The pandemic broke our understanding of the world. How do we put the pieces together again? Samira Rajabi joins us to point the way—and it all starts with getting comfortable “sitting in the shit” with each other.
The pandemic broke our understanding of the world. How do we put the pieces together again? Samira Rajabi joins us to point the way—and it all starts with getting comfortable “sitting in the shit” with each other.
Samira Rajabi is a researcher, writer, and assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado. Her work focuses on the intersection of trauma, social media, disability studies, and feminist theory, and her book, All My Friends Live in My Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma and