At Arm's Length

At Arm’s Length

John Paul Derryberry

Recently,  I was working with a group of educators for the day on students with trauma and the effects it has on us.  It’s always a fascinating topic to get into with professionals. This group was curious, asked thought-provoking questions, and provided insightful feedback during the discussion time. It was everything a presenter would want out of a group of people trying to improve professionally.  Yet, as always, there was this thin divide between the subject matter and the group. I have noticed this throughout a career in presenting; the notion that we can tackle trauma in society by keeping it at arm’s length.

It’s almost as if we collectively say to ourselves and our fellow professionals, I know the effects trauma has on people, but it doesn’t affect the people around me like that. They are somehow more resilient and capable of navigating life through sheer grit and determination than others who have gone through tough times. Or somehow they know how to leave it at the door and not bring it into my environment. Humans just are not wired that way, and most of us have to process our truama over a long period of time through starts, stops, confusion, progress, and relapse.

I once sat in a team meeting and a professional commented, 'It’s just all so messy; I want it to be clean.' I let out a loud and probably unprofessional: “How dare you!”  I was younger and far more brash back then. I’m still brash, but I try to build bridges now, rather than tearing people down. But I stand by the how dare you, how dare anyone of us who think abuse, neglect, assault, hunger, homelessness, and countless other situations people have to endure can be cleaned up without getting our hands dirty. I mean, as a guy who has been chased around by someone having poop in their hands, I wish it were not messy at all. You have no idea how fast or quick your reflexes are until you face that situation in life. It just doesn’t process that way for pretty much everyone, except for those gifted the most resilient genome sequence on the planet. Most of us are not that lucky or touched by any god that way, if you are the religious type.

Truama tends to be an emotional outburst, except we cannot see the emotional projectiles. My career would be a lot easier if we did. At no point in our lives have we seen someone throwing up and thought to ourselves, 'They should be more resilient.' Part of the drive for my work is to have all people, everyone understand truama on a more basic level. Not social work or psychological jargon, my field tends to use, but normal terms. Like explaining to a teacher who asked, 'I know they come from a bad home; why can’t they leave that at the door at school?' I asked the audience, Has anyone gotten into a fight with their spouse or significant other before work. How many of you that day left it at the door? If you didn’t and you are a well enough adjusted adult to be employed, why are we asking a kid whose dad beat him up before school to not think about that while attempting to learn his newest math lesson?

Look, I get it, I too wish there were less of a mess. At my full-time job, we have expanded services by roughly 22% with a goal of reaching 25% in three years. Just about every program I operate has to turn people away because we are at capacity. I wish it were easier. I wish social work, psychology, and education would modernize in a way to meet the needs of the current population.  But one thing I do not wish is that the fields that deal with trauma continue to attempt to keep at arm's length. Do we need boundaries for professionals? Yes, but trauma is not fixed with it at arm's length away. That space allows us to dehumanize it.  But this is not doom and gloom for me, because when I started my career two decades ago, we kept it way farther away than we do now. We have made progress; people like me are brought in to discuss it. It’s all over professional development agendas. The next step might just be the hardest thought: we have to drop the protective arm and allow it to come closer to us, because we cannot fix messes without getting our hands a little dirty along the way.