Sociocultural Trauma in the Workplace [video]
For many organizations, the inability to recognize the ways that sociocultural trauma is activated becomes the missing link in otherwise genuine efforts to create a healthy workplace environment.
This was a webinar by Donielle Prince.
In this webinar:
+ define socio-cultural trauma
+ learn how it becomes activated at work
+ learn how to create a truly inclusive community at your workplace
Transcript:
Donielle Prince 0:00
there'll be these will continue to come through. And if you visit our website you already know I'm Daniel prince, and I'm an advisor to tend. And I'll be supporting, especially on these kinds of topics like we're going to go. We're going to cover today. Let's see, I'm in Berkeley, California, and the vibe is hipster. Ah, yeah. That's a good one. Okay, all right. So I will. Yeah, they are great vibes, Allison. Thank you. So I will go ahead. And we'll just go ahead and get started. There's a little bit of time, have a little bit of interactive activity just a little? And will you all share your thoughts in the in the chat? So low, low threshold? Okay, so you are trying to hear by the title, what does socio cultural trauma have to do the work with the workplace, Osama do my best to answer that for and with you. We will cover I'm going to start us off with a very brief mindful moment. And I'll get into a definition that's good socio cultural is not a term that just falls flows out of the mouth, or is also commonly understood. In fact, I feel like it's still being defined and redefined all the time. So it helps to know where we're coming from today. And then I have this, this section just on individual versus structural axes, which is kind of a mouthful, and I'll explain more when we get there. But just I want to talk about a turn from looking at trauma, as an experience of the individual and more of it is solely because it is an experience of the individual also, but more as a turn of toward understanding it as something that can happen outside of the household and outside of the individual but come from structures. And then some suggestions around how do we address this in the workplace, because something like socio cultural trauma sounds like it belongs in a philosophy class. But it does have it does have relevance to our workplaces. And so we'll talk a little bit about how that isn't the case. And then we'll end with some suggestions and information about services that 10 can offer. So our mindful moment is something that's kind of new to me. And it may be new to you, are you familiar with. I've been doing Qigong. And there's this, I wish I remembered the title I'm going to, before these slides go out, I'll update the references. And so I'll put the the link to this Youtube series that I've been watching on Qigong. And there's this wonderful exercise that I don't even know if it has a name. But it, what you do is you rub your hands together. And I guess it's creating chi, and then you place your hands over your eyes, your goal is covering your aisles and you leave them there, you leave, I shouldn't do this, I'm leveling my mouth, but you leave them there for a moment. And and then when you're ready, you can you can take your hands off, it's not necessarily lengthy, but it can be if it feels good. And the idea is, when we're doing the exercise, the instructor says give me your eyes a rest. And I thought that's really good spending a lot of time looking at screens. But also in my background, I am a counselor. And I do both counseling and mental health education. And one of the things that you can work with people on in counseling, kind of, to bring them back into their body, or any number of activities that literally bring their attention to their body. And so when I did this exercise, it's like, oh, this is a great exercise for that, because I'm always looking for things that are simple, don't require a lot of instruction, and can be done anywhere. So that's something that people can do. And then they can move on. And it just kind of reminds you when you touch yourself or remind you that you're here. So if your thoughts are getting overrun or your emotions are getting overrun, just touching your body sometimes can just kind of bring you back and bring you out of that and then to your present moment. And so I that wasn't a new one for me, but I already am ready to adapt it. So now you If you haven't done that before you have a new one in your toolbox. And so, see, I'm just gonna check the chat really quick. