I spent the early part of this week at a conference for the Federal workforce doing two presentations on integrating a trauma informed approach into their work. Most of these folks were EEO counselors, investigators, or lawyers—and they come into contact with trauma both in the stories and experience of their clients, but also importantly in the vicarious trauma and moral injury that listening to those stories can create. The impetus for bringing this work to this group is the part of a new directive for agencies to prioritize ensuring that employees who are responsible for receiving, investigating, and/or resolving complaints are well-trained to communicate with employees in a trauma-informed manner. This is especially crucial given what we now understand about the effect of trauma on attention, memory, coherent narrative, and time—all of which can impact a person’s ability to report that something harmful has happened to them.

In my presentation I also focused on trauma’s impact on relationship—how a person who has experience repeated relational trauma will often not trust help—and given that workplace complaints need to be registered in a timely manner—the lack of belief in help and relationships mean that people often do not seek help in time.

And while there is a grief and a sadness about the impact of trauma on relationship. The fact that relationship is so central to healing is what makes me hopeful.

A few women stayed after my talk to talk about how to bring these ideas into their agencies—and one of the women thanked me for the presentation and said, “blessed are the peacemakers.” And I paused for a moment and breathed in that sentence.

I love the word ‘peace’ but I can’t say I have an intimate relationship with it.  Peace has either felt like a country too far away to really visit –like Australia-- or a state of being that I can’t fully imagine. And I certainly never considered myself working directly on its behalf—and yet the woman continued: ‘that’s what you are doing – you’re bringing peace. I’m doing it too. It’s your gift. It’s my gift. We’re dropping pieces of peace wherever we can.’

Thanks to delays and a long flight home I had a lot of time to think about this—and essentially begin to make peace with my idea of peace. I realized first that there are just so many ideas we have in our heads and our hearts that we haven’t updated. My ideas of peace were formed in high school and college when the world in my mind was mostly an all-or-nothing affair—and since I didn’t really understand the word ‘safety’ –peace was a far-away abstraction.  My current images and definitions of peace were stuck in this time capsule of beliefs.

But after years of healing—I actually know, in my body, mind and heart what the feeling of safety is. I know that feeling of rest, comfort, refuge, freedom. It is a feeling of expansiveness and ease.  It is a place of wonder, rather than fear. So now if I slow down and look at the word ‘peace’ -- I realize I actually do know something about what peace feels like. I can imagine that peace is a state that I can bring to others through my work—a small ‘p’ kind of peace if you will.

I thought of the reading I’ve done about peace processes in post-conflict countries and how one of the tasks of peace processes is reconciling differences of the past and envisioning a future. Peacebuilding may be the embodiment of integration—the ability to hold past and future in the present: to stay grounded in all three at once.  

But more than anything-- peace building, like the repeated trauma that necessitates it, is about relationship—and therein lies the hope. It may just be semantic—peace building may just be the term for healing and integration at a larger system level—but if so, I love the idea, as the wise woman I met yesterday suggested, of referring to the healing work we do with ourselves and others as peace building. Referring to those who do this work as ‘peacebuilders.’ And I love the idea that our small acts of relationship and healing is connected to a larger peace. We can feel helpless to create peace in a world full of conflict—if we only sit in the idea that to create peace means to tackle the entire world at once. Instead, it feels manageable—even empowering and hopeful to believe that we can build peace in every conversation we have. That we know that our ability to say hello and listen for the response—smile and wait for the smile in return—just those acts—might be weaving a fabric of peace. That if we nurture ourselves and our relationships—we are nurturing peace- “dropping pieces of peace wherever we can.”

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD