Becoming Resilience-informed: How I overcame workplace adversity to become a champion of my own resilience

 

BY ERNESTINA MALHEIRO, M.A.   

FOUNDER OF UPLIFT LEARNING, EDUCATIONALIST

 

I thought it couldn’t happen to me.

It’s a cliche I came by honestly.

Let’s insert a moment of self-compassion.

 

As soon as we think it couldn’t happen to us, the universe says, “Oh ya? Watch this.” That naive thought can return in the form of countless slices of humble pie. Humble pie being the pie we eat when we are in need of embodying more humility, empathy and compassion for ourselves and others. I ate not just slices, but pie after pie. It was a kind of medicine I didn’t know about but desperately needed. I was consuming a lot of humble pie when workplace adversity ‘happened to me’. Workplace burnout and trauma were knocking on my door gnawing away at my resilience on a daily basis. I responded by saying, “She’s not here right now.” Avoidance might not have been an effective strategy. At least I was trying something to cope through.

 

The nature of helping work places create inherent costs on helping professionals. Helping professionals such as educators, human resources, physicians and many other social service based organizations and professions is that they/ are regularly exposed to workplace adversity. Adverse workplace events manifest as impacts to workplace resilience. Burnout, trauma and compassion fatigue are just a few ways we can name these mental health impacts. These terms provide language to describe how our nervous system predictably responds to workplace adversity. You might be wondering what’s the difference between burnout, trauma and compassion fatigue. Let’s explore on a basic level.

 

It would be easy to write an entire article or books on the intricacies of trauma. Many have. In the workplace, helping professionals can experience trauma and vicarious trauma (Herman, 1992; van Dernoot & Burk, 2009). Trauma occurs when we experience single or chronic adverse events overwhelming our capacity to cope. It leaves us feeling helplessness, loss of choice and control. Vicarious trauma is also known as secondary traumatic stress (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995; Salston & Figley, 2003). These terms were coined by different researchers in the 1990’s. Vicarious trauma happens from being exposed to other people’s traumatic stories and experiences. We can experience the same nervous system responses as direct trauma.

 

Burnout is experienced as profound exhaustion and difficult attitudes towards those we’re helping. It’s also experienced as, cynicism, reduced productivity, capacity and ability to cope (Maslach, 1993). It’s not hard to see how burnout is traumatic because burnout shares features with trauma. Helping professionals facing burnout perceive a loss of choice, control and helplessness about overwhelming work volume with too few resources for too long. The profound exhaustion cannot be resolved through rest. Burnout taxes the nervous system in similar ways as exposure to chronic trauma resulting in an expected inability to continue coping. 

 

Moral injury can also form a part of burnout. Moral injury represents a violation of values when we perpetrate, witness or fail to stop something that transgresses our morals (Heinze et al., 2021). An example for helping professionals would include the inability to effectively help due to lack of resources resulting in negative outcomes for those we serve. In helping professions, these kinds of situations happen every day.

 

Compassion fatigue is what results from Burnout and Trauma (Hudnall Stamm, 2012). The core features of compassion fatigue are absent empathy or inability to care for others anymore. It can also be accompanied by a deep apathy and cynicism towards the people we serve. It is a protective response from our nervous systems. When it’s all too much, our nervous system shuts us down (Porges, 2003).

 

The circumstances of workplace adversity are tricky to navigate. Perhaps we’re left with difficult choices such as overwork to prevent crushing debt. Perhaps we’re facing bullying, harassment or witnessing these things in the workplace. Perhaps the pressure to do more with less has finally caught up to us. The bad outcomes for the people we’re helping can leave us with an indelible mark. Our self-preservation instincts are discerning between difficult odds. We can feel quite numb or like we’re perpetually pinned at the bottom of a standing wave while we’re running out of air.

 

Many helping professionals feel the impacts of workplace adversity. The experiences associated with workplace adversity (ie; bullying, harassment, discrimination, overwork, loss of choice, control and helplessness etc.) are frequently described but never named as trauma. How can we find appropriate support for the impacts of workplace adversity if we’re unsure how to name what we’re dealing with? It’s a nebulous topic many will go to great lengths to avoid or don’t know how to talk about. But it’s there. Whether we know how to talk about it or not.

 

Trauma has a cumulative effect. Like so many, traumatic experiences had come my way more times than I would have liked. I’ve been profoundly affected by traumatic experiences as

 

a child,

an immigrant,

a student,

a single woman,

a patient,

a professional,

a survivor of intergenerational fascism

and

through traumatic losses.

 

I thought I was resilient enough to make it past personal and professional demands that were beyond my capacity to cope. Life repeatedly lambasted me with personal and professional adversity. Within a decade, life had brought me sexual assault, traumatic losses, accidents and workplace assault. I took on full-time grad school and full-time professional work; a common practice in my grad program. If others could do it, surely I could figure it out. The last straw was severe workplace bullying on top of grad school and a full-time job. That was it. I couldn’t continue to cope through personal and workplace adversity anymore. It was in those moments I came face-to-face with all the trauma – past and present – at once.

 

At that time, I’d already been researching and experimenting with dozens of trauma healing modalities for some time. I needed to try everything to heal and cope through the barrage of trauma in my life. I thought to myself, “I already know what to do. I’ve got this.” On a subconscious level, I didn’t want to acknowledge my limitations. I wanted to be the person that could do it all. Few of us are that person. Even though we all have different limits – we do in fact have them. I was minimizing the severity of what I’d been through. Minimizing is a pretty common coping strategy.