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm glad you like to Alison. Okay. All right. So this is a fairly familiar slide, because I took it from Bree, and from her presentation last week, but it helps to set up the definition of socio cultural trauma. So it's from SAMSA. And it's really focused on an event or series of events experienced by the individual that has harmful or life threatening, and lasting adverse effects on an individual's functioning and in all the ways that are listed. And so and that's, you know, that's the SAMSA definition. And there's several from different sources, but they align, there's one from the American Psychiatric Association, that is pretty similar. When you look into the actual DSM five, it's really lengthy. It's how it describes all the possible things that could be be trauma, but it is, it really can be summarized the way it is here with SAMSA. SAMSA is also contributing to this definition of socio cultural trauma. As you see on your screen, it's a form of trauma that's not often talked about, I really appreciated that being raised, but is experienced daily by marginalized and oppressed people. The impact of toxic stress on people living with unresolved trauma has been observed to trigger trigger a trauma response of either fight, flight or freeze. So similar to individual trauma, or time less experienced individually. And this was, this definition comes from a resource from SAMSA SAMSA has. And for those that don't know, just in case, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, federal agency has these mental health technology transfer centers, and they're regional. And so the Great Lakes Mental Health Technology Transfer Center created this, a teaching around socio cultural trauma has some other pieces to it, but I was like, that's a, that's a great definition to get us going. And what you see here, which may not, I just, I took a screenshot of this, I don't have a better image. So I think it's a little hard to see, and I apologize for that. But I do this, again, maybe I'll create my own. But this is a identity will. And it has several different identities. And we're actually going to do an exercise related to this. So I hope everyone is able to participate, and then kind of write their thoughts in the chat, I have a form for you to fill out because you'll see it's a little involved. And you want to think about it, it'll it'll have each of I think down. And what does that column on the side, it'll have all of the identities and then across, it'll, you can check the identities and you can check more than one. So identities you think about most often. identities, you think about the least often your own identities that you would like to learn more about identities that have the strongest effect on how you perceive yourself, and identities that have the greatest effect on how others perceive you. And what I'm gonna do is take you to the form, and you can also type that Bitly directly. And I can also put in the chat, if I didn't mess it up, there we go. You can click directly on that link, and it'll take you to the form. And I think what I will do, I will go ahead and take one minute to complete it. And I will do it along with you. Let's see if I can do that. What
Alison Cebulla 9:10
happens when we submit on the form, I'm like, oh, gets the info or like, who
Donielle Prince 9:19
I should have said because that's a I've used this before and I it doesn't actually work. And I want to take the Submit method. This is like a form a thing where you can design your own form. Oh, okay. And it it won't let me take off the Submit even though you when you click on it, it doesn't go anywhere. Got it. Okay, thank you. Oh, so it does Yeah, no one will get this. It's it's anonymous, but also doesn't matter because it doesn't go anywhere except for your screen. And it's just for you to be able to look at and think about think through those those five questions about those. I don't know 10 To 12 identities and only If I can do this elegantly, I would do it with you. And you could see mine. Let's see. Oh, there we go. I can Oh, it stopped sharing because I moved but I'm still gonna do it and then I'll be quiet so you can do yours and then we'll come back together
Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay
Donielle Prince 10:55
and I may have messed up my sharing let's see if it'll let me come back without coming out
Alison Cebulla 11:13
we can still okay, I was gonna say we could still besides Yeah.
Donielle Prince 11:15
Okay, I guess it was just being slow and telling me.
Alison Cebulla 11:19
Okay, yeah, but now it's gone. Yeah, yeah, I'm
Donielle Prince 11:22
definitely out now. Okay, cool. I'm gonna come back here we go. All right. So I did it too. And I found for me that the first three race ethnicity and SES were the ones that I thought about the most and everything else was what I thought about the least. Oh, can you see it now? The screen now? Oh, boy. Let's see. How about now? Yes, great. Ah, okay. Um, so yeah, so those were the ones that stood out to me. And it's, and I've actually done this many times. And it always kind of stuns me that many of the others have ones that I don't think about, and have some ideas about why that is. But I wonder what Did anything surprise you about you what you marked, and feel free to add that to the chat. If you want to come off mute and share that screen to?
The end and the question was, Is it anything surprise you about what you noticed? And I guess I'm surprised because there are other issues on there. But I like I don't tend to think about gender, which surprises me and that because I think of myself as a feminist who thinks a lot about feminist issues. And when I really reflect on it, I don't think about it as a as a way of thinking about myself or my identity. So any surprises for people are really now no surprises at all. And then just give like 15 seconds pause to let people if you're typing something, you're typing your response.
