Beyond the Cliff | Laura van Dernoot Lipsky | TEDxWashingtonCorrectionsCenterforWomen transcript

[Music] 18 years ago, I found myself standing on top of a very tall cliff, having what I would only come to recognized many years later as a near psychotic break. It would be fair for you to ask if I had always been that on edge. And the answer is no. But as many of you, I imagine can relate to, how I found myself on top of that cliff on that particular day was by way of a very long road. Like so many others, my childhood was filled with a lot of love and many challenges.

Life came into particularly sharp focus for me when I was 10 years old. My mom, who was the healthiest person any of us knew, went into a doctor's appointment for what everyone thought would be a diagnosis of pneumonia at the worst, and returned home having been told she had a very rare form of lung cancer. They gave her three months to live. She lived for three years, much of that time with one lung. And so she died when I was 13. and the sun rose and set with my mom and I entered into my adolescence feeling if continuing to live wasn't going to be impossible, it was going to be highly improbable.

So, I navigated high school with a lot of overachieving. I spent my days getting straight A's and working three jobs. And I spent my nights planning on how I could end my life without causing my older brother, who'd always been my protector and my role model, too much pain. I did make it through high school. And then I landed in college and I found myself sitting in one of those very large lecture halls and my professor at the time, Professor Richard Applebomb, was talking to us about suffering on this one particular morning.

In particular, he was talking about homelessness. And he was talking about it in a way that allowed time to stand still for me. He was building on what so many traditions have taught us for the beginning of time really that in life it is said there's equal measure of brutality and beauty of pain and pleasure of annihilating moments and of sublime moments. And yet there was a way he was talking about it. this whole conversation about equinimity that was completely new to me because during those three years when my brother and I were taking care of our mom, we were surrounded by a number of very very loving people and kind people who gave us a lot of support for appearing to be stoic, for seeming to be strong and for holding it all together.

And what Professor Apple was talking about on that morning is when one is engaged in suffering, there is so much more to it than holding it all together. So what I knew was I wanted more of whatever he had going on. So I went up to him after class, asked how I could help. He scribble on a piece of paper the name and number of our local homeless shelters director. And that's when I started volunteering at age 18, spending the nights regularly volunteering in a homeless shelter.

I went on to work with all forms of trauma and always within this kind of larger backdrop of systematic oppression and liberation theory. And what I knew was that I was so grateful that I had found something that made sense to me and that I felt passionate about. What I had no idea and wouldn't know for years to come was to what degree having borne witness to the suffering of my mom and then the subsequent years of w bearing witness to so much suffering with so many people to what degree that was taking a toll on me.

And this is something that wise people have passed down for a long time and we know more and more about now because of the advances in neuroscience and the wonderful research that many of my esteemed colleagues are doing. But at the time I had no idea about this cumulative toll. So one of the ways that the toll can show up is for those of you who are doing work. There are folks who do work and as a result of the work you do, you might be exposed to things either because of the content of what you're doing.

But what a lot of my colleagues say is like, look, the work itself is the least of my concern. It's all my colleagues who put me over the edge. Right? So sometimes the toll is because of the work. Sometimes the toll is because of the caretaking we do on our lives. Here she's saying, "I feel like I need you less and less, Mom, now that I can make myself feel guilty all on my own." So much of the toll we feel is because many, many, many of you are caretaking in your personal lives.

You're caretaking those around you. You're at home tending for folks who are returning from wars, folks who are ill, people who are in need in the community. Sometimes the toll we feel is because of the suffering of other living beings. This is Chris Jordan's wonderful work. And sometimes it's because of what's going on ecologically on the planet itself. This is the work of Vance Freedenberg. He's one of the leading scientists looking at the six mass extinction.

But what we know is that when humans are exposed to suffering, hardship, crisis, trauma of humans, other living beings or the planet itself, there's a cumulative toll. And there's a toll on us individually. There's a toll on your immediate relationships. There's a toll organizationally for those of you who have this exposure in your work institutionally, systemically. We see it in movements we're a part of. We're seeing it throughout all of our communities and society as a whole.

She's saying, "Speaking personally, I haven't had my day and I've never met any dog who has." The other piece of this that's very important, at least when I do this work, is it's always held in a larger context of systematic oppression. You know this so well, but a reminder that the degree to which you're impacted by the lives you're living and the work you're doing is intimately tied to the fact that we're in a society with so much supremacy.

And if we're in a society where there's no oppression, there's no racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, aism, abbleism, classism, and xenophobia, so much of the suffering we are tending to wouldn't exist. And the remaining bits that exist in life, we would all be affected by that so differently. I have no doubt that all of you have so much more insight and personal awareness than I did back in the day. and that for those of you who know what this toll is and when you feel this toll either because of what's going on in your personal lives or on the job that you're able to identify it but I was not at all able to identify it.

So, it was about 10 years into my career when a critical mass of people started kind of getting up in my face doing that, "Hey, Laura, you're tripping. You should take some time off." And I'm sure somebody said something earlier than 10 years in, but I was very stubborn and successfully ignored them. But 10 years in is when there was a critical mass of people up in my grill really begging me to look at this. And what some of you will appreciate is that a number of those people were clients I was serving, which you can imagine is always so disconcerting.

