3.22: Trauma Stewardship & Our Organizations

In this episode, I share insights from the Institute of Coaching Conference in Boston, featuring Dr. Alicia Moreland-Capuia's impactful work on trauma-aware organizations.

Dr. Moreland-Capuia, a neuroscientist, emphasizes the need for compassion in healthcare and leadership, offering a powerful takeaway: trauma-informed support means "hear me, protect me, prepare me, support me, care for me." She explores how fear-based policies can be limiting, advocating instead for policies rooted in hope to build equitable, supportive workplaces. 

Join me as we dive into creating healing-centered, compassionate environments for lasting change. 

Episode Details

Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to the mindful Academy. And thank you again for lending me your ears this week. I am talking today about some conference takeaways from two conferences I went to in May. So in early May, I went to the Institute of coaching conference put on by Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, the Institute of coaching looks at coaching and health care and coaching and leadership, and a lot of academic medicine. And so that touches on a lot of things that are of interest to me and I went to that conference as a learner. It's Harvard, they have access to a lot of really great speakers and people who are doing research that influences coaching or research on coaching. So, Amy Edmondson that was there, who's the Harvard Business School professor who writes about psychological safety. Charles Palmer, I think is first name is Charles, who's a psychiatrist at McLean's hospital, gave a talk on brain energy and basically sort of the cellular somatic Mind Body illness paradigm where mental illness is physical illness and mitochondria. And it was super interesting. It's actually not what I'm going to talk about today. Because he was looking at schizophrenia, and then anxiety and depression and whatnot, which we can go there. But today I want to talk about Dr. Alicia Moreland. Capuia is talk. So she Alicia Moreland Capuia is a doctor at McLean Hospital, the director of trauma informed treatment, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard. And she gave a talk on building trauma aware organizations. The book that is giving her the platform, I think, to talk about this is called the trauma of racism, exploring the systems and people that fear built. And Dr. Moreland Capuia was the second speaker in a two day conference. And when her talk was done, I turned to my neighbor and said, that was the talk of the conference. She was like, really worldly, to toxin. How can you say that, and because it was amazing, and I was right, it was amazing. And it was the talk of the conference. So I want to share a couple of nuggets from her talk that have resonated with me and keep resonating with me, and I think have applicability across our personal and professional lives. And I'll begin with a really unfortunate anecdote that as Alicia took the stage, a man who was sitting in the same row as me, had to stand up and excuse himself, because the terms of his funding in Texas dictated that he was not allowed to even sit and listen to a dei themed talk, which I found disgusting, but also super interesting, because the talk was in no way framed as a dei talk. And although racism was certainly a large part of the traumas she was talking about, it was not exclusive to that, nor did that show up in the talk title from what I recall. But merely her having published a book on the trauma of racism, I believe, disqualified her from being somebody this man could listen to, according to the terms of his funding. I was so disgusted that I believe it made her talk hit me even harder, because it illustrated for me how high the stakes are around our discussion of trauma and race and civil discourse. Just gobsmacking really, so more about that, perhaps over a beer with a rant. But to get to Dr. Moreland, Capuia is talk. She was talking about trauma, stewardship, and being trauma informed in health care, but also in leadership in work life, I think as a human being. And she said, what we need what we need in our workplaces what we need in health care. What we need in the classroom, as we are teaching people is the science of compassion. And you've probably heard me talk about the work of Kristin Neff before who's at the University of Texas, who is America's leading researcher on self compassion. But the science of compassion was something that Dr. Kapoor Moreland Capuia referenced that it It's wording really landed with me like what do we know about being compassionate, which we know about the effects of us being compassionate on us and on the people we are being compassionate towards. And what we know is that self compassion and compassion towards others actually promotes health. And so in this framework of the science of compassion, and stewarding trauma, recognizing that like fixing trauma is that's way down the line. But what does it mean to be aware of and steward trauma in your teaching and in your leadership? And in in studying what people who are experiencing trauma need? studies revealed a really simple, almost beautiful summary of what is needed by people who are experiencing trauma. So, before I say what it is, I will pause and say the studies were rooted in what health care workers needed during COVID. Right. So when they were overworked and stressed out and fearing for their safety, what did they need in order to survive an extended moment of trauma and trauma, as she defines it is, so you have been triggered in some way your fight flight freeze fawn response is on. So COVID is an example of that we were all at least temporarily, and some of us for a very long time existentially scared, either for our physical health, our lives, our livelihoods, our income, right, the people around us, our community. So that is a long moment of triggering that does not abate I will offer and here is an insight from the second conference I went to where I was a speaker on sort of people and culture and education and government. Somebody at that conference came up to me and shared that she had recently, in the last academic year, helped shepherd her college of arts and sciences. Through the closure of the small liberal arts college. She was a faculty member at so she had been dean as the university was shutting down. And I will offer that that kind of exigency. Until intellectual exigency, belonging exigency, financial exigency, right, all of those things, is also an extended moment of trauma. And so whether we're looking at a worldwide pandemic, or the trauma that is happening closer to home, right, I grew up in a, an emotionally abusive household, my stepfather was horrible. And that was an extended moment of trauma, like a decade, that impacted me in all sorts of ways, right? So thinking about your own experiences with trauma, and your experiences, observing trauma in your environment, and thinking about what people need from fellow humans in order to get through the trauma survive it, so that healing is even possible. Alright, so here is what people need. Hear me, protect me, prepare me, support me, care for me. So simple. And reading through that list, I can almost instantly apply it to the healthcare context where these frontline medical workers were terrified, and also to all sorts of personal emotional traumas, and institutional trauma. So I'll repeat it again. Hear me, I'm saying something, what is it? Are you listening? Protect me. If you are in the position to shield me, please do so. Prepare me what resources do I need in order to make the best decisions for myself? Sometimes when we see people experiencing trauma, we want to take care of them. And that isn't always preparing them. So think about what it means to prepare. Support me as I make those decisions for myself, support them and care for me. Care about what I care about. Care for my body and soul, right care for me as a person then.

