Can We Talk About Recovery?

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome to If I'm Honest. On today's episode, we are talking about recovery. Now, first I want to give a big shout out to my friends. I got the phone a friend kind of friends, and sometimes you just need to call your friend to help you fill in the gaps and find the missing piece. So shout out to my friends. Today we're talking about recovery, and we're talking about it in a way that I hope isn't condescending, or redundant, or patronizing, because you already know how to do this. You recover in some way, somehow, in your everyday relationships because it's a necessary thing. of maintaining and building successful relationships. So you already know what to do and you've already done it. But I want to talk about it here in this space and I want to define what it is. And I want to talk about what the characteristics of recovery are, what they look like. I want to talk about the space that we occupy when we're not recovering well. And typically our lid is flipped and we are in fight or flight. Or another way of looking at it is we use the fence mechanism. instead of recovery, and then what the ramifications of not recovering well look like, and why it's so important that we recover well. Um, so come on in the room. Let's talk about it. All right. Now, before I get too far into the episode, I want to name something that I think is the elephant in the room that we've got to keep addressing, right? And it is the language of social justice. Invariably, we have to talk about, um, The reality that recovery is a process that must happen as a result of causing harm. And I feel like this phrase, causing harm, is like this catch all. And it disallows us and absolves us from naming the actual thing. But the process of recovery, right, is to first name the thing that we've done. What we said, what we did, how we harmed another person. We have to name it, right? We have to take ownership of that and apologize sincerely. We have to seek counsel on what it looks like to mend the relationship and rebuild the trust, right? And so that's the process of recovery. And I feel like sometimes it gets lost because we're using this phrase that's serving as this catch all. And I a little bit feel like It's going through the same iterative process that I'm sorry went through for me as a kid. Like when I was four and I slapped the shit out of my brother who's 18 months younger than me, my mom would say, keisha, don't hit, say you're sorry. And at four, the only thing I could do is regurgitate language, right? The only thing I could do was say I'm sorry because my mom said say sorry. But as I got older, she required more of me. And then that I'm sorry changed to for what? Right? I'm sorry for what? And I did. I adapted. I was able to add the reason why I was sorry. Right? But then even when I got older still and I personally experienced harm, I started to learn what a sincere apology was and meant and what I needed in order to feel seen, heard, and understood and that the person who harmed me had good intentions, was sincere in their apology, and were able to. Appropriately take the steps of naming the thing that they did. acknowledging the harm that was caused as a result of that, sincerely apologizing for that harm, and seeking my counsel on what it would look like for us to mend and recover and restore the trust that was lost in the process. And that's what I want us to do here. I don't want us to like get lost in the sauce of language and just say the thing and we're actually glossing over and not being productive. in our interactions with people. And this is so important for this work. It's important that we go through a real process of recovery because we work with a vulnerable population and we have power in the fact that we are hearing and able bodied, right? We have power over this population and we have a real strong ability of oppressing. And oppression is huge. It has historic roots. It has long history of harm, and we have the potential of triggering that. That's a much bigger thing than slapping the shit out of somebody. And so if we don't know how to recover when we slap the shit out of somebody at four, right, at four, then how can we start addressing systemic issues that we cause? Historic issues that are found in our being. Of being hearing people, of being white people, of being upper class, of being fill in the blank, right? We have to be able to be recovering. I know that you're doing it, but we have to be able to recover well in practice and do that every day so that when we get to the hard stuff, we can do it then too. And just like that, we've covered the characteristics of recovery. And so now I want to talk about. The space that we occupy when we aren't recovering well and the defense mechanisms that arise and what that looks like and how we can come up with strategies of how to do that better. But first I want to tell you a story about grad school. So I graduated from Eastern Kentucky University in 2012 and what I knew at that time is that I was not qualified or ready to go into the workforce. And so when I didn't get hired at my internship site at RIT, I went straight to grad school because I knew I wasn't ready. And while I was in grad school, I worked at the same time. But I was mindful. I was really mindful. And what I did was I was trying to select jobs. that I was qualified for that would allow me to grow and bumble and make mistakes and still do the work, right? And inevitably, I picked jobs that I couldn't really tell that I wasn't qualified for. So I show up to the assignment and I didn't think about what the implications of me doing a bad job in this space were. I didn't think about how I was impacting taking the power of deaf people by representing them poorly, by not understanding them, by making them sound, and also me sound, like a hot mess express. I didn't have any coping mechanisms at the time. And so I was in this kind of self centered place of believing I was bad. I was bad. And not just a bad interpreter, but a bad person, right? And so I think shame is uniquely tied to the way in which we recover. This shame cycle was an experience I was having too regularly. And then one day, uh, My cohort was asked to volunteer and do pro bono work at the Open Enrollment Fair at Gallaudet. And while we were there, right, I had a colleague who was interpreting for a well known deaf couple, uh, who has very difficult language when you're brand new. And I was sitting across the