Okay, I don't see anything. If you can, let me just check to see if anyone's coming off mute. Don't be shy. But yeah,
Alison Cebulla 13:52
I can, I can share one. I have gotten a lot of feedback in my life that people judge me as being high socio economic status, and in a negative way. And I grew up, I grew up in a low economic, socio economic, neighborhood and home. And so that's always been really interesting to me. Because people will often say like, Oh, when I first met you, I really thought that you were really stuck up and wealthy. And so that's been I've gotten that feedback, like, what so many times in my life, and it's been a really interesting piece of my identity to be like, Why am I what? What are people reading about me?
Donielle Prince 14:42
Okay, yeah, um, so, yeah, that's interesting. So you're sharing that you're, when you it's, that's one that you learned that people ask us answering that part about how other people perceive you even and then it turns out not even to Be an identity that you occupy. So that's interesting.
Alison Cebulla 15:04
Oh, used to be really important to people to, like, label that or something, you know? Yeah.
Donielle Prince 15:10
And April, I'm sorry, the, the form says submit, but you can't submit, it's really just for you to click. So there's no calculation. There's, it's just so that you can have the experience and see it all laid out. Because it's kind of like you have 10 or so identities and five questions, it's hard to reflect on it. So I made that form. So you can click, and you can click as many as are, are relevant to you. One day, I will go back to the form or try to find a new form maker so I can, because every that everyone gets confused by that. So yeah, and so I'll just say, the reason I included this activity is something I actually focus on I do a regular webinar, I guess. It's like a kind of a workshop session, specifically with counselors there the audience for it. So we talk about how to you some of the things we're talking about today, but how do you address those things in a counseling session in that particular type of workplace? So and so I include that here? Because it helps us expand our idea of what socio cultural is that part of the the question that brings us here today? So it's because sometimes it's hard to just kind of conjure that up, like, what are the identities? And these are not all the identities? I always ask the question, if you notice anything that should be there, please put it in the chat. Because, you know, I'll try to I want to try to make this not just take a copy of it, make this myself and then I can add, but someone shared body size should be one that gets added there. And so I will try to make that happen. So if you think of anything else, please share. Oops. Okay. So moving into socio cultural trauma. The one of the key, you know, I'm going to talk more about this individual versus structural or individual towards structural turn. But the important thing to keep in mind about socio cultural trauma is that yes, it's historical, but it's also present. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some very recent research on the concept of status from Stanford researchers, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Hazel Marcus, that help us understand that we're going to talk about the sources of socio cultural trauma. But these, these behaviors that end up excluding include the trading, inclusion and exclusion of others, are kind of automatic, they operate automatically. And there is no such thing as being socialized in this in this society, in many others. And not having adopted these kind of unconsciously adopted these belief systems. And so that means our task when we're trying to address it, in settings of within ourselves of just personal development, but also within Settings, where we're working with people, with diverse groups of people, we have to actively challenge them, we have to not just challenge them, we have to actively identify, acknowledge and then work through there is no, I don't think anyone says this anymore. But there is no I don't see color. There's you you're in, you're in a society. It's like being in an ocean, you're wet. And so you have to you have to that's the first and most important step is to recognize that we're all swimming in that and so you have to go through a process very intentionally. And so, you know, they use the term, the socio cultural. They're a social psychologist and the sociologists so they say schemas, but socio cultural schemas have rules that are unquestioned common knowledge assumptions that govern how to place value on other people based on the identities that we just talked about. So and I have a little bit more from this piece. I will also share I meant to put the reference on the slide but I have it a reference slide with there. If you want to check this out. And it's free. You can get this article, there's a link you can click and download it for free. And so just a few more I have some pullouts or have some other pieces of this kind of long article that kind of make a point that will frame the remainder of