The situation continues to be heart crushing. A lot of people are on the verge of making life changing decisions to commit to adopting a Haitian child, to using their savings to move heaven and earth to help, to devote their life to the allieviation of suffering. I predict that in upwards of 90% of the cases in people who aren’t already active and trained in emergency response, that decision is going to turn out to be a mistake.
We often don’t understand our basic selves
In my previous post I wrote (obviously while in the center of a stress reaction) about typical behaviors people who, in real time, witness excruciating suffering of others. When people are in a calm state and then suddenly focus on the real time intense suffering of others, the most likely response will be for our systems to trigger a stress response in our bodies that floods our bodies with naturally produced chemicals that strongly incline us to adopt behaviors that have been proven to trigger actions increase the chance of survival in species aroung the globe for eons. We humans have other built in behaviors that lead us to reject that we have automatic responses, to trust that our thinking brains are the bosses and can outsmart our subconscious mind if we are tough enough or talented enough. This, because this misunderstanding has caused a lot of people to interpret their natural and automatic reaction as being proof of internal weakness and failure–creating fuel for long term revisions of expectations and suffering. It sucks, because it has been proven to be incorrect , the recent PBS Series This Emotional Life had a Stanford Neurologist who explained that there are literally millions of pathways from our subconscious brain to our conscious brains, a mega super highway, but there are no direct pathways back. They’ve recently been able to use Neuroimaging technology to prove that our subconscious minds signal what decision we are about to make as much as 10 seconds before we think we have made our decision.
Tend or Befriend
The automatic stress response that we need to examine today is the mixture of brain chemicals that flow through our bodies pushing us to ‘Tend or Befriend”. Something scary happens, all of us, but women far more, are flooded with chemicals that prompt us to go rescue our objects of care (children/older adults) Let’s let mama kitty demonstrate (40 seconds in):
WWAD?
Cats are like people, they are also sure that they are totally separate and superior to other animals, they aren’t as social as we are. Ants are social creatures, in a crisis what would ants do?
Social creatures are compelled to rush to help, rush to share in the suffering. And thank goodness. This behavior is integral to our survival, crucial. But it can also be bad.
How can it be bad that we rush to help?
Let me count the ways:
1. Feeling the intense compulsion to rush to help indicates a traumatic stress reaction Our biology is built around the idea that we have short term bursts of intense stress, but then we go back to normal. The stress response is very bad for us though. It causes our immune system to shut down, it inspires us to sacrifice our long term plans, it makes it hard to focus on immediate needs, even family and jobs (part of ’sacrificing long term plans’) It disrupts sleep, frequently sparks depression, a loss of faith in the rest of the community, feelings of social isolation and anxiety.
2. We have become just smart enough to realize that you can get people to do things that help you if you can trigger their automatic responses, but not smart enough to realize that this is harmful. so in modern life we have organizations of all sort working to nurture and extend the continued production of the brain chemicals to keep the stress response going. As long as we do we will ‘keep watching’ ‘keep giving’, etc. Since we are so out of touch with how our brain works, these organizations most likely don’t even realize they are doing it. Since they are advocating the same behaviors that the stress response is pushing you to take, it feels entirely normal, and even very important to keep doing it.
3. It leads to messed up priorities and bad decisions Our brains work in a way that lets our subconscious have the primary vote in almost every thing we do. It tells us how we feel about things, and unless we are careful, we will go rushing off doing things that ‘feel logical’ but actually aren’t. We feel great doing them to! ‘Tend and befriend’ leads us to strongly desire to reach out and help. That’s why you get so many people donating totally inappropriate junk and feeling so good about it. The stress response also inspires a state of hyper-vigilance–that’s why it felt so logical the first thing we needed to do in Haiti was to get camera crews there. That’s why so much of our efforts haven’t been directly improve the situation on the ground, but to improve our ability to visualize it. Map it, photograph it, read about it. That feels great, too bad that still now, the only Americans hundreds of thousands of Haitians have seen have been carrying cameras and not aid. Why we succeeded in getting all of our anchors on the ground, lots and lots of PIOs and public officials–but didn’t succeed in getting almost half of the Search and Rescue teams there–they couldn’t fly in, the airport was too full of the planes carrying all the cameras.
