First-Responder Trauma: A New Framework for Activists
Effective movements to transform our world will emerge from cultures that integrate both resistance and healing.
Most people today are experiencing ecological trauma.
Whether it’s attached to anxiety about catastrophes like global warming and species extinction, toxic pollution, or to seeing beloved places destroyed, these experiences are ubiquitous. There are even new terms — solastalgia and climate anxiety — to desribe this. And while this piece focuses mainly on ecological trauma, racism, patriarchy, war, colonization, and increasingly dangerous extreme weather events share many similarities and are also creating and re-creating trauma.
Many of us also suffer the acute stress of front-line organizing. Direct action activists, water protectors, and community organizers are first responders. We go towards tension and danger. This is psychologically, physically, and spiritually stressful, and can result in trauma and burnout.
These first responder traumas are functionally equivalent to those experienced by Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), firefighters, police, and soldiers. As with other first responders, facing these issues and continuing to do the work is essential. That’s why activists and organizations should deliberately work to mitigate, heal, and integrate the traumas we suffer.
For those who are new here, I’m Max Wilbert, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass and co-author of ‘Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It.’ This is Biocentric, a newsletter focused on sustainability, greenwashing, and building a resistance movement to defend the planet.
The Responder Stress Continuum
Stress is inevitable in life, and inescapable in industrial civilization, which is a profoundly unnatural way to live.
But stress injury — which is what happens when transient experiences go untreated and become long-term health impacts — doesn’t need to be. For decades, medical professionals have been studying the effects of stress on first responders. One result of such research is a diagnostic tool called the "responder stress continuum.”
[The following is redundant for most of you, but I have some blind readers so I’m describing what the image shows].
The responder stress continuum describes four states of well-being for first responders.
In the first state, "ready," which is marked in a green color, people have a sense of mission, are spiritually, emotionally, and physically healthy, are emotionally available, getting healthy sleep, feeling a sense of gratitude and vitality, and have room for complexity in their lives.
In the next state, “reacting,” which is marked in a yellow color, people are losing sleep, experiencing a change in attitude, feeling critical and avoidant, losing interest, and feeling distant from others. They may feel that they have a short fuse, begin cutting corners and losing creativity in their work, have a lack of motivation, and feel fatigue.
The orange state, “injured,” deepens these issues. People begin to have worse sleep issues, feelings of emotional numbness and burnout, and may experience nightmares. They feel disengaged and exhausted, and may experience other physical symptoms of stress. They feel trapped, isolated, and alone, and their relationships suffer. Stress is becoming a downward spiral.
Finally, the responder stress continuum describes the “critical” or red state as defined by insomnia, feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, panic, depression, and intrusive thoughts. People in this state often feel lost or out of control, blame others or themselves, and isolate. They may be experiencing broken relationships and suicidal ideation.
For people who are in the yellow or orange zone, self care and help from family members, friends, co-workers, and others can help them move back towards the green. People who are in the red zone are in need of professional help which is beyond the scope of this article. There are resources linked at the bottom of this page for those who need help.
Stress kills
As I mentioned a moment ago, without resilience and the ability to heal, stress can transform from a transient experience into a long-term health emergency.
Chronic stress leads to increased rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, headaches, obesity, autoimmune diseases, suicide, and other illnesses. On an emotional level, chronic stress often leads to self-isolation, shame and doubt, loss of trust, bitterness, breakdown of relationships, self-medication, and addictive behaviors.
It’s worth talking about addiction in detail, because I believe it far more common that we admit.
Dr. Gabor Maté, in his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction,” describes addiction as a survival technique — a form of dissociation — that people use to deal with stress. I used to believe that addiction meant drug or alcohol abuse. But, it is also possible to be addicted to food, sex, unhealthy relationships, shopping, gambling, emotions (like anger, confusion, or indignation), dopamine-inducing technology like social media, video games, pornography, TV, and many other things.
It’s possible to be a high-functioning addict who to all appearances has a normal, healthy, and successful life.
Maté writes:
“At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable.
Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction—and it serves the same purpose.
‘One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.’ So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.”
Rather than looking at addiction as a rare problem, I now see it as almost ubiquitous in modern society. Dissociation is our cultural default: numb the pain rather than feeling it.