our discussion. So the status of people's group identities affects how they are treated by others and all aspects of their lives, including the institutional context, such as work, school and health organizations that are consequential for their life outcomes. And, as I noted, I added that emphasis, because this, if you're familiar, and I think most of the people who are attracted to this session are with a lot of the kind of fundamentals of understanding trauma and toxic stress, that just really stand out to you consequential for a lifetime. And let's see, oh, and I see, I'm just checking the chat really quick, because I noticed it generate a generation, yeah, more than age generation, for that previous slide about identity. Another piece that comes out of this article is that status is best understood as a socio cultural schema or blueprint for organizing social relations, to manage this basic tension, which they mean kind of competition for resources, and produce collective outcomes. And so this is kind of an emphasis on the point, you, if you're in the ocean, you're wet, you're not, you're not, you're not, you have to consciously, you have to say, Oh, I'm in the ocean, I want to be dry, I'm gonna walk out, you have to go on a journey. It's, in other words, it's fundamental. And in other words, the inequality embedded in society status, beliefs about people, significant group identities, is delivered home, it's just their language, folks, the language is delivered home to the individual, and shapes their life outcomes at the level of what people do every day, in their work oriented relations, relations with one another. And in this particular passage, they were talking about the workplace, because they kind of talk about some different settings. And so I just highlight that, obviously, because we're concerned with the workplace. And this is just more emphasis that it's there. So it doesn't just go away, we have to, we have to actively work on it. And then, in their review of the research experiments show that people form shared status, beliefs about the indicators of worthiness and competence quite easily and act on these newly formed status, beliefs and their subsequent treatment of people. So essentially, they're just saying, We social, we have socialization in our society around groups of people being more worthy, and more competent, other groups being less worthy and less competent. And that is just kind of a fact of American life. And then there's, which is, I also found very interesting. The norms around these beliefs are, can be recognized not just by their enactment, but also by their enforcement. So despite there being somewhat unconscious and automatic, people will actually act to protect them very defensively. We see evidence that people enforce the basic status norms with sanctions against violators, and do so spontaneously. I remember an experience I had. I did, I used to do a lot of research in schools and there was a school in Palo Alto, California, which isn't known for that town is not necessarily it's definitely not hipster Berkeley. It's a but this particular school, they had a very, they did a lot of they had an interesting curriculum that was very diverse. And most of the population at that school was white, and it was elementary school. But they were doing a lot of progressive things. And then there was the suggestion made that a nearby town East Palo Alto just a mile and a half away, that was mostly African American, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander. There's the schools were in bad shape, and giving kids an opportunity to go to schools in Palo Alto, including the school and I witnessed the most corrosive behavior from these progressive people who had been like embracing like, like just saying they had really been embodying the idea that, you know, understanding diversity is an important thing. But when their resource was challenged, they spontaneously began talking about these kids will bring down our grades and the quality of our education and it was just, it was
I already had a lot of education around how socio cultural factors operate. I'm not necessarily from this perspective of trauma, but I still was very stunned by that. And so this, this really resonated with this piece of the research. Oh, yeah, the black, the blue eyed experiment, I see Gail Murray sharing about that. So, all of this to say, these are, we cannot avoid that we have to whatever setting that we enter, we have to do work, that's intentional to, to move forward to, because we can even in this piece, I talk about how we can undermine that just by becoming aware of it. But we can't what we can't do is ignore it. Okay, and so I'm gonna let James Baldwin make this point even better.
Speaker 1 25:53
I would like to add someone to our group here. Professor Paul Weiss is sterling professor of philosophy at Yale.
Unknown Speaker 26:12
Were you able to listen to the show
Speaker 2 26:14
backstage? Deal a bit, but then I was behind the last project? Yes. So you heard only some of it?
Unknown Speaker 26:19
Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?