This poor 71 year old woman, here she is talking to an American telling about how she is less than a mile from the airport but is starving to death. The American face she saw was getting to help us, to feed into the story, it wasn’t to help her. Oh, but you have to tell the story to get people to donate. Which, is another way of saying, you must tell the story to trigger the traumatic stress response that will trigger the flood of donations. Currently, the vast majority of our efforts are to restore the funding of our non profit organizations, we feel so good about it, we haven’t even stopped to ask if the organizations actually do the functions we are imagining they do. Organizations do specific things, they do not make up what they do to fit the need of each crisis. This is a good thing, it means they can focus on being very good at the functions they perform, but there seems to be a disconnect on understanding that. The non profits need to work a lot harder to explain exactly what they won’t be doing, what the limits to their capacity and skill base it–since backlash definitely does happen once the disconnect is noticed. I haven’t really seen that. Lots of effort to keep the shower of donations (ie stress response) not a lot to clarify expectations. I can imagine why it would be so hard to provide information that might slow down the flow of funds at a time when the funds are so dearly needed. But it would be better for all of us if they did.
The Red Cross has a surge of volunteers with every disaster, one of their greatest frustration is that the majority of them never come back and volunteer in their community. Those volunteers made a decision to devote their life to helping during the stress response, but when it ended, for most of them, that devotion ended as well. That’s OK, that is totally and completely natural. This is why it is important for anyone who suddenly wants to adopt an orphan (or for anyone who wants the US to adopt a country) to wait until they are sure the effects of the stress results are past. You can discontinue your volunteer activities if it turns out the fit wasn’t right, it is far more harmful to realize you want to discontinue your parental activities. If you didn’t want to adopt a Haitian child before this event, probably around 85% of people will realize they didn’t want to again once it is past.
4. It can lead to neglecting our communities The rush to help is a part of an intense stress response that has bad long term repercussions on our health and psyche. We are pushed to sacrifice long term plans to meet short term needs–that means paying less attention to the parts of your life that really need your attention, when the stress response is triggered because of something in your community, directly affecting your life, this is a really good thing, it means that your community can be vastly improved. Through the wonders of technology, it can now be triggered by something that is very far away, and that is also happening with hundreds of millions of people around the planet, it means that you have hundreds of millions of people sacrificing in small and large ways, the interest of their immediate family and community to help far away, in a place they hopefully can’t get to, since if they did, it would turn out to matter that they don’t have the skill sets, resources or psychological training to do any good in. If every person who feel desperately driven to get to Haiti could, the number of people needing help go up to include 99% of them. In the mean time, a teenager’s decision to reveal what’s been bothering them wasn’t even noticed as the parent shush’s them to continue to think intensely about what they can do… It feels logical not to get that project done, work will understand. So we end up making sure that the people who really can’t afford to create earthquake safe buildings have them built for them, while not noticing that most US cities where earthquakes happen have huge swaths of buildings occupied by the people with the fewest resources, that have a good chance of failure in quakes. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to teach ourselves to feel that need to rush to prevent suffering until we have our ‘help’ responses triggered by the group suffering.
5. It can lead to the creation of more heartless people Stress responses have an emotional and physical toll on our bodies and our lives. They mean that it is really hard to focus on meeting the needs of daily life. People who need to function often over react by teaching themselves not to care about suffering. The easiest way to do this is to dehumanize or belittle the harm that is happening to others. If you don’t care, you won’t have these emotional responses and you will be able to continue to get things done and think rationally. The better that organizations get at triggering stress responses to get help and donations, the more they will find that ‘compassion fatigue’ sets in–the higher the number of people who will adopt thick protections against feeling anything due to other people’s suffering. This is not because people are bastards, people become bastards as a way not to have to stop functioning to feel. OK, some people are born bastards. Just are.
What can we do?
I’m not expecting this post to be read by many, and I suspect it won’t be forwarded much. I’m not a good enough writer to explain things well enough for this post to be retweeted- and the post is telling anyone in a stress response that they aren’t acting of their own free will, and worse, that maybe they are making a mistake. How can helping be a mistake? This post is the equivalent of one tiny person standing in front of a flash flood of subconscious driven emotion. But here’s what I think we need to do:
Teach yourself to tell the difference between innate responses and actual needs We can feel good about taking action, so we miss that the action we took didn’t actually meet the needs of the situation. This is tricky because chances are, if it becomes obvious, the ‘doer’ can end up wanting to withdraw, losing hope, or feeling frustrated. What is needed is to be able to recognize the common reactions, and be careful to compare what actions you are taking vs. the larger picture, and adjust our thinking to match.
