Abstract
Higher education institutions can often serve as sites of growth and possibility. At the same time, trauma in varying forms permeates higher education across institutional types. As educators within higher education, we must recognize and respond to this trauma context. We define trauma as the short- and long-term direct and indirect response to deeply distressing events. Students, faculty, and staff all experience various degrees of regular trauma both on and off campus, and these trauma experiences can compound in dangerous ways that impede our ability to achieve the intended outcomes of higher education. Trauma can stem from systemic oppression, failures to respond humanely to natural disasters, interpersonal harm and violence, and more. Trauma can be observed on interpersonal, community, generational, systemic, environmental, and global levels.
Trauma can feel omnipresent in our lives. As Tricia Shalka stated, “trauma is embedded in the fabric of our institutions and our students” (p. 21). Although the traumas of this moment will pass, their impact will linger, and new traumas will emerge in their place. Trauma can show up in our work on a daily basis. We cannot remove the trauma from the world, our students’ lives, or our own lives. In their book, Trauma Stewardship, psychologist Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and co-author Connie Burk outline an approach that can help us as student affairs educators. In this article, we explore the trauma context within which we live and work, the warning signs of our trauma exposure response, and the ways a trauma stewardship framework can help us as student affairs educators be more effective in our work with students, with each other, and with ourselves.
Our Trauma Context
We see the trauma with which our students live, ranging from mental health issues; the lasting impacts of a global pandemic; systemic racism, activism, and racial battle fatigue; being mis-gendered regularly on campus; experiencing sexual violence; food insecurity and lacking basic needs; the threat of immigration policies and their enforcement, and more. While all these types of traumas affect students, we cannot lose sight of the fact that as educators we, too, are humans living in and trying to navigate the trauma around us and in our lives. We are affected, often in many of the same ways students are, and the ways this trauma affects us are directly influenced by the intersection of our social identities and positionality.
Those of us working in student affairs struggle with our own mental health. We manage the cumulative effects of daily microaggressions toward our marginalized identities by colleagues, students, and institutional leadership. We feel fear, anxiety, and mourning related to illness, war, and disasters. Those of us who are Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients hold great uncertainty about our futures. As Wilson Kwamogi Okello and others describe, those of us with racially marginalized identities also experience racial battle fatigue as a result of our efforts to work against these systemic injustices. What we typically think of as self-care does not suffice. Many of us are acting on our commitments to racial equity and other forms of social justice, through protests, volunteering, education, and activism—accompanied by the awareness that injustice and systemic oppression persist in many forms. We worry about the effects of climate change on our planet and our lives. We have the same access to social media's stream of traumatizing news as our students do, which only exacerbates the effects of our own trauma. We hold not only the trauma that students entrust to us, but also our own. This trauma affects all of us—but affects each of us differently. We hold not only the trauma that students entrust to us, but also our own. This trauma affects all of us—but affects each of us differently.
Arguing with this reality is tempting. We may find ourselves thinking, “I cannot believe this is happening,” or, “How is this still happening in this day and age?” However, we cannot work to change or heal from what we do not acknowledge. We face unprecedented challenges both within and outside of the sphere of higher education. At the societal level, we continue to see violence rooted in oppression, while state legislatures are limiting funding and banning offices and practitioners doing the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are still living with COVID alongside the loss, grief, and individual and societal impacts of the pandemic and its disproportionate effects on those most marginalized. In the United States, our political divisions seem more polarized than ever and have politicized science, history, competence, and even reality.
On campus, leaders are navigating financial, political, and human challenges. Simultaneously, leaders wrestle with calls from within and beyond higher education for racial justice and anti-racism beyond performative statements and symbolism, while also under increasing restrictions from state legislatures to do so. Student affairs educators are navigating increased student needs, additional pressure and constraints, often with fewer staff resources.
As a field, we know we need to consider the ways we manage the effects of trauma on our students. Perhaps first, however, we need to place a priority on managing the effects of trauma on ourselves, at each level of our work. What skills do emerging student affairs educators learn in graduate preparation programs that might assist them in finding ways to acknowledge and sustain a commitment to such inherently challenging work? How do our professional associations encourage us to acknowledge and navigate this inevitable element of our work? How can we prepare ourselves and those we lead to meet societal challenges, serve students, and do so in professionally and personally sustainable ways? How do we approach our work with students in a way that fosters our accountability as well as their learning, development, and growth? What skills do emerging student affairs educators learn in graduate preparation programs that might assist them in finding ways to acknowledge and sustain a commitment to such inherently challenging work?
