Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky

To be an effective trauma steward, it is important to know where our own self ends and another’s self begins. This can be a hard distinction to maintain even when we are working with other adults, who, whatever their difficulties, are clearly separate people with agency in their own lives. Ironically, it may be even more challenging when we are working with populations that seem particularly defenseless—young children, for example, or abused animals or endangered species. When we speak up for people or creatures or environments that are unable to speak for themselves, we may gradually lose the ability to distinguish their voices from our own. If we don’t pay careful attention, our feelings of identification and responsibility may increase to the point that we experience their anguish in a debilitating way. In the long run, this can diminish our ability to be effective advocates. We can sustain our work with trauma only if we combine our capacity for empathy with a dedication to personal insight and mindfulness. This is difficult terrain to navigate.