Idaho State University Institute of Rural Health
National Child Traumatic Stress Network Rural Archive (coming soon!)
Preface To Secondary
Traumatic Stress:
Self-Care Issues for Clinicians, Researchers & Educators, 2nd
Ed.
Reprinted here by permission of Sidran Press, All Rights Reserved
ã Sidran Press, 1999. You may make copies of this paper as long as you (a) do not change the document, (b) you do not sell it for a profit, and (c) you do give credit to the author and the publisher of this book: Stamm, B. H. (1990). Secondary Traumatic Stress: Self-Care Issues for Clinicians, Researchers and Educators, 2nd Ed. Lutherville, MD: Sidran Press.
The better part of a decade has passed since I first committed to paper the words that formed the genesis of this book and which appears in the preface of the 1995 edition. They are for me, as interesting and baffling as when I first wrote them. I am a scientist and I value my ability to think logically. However, at times as I go about my work in the traumatic stress field, it is difficult for me to differentiate between my feelings and my thoughts. I am caught reflecting on the ebb and flow of hope and frustration that is so much a part of our work.
When I was completing the first edition of this book, AIDS was rampaging through the world. Now rather than learning how to die from AIDS, many are struggling to learn to live with AIDS. There is no cure, but there is hope. During that same time, the new South Africa emerged from the odium of the apartheid; the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches and the governments of Canada and Australia apologized for their role in the genocide of indigenous peoples; the PLO and Israel agreed to extend Palestinian self-rule into the West Bank; and there was the return of home rule to the countries of the former Soviet Union, and a peace agreement was reached in Northern Ireland. The OJ Simpson trial brought to the world's attention the horror of family violence and while producing mixed feelings about the guilt or innocence of Simpson, brought consensus against family violence and racism.
Concomitantly, there has been a global rise in the number of children who were soldiers. Eighty-three percent of the men Liberia were killed in a civil war that had its roots in American Slavery 200 years earlier. As the world watched in awe while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heroically staggered forward toward healing in South Africa, warfare continued in the eastern South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. During the Northern Ireland peace process, a bomb blast killed 28 people tore at the hearts of the people in Omagh and around the world. Between April and July of 1996 Hutu extremists killed as many as 800,000 people. In 1995 when I wrote about the spice basket from Burundi, we could speak in terms of the loss of a village. Now we speak in terms of loss of a people. To our growing horror, the loss of a culture or a nation or a people is not limited to tribes in Africa. Who among us has not stood and held our breath willing the Dayton Peace Accord success in the Balkans. Around the globe, eyes are trained each day to CNN world news and we pray for coverage of peace rather than violence wrought by the despair.
Why do we move forward only to see new horrors arise? Why does terror overwhelm our best efforts to gain a foothold in the light? It is naïve to hope for a cure for terror. Nonetheless, I think we have to get up each day and do something. Somehow, we are existentially bound to go out and do business with the world. How we are in relationship with others is a direct reflection of our relationship with the deepest knowledge of our spirits. We move forward as individuals and as groups only to discover a dark area, one that frightens us or allows for unique self-expression and we may falter as individuals and as groups.
Most of us have current and historical understanding of light and dark; of light, either shining in the darkness or the darkness that does not understand the light. I would submit that when we align ourselves with the uncomprehending and incomprehensible darkness, we lose our vision and simultaneously find that it is too difficult to continue the journey in the light. Perhaps this is the best understanding I can offer of what it means to suffer secondary traumatic stress. By perceiving the light in the dark, by knowing there is hope when those we seek to help those who feel hopeless, we are both heroes and at risk. How shall we differentiate between our heroic and our dark times?
I wrote this poem in the fall of 1994 as a question to myself when I was between the light and the dark. For me, it represented my interior battlefields though it can easily be applied to the struggles of war. It still stands as a harsh condemnation of my own arrogance in believing that I act heroically and a sharp reminder of how important it is that I continue to try.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
There is no glory there.
Only the blackness of eternal loss
and hope that is despair.
There is no glory for the should.
The battle steals away
the splendor of the soul in light
and takes its power for the fight.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
There is no hope in that field.
There is no glory for the dead,
whose souls are given for the fight,
who will walk empty from that night.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
That I could turn this enemy with joy in my voice,
calling it to join with me
to see the unity of light and dark.
As if we could see who was whom.
Am I the light?
Should I so presume to wonder if I could
walk this path with clarity of vision?
Am I the light?
Should I so presume?
Perhaps not.
I would not so stand here on this field
if I were of the light.
Never would I have turned
from the truth long enough to see this path.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
Run
Run. It is not a beauteous sight.
It is not glory.
It is not what we believed.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
That I could reach across this field
to the other who stands and prays
"O that I would go to battle not this day"
I know as I hear the sharpening of the sword
that no one has the heart for this.
There is no joy in the battle
There is no joy in the fight.
O that we could go to battle not this day.
That we would reach to the other and say,
Unite for the time that we may,
to stand in the light
and know the futility of the battle.
O that I would go to battle not this day.
But I will fight on.
I know no other way.
It is finished.
There is no place to be
but in the battle deceived.
I move, only to discover a frightening dark place and falter. Can I presume to make a difference? Or, must I stay in the battle deceived? I have to believe that I can make a difference; that I can honor that existential obligation to chose light. I also must remember that the darkest of my incomprehensible darkness is my own deception. A deception that tells me the world is all darkness or that I, alone, am the light.
Discernment comes from my hope and from my community.
This book was, and in this second edition, continues to be, about learning to live well with the joy and sorrow of caring. I believe that for those of us called to perceive the darkness and the light the world looks very different than it does to others. For we see clearly the darkness. Together, we must stay rooted, looking with hope toward the horizon for dawn's first light. This book is dedicated to that watch.
B. Hudnall Stamm
Saint Valentine's Day 1999
Mink Creek, Idaho
This page was last updated on 11/18/01 23:47
© B. Hudnall Stamm, 1999