Trauma Exposure Response in Student Affairs
In Trauma Stewardship, the authors define a trauma exposure response as “the transformation that takes place within us as a result of exposure to the suffering of other beings or the planet” (p. 41). This framing has helped us better notice the troubling ways the cumulative effects of trauma manifest themselves in our own work and lives. Perhaps the most obvious way is the prevalence of what we often call “burnout.” Student affairs educators use this term time and again, without explicitly naming what burnout actually looks like. We’ve all heard the “you can’t pour from an empty cup” metaphor, but what clues tell us that our cup is approaching empty? What warning signs might we notice in our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that might help us find more sustainability before reaching burnout?
Our responses to trauma exposure can take the form of ineffective coping mechanisms as well as shifts in our approach to and feelings about our work. How can we identify and attend to these signs earlier? How do we recognize when our cups are depleted and tend to this before our cups are empty and we burn out? The warning signs of trauma exposure response might include hypervigilance, inability to embrace complexity, physical exhaustion and ailments, avoidance, dissociation, cynicism, and numbness. As we explored this list, we found that too many were warning signs we had experienced in ourselves, witnessed in our colleagues and friends, and even in the formal and informal systems and structures of our work and profession.
For example, as we are socialized into student affairs, we quickly learn to be hypervigilant to student needs, and many of us often feel as though we can never do enough in our work. Not only are we socialized to be hypervigilant to students’ needs, but we can also be conditioned to believe that their needs are our only priority. Consequently, we establish unrealistic expectations for what constitutes success and the impact we expect to have on students’ development and overall success. Over time, this approach compromises our mental and physical health, overall well-being, and ability to be effective educators. This dangerous modus operandi blurs the boundaries between us and our work.
Can we retire the subjective phrase “work/life balance” and instead teach and model the practice of healthy boundaries with students, our workload, or colleagues? Graduate preparation programs must not only espouse the importance of a balanced approach to our work but also socialize us to understand that our caring and commitment to students need not come at the expense of our personal health and well-being. Obstacles can start with live-in positions and 24-hour duty expectations, the need to be on campus for late-night student programming, or expectations to share our personal phone number as a sign of commitment to students in need. While none of these realities of our work is inherently troublesome, when we do not learn how to implement healthy boundaries with students or our work, we become consumed with the expectations of each, and the line between our sense of self and our work begins to blur. Many of us who have held a duty phone can name the physical feelings of a post-traumatic response to hearing a particular ringtone, even many years after leaving a position with duty responsibilities. Our heart rates increase and our muscles tense as we wonder: What's on the other side of the call? What student need must I meet, no matter the time of day—or more often, night? our caring and commitment to students need not come at the expense of our personal health and wellbeing.
While crisis response is a vital element of the work of some student affairs professionals, a boundaryless approach to our work with students has negative implications for both students and ourselves. When we compel ourselves to meet each student’s every need as presented to us, students do not develop the skills needed to meet their own needs. This can lead to burnout for us, and also means we may be enabling rather than educating students.
On the other end of the spectrum, we may at times find ourselves coping with the effects of trauma by avoiding our work. Perhaps we leave texts and emails unread because the thought of responding to them feels overwhelming. Perhaps we avoid simple tasks and projects for the same reason. This avoidance may spill over into personal relationships outside of work, when we simply feel we have no more to give. Some of us may turn to dissociation in a variety of forms. For example, we might notice we are fueling our overwhelm by incessantly checking social media and news outlets, nobly disguised by our conscience as a form of activism, or perhaps we routinely turn to various substances—from food to alcohol and other drugs—that we tell ourselves help us relax at the end of a long day or week, or that we have earned with all the trauma we have navigated for ourselves and others.
At times, the cumulative effects of holding trauma leave us feeling helpless, powerless, and out of control. When we feel powerless, it can be deliciously tempting to take those feelings out on those we perceive to have less power than us, such as students and those we supervise, or those who are more powerful than us, including supervisors, vice-presidents, or “the administration.” We may also vent our powerlessness as self-righteous indignation dressed up as criticality on social media. The reality is that rarely do any of these outlets for our trauma response actually serve us. When, inevitably, these strategies prove ineffective, we may turn our eyes and attention to fantasies of a flawless new role, new institution, or a new job outside of student affairs as a panacea.
