts doing the work of healing themselves—acknowledging their own experiences, integrating their fears and triumphs, and naming their own wants and needs—they come to see that an experience different from and better than their norm is possible. Once a few start doing this work, it rubs off on others, who also come to see and feel that a different and better experience is possible. Our method is to create deliberate, well-supported cultural practices and norms that change people’s experiences well beyond any one initiative. 

Self-focus has another benefit for individual leaders. It makes them more effective and less likely to burn out. Creating the conditions for organizational healing through one’s own experience is far more sustainable than trying to solve for, fix, or erase other people’s pain. Switching this focus is particularly powerful for our clients who are socialized as caregivers. Since pain is not a zero-sum commodity, taking on pain doesn’t usually relieve its original bearer. It just spreads more pain through a system and exhausts the leader who now bears their own pain and that of others, too. We teach clients not to take on another’s pain, but to be with it in order to allow for it to resolve.

Thomas’s college is working to increase the graduation rates of its students most directly impacted by traumatic experiences. This includes students who have experienced homelessness, poverty, family separation, gun violence, racism, sexism, and more. It includes students like him, who have experienced traumatic overwhelm for less dramatic reasons, too.

There is much that workers at Thomas’s college would like to do for him. They’d like to make it so that he doesn’t have to work so hard to study and take care of his siblings. They’d like to ameliorate the experiences of racism that he and his family have experienced as Latine immigrants to the U.S. They’d like to take away the grief of a son who has lost his father. But a college can effectively do none of these things. In fact, getting caught up in these desires is why many DEIB initiatives are abandoned. It feels like too much to solve and inclusive leaders experience grief when they see what they can’t do.

So what can the college do? To answer this question, we ask employees and staff to consider these questions: why have I chosen to be here and do this work? What makes this work hard for me? What have I overcome or what am I overcoming in order to do it? What have my challenges given me that I can appreciate? What helps me know that I am safe and provided for? How does this work give me the resources to feel this way?

At Thomas’s college, we asked the faculty members who welcome and advise students like Thomas to reflect on and work through these questions. Many of them recognized experiences that were similar to his in one way or another. They have had more time and experience in their lives in order to process their challenges. We identify this as their advantage and their source of change. We asked them to imagine that Thomas is asking, on a deep level: what is it like to be on the other side? They can only answer this question through their own experience, which requires them to feel safe and connected, and to feel that past pain has resolved and that what will be is exciting and possible. In that vein, and because no relationship is unidirectional, we ask clients to imagine that Thomas is showing them a younger version of themselves. We asked: how might showing compassion to Thomas help you heal more? It is foundational to our work that whatever we heal in ourselves, we heal in others. 

In other words, to create the conditions we want to see in our communities requires first doing so for and within ourselves. Inclusive and equitable community building isn’t about self-sacrifice. It can’t be. When we see ourselves as active culture creators with the capacity to make change through healing, then we get to be both the agents and the beneficiaries of the conditions we have created.

Photo Credit: Markus Spiske.