Trauma is not a growth experience
I am a different person than I was at the beginning of this year. I don’t mean that shallowly: I am distinctly different. It’s not because my values changed, or my beliefs, or my role — it’s because traumatic events cause harmful changes down to the cellular level.
Trauma doesn’t make people grow or make people more resilient. Trauma is damaging, plain and simple. It changes us permanently — and although we can recover, that’s not a guarantee. Only with support can we heal at all. It is that healing process by which we develop coping mechanisms and build resilience.
Through therapy and with the support of friends, I’ve learned how to process traumatic experiences and how to get the support that I need to recover and to develop resilience. Although I am not a therapist, I want to help you learn some aspects of how trauma can affect people so that you can empathize. I hope this may provide you with a better understanding of how you can support trauma recovery, what’s harmful, and what’s helpful.
Memory is a fickle thing
I was hard on myself recently (mah nishtanah?), and I found myself saying, “I should have known better, I’ve been on this team enough years.” — It’s been four (4) months.
I have an exceptional memory for some things — but in the face of trauma, that capability dissolves like cotton candy in water.
In a very literal sense, January feels like 6 years ago. My memories of several periods this year were obliterated by my trauma response. Some memories are hard to retrieve and obscured by a layer of fog, much like memories from years past. This is expected, this is fine, and this is normal. This is all part of how the human brain protects us from trauma. In time, as I process through it, some memories will become easier to recall.
Annihilation to Nihilism
Many years ago, after I left my first management role, I was unemployed for 18 months. I became a different person.
In retrospect, I was a decent first time manager. But after my lengthy unemployment, I was humbled and grateful to be offered … an entry level security engineer role. The level wasn’t entirely wrong: what was wrong was me thinking of myself as being brand new, doe-eyed lil’ fawn.
Unemployment — or rather the seemingly endless series of retrospectively-ludicrous rejections like “not technical enough” 🙄 — demolished my self-confidence. Razed to the ground. I didn’t start healing from that until I worked with the PagerDuty Security team (ty 💙🦙). I recovered through the validation and reassurance and encouragement of my colleagues. (Also, lots of therapy.)
I want you to pause and reflect on that: I went from a confident, capable, knowledgeable people manager to a wary, insecure, clueless waif. (I even paid for a coding bootcamp in the middle! As it turns out, I do in fact know how to write code 🙃)
Traumatic Invalidation
Comparing traumatic experiences isn’t something you can truly put an ordering on — but I find myself downplaying my own experiences by saying, “but no one died!”
Sometimes the hardest part of a traumatic experience ain’t the dying but the living.
One of the classic experiences of surviving trauma is minimizing our experiences. And it’s no wonder: our feelings are so often invalidated that it changes everything from our internal dialogue to our external presentation and relationships.
Recovery from trauma *cannot happen* without validation.
Most of us are not therapists. But we can provide the support that the people we care about need for their recovery from trauma. Recovery is on them, and therapy is important — but someone who experiences trauma requires support and validation to feed their recovery process. Ideally, support for trauma recovery comes from people close to them, but that’s not always available (especially when traumatic events involve people close to them), and validation from outside can be a powerful form of validation.
To segue into a note on hate crimes:
Hate crimes are not a traumatic event in isolation: they are intertwined across the community’s history, and they impact the entire community. The traumatic event itself is only one part of a hate crime. The impact of a hate crime reverberates across a community.
When a hate crime survivor lacks unified support, their trauma can be acutely magnified by ongoing trauma they experience from people who question their experiences, or by feeling betrayed by friends or family that defend perpetrators of violence (e.g., DV/SA). A community affected by hate crime may face ignorance from outside the community of their trauma.
The trauma experienced by the community is not in response to a single hate crime but to the overwhelming, cumulative oppression faced by the community. — Supporting Reports through Trauma, by Sarai Rosenberg
Beyond hate crimes, the community impact of cumulative oppression in the face of trauma can be acute for any group of people that experiences some form of systemic oppression or a persistent and pervasive power dynamic. Epigenetic trauma is one example, but it may not necessarily be as straightforward to identify (e.g., common experiences for neurodivergent people surviving among neurotypical expectations). Furthermore, validation of experiences is complicated for people who may be alienated from one community by being part of another — and vice versa, thereby alienating them from multiple communities.