The challenges and uncertainty within and beyond higher education can foster a culture of fear and scarcity. When we operate within this culture, we are limited in our ability to think creatively or identify innovative practices in order to better serve students. In a trauma response, our bodies and interconnected neurobiology force us to attend to our own perceived survival needs, making effective leading, learning, and truly being present for others difficult, if not impossible. When we become chronically exhausted or experience other physical manifestations of burnout, we become less able to serve students in the way many of us entered this field to do. Our trauma response can take the form of binary thinking—seeing situations as having one right and one wrong answer. This way of thinking does not serve us as we navigate complex conduct cases, interpersonal conflict between staff members, supporting student well-being in a global pandemic, or the complexities of anti-racist institutional responses.
When we are overextended, we may find ourselves irritated with student needs or supervisor requests. We start to feel the undeniable signs of exhaustion and may experience other physical symptoms as our immune systems attempt to stave off the effects of operating in a long-term stress response. Maybe we decide we need a “mental health day,” ostensibly to recharge us to return the next day more equipped to perform. But we encourage us to ask ourselves, how often do we actually stay away from work that day? How often do we actually return recharged and ready to engage with more wholeness? Students’, team members’, and supervisors’ expectations of quick response times, coupled with our desire to “stay on top of” our work and prove our dedication to students, mean we rarely ever really stop working. Many of us may feel guilty for attempting to prioritize our own needs over those of others due to the culture of overwork and narrative fostered within our field that tell us if we are truly committed, we are willing to be “all things to all people.” Supervisors who hold onto these expectations despite the harms they cause can keep educators trapped in this cycle of despair and reinforce exploitive power structures and systems.
When we do actually find ways to place boundaries around ourselves and step away from work for some amount of time, how do we spend that time? The concept of “self-care” has received much attention in student affairs. Some have touted self-care as both useful and necessary, while Dian D. Squire and Z Nicolazzo explain how our field has used it in harmful ways that reinforce systemic privilege and oppression. What we typically talk about as self-care should be viewed on a continuum from healthy and unhealthy distraction to self-soothing, self-care, community care, and deep healing. We must determine which strategies are truly healing and restorative for each of us. We must determine which self-care strategies are truly healing and restorative for us as individuals.
Trauma Stewardship in Student Affairs
Trauma stewardship, as Lipsky and Burke outline, offers an approach that can help us integrate healing strategies and practices into our lives in order to sustain our ability to serve as effective custodians of the trauma inherent in our work and lives. Reflection is essential to helping us determine whether an activity will help refuel, heal, and bring us more wholeness, or if it is actually a dissociative temporary bandage. The latter kind of empty self-care can actually be selfish. We can step away as an avoidance tactic or we can step away in a manner that helps us be more fully and effectively engaged with the realities of the world. Reflection and healing can help us show up as our full selves rather than show up with bitterness, resentment, and using social causes, leadership roles, or students as means to meet our own unmet emotional needs. How do we find the kind of activities that help us not dissociate but to return more engaged, energized, and whole, so we can be of service to causes to which we are committed, those we lead, students, and important people in our lives? The trauma stewardship model can help us incorporate this type of reflection and holistic approach to caring for ourselves. Trauma stewardship includes four elements: creating space for inquiry, choosing our focus, building compassion and community, and finding balance.
Creating Space for Inquiry
This aspect of trauma stewardship is about creating space for critical self-reflection. When we are engaged in constant crisis management, email barrage, and meeting stacking, it can be easy to lose sight of our purpose, what is going on for us, and what is working or not working for us. Creating space for inquiry gives us the opportunity to re-ground ourselves in our purpose as people, not just as student affairs educators. What if we started each day asking ourselves why we do the work we do? When we maintain clarity about our purpose by answering this question each day, we can better recognize when we have lost our way and are going about our work without purpose—or with someone else’s purpose rather than our own. What if we started each day asking ourselves why we do the work we do?
In student affairs, it can be particularly challenging to truly get to a healthy response to this question. The trouble we have setting boundaries is one contributing factor. When we lack boundaries related to work, we often confuse our identity with our vocation. Yes, we should enjoy and find fulfillment in our work, but we must also recognize the need for some degree of healthy non-attachment from our work. If we define ourselves solely by what our students or supervisees think of us, we are unable to receive constructive feedback without becoming defensive, when often constructive feedback is precisely the thing we need to learn, grow, and better serve others.
