Tell Me My Story: Challenging The Narrative of Service Before Self
Dimple D. Dhabalia
278 pages, Ambika Media, 2024
For generations we’ve been conditioned to believe that by choosing a career in service of others, we agree to sacrifice our own health, well-being, and relationships. But what if the path of service we’ve chosen is actually an invitation to see and heal and love and embrace our own humanity through the stories of the people we’re serving? What if the path is giving us powerful opportunities to reveal and heal our own wounds, and we just don’t realize it? And what if healing could happen at both the individual and organizational levels?
When I set out to write Tell Me My Story: Challenging The Narrative of Service Before Self, it wasn’t part of the plan to dive into the dark and murky depths of my own stories. But as I wrote, what started as a simple leadership book turned into part memoir, part manifesto as I realized the healing power of sharing my story—first with myself and then with others. I saw in my own two decades of experience how the needs of those working in service of others are often overlooked because we silently do our work, minimize our own trauma, and put off healing our wounds in order to continue serving others. For many years I didn’t realize I could both acknowledge my pain and serve others at the same time, that being “of service” doesn’t have to be—and really shouldn’t be—one or the other.
The excerpt you’re about to read comes from Part Six of my book, a manifesto committed to changing the status quo by shedding light on the occupational realities of mission-driven, human-centered work, and providing a framework to help individuals and organizations shift collective expectations about what it means to be “of service.” Two decades of experience have shown me that service doesn’t have to come at a cost. I know there is a better way, where head, heart, and metrics come together to create workplace cultures where individuals are able to acknowledge their own pain and serve others at the same time.—Dimple D. Dhabalia
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Some might argue that people working in mission-driven fields had been operating in stress-, crisis-, and trauma-mode long before the pandemic arrived and have done fine. I’d propose that they really weren’t fine. While they’ve survived every bad thing that’s happened until now, most people in this line of work are perpetually operating in survival mode, often without realizing it. Childhood traumas and other pivotal moments that shaped their worldview created their go-to survival responses, and they aren’t something to simply outgrow over time.
Operating in survival mode isn’t sustainable over the course of a career. Trying to compartmentalize stress, crisis, and trauma doesn’t work, and insisting that these factors don’t impact the way people show up at work simply isn’t true, especially as our workforce demographics begin changing and a new generation of employees who have grown up prioritizing their well-being enters the workforce. Organizations across mission-driven sectors can support humanitarians in shifting from surviving to thriving by acknowledging and normalizing occupational mental-health challenges and trauma, designing cultures of empathy and compassion, and promoting trust and psychological safety across the organization.
Become a Trauma-Informed Organization
The term VUCA, often used in the business world, describes this situation of constant, unpredictable change that is now the norm. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and operating in a VUCA environment can destabilize people and leave them feeling anxious, unmotivated, overwhelmed, and stuck in survival mode. The humanitarian sector as a whole has always faced change, but today’s challenges, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have created a VUCA environment, the effects of which are traumatic, on top of the traumas humanitarians encounter in the course of their work every day. Becoming a trauma-informed organization requires that all levels of the organization understand what trauma is, how it shows up in your line of work, and most importantly, how to normalize and acknowledge it to remove the associated stigma.
In its simplest form, trauma is an event or experience that affects our ability to cope and function. As research on trauma has advanced over time, a distinction has emerged to divide trauma into two main categories: big-T traumas and little-t traumas. Events that fall into the big-T trauma category typically include serious injury, sexual violence, natural disaster, or life-threatening situations. They’re the traumas that create a memory that delineates our lives into before the event and after the event. When they happen, these traumas often have a noticeable impact and can leave us feeling powerless. However, it’s important to understand that big-T traumas are not necessarily more significant or detrimental to the person experiencing them. Research shows that repeated exposure to little-t traumas causes more emotional harm and tends to be more dysregulating for people than a single big-T traumatic event.
Little-t traumas refer to ongoing stressors like poverty, chronic abuse, discrimination, race-based traumatic stress, subtle acts of exclusion (microaggressions), misogyny, and harassment. Add to these neglect in subtler forms like constantly changing job policies, inadequate communication, and a lack of caring in workplace cultures, and it’s a wonder anyone can function each day. Because people have varying levels of resilience and different interpretations of what constitutes trauma, these little-t traumas can be hard to identify and, therefore, often go unaddressed. But these little-t traumas chip away at us, ultimately impacting our ability to flourish and thrive in our day-to-day lives.
Unfortunately, without acknowledging the impact of trauma on individuals and the systems in which they work, organizations send the message that what their people are experiencing isn’t as important as the work they are expected to do.
In addition to these more general forms of trauma, humanitarians are also susceptible to occupational traumas including the following.
- Vicarious trauma: experience of trauma symptoms that can result from repeated exposure to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events
- Secondary traumatic stress: emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another
- Post-traumatic stress: unprocessed trauma resulting from exposure to life-threatening or highly distressing events that lasts more than one month and affects daily functioning
- Moral injury: perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress one’s deeply held beliefs and expectations
- Compassion fatigue: a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion associated with caring for others who are in significant pain and physical distress
- Burnout: prolonged physical and psychological exhaustion related to a person’s work
Becoming a trauma-informed organization takes time and radically human leaders. A few things organizations and leaders can do to get there include the following.
- Listen and acknowledge: A willingness to listen and acknowledge what another person is experiencing is foundational to trauma-informed leadership. This requires giving people time and opportunity to share their experiences and then validating them through active listening. Active listening includes empathizing, asking open-ended questions, and mirroring back what you’ve heard. This allows the person to realize you’ve heard them and helps foster connection. Listening and acknowledging isn’t about fixing or reframing the situation. It’s about giving someone the gift of presence and ensuring that they feel seen and heard.