Sacrifice vs. care
There is a tendency in radical activist circles to minimize the effects of stress. This is a sort of patriarchal holdover that tells us to “man up,” even to the point of exhaustion and burnout. A friend and I have been involved in a years-long debate on this. He argues that resistance movements are always fueled by martyrs. To be effective, he says people need to sacrifice their health, well-being, freedom, and even their lives for our causes.
This is true. Resistance movements share some similarities with militaries: both depend on individual sacrifice. Yet organizations like the U.S. military have adopted the stress continuum tool and mindfulness meditation because these methods impact success. The effectiveness of soldiers on the front lines of empire (who are tasked with maintaining Kennan’s unjust wealth disparity in a modern version of manifest destiny) is decreased by untreated stress.
If a patriarchal and genocidal institution like the U.S. military can recognize this and change the way they operate, we activists must be able to as well.
On the other end of the spectrum, some people have told me the answer to ecological stress is to stop being involved. But for people like me, that is not an option. Like many first responders, we find great meaning in our work.
My trauma
I recently saw a powerful and disturbing performance art piece that reminded me how deep the trauma of frontline activism has settled into my body.
The video shows a naked woman standing in a field of grass. A bucket excavator appears and begins digging next to her. It excavates a deep trench on one side, then moves to the other. Soon the woman is surrounded by a moat, standing isolated on an island of grass. Her nudity and vulnerability presents a stark contrast to the hardness of the steel machine.
As I watched this video, my stomach churned — both because of how powerful it is, and because I have seen human beings run to put their bodies between machines such as this one and our planet.
These people were risking their lives, and I have done so too, in order to stop these machines. And every moment of it, we know that we could be crushed and cut as easily as the Earth. Each year, hundreds of land defenders are killed, and millions of acres of wildlands are destroyed.
Personally, I have been threatened with violence, stood alone in the face of danger, am being sued by a wealthy corporation, been harassed by the FBI, smeared on national media, experienced abandonment and betrayal, and carried many grave responsibilities. I have only been able to endure this stress because of supportive friends and family, a resilient practice of self-care, and my background in risky sports which has given me practice in managing danger and maintaining emotional clarity despite fear.
The role of joy in radical activism
Lithuanian revolutionary Emma Goldman is most well known for a quote which is actually falsely attributed to her: “If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution." This is based on a paraphrase of her actual writings, which include the assertion that everyone has a right “to [a] beautiful, radiant” life.
Goldman’s saying has often been dismissed as frivolous, but it reflects an important part of a healthy, multi-generational culture of resistance: a vision which is not only negative, but which encompasses joy.
For my part, I have come to see that finding joy is part of resistance to industrial civilization. Alienation is the calling card of modern mass culture, and so for me, re-connection is an essential piece of holistic resistance. My process looks something like this:
Find joy. Swim in wild creeks, rivers, and lakes. Play sports and games with friends. Climb and run. Find time to go to wild places for backpacking, camping, foraging, hunting, or fishing. Sing in the shower, dance in the kitchen, and enjoy hobbies that are completely non-productive.
Invest in relationships. Friends and family are more precious than any amount of money, even when they have nothing to do with politics.
Seek peace. Meditate, and try to extend that peaceful silence to other parts of life. Set aside the constant drop-feed of negative news. It only feeds an addiction to despair and drains energy to take action. Avoid addictive technologies, websites, and apps. Make time to relax.
Work to heal. Consider therapy, journaling, self-reflection, attending men’s or women’s groups, working to undo the conditioning related to patriarchy and racism, learning about and healing intergenerational family trauma, reparenting via IFS / ACA techniques, letting go of the past, and cultivating peace within. As Gabor Maté reminds us, “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.”
Have a spiritual practice. Pray and ask for support from ancestors, the universe, nature, spirits, god, or any other “higher power.” Ask for strength, let go of what cannot be controlled, and have faith.
(I would be lying if I said I’m an expert at these practices. I often lose the path. These are aspirational goals, reminders that this is the direction to move in.)
