We are the only species on the planet that make use of story. I read once that the reason human beings emerged from among other primate species (like the Neanderthals) was because of their special superpower: the ability to use story and language. Neanderthals, as the story goes, could only coordinate among small, familial groups. Therefore their cumulative strength was only as powerful as the size of their family.
Homo sapiens, however, developed a keen ability to enthrall and motivate much larger groups via shared themes and collective narratives. That’s why they came out on top. Using stories, they could gather massive numbers of people and dominate their surroundings during times of war.
Think about all the world’s religions. At their core, they are really just powerful stories that people have embraced and internalized. I am not challenging the veracity of these tales, but rather making the point that for a human brain, hearing a story about something is pretty close to experiencing it directly. In fact, our brains light up in virtually the same way regardless.
Think about a scoop of ice cream sitting in a cold dish with hot chocolate fudge oozing down the sides. Can you taste it? You may be salivating already. Imagine that you are hiking at the grand canyon and that you are cautiously stepping toward the edge. You can see straight down to the river valley 4000 feet below. Did your feet start to tingle? Your rational mind knows that you are at your desk or on your phone sitting in your car, but your body doesn’t know that! It’s already preparing to hold onto some little tree should you spill over the edge.
In addition to being susceptible to other people’s narratives, we also have a set of stories we tell ourselves. For us, these stories are “truth”. That is, we have confidence that our stories are “actually” real. In fact, these stories are undoubtedly based in reality and and serve us well. For instance, we usually go to the trouble of showing up for work because we understand that if we do, then twice a month the electronic number in our savings account will bump up, and that somehow that electronic number means that if we show someone a little piece of plastic we can get a cup of coffee or a new dress.
We may not understand all of the mechanics of this because most of it is very complex, behind the scenes, and completely abstract. But we have enough faith in the “truth” of this story that we take on work tasks we don’t necessarily like and drive to the mall with the firm belief that someone will let us leave with that new dress in hand.
Sometimes our stories don’t serve us very well…or at least not anymore. Maybe we believe that we’re bad at math, so we never bother taking on projects that require it. That happened to me. I hated math because I had tried and tried as a kid, and never seemed to “get it”. Years later, I decided to take a chemistry course purely out of curiosity- to test the belief that I was math-challenged. The result? I aced the class. It seems that my belief was wrong– or at least it became wrong at some point.
That wrong belief is why I didn’t go to medical school. My life could have been totally different if I had just challenged that no-longer-true belief just a few years earlier. I read once that if you believe that you are a “7” out of “10” in a particular area of life, and if you find yourself performing at a “5”, you will naturally bring up your game so that your perceived performance matches your self concept. In the same way, if you find yourself operating at a “9”, you will unconsciously dial back your efforts or self-sabotage until you think you are back at a solid “7”.
Ok, Sean, thanks for the pop psychology class. But how do these ideas actually help me in my social work practice? Why does any of this matter? It matters for this reason:
The lives of social workers are decimated by stories.
How can that be? Well it’s actually quite basic. So basic, even, that we can be harmed over time without even noticing. When we hear stories of trauma again and again, it affects our own story- our greater life-story. Have you ever heard of “suspension of disbelief”? It is the idea that we allow ourselves to believe that a story is real so that we can get into the action and enjoy the film or book or play. Then why is it that when we watch movies we are not traumatized by the horrible and often graphic human destruction we see? It is because our brains aren’t so easily fooled- they can tell what is real and what is pretend. Since we were toddlers we learned to use make-believe to entertain ourselves, to learn about the world, and to build bridges with the children around us. So we are good at suspending disbelief.
Trouble ensues when we know that the story is real. We sit with a mom as she tells us how her partner came home two days ago and hit her with a chair. We can see the defensive wounds on her arms. We watch the tears stream down her face. We believe her. We accept her story as truth. This is not CSI or Law & Order- it’s real life. And because we believe her, we open ourselves up to a kind of trauma- the kind of harm that comes from knowing at a deep level that there is actual wrong and strife in the world. We are unsafe. We and those we love can actually be harmed.
So it seems that our ears are our most vulnerable bodypart as social workers.
Maybe the vicarious “harm of hearing” is more easily understood in other contexts. It happens all the time with phobias. Mom is scared of dogs, so her son develops an aversion to dogs- a vicarious aversion. Have you ever seen a startled baby held by a parent? What happens when a book falls off a shelf or a big laughing stranger walks into the room? Baby never reacts immediately- she will always look to mom or dad first. Mom and dad provide the context that baby hasn’t developed yet- she learns to be afraid (or calm) vicariously. Mom and dad know if this is normal or something to freak out about. We do it as adults too. We look at the sudden thing that happened across the road then we look back at each other for the collective reaction. We are relational beings.
Here’s where the real harm happens. The research tells us that when these traumatic tales are multiplied many times, our worldview bends and buckles. Our stories about ourselves shift. This is especially true when we work in fields where we don’t often see a lot of hope and change in people. Most of us graduate with our degree being fairly certain that we are a solid “7” or “8” in terms of being able to “help”.
Yet after months or years of traumatic exposures, witnessing chronic pathologies, and seeing our very best attempts have little to no effect on our patients or clients, our helping score starts to tank. Our sense of professional self-efficacy drops. Our own story can become impoverished and darkened. If we already struggle with depression or anxiety, those symptoms can be exasperated.
What’s your story? What beliefs have shifted for you since starting in your profession? Maybe you feel as though you are doing fine. That’s awesome! Maybe you’re struggling. That’s okay too. The good news is that there are solutions for vicarious trauma that work for most people. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Next week I am going to talk little about that light.
If you want a taste of what I am going to talk about, sign up here to get a free sample from my course and figure out your story.