 

Professionally, I could feel a deep collapse coming on for a while. It was a kind of exhaustion I’d never experienced before. I couldn’t sleep. I dreaded going to work and loathed working for one more second than absolutely necessary. I wanted to quit a job I formerly loved. No amount of rest seemed to make it better – not that there was much time for rest. I had absolute apathy towards supporting my spiritual community. The burnout and trauma from other areas of my life shutdown my ability to continue caring for others. It took me a long time to name that as compassion fatigue.

 

I toughed it out at work with a stiff upper lip. Burnout, trauma and compassion fatigue had me. The impact on my mental and physical health were far reaching. This made it pretty difficult to function at work or any area of life. It’s common to experience:

 

  • depressive mood and low energy,
  • sleep disruption,
  • cynicism, lack of empathy
  • profound exhaustion not relieved by rest
  • intense anger and emotions in general
  • sensitive startle response,
  • intrusive thoughts of traumatic events
  • constantly scanning for threats
  • physical body pains – just to name a few.

 

Even though I had a sense of what to do I can’t tell you how hard it was to navigate all this alone. It was a tall order to ask for the support I needed from workplace managers, union reps, physicians, human resources and insurance professionals while in a compromised state.  Especially when all of them weren’t resilience or trauma-informed.

 

One of my healthcare managers told me, “Just be more resilient” buzzword style. My employer wasn’t willing to acknowledge the impacts of the extreme workplace bullying I was dealing with alone. The subtext was, “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you more resilient?”. It’s the wrong question to be asking anyone. My employer wasn’t asking, ”What’s happened to you?”. That question demonstrates curiosity. It can lead everyone to a place of more kindness and compassion. This question is at the heart of trauma-informed perspectives. It acknowledges that adversity has real impacts to our resilience we can’t sort out alone. The more I learned the more I came to understand there was nothing wrong with me. The word resilience rolled around in my mind. It took years to acknowledge my resilience in this situation. I wasn’t failing at resilience. I had to tap into a level of resilience I didn’t know I had. At the same time, I was doing my best to recover in professional environments that aren’t well adapted to supporting recovery.

 

According to decades of research, my nervous system was responding to extreme stress as designed. It was a transformative moment to realize there’s nothing wrong with me. My body is healing. It knows what to do. I needed to give myself a break by finally acknowledging what happened to me. I needed to show myself kindness and compassion regardless of what professionals around me were doing.

 

A resilience-informed perspective moves the trauma-informed perspective one step further. It acknowledges our resilience in difficult situations – no matter how messy it looks. It acknowledges what impacts resilience – adversity. It also discusses what we can do to build, protect and restore resilience when we’re coping through or recovering from adversity.

 

My wish for you is that you’re brave enough to say, “I can feel it in my bones. Something has got to change.” I hope you can say, “I need help,” without feeling shame because you know your nervous system is responding in predictable ways. I hope you know there is nothing wrong with you. I hope you say that long before you cross the line into the terrain of injury. I hope you can have compassion and kindness for yourself and others on these kinds of journeys.

 

We’re all so proud. We’re afraid of being judged. No judgement about that. I get it. I was too afraid to say any of that to myself – let alone anyone else. But this is the thing – we think we have to manage all this alone. Some things are just too scary to be done alone. We need to be in the presence of others who can hold a safe space for us to say the things that are too scary.Your resilience matters. You’re the best champion of your own resilience. 

 

Join the conversation about workplace resilience and adversity. Check out our resilience-informed pathway resources at http://linktr.ee/upliftlearningonline.ca

 

References

Heinze, K. E., Hanson, G., Holtz, H., Swoboda, S. M., & Rushton, C. H. (2021). Measuring Health Care Interprofessionals’ Moral Resilience: Validation of the Rushton Moral Resilience Scale. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 24(6), 865–872. https://doi.org/10.1089/JPM.2020.0328/SUPPL_FILE/SUPP_APP1.DOCX

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. In Trauma and recovery (Vol. 1992). Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/033001

Hudnall Stamm, B. (2012). Professional Quality of Life Scale (PROQOL) (pp. 1–3).

Maslach, C. (1993). Burnout: A Multidimensional Perspective. In W. B. Schaufeli, C. Maslach, & T. Marek (Eds.), Professional Burnout: Recent developments in theory and research. (pp. 19–32). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315227979-3

Pearlman, L. A., & Saakvitne, K. W. (1995). Treating Therapists with Vicarious Traumatization and Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorders. In C. R. Figley (Ed.), Compassion Fatigue: Coping With Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder In Those Who Treat the Traumatized. Bruner-Routledge. https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6ilc-5XDs3UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA150&dq=saakvitne+pearlman+1995&ots=MN0j9A-MEB&sig=VNqVHSQEgKUg1a-x1_AO_M5gP-Q&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=saakvitne pearlman 1995&f=false

Porges, S. W. (2003). Social Engagement and Attachment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1196/ANNALS.1301.004

Salston, M. D., & Figley, C. R. (2003). Secondary Traumatic Stress Effects of Working with Survivors of Criminal Victimization. Journal of Traumatic Stress 2003 16:2, 16(2), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022899207206

van Dernoot, L., & Burk, C. (2009). Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (First Edit). Berrett-Koehler.