Speaker 2 26:22
I disagreed with a great deal of it. And of course, it's a good deal I agree with, but I think he's overlooking one very important matter. I think each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. There's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape, or lack of ability. And the problem is to become a man. But what
Speaker 3 26:47
I was discussing was not that problem really as discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very, very real danger of death, thrown up by the society when a negro when a black man attempts to become a man
Speaker 2 26:59
was emphasis upon black men. And White does emphasize something which is here, but emphasize it or perhaps exaggerated, and diff will mix us for people together in groups, which ought not to be in, I have more in common with a black scholar that I have with a white man who was against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against old literature. So why must we always concentrate on color, or religion? Notice there are other ways of connecting men,
Speaker 3 27:30
I tell you this, when I left this country, in 1948, I thought this can be one reason only one reason I didn't care where I went to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu ended up in Paris on the streets of Paris before I was like talking on the theory, that nothing worse could happen to me there that had already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a write about yourself, you have to be able then to turn off all the intelligence that you live, because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to get a typewriter and constantly on that, if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris, and one thing for me, they released me from that particular social terminal, which was not the paranoia of my own mind. But a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody. I don't know what most white people in this country feel, I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate negros or not, but I know that we have a western church, which is white, and a Christian churches, which is black. I know as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That sets a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can afford to trust most white Christians, and certainly God plus the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter. But I know I'm not in the unions. I don't know if the real estate lobbyists, anything against black people. But I know the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I love the textbooks to get my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence you want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism, which you are surely just in America, which I have never seen
Donielle Prince 29:28
I feel like this was 1968 but I feel like they were eavesdropping on our our conversation today or they read Hazel Hazel Marcus's 2024 paper and then they were just discussing it because that's how relevant this felt. I'm not sure where I am in my slides. Okay, here we go. But yeah, he captured so much actually that I want to be with you when you have He that he captured so much of just everything that I said, I mean, maybe if I do this, again, I'll just say less and play this. Because he, one thing that really stood out to me sort of when he first started talking, he was talking about socio cultural trauma, like he was describing it, I could transcribe what he said, and put that as my definition next to the SAMSA definition. He's saying, going to another country released me like the language even. And when you think about what trauma is, and what healing from trauma requires, just going to another setting where these particular social structures were not relevant. So he was not cast, his identity was not a target, he was able to be a writer in that space, even with only $40 in his pocket, and probably not speaking the language. So and then he he then goes through, like how it structurally works, you know, he talked about all these different settings, a lot of that hasn't really changed. very sadly. It's so it's a it's really just such a great example. And his interlocutor, sorry for using that word is pops in my head. But the other guy, the Yale professor, whose name I don't remember. It was a perfect example. But people believe like the well intentioned, this is not even overtly racist, point point of view, as well intentioned, and he believed that he really believed things that he was saying, but he couldn't understand it. Because his identity in this particular exchange and topic was not at risk. When you do that identity, will you realize, depending on the identities that are relevant to you, you're either in James Baldwin seat, or you're in your professor seat. So it changes. In my, in the other session that I was talking to you that I shared with you that I do, we talk about that a little bit more extensively, like what's missing, and then that shows you where your sites of privilege are, when you have an issue you don't think about? It means it's not showing up for you, you're in the Yale professor seat with respect to the identity. So um, oh, go ahead. I
Alison Cebulla 32:19
was just thinking about how, you know, as we did the identity, we all and right, for some of us, we can identify different areas of privilege. I just was remarking that we don't, we don't have any white men here in this room. Nor do we often see white men in the room, you know, when we have these types of workshops, which is really interesting, because then we don't get to have, like, some really interesting conversations, or we don't get to see them saying, Wow, let me acknowledge this, you know, like, and I think, I think that we all miss out, and we don't get to have that experience, you know? And yeah, just commenting. Yeah.
