It is a staple of every conference in the non-profit world: the survivor of the very issue we are all there to discuss, shares their story. The conference center salad is served: pale romaine leaves, the one sort of red cherry tomato, the two gravy boats of dressing. And out comes the Inspiring Person. 

Inspiring Person shares their story, and those of us in the audience who work as service providers are inspired to keep going. The speaker is the culmination of all of our hopes for our clients. And they may also be a mirror for ourselves. Because if you've ever worked on a social issue, you know that many of your colleagues have direct experience with the issue at hand. And that can be an overwhelmingly powerful thing--or a dangerous phenomenon that will impact that survivor, their colleagues, and your ability as an organization to deliver effective and ethical programming. 

Social media has taken sharing our stories to a new level. What used to be reserved for our friends and family, our therapist, our congregation, has an audience. And it's not just a memoir book deal, or selling the film rights-- our life's greatest challenges and triumphs are now easily posted by any of us on our blog, as an Instagram caption, or regular Facebook updates. Brene Brown's work on vulnerability has inspired many people to share their stories. And sharing can be empowering. But Saint Brene did not give us carte blanche here; it is not always healing and empowering when we share. She reminds us that we have to decide who has earned the right to hear our story. And that we should not be sharing what we have not yet processed for ourselves. 

In my most requested training, Trauma-Informed Radical Self-Care for Service Providers, I share the highlights of my resume--and then how those highlights align with some of the most profoundly personal pieces of my life. I share that it didn't occur to me when I took a job in HIV prevention that I was perhaps working to right the wrongs against my close family friend who had died of the disease. Or that serving refugees was in some way serving my immigrant grandmother who boarded a ship to give me the kind of life she never could have imagined for me. Or that my work around Adverse Childhood Experiences helped me answer life-long questions about my reactions to losing my parents at a young age and a childhood with a chronic health condition. I was drawn to work in the domestic violence field and it took me training others on domestic violence to name that it had happened to me years before. 

And in all of these instances, I am far from alone. I have always worked alongside colleagues who came to the work via their own personal experiences with the topic at hand. Non-profit break rooms, blogs, and interviews are full of "I wanted to give back after I had received help" and "I wanted to use my experience to help others" and "I think this happened to me for a reason, and helping others is it." These are some of the most dedicated employees I have ever worked alongside. 

But I have also seen them burnout at alarming speeds. 

When we are confronted daily with our own trauma, especially trauma we may not have fully addressed and integrated yet, we can have the same trauma responses that we are trained to see in our clients. We can easily project onto that client, rather than empathize. What if the client isn't doing it the way you did it? We can become frustrated and self-righteous. What if the client has more resources than we did to resolve the problem? We can become defensive and withholding. We know these are not pathways to healing, but if we are not engaged in our own healing, we cannot walk with others on their journey in ways that are effectual, and I will argue, even ethical. If we are asking our clients to show up for themselves, to put in the hard work of self-exploration and healing, we must be engaged in that too. 

It's likely clear to anyone following my work now that I honed in on a particular obsession in my endeavors, and I don't intend on letting it go. I wrote months ago about toxic work environments in organizations that are expressly working against a toxic society. I developed a training around creating a trauma-informed workplace, and a training around trauma-informed self-care. It came back to me over and over that we cannot create social change when we as change agents are not willing to change; and we cannot be willing to change if we do not identify what needs to change; and we cannot do that hard work of identification if we are not taking care of ourselves. So, the trainings merged and now I offer Trauma-Informed Radical Self-Care for Service Providers. The name is hulking and clunky, I know. But so is the topic. I'm working on it. 

In April when the weather begins to change, we see more sign-ups for run/walks, bike rides, and marches for social change issues. Here in Indiana, the Indiana Coalition to End Sexual Assault dyes our downtown canal teal. Pinwheels cover the lawns of youth-serving organizations. It's Sexual Assault Awareness Month and National Child Abuse Prevention Month. 

Even if your organization does not directly address either of these issues, if your organization is staffed by, well, any person at all, chances are unfortunately rather high that someone at your organization is directly impacted by one or both of these topics. And April may be a hard month, or an empowering month, or both (or neither!), for them on their healing journey. Life is complicated.

The Instagram account @Therapyforwomen shared this recently and I adore it. We can't know what we don't know. We can't fix what we don't know needs attention. As social media continues to transform our sense of self in ways both good and bad, more survivors are claiming their stories and sharing them with others. Maybe you are connected with a colleague on social media and see them share a #metoo post. Maybe they re-tweet a National Child Abuse Prevention Month statistic and disclose their own abuse. Many of us have had that moment with someone else where we think, "Oh no. I didn't know they had experienced {fill in the social issue here}. I hope I've never said anything to offend them. How do I treat them now?" 

As a lover of The Office, my mind goes immediately to Season 3, Episode 1 when Michael and Dwight find out Oscar is gay. 

Michael Scott: There could be others. I need to know. I don't want to offend anybody else.
Dwight Schrute: You could assume everyone is, and not say anything offensive.
Michael Scott: [rolls eyes] Yeah. I'm sure everyone would appreciate me treating them like they were gay!