room, but I was kind of watching the interaction happen. And what I saw, is I saw him fake it. I saw him pretend as if he understood, and when the deaf person said, I don't understand you, he dropped it. He responded as if it was a conversation she said to her husband and not a conversation she was trying to also have with him, right? And at the time, here's what I knew about me is I couldn't have done it any better. And so what I realized in that moment is that this shame cycle wasn't uniquely tied to keisha. It wasn't just a keisha thing. It was happening all over the place with newer interpreters. Who are faking it until they made it. And so I decided to do my master's thesis on shame. At the time I was reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. If you haven't read it, go pick it up. It's fantastic. And what I realized is that things that she talked about in the book was the things I've experienced in that work and this thing that I saw my colleague do. And I wanted to find out who was in the shame cycle. So what I did was interviewed six newer interpreters who were a year and under, maybe five years and under, I can't remember, it's been a long time. And then the other six interpreters I interviewed had 12 plus years experience. And what I found was that the people who had more experience, more time in the game, Recovered much better, making mistakes where it wasn't tied to identity, it was tied to the work. And I know that we say this kind of cliche thing, separate the work from self, all the time, we say that kind of stuff all the time. And, we have an image of who we are, who we want to be. And, and we also have an image of how we expect other people and what happens as a result of how someone is responding us being misaligned, we, we melt down, right? Like we are triggered and get into a space of fight or flight, or in this case we defend, right? And so instead of recovering well, what happens as a result of that is we started using defense mechanisms like Violent forms of silence, where we just pretend like nothing happened, or we justify our actions by what we say, or what we do, or we don't stop to be self aware of the actions that we have on the situation, and we just keep doing the thing that causes harm. And how productive is that, right? When we're in that space, we are not able to clearly see that what we are doing is oppressive, right? We're not able to see that this access isn't better than no access. We're not able to see that we are complicit and participating in the oppression of the system. And we're communicating to the system that they don't have to book qualified interpreters. Uh, one interpreter is fine. Okay, fine. I don't, I don't care. Right? Like we are. Actively focused on the wrong thing because of this misalignment with our sense of self. That's crazy. And it's human. All right. So what we understand here is that when we are triggered and we have this misalignment of our brains and who we are, our sense of ourselves, who we want to be, when we have that misalignment, we get to a space where our brain is like, hell no, I'm not going. That's not me. I don't know who that is. I don't know I don't care what's happening, and as a result of that, we are trying to get back in alignment with how we see ourselves, or how we want to see ourselves, or who we're becoming, right? And we're working towards doing that, but it also means that we cannot recover. because we cannot think about what's actually important, right? And so we have to figure out what strategies work. What are some strategies that you use in order to regulate yourself when you're in this kind of dysregulated misaligned space? What do you do? I can tell you that as I have gotten better as an interpreter, it's not hard for me to say I don't got it, fam. I don't got it. Can you take it? I'm not qualified to be here. Because now those things don't mean anything about keisha. In fact, they mean that I am self aware enough to know when I'm not in this space. Right? Now, I think this same process happens when, as a white person, you say some really fucked up shit, right? And someone calls you on it, and you're like But I'm not racist because, but I've done, but I've said, but I, my friend is, but my, and all of those things, I'm being facetious right now with the friend piece, but all of those things really are good work towards who you want to be. Right? They're good work in the alignment of who you are. But when you're called out for a mistake, for a process of thinking that is harmful, that is oppressive, and it misaligns, then you're not able to regulate to a space to say, I hear you, I see you, I will do better. And these are the steps I'm going to take. A couple years ago, I did this job with this intern, and I can remember, uh, and I think about this, I actually just talked to him about this recently, where we were doing this job, and he was teamed with this really good interpreter who knew his shit, right? This interpreter's got eight dollar words, he sounds smooth, He's doing a fantastic job. However, it was this intern's turn to voice, right? And so he's struggling and he's having a hard time with it. So he inevitably hands the mic to his team and then he shuts down. He disconnects and I flag him down and I said, feed your team, right? Support him. At the end of the job, I gave him feedback and it was a two day job and I gave him feedback and I said, like, he had it. And it was great that he did, but your job is still to support him. Your job is still to stay in the job, right? That's, that's your job. Your job is to be a team to your team. It is to pat him on the back and tell him he's doing a good job. Your job is to stay in it. And what we can see now based on this conversation is he just wasn't recovering well. And so the process of recovery is that we, when we. Are triggered and dysregulated. How do we re regulate so that we can go back into the assignment, so that we can take critique and not make that mean something about us, not make that mean that we are bad, that we can listen, that we can respond appropriately in that situation. Now I'm happy to say that the following day we came back to the job and I came in and I said, uh, I'm gonna support today. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stand over here and sign and you're gonna voice with him again. And you're going to take the mic. And he did. And he so I have to interject here with a new form of video. I am in a hotel, because I am traveling for work this week. And I get to the hotel and pull up my hard drive and realize that the last two sections of the episode are muted. They don't have any audio. So I've got to do them again with a different mic setup. I'm using the mic from the computer. And just hoping for the best. So we all get to be human. All right. So I'm thrilled to go back to the conversation of that intern and say he came back the next day and he killed it. The advice and the feedback I have given him, given him the day before he integrated into his work the next day. So in the moments that he needed support, he gave the mic back to his team, but he took it back. Right. And when it wasn't his turn to voice, he supported his team. He was able to. in it. And this really raises a significant issue that recovery requires a lot of trust. Because if I am in this space where I have to expose to you my misalignment, the insecurities, my vulnerabilities, I've got to tell you where I'm making errors. I got to tell you I'm ill equipped. I have to tell you I'm not qualified. I have to tell you that I'm wrong and I'm not ready. And you might think less of me. You might think how I'm feeling on the inside. I'm not going to tell you that. I don't want to tell you that, right? And so I would rather fake it until I make it than be naked in front of you. I don't want to bare myself in front of someone I cannot trust with my own vulnerabilities. And that doesn't absolve us. from being good humans who care about the impact that we're having regardless of how our sense of self is misaligned with who we are and who we want to be and who we want people to see us as, right? We don't get to just be like, well, I'm just going to keep doing this thing because that feels better, even though it feels bad, than to take responsibility of the harm that we're doing. Causing moments that we are thinking about our own insecurities and our vulnerabilities and all that stuff that I do think is important, so I don't want to diminish it at all. We are so consumed with ourselves and not what we're supposed to be thinking about and honoring in the first place. Like we don't get to take this moment. and oppress people because we are consumed with our self image and how we think of ourselves and how we want other people to think about us. We spend all this time thinking about the wrong thing. If I go back to my research just for a minute, just before we wrap up, I am reminded and I know that you are aware that more seasoned Interpreters don't make the kinds of mistakes in the work that younger interpreters do. And then when we do make those kinds of mistakes, we are more defensive because we have bigger egos and we have a more inflated sense of self, right? Because we've been doing this for 20 years, because I have x and x and x degree, because I'm keisha osborne, because fill in the blank. And the people with the big egos, you in the back, I see you, I see you, you, right, can cause more harm as a result of not being able to recover well. And also taking these moments to think about you and not about the people that we're serving. To think about you and not the implications of damaging the integrity of someone to access. That is just oppression of deaf people, right? And it contributes to the trauma. So for those people who don't have this, cause y'all exist too, like I don't want to miss you. I want to hit the new interpreters. I want to hit the interpreters who have the big egos who are making these kinds of mistakes and, uh, and, and pretending they don't, right? Y'all shit don't stink. I also want to talk about the people who are actually really good and self aware, right? And so maybe for you, this isn't about the work. But this is a conversation that I'm using to shine a light on the bigger issues, the bigger ways that we can, contribute to systemic oppression, um, that we talk about so often on this channel. So this is for everybody. All of us have to scale up our recovery efforts. And so if we go back to the intern, what we will recognize there is that I established a trust relationship with him, right? I didn't bash him. I didn't drag him. I didn't talk bad about him or to him. I just encouraged him to stay in the fight. And I told him, stop disconnecting and shutting down, right? You don't get to do that. And I said it in a way. That he was able to take it and integrate it into his work. And so, I do recognize that trust is an important part of recovery. And, sometimes, building the trust is in the recovery, in the reverse. And what I mean by that is I think I think deaf people trust interpreters who are willing to say, I am not qualified, at least on the surface, a lot more than they trust someone who completely botched. their access to language. And so when you think about the traumas that deaf people have experienced at the hands of interpreters, the traumas that you're responsible for, that I'm responsible for, that hearing people well before us were responsible for, when we think about that, right, us not recovering just further emphasizes that trauma. While us saying, I don't want to traumatize you anymore. I don't want to be complicit in adding to the traumas that you already have by focusing on how I'm feeling and how I'm seen and how I see me. I'm not interested in contributing to that, and therefore, I'm going to be vulnerable with you and say I'm going home and I'm going to call the agency and see if they can find a replacement, or I will talk to everybody and say I'm responsible for the reason that this appointment needs to be rescheduled. It requires vulnerability, because if not We are just oppressing and traumatizing deaf people. And likewise, this same process applies to larger things like misogyny or sexism or homophobia. You name it, it applies, right? And it's just on a larger scale. And so what I'm talking to you about. Is the recovery that you do in your everyday life with your everyday people scaling it up so that we can do it with people that we can and do oppress all the way up to systemic issues that are much larger and also still our responsibility of addressing. And so I would encourage you to answer the questions that I asked earlier. What are your strategies? What tips and tricks do you have that will help you scale up? Your recovery effort so that when you are in community and in conversation with people in your everyday life, at work, and even on a larger scale of systemic issues of things that you are responsible to recover, you can do that. All right. Thank you for coming. Talk to you

22:40

soon.