And that list of hear me protect me prepare me support me care for me is a short list. And it seems simple and beautiful. And yet I believe we can all look in our environments and say, okay, when the first hits the fan, are we hearing the people who are impacted? are we protecting the people who are impacted and preparing them to make the best decisions for themselves? are we supporting them during the trauma or the transition through stages? And are we caring for them? Or does the pain of witnessing trauma make us simply turn away? Right? And in Dr. Moreland, Capuia is talk. She, in the subtitle of her book, she references fear, right? We fear all sorts of things, but we fear trauma, we fear being tainted by it, we fear witnessing it, we fear, the effects that watching trauma may have on us, or that witnessing other people's pain may have on us. And she says that healing from trauma has to be the way forward. And that fear is trauma. Right? So the neuroscience of fear is the neuroscience of trauma. So what we fear is also what is traumatizing us right fear and stress that don't turn off our trauma. One, one thing she mentioned. So that's just the nugget, right? Hear me, protect me, prepare me support me care for me. And being in places where fear and stress don't ever turn off is what traumatizes us, right. That's nugget one, nugget two, is if healing is the way forward, are the policies and practices that we have in our organizations rooted in our greatest hopes? Or are they rooted in our greatest fears? So just to pick on, you know, typical HR for a minute. As I also after the pandemic, when people were coming back to campus, and I'm watching this institutions I'm consulting for right now, we're seeing an emerging tension between Oh, thank God, we can be back on campus. And our goal now is to rebuild a vibrant intellectual community that sees each other face to face and engages. And on the other hand, you have people saying, Wow, working from home, I noticed that I'm productive, and I can manage my home and work balance, so much better, I can be available for my children more, I have less of a commute, my time is freed up, my work doesn't suffer. Right? For people who have expenses and time that are caught up in commuting, accessibility that makes getting to campus difficult, right? Working from home, even post pandemic has been such an asset, right? Flexibility and accessibility are things that we noticed working from home, and some of us want to hold on to those things. So then Universities need policies, who gets to work from home? And why and under what circumstances? And in discussions around these policies that I've witnessed, right, I don't make policy ever thank goodness, because it's not what I love. But in discussions around this, you can hear people thinking, we have to prevent people, we have to prevent our staff or our faculty from taking advantage of us taking advantage of working from home. Right. And that is something that is a viewpoint of policy that is rooted in our greatest fears, our greatest fears, that that we will be taken advantage of that somebody will get something that we don't have. Right? What would it mean to route your policies in your greatest hopes? Right, setting up the condition for okay, we understand that working from home and Teaching Online offers both teachers and students a great deal of flexibility. What does it mean to maximize that flexibility or enhance that flexibility for the people who need it? What does it mean to create a vibrant face to face intellectual community for the people who need that? This is a challenge. Yes. But is it rooted in hope, as opposed to rooted in fear? And I thought that just that pithy saying, Are your policies and procedures rooted in your institution's greatest hopes? Or are they rooted in your greatest fears? Are you creating pathways in your policy for people to choose and act according to the greater good according to virtue, right? Or are you creating policies and procedures that block people off from doing, doing what they want doing things that you don't like, right, or your policies, inhibitors, or permit errs, I think is another way to look at that. And those are super elegant, elegant, elegant words, I will acknowledge. But that's another nugget I wanted to share with you that we can create, whether it's for