Recognising that depression can be dealt with in a ‘paradoxical way’ may be why we in risk and safety struggle to understand it.

A close friend has recently started as a mentor in a program that supports women who have been victims of severe domestic violence, to work their way back into society. Part of the training for this role is the Accidental Counselor program.

My friend shared some of the details of the training and the thing that stood out clearly was that the role of the ‘counselor’ is not to fix people. If we do try to fix people she told me, we often unintentionally create more pain and suffering. The role of the counselor is to accept the other person’s pain and suffering, not to try to eradicate it. Listening and being present are the key things, my friend told me.

Pain and suffering are a normal part of what it means to be human. It is inevitable, essential and crucial in our maturing, growing and being. Pain and suffering are part of what is means to live, albeit not pleasant when we are in the midst of experiencing it. We should not seek to run from pain and suffering, instead we should listen to it and learn from it. In going one step further, we cannot experience true happiness and well-being if we don’t accept pain and suffering. The Buddhists have been onto this for years.

Challengingly in our modern world though, and in particularly in risk and safety, it is tempting to want to fix people when things are not quite running right. We can struggle to accept that pain and suffering are part of a normal life when we constantly hear messages focused on ‘fixing’, ‘helping’ and ‘preventing’. So why it is that humans find it difficult to cope with, and accept, pain and suffering?

This question is not an easy one to answer; however Kushner (2007) explores it when she poses;

It may be that instead of giving us a friendly world that would never challenge us and therefore never make us strong, God gave us a world that would inevitably break our hearts, and compensated for that by planting in our souls the gift of resilience.

(Kushner 2007, p.55)

When one is in the midst of pain and suffering and experiencing all of the feelings and emotions that go with pain, it may be difficult to understand that experiencing the pain is necessary for learning, maturing and importantly as Kushner notes, developing resilience.

So if we do accept that pain and suffering are essential for ‘being’ as a human and developing resilience, how can we go about dealing with it?

To explore this, lets consider the pain and suffering of grief.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her helpful book On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss provides a framework for people to work through grief and grieving. While she has been able to simplify this process down to five key stages of “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance” (Kubler-Ross 2014, p.7), each stage is not described as a step-by-step process. Instead, Kubler-Ross (2014, p.22) outlines that each stage may be difficult and it may not be sequential, rather it can jump in stages. Importantly she also recognises the paradoxical nature of pain;

“As tough as it is, depression can be dealt with in a paradoxical way. See it as a visitor, perhaps an unwelcome one, but one who is visiting whether you like it or not. Make a place for your guest. Invite your depression to pull up a chair with you in front of the fire, and sit with it, without looking for a way to escape. Allow the sadness and emptiness to cleanse you and help you explore your loss in its entirety. When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss. As you grow stronger, it may return from time to time, but that is how grief works.”

(Kubler-Ross 2014, p.22)

Recognising that depression can be dealt with in a ‘paradoxical way’ may be why we in risk and safety struggle to understand it. This is grey and messy, and not an easy concept to get our heads around. This will be especially so if our focus is zero harm, the favoured religion of many in risk and safety. Zero Harm is the epitome of the lack of acceptance for pain and suffering.

Suggesting that people “experience depression”, and “allow the sadness and emptiness to cleanse you” is outlining a process that is not clear-cut and unequivocal. Instead, is it implying that at times, life through a period of grief may be disordered, confusing and challenging.

Can you imagine anyone working in the risk and safety industry suggesting that people should experience pain and suffering and allow sadness and emptiness to cleanse them? Not a chance, that’s when the ‘Crusaders’ quickly jump into save you. For Crusaders, pain and suffering is nothing but an evil menace that must be eradicated and eliminated. You can hear this all through the language of safety, especially those that espouse ‘zero’.

I wonder what lessons there are in this story for those of us who work in risk and safety? How do we go about practicing more ‘counselling’ and less ‘crusading’? What is it in our language and practices that suggests that we cannot handle pain and suffering? How can we better understand the paradoxical nature of risk and safety; that is how can ‘pain and suffering’ and ‘safety’ co-exist?

I wish my friend all the best in her new role as a mentor; in her listening, in her being and in her ‘meeting’ with the woman that she will support. She knows that the woman doesn’t need fixing; she will do that all by herself.

As usual, we’d love to hear your feedback, experiences, critique and ideas.

Author:         Robert Sams

Phone:            0424 037 112

Email:             robert@dolphyn.com.au

Web:               www.dolphyn.com.au

Facebook:      Follow Dolphyn on Facebook

“…..every human brain has not one, but two systems of thought. They called them Systems One and System Two. The ancient Greeks arrived at this conception of humanity a little earlier than scientists-personified the two systems in the form of gods Dionysus and Apollo. We know them better as Feeling and Reason”

Daniel Gardner – The Science of Fear (p.16)

We’ve all been afraid of something at one time or another. The classic situation that I remember as a kid was being afraid of the dark; it haunted me for years and stopped me doing a lot of things. In more recent times, I recall being afraid of two guys who ‘looked like terrorists’ when I was on an international flight soon after 9/11 (more on this later). I recognise that fear has impacted my life in many ways. It can be debilitating, restrictive and a source of much anxiety. Today, I remain fearful of many things; least of all the fear of rejection, loneliness and isolation.

It could be easy though when we are not in the midst of a fearful situation to think that fear has no real influence on how we feel or how we make decisions or judgments. But perhaps this is because we are just not aware of how fear works? If our approach to understanding fear is focused on rational and logical decision-making, perhaps we only understand a small part of the story. In this piece I explore fear and try to understand how it makes us feel, why it can have such an impact on our lives and understand how it impacts on our decisions about risk.

READ THE FULL POST FIRST PUBLISHED HERE

I Just Don’t Know

I was talking with a friend recently who works in risk and safety. They shared a story about how a relatively serious incident had occurred at their company and despite a very thorough and detailed examination of the events that lead up to and followed the incident, the reason(s) that it occurred could not be found. It was a complete mystery as to why the things happened the way that they did. My friend said to me “I just don’t know how this come about, it’s got me buggered”.

I remember reading in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow his theory about how if people don’t know the answer to a question asked of them, one option they can take is provide an answer to a different question on a topic that they do know about. Politicians, through spin, are obvious examples of this, but Kahneman’s point is that this is something that we are all prone to do at times, particularly when there are social pressures in place that make it awkward not to provide no answer.

In your work in risk and safety, have you ever felt the pressure to provide an answer in a tight timeframe? Have you ever provided an answer that was plausible and ‘could be’ right, but you weren’t quite sure, because you didn’t have the time to think things through, if it was?

Have you ever made stuff up just to complete a report on time? Stuff that might have been right, sounded like it was right, and to others could be right, but to be honest, you couldn’t be sure? These may be challenging questions, but we can learn so much by reflecting on them and it can be useful to further examine the social arrangements and context in which we may make such decisions.

It can be a challenge in risk and safety at times to say “I just don’t know”. There are often social, cultural and organizational factors and expectations that ‘answers will be found’. Systematic and linear approaches to incident reviews are often mute on such factors and expectations, the focus is usually “Just Get to the Bottom of it”. When this is the focus, when our incident reviews are solely systematic reviews, do we limit opportunities for learning from the incident? Could it be that the more mechanistic our response, the less we ‘think’ and reflect humanly about what has happened?

So why is this? Why do we find it terribly difficult at times to say “I just don’t know”.

Read the full article that I first published here.