And all joking aside, I think this may actually sum up how to begin infusing our workplaces with trauma-informed care principles. I know. Stay with me. 

We don't need to assume anyone's sexual orientation (or level of trauma, or ethnicity, or ability, or anything else) to behave with respect. It doesn't mean we won't sometimes say the wrong thing, but it means that we are aware of how our words and actions may impact other people, who we cannot possibly know everything about. Now, not behaving like Michael Scott at your own workplace is a pretty low bar, so let's raise is a bit: how can we become aware of possible triggers in our work to our colleagues?

Use these awareness raises months to do just that: raise your awareness! Read the posts you see. Familiarize yourself with the statistics. That alone will begin to shift your perception. For example, when you learn that one in three women and one in six men in the USA experience some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime, you may be more sensitive to the fact that people around you may struggling if a big sexual assault or rape case is in the news. And, you can begin to think critically about how the work of your organization may be affected by those you've hired to deliver the programming.

Ask yourself:
-does my team display signs of burn-out? 
-are team member over-identifying with clients? Displaying symptoms similar to those they are caring for, or obsessing over certain clients while others suffer?
-Do you have employees who got into this work because they have direct experience with the issue at hand? 

The last point is the topic of the next blog post, so stay tuned. In the meantime, how can you channel more empathy at work? Do you have a role model for that to emulate, who seems to be the opposite of Michael Scott? Begin by journaling what you admire about that person's style, how they make you feel, and analyze their leadership style. Try to incorporate one thing a day that you think they may do, if they were in your situation.

​We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. -Anne Frank

When I was fifteen, I traveled to Amsterdam with a school group. I had been anticipating our visit to the Anne Frank House museum since I learned about the trip, having read her diary as a child and becoming somewhat obsessed with her story ever since. The thought of standing where she had stood, calling to mind scenes from her entries and imagining them unfolding, right there in front of me, was almost too great to conceptualize before it happened.

The museum begins on the ground floor of 263 Prinsengracht, where the offices of the company owned by Anne's father functioned. Today they are filled with artifacts: typewriters, letters, photos of the Frank family and those who joined them in the Annex. Suddenly, you turn a corner and before you is the bookcase that obscured the door to their hiding place. It stopped me in my tracks, seeing this passage I had read about so many years ago, immortalized in movies and plays and history books. There it was, just in front of me. I could touch it. I did touch it. And then I walk through it, feeling as if I was walking on sacred ground, and also ground I had tread before, though I never had, because it had been in my imagination so long. I identified a lot with Anne. Both young avid readers and writers, dreamers who often left others around us frustrated as our imaginations and hopes for the future swelled, pushing out the present. The profound, urgent feelings of first love. Carrying on as a relatively normal teenage girl in the midst of great challenge and uncertainty. While my challenges were nothing like hers, the juxtaposition of her very humanness and teenager-ness against great pain reminded me that I could do the same.

I thought of Anne this last month when I traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland to present at a conference and visit youth-serving programs as part of The Journey fellowship. Our tour of the peace walls, monuments displaying gruesome photos of the dead after a bombing, and watching school children—in real time, in March of 2019, 20 years after the Good Friday agreement was signed—keep to their sides of the walls, and attend segregated schools. Our protestant tour guide who told us he has metal over his windows and multiple locks on his front door and sleeps with a gun after 4 assassination attempts against him; and our Catholic guide on the other side of the wall, who was in prison for 12 years and pointed to the wall mural memorializing the ten prisoners who died in the 1981 hunger strike and saying, “These are my friends.” Visiting R-CITY, a program serving youth on both sides of the walls, trying to bridge the gap through camps and self-development workshops and a coffeehouse, even as the barbed wire stands. Listening to Alternatives, a restorative justice program in the most economically depressed neighborhood along the wall, who also began suicide prevention work because it is such a problem there. In all of this, I thought of Anne. I thought of her when I saw the images of dead young people on the sides of buildings, and when I walked past gaggles of kids as they walked home from school. I thought of her in the youth centers we visited, meeting adults who had been given the chance to heal and process and change when they were kids.

Our delegation from the United States was made up of youth workers, and each time I travel with the fellowship, I am reminded of the power of our youth. Their vitality and high emotions and lack of filter is powerful—and can be harnessed for good or bad. The adults around them—us, their parents, teachers, social workers, neighbors—guide the direction of those gifts.

It was not a stretch, you may imagine, for a group of American social service folks to stand next to a wall dividing a city and think of our own nation's call to build a wall between us and our Mexican neighbors. To hear stories of Northern Irish children caught in the middle of the affairs of adults and think of innocent children in cages in our own country. To hear the fears surrounding Brexit and what it may do to the two decades of relative peace between the Catholics and Protestants, and remember the visceral feelings surrounding the 2016 US elections. And in both we hear the generalized caricatures of the masses, us and them, good and bad, and we bias our children and change their fate based on it all. We build walls, physical and metaphorical, for them to grow up in the shadow of, and navigate around for the rest of their lives. As a youth worker, I grieve the work we are leaving for them. But as a youth worker who has seen the power of youth, I also hold on to the hope that they will also be the people to eventually tear those walls down.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world. -Anne Frank