Donielle Prince 32:59
Thank you for that point. Because I feel like when we are talking about 10, services, exactly that like once people need some kind of roadway. So some people are going to come because they're interested in the topic. But what if this showed up at your workplace, in a format that you can use, because we're getting a little, we're playing with theory a little bit, but in a format that you can use and apply, so that people who don't look at a title and say that's for me, still get the information and still get to have the enlightenment that comes with it. And I see my Isha has written, El Palo Alto is your hometown. And you can speak to it from personal experience. Oh, as a black, a black and brown child attending a predominantly white school. I'm assuming you're saying that was you? And what does it look like for systems check the box with attendance, but lack intentional change and inclusion? Yeah, that's, so you're resonating on that on multiple levels? And asking like the question, these are the questions, exactly what you wrote there. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And we will. We'll go on, I'm gonna have to edit myself a little bit. This will be part one and part two next time. Okay, and so I want to talk about this individual versus structural, a very brief history of the concept of trauma. And I won't have yours but sometimes that's in my head, but I'm gonna go super fast. And that, you know, we started out talking about this how the popular way currently of talking about trauma is thinking about it as an experience of the end of vitriol inside of their households. And not in the structural ways like my you should just spell it out as a perfect example. And the thing is globally, that's not the case, there have been these conversations. In fact, in many parts of probably mostly the global South, people start there when the concept of trauma began to expand. They started with genocide, war displacement. They're like, yeah, trauma is a thing. And then there came around 2015. But before that, like maybe 2010 ish. Now even before that, like in the 2000s, where people started noticing that the Western and American conversation about trauma was like, why are they only talking about events that happened to people, individual people, like, Where's all this other stuff? Meanwhile, here in the States, people who have had like, we have studied race and culture and those kinds of issues, also noticed it but they have have yet to see that those two conversations are happening together. So I see in the American context, people struggling and wrecking like, this is not this doesn't do it. For me, it's trauma is not just individual. And over here, there are these very deep conversations happening exactly about the fact that trauma is structural. So there's some work to do to bring those things together. And so I just bought a piece of that way of thinking, I just want to point out that it's not new, it's just we can ask ourselves, the question is, why aren't we having that conversation here? When it's been it was obvious elsewhere and has been happening. So then you can see right here, trauma theory continues to adhere to the traditional event based model of trauma. I like that term, according to which trauma results from a single extraordinary, catastrophic event. In numerous accounts, trauma is defined as a frightening event outside of ordinary experience. But this pair parodic. I don't know how to say that paradigmatic paradigmatic model of trauma does not necessarily work for non western and or minority group trauma, nor even for groups and individuals within Western societies. So it's just a perfect encapsulation of that conversation. People are looking at the Western world, like, What are you talking about? Like, why is, why are you honing in on just this one singular dimension so hard. And so I'm not going to go through these. And there, these are, I'm gonna showing you two frameworks that I'm familiar with. And there's more of specifically American thinkers and panels who are trying to work through this. So this one's Wendy Ellis at George Washington University, who came up with this idea of the pair of aces. And now she's built some work around resilience that also addresses both the adverse childhood experiences, that individual level of trauma and the the roots, and name some of the things that can be the kind of the socio cultural components of, of trauma, but it's not necessarily an exhaustive list. So and then we have something that might be exhaustive. It'll take you a long time to read through all of this, if you haven't seen it before. But I like this rise Center in Richmond, California, they do a lot of field building work. And in addition to working directly with youth, who are in Richmond, California, which those us have, are living in a community with a lot of different issues. So they've done in their field building work, they've done a lot of thinking about what they don't call it socio cultural trauma, but recognizing that trauma operates on these different levels. So individual and personal, yes, they include it. But there's also community in place, it's also systems and institutions. And it's also history, legacy and structure. So they're having the conversation that those Global Scholars I mentioned are having, but what I hadn't seen as those conversations intersecting. And so, getting to some of the burdens of socio cultural trauma, people who are whose identities are targeted in some way or multiple ways, have to live with a heightened awareness of their emotional, psychological and physical vulnerability simply because they walk out of the house or if someone sometimes their identity might not be known, but if they do something to that makes it known they will become targeted. If people just assume, like Alison was sharing that they possess an identity, they may be you know, targeted It was dislike, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna offer you experiences or friendship or things like that because of what I believe about you. And also the lived experience because often, like the Yale professor in the video is like, I have more in common, he was denying that the experience was