We need to recognize that ‘capturing the story’ does more harm than good. It feeds our ravenous hyper-vigilance needs, not the needs of the situation. We need to recognize that ‘telling the story’ of our actions ends up flooding the information stream with pictures of us doing good works–the survivors don’t have PIOs, so there are no pictures of them. It also implies that we are having a much greater effect than we are having. If focus was on the fact that international aid hasn’t been able to make it to very many places, than chances are there would be a lot of good ideas coming in on how to do better. A lot of disaster response turns out not to be very good because our we easily mistake feeling good about doing something our subconscious wants (hyper-vigilance) it becomes hard to recognize the real situation.
This is because those that hold the cameras are create the historic record. The people with the cameras create a false version of history. Particularly when every photograph taken is calculated to ‘tell the story’, it becomes necessary for the donation receivers to portray themselves as heroes to justify the donations. History then, records the situation being that the group most affected by the disaster were saved by the outsiders who took so many pictures of that happening. The people who have endured the absolute brunt of the disaster don’t have time, experience or equipent to calculate ways to tell their story. For days upon days, actual international assistance didn’t get further than a few blocks—a couple of hundred, maybe even a couple of thousand people.Very important for the people reached, but barely anything when compared to the sea of suffering: 2 million people needing help. The rest of the rescues, the rest of the heroic acts-those weren’t photographed, so they disappear as if they never happen.
Put pressure on organization and people to never using the suffering as a marketing tool It seems like this would be obvious, but the problem is that it is so effective in generating what people need: donations, income, attention, good PR, hyper-vigilance, narrative creation. It needs to stop though, it is harmful. Having the ability to do something to help, like giving donations, is an important part of the recovery process from grief and traumatic stress-it helps the community bond and start the slow process of neutralizing the negative stress chemicals that were pumped into our system with positive ones. The current way it is done, though, needs to stop, cultivating our stress responses. After a shared emotional scar, we will be donating. We need to be able to start the process of recovering from the injury, not to have it purposefully kept raw so we can keep donating. From this point on, only donate to organizations who solicit donations by telling what they will be doing, and how they think they will succeed in doing it. Donate to those that say: ‘you donate this, we will combine it with X more and ‘charter a boat’, ‘pay for shipping’, etc. If this was the standard, it would become very clear who can actually do something and who can’t, which will help our ability to be sure our donations actually get where we want them to, actually do the things we want them to. I don’t know how to get the media to recognize the harm they have caused by flying in all of their media personalities to get good footage of them rescuing people. Gosh, that really got great ratings, too bad about the airport bottleneck.
Focus your feelings towards alleviating suffering in your community by reducing the causes of suffering. Teach yourself to recognize this. The big international events literally have hundreds of millions of people hoping to help. If you weren’ t already active in that community, or already trained in response, you will probably have the greatest positive effect if you channel your drive to help the community you live in.
Ready to radically change your life? Let’s hold off for a bit. You may suddenly realize that you need to change your life to help others. This is a wonderful thing, but there is a good chance your feelings are a result of the natural reaction you are experiencing to so much suffering. If you radically change your life now, there is a good chance that you will find yourself either regretting your decision, finding it has caused massive distress within the relationships that you already have. Often, when the stress chemicals finally start to neutralize, you will work to keep them going so that you can continue to feel the fire, but doing so will have a negative long term impact on your life. Take 6 weeks to stop this stress response and restore your homeostatic chemical balance in your brain–then decide. You very well may still choose your new path, and when you do, you will be able to make the massive life transition more deftly, and with much greater effect. The better the quality of your decision, the better you can help others.
Find your way back to feeling normal
If your emotions are strong enough that you feel as if you are losing faith in the community or yourself, please reach out and talk to someone who has devoted their life to this field, and who is recognized by a larger body to be qualified to help. A good first step is to call a mental health hotline. It can feel very difficult to call on your own behalf, directing thoughts inward can lead to feelings that you are putting at risk all your ability to keep it together-but once you get started, it turns out you can talk about concern for yourself without losing control’. In the Seattle area the number for Crisis Clinic is 1-866-427-4747. In many communities in the US you can dial 2-1-1 to get a list of social resources that may have a list of providers.