Trauma and Leadership: A Sensitive Subject
In Jewel’s last post, Embracing the Cracks: Inspiration for Transformation, she related insights about the Japanese art of kintsugi, the craft of mending broken pottery using lacquer and gold. The end result is a piece of pottery even more valuable than before.
A part of the philosophy of wabi sabi, which accentuates the beauty of impermanence and imperfection, kintsugi points to the broken as well as the potential for healing, a resilience of becoming, a making of a way despite feeling lost.
Yet there are times when it’s tough to make a way, to bounce back, to mend and heal. In past posts such as “The Blues and Tragic Optimism” and “Loss and Leadership Maturity” we’ve looked at tragic reality and loss. In this post, we point to some resources for dealing with trauma, a persistent sense of brokenness based on adverse experiences in the past difficult or seemingly impossible to integrate and mend in our body and mind.
Three Books on Trauma
As the authors of this blog on culture and leadership, we are not psychologists. Yet we feel a responsibility to you, our readers, to face and confront issues that leaders, whether leaders of families, teams, or just being a leader of oneself, will usually face over the course of our adult lives. So we point to three works that we’ve learned from and that may be helpful to you and to people you care about.
The first work, The Monster’s Journey, by psychologist Mark Forman, uses Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey archetype as a foil through which to contrast the debilitating and reactive journey of many who have experienced ACE, adverse childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect. Far from a dry clinical approach to the topic, Forman uses examples from literature and movies to draw out examples and to illustrate how persons suffering from personal trauma can slowly and carefully develop positive relationships.
The second book deals with social and cultural trauma that appears in bodies of people racialized as white and black. Resmaa Menakem, trauma specialist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, also provides resources in this candid and compassionate work for traumatized police officers. By delving into cultural and historical background and the psychological and neurophysiological impact of trauma, the method he calls “cultural somatics” points to ways groups of people can begin to mend the pain and persistence of trauma grounded in the sad legacy of race and racialization.
Thomas Hubl
Spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl’s Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds is the third work we recommend. This meditation on the collective trauma experienced by even largers swaths of humanity is notable for its reflection on how the adaptations and coping mechanisms within responses to trauma point to the wisdom of the human body and mind. Integrating our wounds, he contends, will not only involve what we have experienced individually but collectively, over many generations. Facing the blues of trauma is difficult, yet, as leaders, we must have the courage to do so.
If we don’t, humanity is fated to keep repeating the actions and behaviors that cause undo pain and suffering, intergenerationally.