occurring, I have more in common with a black scholar than a white man who is against scholarship, as he put it. And so as a denial, this isn't as big a deal as you're saying, we're just talking about it too much thinking about too much. But people have lived experience and James Baldwin made that really clear, compellingly. Their their experience with a socio cultural trauma camp can't be denied in that way. And then coming into settings like workplaces coping with discrimination and microaggressions. Isolation and exclusion from social connection, which is important. Professional Development and opportunities in the workplace are kind of geared more towards the workplace. And the burden of emotional labor. We don't have time to get into that. If you're familiar with it, you know exactly what I'm saying. So but I'll give a brief explanation is, so one thing that can happen when you are you have a target, I targeted an identity that's targeted by socio cultural trauma. And like I said, it's both historical and present. So one of the ways that it is present, is being not only not being given opportunities, but it's also being given the worst work, the hardest work, the most thankless work the most unrewarded work. And there's this other additional issue of what can be called emotive dissonance dissonance, which I think Twitter is picked up as cold switching Code switching is the old term is linguistic term. But people use that a lot. And a motive dissonance is another way of saying it's you have to, you know, kind of perform an identity, that's not your authentic identity, you can't bring your whole self to work. Because you feel that there'll be penalties if you do so. And it's you have the lived experience that tells you that that is likely. So one of the things that a workplace can do is in is be very intentional about creating an experience that is more just in several ways. And repetitively. telegraphing that so that people now begin to know that they're safe. Because you have to overcome if you're in a workplace that's very serious about doing this work, you still have to overcome the past experiences, people aren't going to let go of things that they actually experienced until they do feel safe. And then I added
there's a really specific, there's really clear evidence that socio cultural trauma is trauma. And not that meets those definitions. And there was this concept of weathering that came about over 20 years ago, was sort of ignored at the time. Probably because it's not the focus of the topic was that black women, it was a public health, oh, I can show you in a moment, I'll show you. We're experiencing what we now will call toxic stress. And we didn't quite have that term yet, then. And they were experiencing it because of their identity status as black woman. So code switching. So this is a great discussion of it, I just saw. And again, all of these sources are going to be on the reference side. So the point here is, Code switching is that performance behavior. And I'll just switch to the highlighted piece where it says, you have to change your entire behavioral profile to successfully convince people that your clothes washing behaviors are in fact, your natural behaviors. And this is incredibly demanding and physically exhausting. And we can see why we spend a lot of time at work, we spend the majority of our living years at work. See, if you're having to do this all the time. This is this is a real problem for you in terms of your health and mental health. And this is the there's a book weathering extraordinary stress of ordinary life and an unjust society by Arleen, Joe animus and I won't spend a whole lot of time because I kind of just told you what weathering is about. And one thing that is not I'll make sure it's on here before you get it. I took that this is the the words are a snapshot of an mpr. Summary and then they have a link of an interview with this author. So you might be interested in learning more that way. The 35 minute I think interview or you can read Brief summary. This is just an excerpt of the brief summary.
And then, I think I'm okay I'm actually okay with I'm starting to panic. And so Charlotte Marie Brown does. She has a she does numerous things, but one of the things she does is lead an academy for counselors called decolonizing, or therapy that liberates is its name. And she also wrote and this link is also in the references a piece in the in a trade with the Social Work trade, journal decolonizing mental health, the healing power of community. And she talks about this uses this liberation focus framework and her training. And what she takes the time to point out is that our time isn't your time management skills and isn't your job. The truth is we inherited a system rooted in capitalism and commodity founded in depression, your lack of self care, the absence of Community Care is because of North American culture. But simply to truly live a well life, our culture would have to change, our values would have to shift, love and spirit would have to be central. And one thing 10 collective believes, maybe we won't not leave it at the collective, we won't change the entire world in every workplace. But any workplace that wants to be intentional about this can change Can't we can create caring communities in the workplace. It doesn't it's like the I think everyone's heard of that parable of the starfish where a man is there's like 1000s of starfish washed up on the beach. And he's throwing them one by one and someone's like, that's useless. It's just one by one. And he's like, it matters to the starfish that gets back into the water. And so I think that matters. And that aligns also with organizing, thinking that community organizing, yes, you want to make a major change a major shift and say how we deal with the environment. But it also matters what you're doing on the local level. And that's a lot of times where you want to focus and you can see the change, it doesn't. We don't have to wait until we feel like there's this moment, for the whole thing to change, or else we won't participate in chained work at all. So we can think of workplaces that way as well. And we can also use that as an assessment of where we are willing to work