- Create transparency around available support: When a person is experiencing distress or trauma as a result of something that has happened in their own life or in the workplace, they may need access to resources to support their mental, emotional, physical, or relational health and well-being. However, because of the stigma associated with this type of help, people often won’t ask. Therefore, it’s important to make support broadly available, and to provide information about how to access this support through a variety of platforms, including emails, text messages, flyers or posters, and during all-hands or team meetings. Ensuring that people know what support is available and providing them with the time and information they need to access it makes it more likely that they will choose the intervention that best supports their needs in a given situation.
- Lead by example: It’s easy to read a set of talking points urging staff to practice self-care or take advantage of available support, but modeling it is far more challenging—yet also far more effective. Leaders set the tone in the organization, and if they’re sending emails at all hours of the night, working late, coming to work frustrated and angry, or regularly blaming, judging, and criticizing others, that behavior will trickle down through the organization. Leaders need to learn how to regulate and, when needed, reset their own nervous system and to model authenticity and vulnerability by asking for help. Something as simple as taking three long, deep breaths between tasks or meetings, taking a short 10-to-15-minute walk during lunch, engaging in a regular gratitude practice, or saying those three dreaded words—“I don’t know”—can go a long way toward resetting the nervous system and showing your staff that you’re human, just like they are.
Occupational mental-health challenges and traumas are inherent to humanitarian work. Organizations that want to retain staff, build institutional knowledge, and see sustained success in the future must create a trauma-informed culture. Organizations that fail to adapt to the health and well-being needs of their staff by acknowledging and normalizing the realities of the work will never effectively meet their mission.
Design Cultures of Empathy
I’ve heard the phrase “our systems are broken” too many times over the course of my career. But the truth is, our systems aren’t broken. They’re doing exactly what they were designed to do. People often forget that we live in a world of systems that were created by humans. If the humans are traumatized—and almost every human being has been—the systems will be, too.
Every system is built by human beings who bring their own lenses, created by lifetimes of experiences—Big-T and little-t traumas experienced firsthand and even generational traumas unwittingly passed down from one generation to the next through DNA. These experiences exert enormous influence over leaders’ actions, reactions, and choices. When they set out to create new systems, their own stories influence what they’re creating, which often results in systems that perpetuate a lack of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And no matter how great the mission of an organization, the systems almost always fail to prioritize workforce health and well-being, which eventually leads to high turnover, low staff morale, and a loss of institutional knowledge.
This is further exacerbated because we operate in cultures that dismiss empathy, compassion, and connection in favor of productivity and perfectionism. This not only results in mission-driven organizations valuing technical skills above relational skills, but it also creates the foundation upon which toxic workplace cultures are built. Leaders in these organizations are rarely taught how to connect on a human-to-human level, or to value that skill in others, and instead they lead from a place of fear. I’ve worked with many leaders over the years who refused to hold people accountable because they were afraid to have the hard conversation, or who wouldn’t acknowledge when someone on their team was in pain because they were afraid to say or do the wrong thing. Fear-based leadership isn’t sustainable, healthy, or effective.
When we’re confronted with someone who is in pain or has experienced a trauma, we generally make assumptions, try to comfort them, try to help them fix the situation, try to fix the situation for them, or try to relate to the person by telling them about our own experience. This is also where we sometimes engage in toxic positivity—quickly reframing the situation with platitudes like “everything happens for a reason” or “this too shall pass.” In mPEAK, we explain that while these statements might be an expression of wisdom and truth under other circumstances, when they’re used as an automatic reaction to pain, they’re actually examples of spiritual bypassing, an attempt to find a silver lining in every negative experience. While these can be natural reactions in moments of discomfort, they’re not always helpful. They can instead minimize or dismiss another person’s pain as we seek to avoid our own feelings of unease or awkwardness.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and share their feelings. Many leaders struggle with how to connect with and support others when they themselves are stressed out or dealing with their own trauma. In those moments, the thought of taking on another person’s fear, sadness, grief, or trauma can feel overwhelming and often results in leaders simply ignoring the issue. But empathy doesn’t require us to do anything extraordinary, fix anything, or say something in particular. As humans, our brains are wired to mimic both the emotions and behaviors of the people around us through mirror neurons in our brains. These mirror neurons are what give us the capacity to experience and express empathy—one of the linchpins of cultures built on connection and trust, and at the heart of radically human leadership. Through empathy, we’re meeting the person where they are in a given moment, and connecting to what they might be thinking, feeling, or experiencing.
When my mom passed away, for several months my boss Jennifer would ask, “How are you?” and then give me the time to share how I felt. If I was having a bad day, she didn’t try to fix it or relate by talking about herself— she simply acknowledged and validated my experience. Knowing she was taking time out of her very busy schedule to ask me how I was made me feel seen and valued. The flip side of this was a colleague who came up to me on my first day back in the office and commented on how nice it must have been for me to be able to take such a long vacation. His assumption left me feeling hurt and essentially put a wall between us, rather than creating a feeling of connection.
This is one example. However, intentionally designing cultures of empathy requires many little acts, perhaps including the following.
- Giving your full attention to people in meetings rather than being on your phone or computer
- Carving out a couple of minutes at the beginning of a meeting to get to know more about your team’s lives or interests
- Taking a few minutes to provide constructive feedback to help team members grow and flourish in their work
- Acknowledging when someone seems upset or not quite like themselves
Everyone is busy, but taking a few minutes to connect through empathy can have long-lasting positive impacts for individuals and for the organization as a whole. It also lets people know they matter, and when people feel like they matter, they connect with others in the workplace over a shared feeling of purpose and meaning.