our students in our classes, our departments or our larger institutions, what does it mean, to create policies and procedures that are rooted in our hopes for the future and our hopes for collective action and collaboration? In the classroom, my mind goes to like absence policies and extension policies. Sure, fairness is important. But we know that that fair, and equitable, are not the same thing, right? Equal. If we think of fair as equal treatment, where everybody gets the same thing. Everybody has to bring in a note, everybody gets one missed assignment, everybody gets one extension, right? Those policies are equal, equally applied to people. Equitable might mean that, okay, this student has a disability, maybe giving them a level playing field actually means that they get more leeway. Right, because their humanity looks different than somebody else's humanity and it is shared, right, their human condition is on the tilted end of the playing field, as opposed to be up at up end of the playing field. So thinking about your policies, and where are they rooted in the hopes that students want to participate? And what to do? Well, for example, also for graduate students you're supervising, where is your supervision of staff or graduate students rooted in your hopes for them, rather than in your fears for fill in the blank? Right. And I think that is a question that we get to ask ourselves where we examine, where am I planning for good things to happen? And where am I planning for disaster? Just by how I set up my systems. The third nugget that I want to share from you share with you from Dr. Alicia Moreland. Capuia he is talk was her notion of success versus mastery. So when dealing with trauma and when dealing with fear, she says people dealing with the systems that fear built, let's put it like that. So dealing with trauma, trauma within our systems within the people who are in our systems, the fear that informs how we set up our organizations and how we set up our systems whether we're talking about the system of education or the system of providing health is that we we tend to look for success as a okay, we've done it, we aimed at a thing and we hit it she used an arrow and target metaphor. She says success is a one for one shot. You aim you shoot the arrow you hit the bullseye. That is success. Was that however is not mastery. Mastering trauma, stewardship, mastering hopeful leadership, mastering collectivity and compassion is not doing it once and hitting the nail on the head perfectly. Mastery is seven out of 10 is consistently aiming for the bullseye. Right. We we want success and we hate the notion of failure which might pull us back from even the attempt right? setting ourselves up for perfect is dangerous because it prevents mastery. So how are you giving yourself permission to aim for compassion to aim for healing to aim for trauma, stewardship, and acknowledging that you will not always hit the bullseye. But if you consistently aim in that direction, are you moving in the right direction for you? And are you moving in the right direction for your environment? I of course cannot do justice to the brilliance of Dr. Moreland. Kapoor's talk, she was just great. I didn't get a chance to To find her later in the day during the conference and tell her how much I absolutely loved it, I've tried to give her all the love I can on LinkedIn, because if you want somebody to come talk to your organization about promise stewardship, oh my goodness. That is she was so thoughtful and so encouraging and so amazing. I can only recommend her highly. And I thought that the lessons that she was drawing out of research for trauma informed workplaces in health care, apply to so many other educational and service contexts. So I hope that this has been interesting for you and I hope that you check out from your university library the trauma of racism, exploring the systems and people fear built. I need to wait until I'm close to the university library I have access to through my partner because I no longer have institutional access. Academically published pretty pricey. So I'm going to check it out from the library later this summer. If you've read it, or if you want to read it, let me no because I have great hopes that it is a brilliant read. Thank you so much and take care. I will be back in your ears soon.