and where we are not willing to work. Do I have time for my favorite? I'll come back to it. Because I want to make sure there's nothing I'm leaving out. This is just a nod to the earlier point. I like the way she says it about the limitations of the individual trauma theory. Now, I don't think she's aware that there is trauma theory as much bigger, it's just in Western and American context. She's in Kentucky, where it's leaving out the justice element. So this is exactly what I'm talking about. Like there's this, these conversations, some people get that there's something missing, but they don't know there's a whole other conversation. But that's not for now. And then we have so workplace starting to think about even more specifically how this works out in the this impacts the workplace setting. So whether we like it or not, we are assigning different value to who is more worthy, incompetent based on their identity group membership, when they walk in, people walk in, it can be age, I just was hearing someone talk about that, how they do a very serious job. They did some investigative work. And when they walked in the room, people just automatically given them less respect, because they're they are relatively young, but they're one of those people who looks even younger, like if they were in high school who might think they were a high school student. And so they have to work a lot harder to get people's attention and respect. We're doing this all the time on all of the identities on identity will plus whatever's missing. So we place more unwanted and less rewarded work assignments and opportunities on people whose identities we devalue. So if we can't acknowledge that we devalue, then we're not going to do anything about it, and then we're going to perpetuate that cycle. We did not Yeah, we deny that we're favoring and disfavoring employees based on identity status despite overwhelming research evidence to the contrary. And by overwhelming I mean, overwhelming, like, there's a whole several sections of sociology that are devoted to this topic, like, people when people refute this based on their opinion, I'm just always Like, Oh my gosh, there's like 1000s, I don't know millions, there's so much research on this, it's not really reputable. And, okay, we're getting towards the end, and I see Alison leaving opportunities to further join 10. And I have a card on that, too. So I won't even read this. But the idea is, like I said before, we can create specific workplaces that are different, just because we can't, we don't think we can do every single corporate workplace doesn't mean that with the right people creating intention, we can't make the shift. So I kind of set here and you'll get the slides, some big ideas about how that shifts, and then a little bit more specific. Or, where a lot of these will hit at policy stood, the kind of how you we do our mission and vision. And one thing that tend wants to work on is keeping these agreements from being symbolic only because that is a lot is what what has happened in the past few years, when people kind of woke up to a we need to do something. But then it became very symbolic and paper thin, really. So it doesn't have to be that way. And a lot of that has to do with getting concrete and having an accountability and review process. So you can add metrics, so you can determine if you are doing things that you set out to do. And so creating caring equity centered communities at work, we can make that intentional shift, we have to acknowledge so that we can then do that work of creating. And this is what I wanted to get to before we ended. So you can think of it as de triggering socio cultural trauma in the workplace. And so for those who want to work with tend, we can include as part of your package. educational sessions, there's more that I have to say about that, because people do need to know the history a little bit. Some people are starting with zero information. I kind of started with an assumption, I didn't even say it, everybody knows that there's racism and discrimination. We didn't even I didn't even start with those people who they don't know that. So we can include that in a very affirming way, not non shaming affirming way to get people to the point of knowledge. And then what do we do to kind of take take accountability, responsibility for shifting. And we can, you know, reach out. And I think Alison probably put that in the chat, but how to reach out if you want to know more. And a reminder of the services that tend offers, this will be in the slides if you want to take a little bit closer look. And and these are our goals to create help. The kinds of issues we want to help you address so that you can create caring community at work. And I had this in here. I know Allison put follow the information in Allison's chat, because I put these in kind of without consultation first. And the job job grief support group as well. But this book club, do you want to say just a quick word because that two minutes about the book club? What if I think the date might have changed, but just about what it's about?
Alison Cebulla 53:42
Yeah, we may end up pushing it back on that just to make sure we get a bunch of people for Adarsha because she's amazing. And this book is incredible. It's listing a lot of the typical precepts for our white dominated society, including like hierarchical structures and money over people and these sorts of things. And then there's a chapter about each precept, interviewing and talking with an indigenous person, indigenous people from all over the world, and how indigenous wisdom and knowledge can help us overcome these really harmful precepts in our worldview, so it's going to be a really incredible event.
Donielle Prince 54:26
All right. And so yeah, we really hope to see you at that event and others, and always reach out if you're interested in working with us more closely. And I will, I don't want you to see that because I need to clean that up before it goes out. All right. Well, thank you.
Alison Cebulla 54:45
Thanks, everyone.
Donielle Prince 54:49
I'll stop sharing.
Realize I missed some chats.
Alison Cebulla 54:58
Probably just me Oh Oh
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