I’m in recovery from Western Civilization
In her 1994 book My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning explains that traumatic disconnection is the norm in modern society. She writes:
“Because of the built-in displacement of our lives from the earth, … a traumatized state is not merely the domain of the Vietnam veteran or the survivor of childhood abuse. It is the underlying condition of the domesticated psyche.”
We are wild animals who have been domesticated, Glendinning argues, and like any animal trapped in a cage and forced to live unnatural lives, our bodies, minds, and spirits rebel. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s famous quote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” (which is actually a paraphrase of a passage he wrote in 1960), speaks to this truth.
Glendinning’s book emerges from her engagement with 12-step addiction recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. My stereotype of these programs was that they were sad places where those deep in addiction went to find salvation in the last place they could: religion. Not long ago, I dismissed these programs with a fundamentally classist perspective: people like me don't go to 12-step programs. We find what little help we need from scientists, therapists, doctors, and other professionals — preferably with lots of letters after their name.
How reflective of a civilized mentality.
Yet again, as seems to happen in life, I have been humbled by circumstance. It is probably only because of my work with indigenous communities over the past four years, during which I participated in various ceremonies and prayers, that I have become open (not just intellectually, but at the level of soul) to a different way of perceiving the world: one that is both deeply reverent of the sacred and yet does not emerge from a patriarchal sky god tradition. As Vine Deloria Jr. said:
“the primary [difference between Western and indigenous worldviews] is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduces things to objects, whether they’re living or not.
The implications for this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.”
Heal to be more human — and more effective
Why do we fight to protect the planet and stop injustice? Is it because we hate evil? Or, becuase we love good? There is a subtle yet significant difference between the two. As Tolkein wrote, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
To insist either on personal healing in isolation from the world, or on social change without a recognition of the role which personal healing plays in that process is to condemn us to repeat cycles of trauma.
Without being linked to political struggle, self-care becomes yet another Global North lifestyle turned into multi-trillion dollar industry. As Adrianne Tamara Arache said, “if my healing only keeps looping back to myself, and doesn’t ultimately lead to reassociation with the Earth and my work to be part of it, then I’m just a casualty of healing-themed consumerism.”
Yet without rooted, soulful practices of self- and collective-care, I am convinced that our movements will flounder. Much of this conviction comes from my own experiences in activism. Over and over, I have observed people reacting from ingrained trauma patterns with emotions, words, and behaviors that are harmful to collective organizing efforts. I have done this myself.
If there is one thing we will need in order to face the challenges the future will bring, it is our highest selves — not our addicted, traumatized, reactive selves, but our selves in full bloom. So, as we seek to change the whole world, we should not neglect the one person we have the greatest power to affect.
Resources
The national Suicide and Crisis lifeline provides 24/7 free and confidential support. Call or text 988.
The Good Grief Network is a “peer-to-peer support group for people overwhelmed by eco-distress and collective trauma from social and ecological injustices.” I know a few of the good folks involved in starting this program.
For inner child work and healing from family and multi-generational trauma, you may be interested in the Internal Family Systems model, Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families, and the book “Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child” by Thich Nhat Hanh (the audiobook is free on YouTube).
PS — After leaving my job in April, I am looking for work. Please contact me if you have any ideas. Another great way to help is by subscribing and sharing this newsletter with friends. Thank you!
Thank you, Will. I needed to read that as it seems the US, France and the European Union are descending into Fascism.
Thank you Max. I really appreciate your connection between activism and self-care. It doesn't even seem like a connection to me at all, but more like a necessary integration that has been stunted and maimed by our cultural norms.
Not to get super philosophical, but it brings to mind Nietzsche's "tragic man," who is a healthy integration between the Apollonian and Dionysian man. The former lives in the world of illusion and dreaming and art, participating in a way that denies the inevitable endings and the many limitations of Earth and humans. The latter sees through the illusion of endless growth but is psychically taken down by both the facade and its lack of sincerity and the limitations to the point he cannot engage. Play doesn't enter the Dionysian experience at all. The so-called "tragic man" integrates the two. I see great activists aware of the illusion of industrial civilization, yet if they can playfully (at times) engage in activism infusing curiosity and imaginative/relational spirit with wild nature, then this seems like a healing counterpart to the work.