Actions on the Colonial Stage
And Burn Out Recovery/ Trauma Therapy for Activists
Todays Blog is from Gaz Kishere. Gaz is an Author, a long term activist, community worker, ex church pastor, ex community project funder, and now activist therapist encouraging and supporting activists in Activist Burn Out Recovery– www.working-it-out.support Here we go:
I guess in putting fingers to keyboard I am trying to span the complexity between those in organized Christianity, those on their way ‘out out’ and those who were never in. Fortunately, our spiritual journey shape, form and rhythm are our personal business … so here goes.
The one thing bridging diverse faith contexts, is our participation in change, our solidarity around fellow humans suffering and responding to a downward spiraling world. A more complicated thing which we all have in common is likely to be positionality in our approach to such humanitarian responses and activism, since while eradicating any personal colonial heritage it is likely that some threads remain from these faith perspectives.
One reason for a significant number of people groups across the world having been colonized by the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese is pretty much down to mobility, the development of shipping, the ability to travel, to colonize and asset strip another people in another place. One thing we can be sure of, as with the crusades, is that organized Christianity either permissioned much of it or downright advocated that such an invasion should take place in the name of their God, our perceived right to ‘act upon’ others.
In there somewhere, is not simply plain old domination and commodification of peoples…. but likely a confused idea of love and care for another, which even to this day can be a messy convergence of theological mandate and unhealed childhood where trauma sensitized ‘rescuers’ are over self-sacrificing and worse still, getting the applause, position and a salary in our institutions and ngo’s. Such a thing remains present to some degree in much of our activism and social engagement and remains unchecked until we burn out because if it is flowing from personal trauma, aspects of our compassion and tuning into the need are likely a coping mechanism with a shelf life which is holding us in ‘unwellness’.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of taking away anyone’s white horse and courageous standing with the oppressed and down trodden, we would all be in the shit if those folks who are intrinsically wired to live simply, so others can simply live, disappeared over night. What we do want, is for those who are life engaged in meaningful ways to remain present in the long-term bringing their offering to the table of change.
The trouble with a rescue mindset stemming from or in part fueled by our own unresolved personal history is that we place ourselves repeatedly in contexts of need, as people who likely have unresolved unmet needs. The need to be needed, live meaningfully and usefully is a rewarding focal point, to keep moving towards others or life spheres in activated self-sacrificing ways yay! In psychobabble words, where there is life affirming reward there is likely a secondary driver of avoidant behaviour’s, those things we are moving away from and unconsciously hopeful of not catching up with us. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s also learning from my being a practitioner, both working in frontline contexts and now as a therapist to frontline workers.
My own background is ex church pastor, ex church, ex community project funder, ex counter child trafficking and presently still around the European refugee crisis living in Athens Greece. My primary role has shifted significantly from personal frontline engagement to being largely behind the scenes, picking up the pieces of burned-out workers whose present life meltdown, has become an amazing opportunity to explore motivation, the drive towards serving others and slowly but surely, identifying and healing in all of the old sore places of harm or deficit which has contributed to trauma sensitization.
I am finding with clients, 80% of whom are project founders or leaders, that they are noble folks with genuine love and regard towards their fellow human. This is intrinsically who they, and perhaps you ‘are’.
It is rarely the work itself which brings things to a head and a tipping point for them, and more often that lack of understanding that what makes the love and regard unbalanced is frequently their own trauma. Without realizing it, we can become super sensitized to the wounded, the rejected or the marginalized in any context, often without even speaking, simply through a mix of intuition and shared pain or deficit ‘resonance’.
My wife Victoria and I moved to Greece in 2016 and plugged into an anarchist run (consensus based) multi-faceted refugee support service called ‘Khora’, which was then in the heat of the overwhelming numbers of arrivals and unbearable August temperatures. My wife was working with Khora’s children so the parents could attend language classes or the asylum support department, while I stuck myself in the kitchen, which had the largest amount of volunteers. I rather passively offered a listening ear service to support the workers and not a single soul asked for support in more than a year.
Things changed when one of the founder workers was in the kitchen space with leaking face, where you don’t want to cry but the water is flowing without your permission. I asked her how she was doing and she said she was flying home the next day and hadn’t told anyone yet, she felt she was ‘done’ or in Gaz speak, ‘royally f****ed’.
I realized people were not asking for help because they did not really have an idea of the impact of immersion in other peoples suffering, secondary trauma (your own traumatic response to other people’s trauma) or that lifelong coping mechanisms from childhood which got them to here, were no longer working for them and unresolved history was knocking at the door and biting their bums.
Khora was great at addressing Western white privilege and ideas of ‘acting upon others’ as you would expect, including one of the founding cultural statements of inclusion of refugees in the work, ‘No Them Only Us’.
A friend who studied anarchy and social movement shared the perspective that the distance activists were willing to go in ‘society challenging’ work was likely based upon the degree to which they carried personal violation or a sense of violation on behalf of others. I would say that this is the meta narrative of life engaged people, but underlying it can be a less obvious movement towards the reward of this engagement, being on the right side of history and yet, less known, is likely some element of moving away from, avoidance around those areas of unfinished business in our developmental years, where there was the presence of what no child should experience and the deficit of what every child needs as healthy foundations for later adult independence.
From my own personal experience, I have burned out 3 times now. Once was when I was going into the third year of a counselling diploma, working on ‘unsafe and no-go client areas’ oblivious to the simmering of my own ‘no go’ shit just beneath the surface. The second was my exiting from church and church leadership where it became evident that I had been conditioned with several destructive ideologies around self-sacrifice. I found myself with completely zero left to give and those classic burn out indicators of ‘I can’t do people right now’ was fully the water I was swimming in. The last was a total shitter of self-harming behaviors and hurting those around me, a delectable combination of childhood trauma and 6 years exposed to themes of counter child sex trafficking. A period where I can only reflect that “I lost myself there – but I’m back now”.
You’d have thought I would have known better by now but there is nothing quite like denial and the false concept that its other people who f**k up and not you and so… Hello!
The genuine golden thread in all this, is that our living in ‘good works’ from any element of old survival skill or coping mechanism, is that they have a shelf life. They were once our friends and enabled us to ‘get here’ though life’s up’s and down but are likely no longer fit for purpose or are even now in the way of growth. They got you here, but they can’t always get you where you are going. I would always prefer people to not hit a wall but if they must, I do at least know it can be a tremendous opportunity for healing and personal development.
I often get clients to express gratitude for the coping skills which have carried them through the years, likely as hidden friends, but now it is time to say goodbye because you finally have the ability children do not have, the capacity to process things through to a conclusion as adult.
I used to think my work here was to help frontline workers to ‘stay in the game’, to remain engaged in the work. This is a valid way of looking at it to some degree, since a counter trafficking friend in Romania said that ‘burn out is not ok, because we lose people with important expertise and experience’. In reality, it is also helping people not carry their burn out back home, or even feeling free to say ‘that’s me done!’ and to self-permission an exit after failing to gain it from others. Some of my clients I have been seeing for 2 years, as they continue to process through the cost of the work and re engagement in life. Its ok to go back to peace and family and ‘being’, since what we hope for those who are exploited or are fleeing injustice is the same, for them to find peace, rest and belonging. From what I can tell, it is the same for your personal internal world too, that the love, acceptance, unconditional regard which you carry to others, is for you also. The flame you carry to others, is for you also… take time to let it do its work in you, allow time and space to be ‘acted upon’.
Gaz Kishere – www.working-it-out.support
