If you think you are in a tree of your service right now, you are not alone.
Americans Cope With What Is Known As The Collective Trauma Cascade As says Roxanne Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, who has spent decades researching trauma.
In an Article published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, Silver and his co-authors describe how pandemics have added a new level to our cascading collective traumas, which they describe as “acute events with unclear end point. We don’t know how serious the events will be or when the recovery will begin. “
“Individuals are faced with the severe direct impact of cascading events (e.g. personal illness or loss, social isolation, economic losses, violent police) with different and sometimes conflicting policies that govern public response, “they added.
Sounds familiar? Unpredictable pandemics, regular mass shootings, hatred against Asians, violence against black police, wars, record -breaking economic disasters, high profile cases of sexual violence and harassment , new supremacist white policies and human rights are on the rise. ‘abortion. In case of danger, one will feel that there is an endless list of traumatic events happening simultaneously.
Each of them has an impact on your thinking and affects how well you can do your job.
“The impact is bigger each time because we have less ability to deal with it because we don’t have enough time to recover from the end,” said psychotherapist Esther Boykin, who likened it to a cold and then a cold. . The allergic reaction, in addition to the infection.
We may face the same storm of damage, but we are all in different boats.
Trauma manifests itself in our body and can affect us in unseen ways.
Silver has it along with other researchers who have studied How Northeasters responded to a series of traumatic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the Sandy Hook shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing. He found that increasing exposure to trauma can increase emotional stress reactions such as hypersensitivity, feeling “in the hedgehog,” sleep problems, and emotional numbness in subsequent tragedies.
But now that injuries happen almost every day, Silver doesn’t know how to deal with them. “We bombard these kinds of challenges very quickly. Maybe we see something different now. I don’t know, ”he said.“ I know that emotional exhaustion is the answer we see in our data. I understand anecdotally that many people say they have reached the limit. They can no longer listen to the news ”.
That’s why Silver advises employers to be flexible right now and realize that people may not always carry their “A game” right now. Trauma is often revealed during work, making our colleagues our most immediate support. On the other hand, people may not share the more personal trauma they experience outside of the office, but they continue to suffer.
“There may be some background challenges that we may not see because people may not share their individual challenges with employees, but the emotional consequences of individual challenges may still be present,” he said. .
“One of the best ways to manage the effects of cascading trauma is to create a space for more relaxation,” Boykin says, noting that relaxation is not only more sleep or rest, it can also detoxify news for a while. Or do volunteer work and rebuild relationships with people.
Flexibility can also mean creating managers in a space to bring people together and support each other when trauma ends during work hours – and it also gives them a clear choice. , says Boykin. Ideally, managers should think about this until the next crisis occurs. “It means not just creating a plan, but also collaborating on creating that plan,” he said. “To earnestly ask the people who work with you to create ways to share even anonymously when something traumatic happens, what kind of resources do you need for the work you throw away?”
For Nancy Hanks, an Atlanta -based partner at a management consulting organization, the cascading collective trauma included the death of her mother a year after the pandemic. “I’ve experienced my personal pain before, but when there are shootings and shootings involving police, it can be mixed pain,” he said.
As a black woman, Hanks said the white attack on a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, had a profound effect on her and, as a former teacher, she was “somewhat destroyed” by a shot at school in Texas.
Her illness manifested itself as more fatigue, sleep problems, and she felt more irritated and cynical on the work day, she said.
An important point of supporting Hanks ’memory was when his colleagues and supervisors not only offered the option to cancel the appointment, but they were also proactive in offering assistance. They send messages like “Hey, look, you know I can do this … this is what you call it, but I’ll be happy to do it”.
“It’s one thing to cancel, but another when someone is fat, when we all feel we need time and opportunity. It’s really beneficial for me, ”Hanks said.
“We are all experiencing this typhoon. We are together, but depending on how you are … it can be very different ”.
– Management consulting partner Nancy Hanks
Part of being more flexible with each other means not caring about how colleagues coped with these collective traumas. Hanks, who was unmarried and quarantined himself during the pandemic, said an employee told him that those without parental responsibilities should work harder.
“You don’t seem to know what’s going on in my life or what that experience is [when you are] Suppose, “Oh, you have to have opportunities,” Hanks said. “When my mother died, no one asked her … but here [pandemic] The situation is more like “Hmm, that must be pretty sweet for him.”
To explain the nuances of how the trauma hit, Hanks told his team they were “in the same storm, in different boats.”
“We’re all experiencing these storms,” he said. “We’re together, but depending on where you are, whether it’s your identity, your background, your socioeconomic status, your mental health, your physical health, your responsibility to care, it can be different- others “.
Hanks said the collective trauma makes him a darker, calmer, and more compassionate manager. “There’s another purpose I bring to work … I’m one of thousands of people trying to deal with grief individually and together.”
“I’m not out,” he said. “I was driven by a little broken heart. These are some of the archetypes of the challenge we have about leadership that must always be strong, brave or all -knowing. Especially in a world where charisma can be everything, I can’t pretend. I don’t have any. I haven’t had it in a whole year. There are those sparks – I’m still myself – but there will be a lot of things that will stand in front of people every day and act like you have the stamina to laugh. I miss my mother so much every day ”.
Source: Huffpost
I’m Liza Grey, an experienced news writer and author at the Buna Times. I specialize in writing about economic issues, with a focus on uncovering stories that have a positive impact on society. With over seven years of experience in the news industry, I am highly knowledgeable about current events and the ways in which they affect our daily lives.