You know, survivors of domestic violence living in a shelter who can't go anywhere, begging me not to come to work. So, people were doing their due diligence, right? But at the time, I was so arrogant. I was incredibly cocky and I was entirely self-righteous. I was doing God's work. You could either step up and help me do God's work or you could step off. But I was definitely not going to have a conversation with you about how I was affected by my job.

And like many of you possibly, I was raised in a number of traditions that implicitly and explicitly communicated if you care enough about what you're doing, if you are down with your cause enough, if it matters enough to you, you're going to suck it up. So this whole conversation about how to sustain was not something I was engaging in. But finally, the pressure mounted. I caved. I didn't take any significant time off, but compromised.

We took a short trip, went to visit our family who lived in the Caribbean. So on a particular day, we head out as a family on this hike and we get halfway through our hike and we summit where we wanted to summit and there we are standing on the top of these cliffs, right? So the families gathered around tiny Caribbean island standing on the top of these cliffs looking out. The first thing I remember thinking was this is so beautiful.

The second thing I immediately thought was I wonder how many people have killed themselves by jumping off of these cliffs. Right? And at the time I worked at Harborview Hospital which you know is the level one trauma center for the whole Northwest. So it wasn't my own suicidality at play anymore. It was because of the years of bearing witness to others suffering that naturally instinctually one starts triaging of course.

Right? So you start thinking where would the helicopter land? Does the helicopter land on the cliff and would you bellay down to the person on the beach? Would the helicopter actually land on the beach? Is there a level one trauma center in the Caribbean? You ask yourself, do they fly you to Miami? Would they stop you in customs? You know, you kind of go through the whole thing, right? So, I said this out loud cuz I was merely presuming I was just giving voice to inevitably what was going to come up in a family conversation cuz who stands on top of a cliff and does not wonder where the nearest level one trauma center is?

But apparently in my family, nobody was thinking that. So, it got even quieter than it had been. Really long, very uncomfortable pause happened and ultimately it was my stepfather-in-law who said, "Are you sure all this trauma work hasn't gotten to you?" And honestly, this was the first moment I had any insight into, you know, check it out. There are people who can go on a hike and not wonder where the nearest level one trauma center is.

But I'll tell you, it wasn't me. It wasn't anybody I was hanging out with, right? Because one of the things about this toll is it's slowm moving. It is very hard to gauge over time individually and collectively if we are being affected by what we're exposed to. And also what happens is we get very isolated. So, this was one of those moments that maybe you've had where kind of everything starts flooding in, right? And then I was like, whoa, well, if this is the case, maybe it's also the case that there's people who still date out there in the world and those people who date aren't doing background checks on everybody they date, right?

Maybe there's people who can go to a playground. It's just a lovely place for children. You're not worried about like head injuries or Amber alerts h, right? So, but this is what happens that over time what you're exposed to affects your entire worldview. There are so many ways that we can be affected individually and collectively by exposure to vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, secondary trauma. Many people call it many different things.

But this exposure affects all of us so differently. What I have found through the privilege of getting to work with everyone from zookeepers to judges, school teachers to nurses, ecologists to activists is that it is breathtaking the commonalities of how one is affected. Right? So some of the ways we find where you feel like you're not doing enough, right? So here they're saying, "We just haven't been flapping them hard enough." So this is where you feel like you're not doing enough, you constantly feel like you should be doing more.

Right? Another one could be morale. So they're saying, "I see you've done time, so working in a cubicle shouldn't be a problem." So I work with organizations nationally, internationally, and one of the things we find so much is the morale, the very very quickly eroding morale, right? Here he's saying I bark at everything. You can't go wrong that way. So hypervigilance, many people can relate to a sense of hypervigilance.

This is where you lose your ability to flow in, you know, really fluidly in between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. You become in kind of in hyperarousal. I had a colleague say to me, she was a child support enforcement officer and she said to me, "I can tell you which ones of my son's friends are going to grow up to not pay their child support." and her son was 5 years old. Right here he's saying, "No, not there, please.

That's where I'm going to put my head." So exhaustion is something many people can relate to. And not the exhaustion before you work out, but this is an exhaustion where you are tired in your soul. You are tired in your spirit. You are tired throughout your bone marrow. All of your ancestors were tired people, right? There is the avoidance. He's saying, "No, Thursday's out. How about never? Is never good for you?" This is where the best part of your day at work is where you don't have to do your job, right?

And then there's the avoidance in our personal lives. She's saying, "It's too late, Roger. They've seen us." Cynicism. Many of you can relate to. They're saying, "But she'll come down eventually, and she'll come down hard." So, what many of you might be able to relate to is not the pure cynicism, but the cynical humor. Right? And then anger and rage. He's saying, "It's a new anti-depressant. Instead of swallowing it, you throw it at anyone who appears to be having a good time.

