Naming the Heaviness in the Air

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog called “Being > Doing.” Truth be told, I wasn’t ready to hit publish, it didn’t feel polished, and I was uncertain about allowing those words to live publicly in the world. However, the deadline had arrived, and the post went live.

Later that day I started to receive emails saying that one line had struck a chord with people; “there is a palpable heaviness in the air.” The feedback was a clue that there was more to unpack on this topic. We needed to name the heaviness.

I’ll get right to the point. I believe the heaviness in the air is called secondary trauma and naming it changes everything.

Let me share a personal example of the power of naming a thing. I grew up in the Midwest, but I have never been a fan of winter. As an adult, my disdain for the cold has become much stronger. About four years ago, in January, I scheduled an appointment with my Primary Care Doctor. She walked into the exam room and asked what brought me in that day and I burst into tears. These were not singular, slow rolling tears, they were more like “the weight of the world” type tears. It felt like an out of body experience as I heard myself speaking in one long, rambling, run-on sentence; “It’s just so cold and dark and grey and I can’t get warm and it doesn’t matter how many layers I put on it’s like my bones are cold and I feel hopeless and my body hurts and I’m a mess and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” 

She didn’t miss a beat. She simply replied, “Everything you just said describes Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

And then I exhaled for what felt like the first time in months. This thing that seemed so all-consuming had a name, which meant it had boundaries, it had a beginning and an ending. In naming what I was experiencing I discovered that this invisible unknown thing had a shape and a form. It had limits.

Secondary trauma, this heaviness in the air, also has boundaries, a beginning and an ending, a shape, and a form. We need to name this so we can rediscover our power because in knowing what we are up against we shift from being victims to having options. We move from reacting to the unknown to responding to the known.

The conversation around trauma often includes three categories: singular events such as a major car accident, repetitive events like a chronic illness, or life events like the death of a loved one.

But these categories fail to recognize the reality of secondary trauma which is generally defined as the trauma of witnessing the trauma of others. Another way of saying it is, we indirectly experience trauma, and it has a profound impact on us. But secondary trauma can be confusing because our logical, rational brains know that the trauma did not happen to us, yet we are still experiencing symptoms of trauma.

In the last three months, my work has primarily been with athletic coaches, educators, and people in the medical community. These are people who have spent a year and a half in close proximity to those who are experiencing trauma. Coaches have seen their student-athletes struggle to navigate life without the social interaction of their peers or the daily guidance of their professors. Educators have logged on to countless Zoom sessions while looking into the empty eyes of students who are connecting from homes that aren’t safe, where food may be scarce while knowing that their students are craving interaction with their classmates. And the medical community has witnessed pain and suffering on a scale I can’t imagine or even try to describe.

Those of us who are experiencing secondary trauma have two basic choices: we can try to turn off the ability to see the trauma of others and reduce our own secondary trauma or, we can choose to be with those who are experiencing life in traumatic ways. We can close our eyes, or we can open our hearts, but we can’t do both, it’s one or the other.

If you are reading this, I would guess that given these two options you will choose to be with, to walk with, to sit with, or to stand with those in pain. The word with, as is the case for any preposition, is used in a grammatical way that helps us to understand the relationship between two things. In other words, prepositions are connectors and the same can be true for humans. To be with is to be in relationship and right now we need leaders in all industries who will choose to be in relationship with others.

While secondary trauma can feel all-consuming, my hope is that in naming it we can gain clarity on the heaviness in the air. It has a beginning, and it will have an ending.

In the meantime, we get to choose how we want to respond. Will you close your eyes or open your heart?

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