Although I found the support I need, this has been a difficult year to feel included as a queer person in the Jewish community, and an especially difficult year to feel included as a Jewish person in the queer community. The Jewish community strives to be inclusive of queer people, but often without strong cultural competence and comfort, so it becomes an awkward dance of explicit recognition and tokenization as they try so hard to be welcoming. In each community, I’m marked as fundamentally non-neutral in some way, akin to dual loyalty, with an unspoken expectation that I perpetually acknowledge that mark by stating my beliefs or explaining my queerness — but only within whatever boundaries of expectations each other person has (no more, no less).
No human’s worth or needs are conditional on their beliefs. Every person’s primary feelings in and of themselves deserve to be validated — and separated from their secondary emotions, which chain out of internal reactions and thought processes.
On managing humans affected by trauma
Brief recommendations from Supporting Reports through Trauma:
- Learn about the event, and about how hate crimes impact marginalized communities
- Avoid triggers such as directly asking how or why I feel affected: let me decide if I want to discuss the event or my feelings
- Demonstrate humility by avoiding assumptions that they understand how I feel
- Validate that my response to trauma is okay and reasonable, while encouraging me to have patience through my recovery
- Comfort in; Dump out: offer support and comfort without exploring your own feelings or venting — don’t make me feel like I have to support you [from Ring Theory: How not to say the wrong thing]
Providing Grace and Curiosity
A topic I didn’t understand well enough to describe when I previously wrote about management & trauma is how feelings of powerlessness, especially in the wake of traumatic events, can materialize as aggressive expressions:
“Regardless of how derailed or wrongly used these motivations may be or how destructive their expression, they are still the manifestations of positive interpersonal needs. We cannot ignore the fact that, no matter how difficult their redirection may be, these needs themselves are potentially constructive. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. As Hannah Arendt has so well said, violence is the expression of impotence.” — “Power and Innocence” by Rollo May
“Tone Policing” is a common example of how this plays out: a marginalized person speaks loudly and directly about their experiences, and people holding relative power criticize their tone, anger, or emotional expression. In other words, someone speaking from powerlessness is derailed from addressing their marginalization and instead the focus turns to how they express themselves.
I urge you to provide grace and start from curiosity when you see unusual behaviors from people who are marginalized or who may have recently experienced trauma. Protect other people from them and don’t shy away from acknowledging their impact on others, but encourage everyone to lean into curiosity around this behavior: What does this person need? Talk through their core needs, and try a behavior chain analysis.
On the opposite end, don’t overlook someone who is relentlessly calm, flexible, and routinely adapts to those around her:
“When she was exploited, … she had no defenses, no way of drawing a line beyond which she could firmly say ‘no,’ no anger to support her. … Along with her inability to get angry, there went, as a necessary corollary, a deep experience of powerlessness and an almost complete lack of capacity to influence or affect other people in interpersonal relations.” — “Power and Innocence” by Rollo May
As in tone policing, Rollo May describes how the enforcement of non-aggression is in itself a form of violence enacted upon the powerless — and in doing so, we remove self-assertion and self-affirmation. As Rollo May later recounts:
“[S]he was also describing something critically important for a human being — the necessity of having somebody listen, recognize, know him. It gives a person the conviction that he counts, that he exists as part of the human race. It also gives him some orientation, a point where he can find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.”
When I ask you to validate someone, this is what I want you to provide. It’s not shallowly acknowledging that someone is valid. I want you to take the time and energy to truly listen, to show that you hear them, and to seek understanding of their needs. I’m not asking you to go outside of a manager-report relationship within the workplace: start from a general understanding, connect with the human who is in front of you, and then turn the focus to what you, as a manager, can do to support them within the workplace.
Trauma is not a growth experience
I don’t have any succinct conclusion to wrap up all these thoughts. I’ve told these stories and shared these examples over and over again because this is a lesson that is so rarely explained — and this is one lesson that you should not learn the hard way.