When we open ourselves to deep reflection, we may find renewal in our work, or we may discover a need to change roles or institutions. Or, we may even begin to contemplate leaving a field to which so many of us feel vocationally called. When our identity is too enmeshed with our work, we may not be aware of this need. We stay put and start to experience resentment. When we are clear about the role our work plays in our life, then we can be clear about our choices. If our current role specifically or student affairs work in general no longer aligns with the person we have become, how do we pursue options that are in better alignment? This kind of reflection and honesty with ourselves may lead us to unexpected places. However, a conscious choice is better than staying in the wrong role out of inertia or pursuing another opportunity for the wrong reasons. Supervisors can develop the practice of encouraging those we supervise to reflect on why we do what we do, and why we continue to show up for students. Creating space for inquiry requires us to ask ourselves, “Is this working for me?” A conscious choice is better than staying in the wrong role out of inertia or pursuing another opportunity for the wrong reasons.
Within the practice of creating space for inquiry, we are invited to consider the role our own trauma can play in our response to student needs. As many of us bring both past and present traumas to our work, we must ask ourselves another potentially challenging question: is it possible we may unconsciously be using students’ trauma to somehow resolve our own? Many of us share the narrative that we have joined student affairs to help students “like us.” We want to ensure they do not have to live through the same challenges we did. Helping, saving, or rescuing students can become a tool to meet our own unmet emotional needs. Van Dernoot Lipsky refers to this reliance on students’ needs as trauma mastery. When acting out of trauma mastery, we often shift from being educators helping students learn how to solve their own problems to enablers who solve students’ problems for them. While its natural for us to want students to see us as helpful and important in their lives, we must also recognize when our actions do not serve students well. When we practice trauma stewardship, we can show up and be of service to students. When we can recognize the influence of our own trauma, and invest in our own healing, we will be better equipped to be present for students when they entrust us with pieces of their own trauma.
Choosing Our Focus
Despite the external realities we all navigate, trauma stewardship pushes us to acknowledge the areas where we have agency over our focus. A paradigm shift of this nature involves understanding the nuanced differences between control and agency. Much beyond us may be out of our control, but we do have agency over what lies within us such as how we manage our reactions, direct our focus, and choose our responses. Identifying a “Plan B” for our lives can help us recognize our agency and our choice to remain in this work. If we know we could pursue a different role, different institution, or different profession, then we are reminded of our choice and agency to be in our role. On our toughest days, reminding ourselves that we chose this important work can be a helpful reframe to help us re-engage. And when Plan B, no matter its complications, starts to look better than the current reality, it may be time to take Plan B seriously.
One exercise to shed light on our instinctual focus (and the agency we have to shift it) involves reflecting on a challenging situation we face in our professional lives. With that scenario in mind, we can identify three things that make it challenging and then three things that we appreciate about it. Then, we can examine both lists and ask ourselves, “Where am I most likely to focus, and why?” Our response to the “Why?” part of this question can help us uncover our instincts, identify options for shifting our focus, and potentially approach the challenging situation from a more effective standpoint.
Mindfulness and being fully present can be another useful practice to help us develop awareness of our focus, redirect it when needed, and help us be more aligned and on purpose. Having a greater awareness of one's focus and purpose does not eliminate trauma, nor does it diminish its impact. It does, however, prevent one from being consumed and overwhelmed by the pain associated with trauma. Pain is an indicator of the healing work we must do. Recognizing, engaging, and moving toward healing can reveal paths to learning and growth. Mindfulness as a practice allows us to move toward a place of greater awareness rather than remaining in a place of inaction and fear. We must be realistic that we may never be fully and completely healed from all that we have experienced. Even though our healing may never be complete, there is a big difference between showing up from our woundedness and showing up from our wholeness.
Building Compassion and Community
We need not suffer in isolation. Building community with others and compassion toward ourselves helps us not just continue but thrive in our trauma-laden work. Within the practice of building compassion and community, we must first ask ourselves: How do we recognize our own needs and practice compassion toward ourselves? Perhaps we begin to experiment with healthy boundaries regarding our work. Perhaps, as we engage in the true introspection required by this model, we realize the need to prioritize our mental health and explore the role of therapy in our lives. This attention to meeting our own needs is vital to sustaining ourselves in the work of meeting others’ needs, as we are so often called upon to do.
This area of the trauma stewardship model also requires attention to our microculture, our closest community. We can ask ourselves: to what extent does my microculture nurture hopefulness, integrity, and mutual accountability? How do we build community as a practice interwoven with our own self-compassion practices? We simply cannot continue to hold trauma without identifying the essential role of community. As we acknowledged in the introduction, we know that the traumas of this moment will pass in some forms, but new traumas will take their place. A misunderstanding of this cycle can leave us feeling overwhelmed. However, we can mitigate this feeling by recognizing our ability to enact change related to the current traumas facing us on individual, community, and global scales. adrienne marie brown's Emergent Strategy compels us to recognize that without community, without recognition of our global connectedness, we will not accomplish social change of any consequence. brown asks, “How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?” (p. 9). This engagement with and connection to community can come in many forms, from faith communities, to service communities, to professional communities that allow us to engage beyond our individual campuses. We must recognize the value of seeking support within community while also recognizing opportunities to provide reciprocal support to members of our communities. We must recognize the value of seeking support within community while also recognizing opportunities to provide reciprocal support to members of our communities.
