In 1997, my partner and I packed up a Ryder Truck and moved from Lawrence, KS to Seattle. At the time I was working at a domestic violence shelter that served two counties with five paid staff. We had a 24-7 crisis line and a commitment to zero-turn aways: if someone was eligible for services, we would get them to a safe place within one hour of their call, no matter how many people we were serving or how full the shelter was.
At my going away party the Coordinating Collective gave me a charm bracelet with little tokens of my time there, as well as a chunky silver tag that read: We who believe in freedom shall not rest.
That line from a popular Sweet Honey in the Rock song was one of the most universal articles of faith among ‘helpers’ at that time. No matter what, no matter what remnant of care or repair you had joined your time and talents to, the most important thing was not to rest until it had been achieved. Collectively, yes. But also, individually. Do not rest.
I met Laura within a year of landing in Seattle. And she has been challenging that mistaken worldview ever since.
As it turns out, Laura’s career has coincided (and driven) a once-emerging, now realized acknowledgment of the toll that showing up for other people’s pain has on the people bearing witness.
It is hard to fully believe, given the rhetoric around us today, but literally everybody thought that metabolizing trauma exposure was fine and good for the (well meaning, but obviously weak) folks who did some other job, but not for them. Realness = Suck it up. And we were all the realest!
That these habits of mass self-sacrifice could not hold up to five minutes of serious moral, ethical or practical examination did nothing to lessen their primacy in the practice and beliefs of the doctors, nurses, case workers, advocates, activists, first responders, researchers, teachers, investigators, cultural workers, carers, attorneys, climate crisis workers, disaster relief workers, healers, clergy, service members, law enforcement, etc etc etc who showed up when folks were hurt or scared or harmed or confused or fragile or fighting to get some structural boot off their neck. (Which, as it turns out, it is damn near everybody at some point.)
Into that certainty of misguided self-sacrifice strides Laura, who, girded with copious research, lived experience, and a treasure trove of on-the-ground examples, simply changed everything.
Her insight was so prescient and her quality of presence so exquisite that she might have succeeded in producing this change simply by talking to people one on one, or by fives, or by groups of twenty and thirty, as she did in the years before she published Trauma Stewardship. But it was driving me crazy that she would do a conference workshop and then almost everyone in the audience would come up after to talk with her, and then she would give everyone her home phone number after each interaction, so she could follow up with them on a one-on-one basis, and so, myself and everybody else with a brainwave left in our exhausted brains asked, neigh begged, Laura to write her books.
Trauma Stewardship dropped into the scene like rain on a desiccated prairie. One moment there is just a vast horizon of bleak drudgery, and the next moment there were patches of prairie violets and sweet grass sprouts and so many good things. Immediately. And the next moment things started hopping and climbing, and pretty soon one dusty draw of a workplace had transformed into fertile little oasis, and then they passed the book to some other group of
folks that they had to try to work with in this wild and wanting world, and then it spread out like little rivulets taking all that lifey-ness out and out to new vistas, new dry and tired landscapes.
Trauma Stewardship was a revelation, and a low-key revolution.
So much so that it is quite hard to understand how epic is was, and how much of an impact it has had, from the viewpoint of now.
(Not everyone was a fan. Once while sitting in the East Wing in advance of a policy meeting with then Vice President Biden, a colleague started to critique Trauma Stewardship to a group of folks who were talking about its significance and necessity. None of these folks realized I had a connection to the book, but TS was just a required conversation of the moment from break rooms to board rooms to the halls of power.)
Laura insists that everyone has always known all of this and she is just reminding us. And I agree to that framework because I wanted the world to have the book. But, in my personal experience, very few people had access to any of this information in any accessible or functional way until Laura showed up.
Now people can imagine what she is talking about, and that is good.
But a mantra of self-care or simply expecting folks to ‘also rest’ is not the same as the framework and tools that Trauma Stewardship has to offer.
Today, no one is going to engrave “…shall not rest” as a good-bye gift to a departing comrade, but despite our new capacity to wrap our minds around the premise of TS, the various factors and pressures that shape our practices–tech, media exposure, climate crisis, etc etc etc—have only accelerated in the almost two decades since TS was first written.
Which is to say, TS is as fresh, as needed, as urgent as ever.