And here he's saying, "I can cure your back problem, but there's a risk you'll be left with nothing to talk about." So the other thing we see here is the externalizing that happens when more and more people are asked to do more with fewer resources. We see this whole seduction to externalizing. So this is where you start saying to yourself, you know, I would actually be fine taking care of my loved ones if I could have different loved ones to take care of. or people say, "I would love coming to my job every day if my immediate supervisor would just retire." Right?

And then there's blind spots that we have. So, one of the things that we notice a lot that people have is blind spots. I'll share the story to illustrate it. This is a water bottle. It says the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. It's one of approximately, you know, over hundred water bottles I have in my home that have been gifted to me like incredible programs that many of you are involved with, right?

And every water bottle I have in my home has something stencled on the side like this which has, you know, domestic violence, sexual assault, HIV, AIDS, infant mortality, flood, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, death, destruction, right? And I'm just thinking this is great. I have water bottles. Every day is Earth Day here. This is fantastic. But what it also means is these are the water bottles that go with my kids to swim meets, basketball tournaments, soccer games, right?

And I'm not thinking anything of it. But then I was unpacking my child's lunch some time ago and I noticed that at school she found the provisions to kind of hack over the word sexual. Right? So she's not exactly old enough to know what sexual violence is. She's definitely old enough to know you're not sitting at the lunch table at school with a water bottle that says domestic and sexual violence on it. Right? I don't know why, but I decided to tell this story at a very large conference of police officers.

And when the break came, a police officer came up to me, two centimeters from my face, 20 bucks in her hand, and said, "Go get your kid a proper water bottle." So, I feel like, you know, things have gone very wrong in life when you've got the cops giving you cash, instructing you on parenting, right? And then dogma, self-righteousness. Okay, so here he's saying, "Your mother and I are separating because I want what's best for the country and your mother doesn't." And then addictions, which many of us can relate to.

She's saying, "Of course I drink during the day. I'm way too tired to drink at night." And numbing. So here he's saying, "Could we have the dosage? I still have feelings." One of the things I want to say to us about numbing, it is incredibly seductive with the volume and the intensity of suffering on the planet today. It is incredibly tempting and seductive to become numb. And what I want to offer to you is how critical it is that we continue to strive to cultivate our capacity to be present.

One of the reasons we want so much to be present is we remind ourselves with everything that is out of our control every single day. One of the things that remains in our control at any given time is your ability to bring your exquisite quality of presence to what you are doing and to how you are being. That presence we know can interrupt the systematic oppression which is causing so much harm and can transform the trauma that is arising.

It is very easy to get into that place of you have no idea what my life if you lived here if you did my job. If you saw what I saw and that's when we call on our ancestors and that's when we call on so many people who have come before us who remind us that when they could not change anything external they were able to shift everything as a result of where they put their focus. And again, I don't know any of you personally, but the assumption I'm going to make is none of us would go up against any of these folks, right?

You were not going to, oh, Desmond, I know things got rough for you in South Africa, what with apartheid and all, but here in Washington State, we got a few things going on. Right here, he's saying, "This is the barn where we keep our feelings. If a feeling comes to you, bring it here and lock it up." The other reason I want to bring us back to presence is I want to remind you that while I know we have so many different life circumstances, I believe we have a shared ethic of doing no harm.

If you are numb, you will not be able to gauge whether or not you're doing harm. And if we believe in what Chief Self talks about with the web of life or what Martin Luther King talked about with a single garment of destiny, you all know so well that there are so many parts of this web that are profoundly compromised. And many of you are bringing heart and soul to tremendous sacrifice to tend to parts of this web that are compromised.

If the way you're doing that out there means in any way you are neglecting your immediate part of the web, cutting off circulation to your immediate part of the web, lighting your immediate part of the web on fire. It is not ethical practice. It's not integrity based practice. It's not sustainable. The other piece with numbing out and what we've learned from so many people who have come before us and in so many traditions is you don't get to selectively numb.

So if you're going to numb out your sorrow, you're also going to numb out any possible happiness you can have. If you are going to numb out the heartbreak, you're going to numb out any ability to survive noticing what is beautiful. And the other thing is your mind and body and spirit will keep trying to bring itself back to a full range of feelings of that whole equinimity and that spaciousness which means that's why you know you can work on coalition after coalition of peaceuilding and then you get in the lunch line or on the freeway and you don't let anybody merge in front of you right and we defend that.

We say how I conduct myself on that freeway or when I'm getting my food at lunch has nothing to do with the other work I'm doing. Howard Thurman reminds us, don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive. So we remember that with the magnitude of suffering at play on the planet right now, we are in desperate need of folks who have the wherewithal and who have the courage to be present.

We know from that place of presence it is possible to aspire to do no harm. It is possible to transform whatever trauma arises and it is possible to continue to work to dismantle the systematic oppression which is causing such a legacy of suffering. From that place of presence we know that it is possible to metabolize whatever arises in life. the waves of life which will continue to present to us what they present. There is a way to metabolize that and integrate it so that over time you find that it contributes to your awakening that the longer we get to walk on this planet we find we have deeper compassion, vaster humility and we are able to come up and out of the narrow places.

And from that place of cultivated presence, we remember that it is possible to create and to sustain an ability to be truly transformative. Thank you.