The Four Commitments | Part 5: Fourth Commitment - Look for Joy
Bridget Vogt has spent the past few years studying what is known in our field as “trauma informed care.”
Simply put, she has learned that when bad things happen to us, especially as children, our brains grow in response to it, seeking out stability and safety. Over time, we are wired to relate to ourselves and the world around us partially by the things that hurt us. The more of these painful experiences we have, the more our behavior might show up as a problem, for us, and for other people.
Bridget first started studying it as a way to empathize with people, especially people with disabilities, who were labeled with “bad behavior.” She learned powerful and important ways to understand what someone might have been through, and even better, learned how to relate to them and to create experiences with them that might help them heal.
It’s a rich, deep, and emerging field of understanding human beings. All of us would benefit from learning more, in particular about resiliency and the kinds of things that help us integrate our painful histories and move forward in good health.
One day, Bridget showed me a list of “Traumatizing Events.” The first half of the list was familiar to me, headed by the clinical term “Adverse Childhood Experiences” (known by the social service acronym as ACE Scores). Things like “abusive parents,” or “food insecurity,” or “death of a family member” were on there. “Drug abuse in the house,” “sexual assault,” and “family member in jail” were also listed.
I wasn’t surprised. These are horrible things for children to go through and I could easily see how any number or combination of those things could disrupt a kid’s development and lead to a tough future for them.
But that wasn’t what Bridget was showing me.
Below that chart was another chart: “Adult Stressors.”
It was a list of experiences that caused trauma for adults.
I could have guessed the first few:
Death of a spouse or child
Incarceration of self or spouse
Diagnosis with a terminal illness of self or spouse
But there, sitting near the top, below those horrible experiences, was something that stopped me in my tracks.
Birth of a child with a developmental disability.
My world was rocked. Bridget and I looked at each other, but neither of us could speak.
We had both been working to advance inclusion of people with disabilities for 20 years at that point, and this was a new perspective we had not really considered.
At first, we were mad, and we wanted to reject it altogether. But ignoring the reality of how the world sees “disability” has never been a strategy for us. That’s dealing in fantasy, ignoring the real work of what we’re actually up against.
The more we thought about it, the more we knew that it was real. Almost every single parent of a child with a disability we knew was in some kind of “special needs support group.” Organizations offered trainings in “dealing with a diagnosis” and “coping with grief” of the birth of a child with a disability.
But even though we knew it was real, we knew we had to resist it. We knew so many good people and we had spent decades helping discover and develop their gifts to offer the world. And we saw evidence of ways their families’ and neighbors’ lives were better off because of their birth.
No, it wasn’t the birth of a baby with a disability that was causing the sadness. What caused the sadness was a culture that made the lives of people with disabilities and their families hard.
That was the true source of trauma. A culture that said your child didn’t belong, or that there was something so wrong about them that only experts would want to be around them, no one would ever want to hire them and they’d never have friends.
That story our society was telling about disability was the problem.
As we worked on developing the Four Commitments, we knew the story the world told about disability, and we knew that if we were going to take a step in a new direction, we needed to step away from the culture of commiseration that surrounded families of people with disabilities.
We had to step into joy.
It felt radical to write that word down, almost like it wasn’t allowed. And it felt risky to name commiseration as something to turn away from, especially because we believe in empathy and embracing vulnerabilities as a way of gaining strength and relating to each other.
But while it’s important for people to share shoulders to cry on, knowing the tears were misdirected toward a child with a disability was something we just couldn’t bear.
So looking for and embracing joy became our 4th and final commitment. And it’s shown to be one of the most powerful.
When we state it out loud and follow that with directing our sadness toward anti-disability culture, everyone in the room breathes easier. Some people find it takes a load off of their heart, almost as if they knew there was something wrong about seeing their child as a problem.
And that joy keeps growing. Families of children with disabilities have found the joy of friends, allies, and co-conspirators who want the same kinds of communities they do. They’ve discovered a new purpose in their family. They’ve learned to see their children in a new way, and found a way to balance and channel their disappointment into action that brings a new energy.
The projects build new patterns and healing rhythms. Their connections with others around positive experiences in their community helps remind all involved of the gift their lives are to each other, and living it out creates sense-embodied memories that last.
That’s the healing power of this commitment. By looking for joy, and resisting the temptation to point our fingers at people with disabilities as the source of a family’s sadness, we are taking an important step toward social justice and building a more decent world.
We are noticing the role our culture plays in leaving people with disabilities out. That places responsibility on all of shoulders, rather than sitting around blaming the victims for what’s happened to them.
And it elevates people with disabilities and their families from the role of “client” or “recipient of charity” or “problem” into the role of colleague. They step into their rightful place of partner in healing the very culture that’s hurting them.
And how do we start to heal a traumatized culture? The same way we start to heal a traumatized person: new patterns over time, full of relationships, reflecting and affirming everyone’s strengths, with rich sensory experiences that give us moments and memories of the goodness of a connected life.
Sounds like Starfire community-building projects, right?