Future Here Now: The whole human matters
This is a selection from Future Here Now, a newsletter that helps you understand and get ready for a Future — in our businesses, our communities, and ourselves — that will look very different from what we’ve learned. Each newsletter includes three articles and commentaries, and periodic access to other resources, like the Future Ready Guided Journal, coming out later this month. Learn more at wiseeconomy.substack.com
For several years, I served as an informal surrogate mom for a young man who had experienced massive amounts of trauma. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, lack of health care, homelessness, etc. He scored a 9 out of 10 on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. One of the many things that stunned me as I tried to come alongside him was the way that his traumas blocked his abity to solve problems, to make decisions, to plan for virtually anything. It was as though his vision was fogged in, and because he could not believe that anything good could exist outside of that fog, he seemed to freeze in place, not unlike my pet rabbit.
This article focuses on refugees who are children or teens, but the insights here are crucial to all of us. Whether they’re escaping Afghanistan’s totalitarians or Haiti’s gang violence or North Carolina’s natural disaster, people who come to our communities and businesses increasingly come with the baggage and trauma of dislocation and loss and fear. And we’ve learned in the past decade about how deeply trauma changes the wiring of our brains — changes how we deal with stressors, how we problem solve and plan for our futures, and even how epigenetic inheritances change how our genes are expressed as a result of traumas — for generations.
Helping people work through traumas and build mental health is important, but we often treat that issue as Someone Else’s Problem. And in the Industrial Era and before, we could get away with that, economically, because what we requiring of our labor wasn’t their creativity and problem solving, but their hands and their backs and their ability to do what they’re told — all of which can still happen if you are experiencing post traumatic stress.
But of course that’s not the case anymore. We are asking people to use very high level thinking and collaborative skills, but a high percentage of our workers are grappling with unresolved traumas. And as climate disasters and global dislocation continue to accelerate, we will find that more and more of our best employees are already carrying burdens that defy imagination.What makes us think that our companies can work at the level that we’re asking if we’re not prepared to help them overcome those barriers?
Helping that young man didn’t take anything special. It took encouraging him, helping him learn some decision-making strategies, reinforcing his intrinsic value and giving him some of our extra space and resources when he needed it. He’s made an incredible recovery, and I am proud as hell of who he has become.
It doesn’t take much. It mostly takes willingness to toss out our old assumptions about how people **should** be, and how our businesses and communities **should** work. And as I look at what our businesses and communities have to do to thrive, now and into the foreseeable future, this is not Someone Else’s Job.
It’s very much our job now.