Finding Balance
Cultivating vibrant lives beyond our work can help us gain perspective, find community, and serve as a key piece of a much larger puzzle of healing practices. Integrating work into our full lives, rather than allowing work to consume our lives or attempting to find equal balance between “work” and “life,” can help us be more present, resourceful, and helpful in our positions. This element of the trauma stewardship model invites us to recognize the work of labor unions and others throughout history to create weekends, breaks, and humane working conditions. We can honor those who have advocated for themselves and others by committing ourselves to a sustainable work schedule and then sticking to it.
A part of finding balance involves integrating the complexities of our lives and the world around us into more wholeness—even when our wholeness includes past traumas and current tragic realities of the world we inhabit. Binary thinking conditioning us to seek one right answer, such as good or bad, work or life, trauma or healed, is rooted in dominant culture. As bell hooks reminds us, “binary thinking actually keeps dominator culture in place” (p. 29). For example, in conversations about movements for racial justice we hear calls that white educators need to both center the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) educators and recognize the complicity of white silence and the fact that it is long past time for white folks to speak up and take a stand in the movement toward racial justice. Embracing this both/and way of thinking requires a move toward paradoxical thinking, and an ability to recognize the truth in two seemingly contradictory ideas. When we are stuck trying to find the correct position in the paradox instead of seeing the paradox, we miss the opportunity to see the world more fully.
When we are stuck trying to find the correct position in the paradox instead of seeing the paradox, we miss the opportunity to see the world more fully.
A Daily Practice of Centering Ourselves
Finally, trauma stewardship calls us to commit to spend time daily grounding ourselves in each of the above elements. For many of us, making the time to center ourselves may be the most challenging practice to develop, given our propensity toward prioritizing the needs of others over our own. Centering ourselves can take various forms: a morning yoga or meditation practice; regularly scheduled lunch alone with a journal for reflection on our intention; or an evening walk during which we reflect on what we can let go in order to regain our purpose and center. We encourage educators to consider what form of centering works for you. This daily practice creates space for us to consciously reflect on the questions we have identified above and recognize the agency we have in developing truly healing habits. In addition to these daily habits, the practices of trauma stewardship encourage us to truly designate at least one day of rest each week. This day of non-obligation serves to remind us that our true contribution to society is not about what we produce in a week, but about our deepest essence as individuals. These critical choices can help ground us and prevent the burnout that cannot be averted by uncritical self-care as escapism.
Cultures of Shared Accountability
Student affairs educators at all levels, including leadership, supervisors, new professionals, and graduate preparation programs, must begin to foster cultures that prioritize a sense of shared accountability for ongoing individual and community healing. The burden for an entry-level staff member's healing cannot rest solely with their supervisor. Our supervisor is not our therapist. At the same time, supervisors and organizations cannot ignore the reality of or their role in the human experience of their staff members or themselves. Shared accountability recognizes that responsibility lies with individuals and organizations as well as supervisors and supervisees.
How do we help students and others we supervise recognize their agency in working toward healing? When we encounter trauma in our work, what departmental or division protocols exist that require us to recognize the imperative that we include healing in our response? How do supervisors help supervisees (both student and professional) identify what they need and support them in meeting those needs? Intentional responses to these questions will assist us in building a culture of trauma stewardship.
Conclusion
“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure … secure your own mask before assisting others.” We can count numerous times as student affairs educators when we have fallen into the trap of overextending and trying to heroically help all those around us without tending to ourselves first. We have refused to fully care for ourselves and we burn out, eventually unable to provide anything for anyone or to continue our work toward systemic change. A trauma stewardship approach to student affairs work includes continued commitment to doing our healing work and better balance between our needs and the needs of others. How do we engage fully with the realities of the world in which we live, while tending to maintenance of our own wholeness so we can better foster healing and wholeness in others? Tending to ourselves isn’t selfish—perhaps it’s actually the most selfless thing we can do. Tending to ourselves isn't selfish—perhaps it's actually the most selfless thing we can do.
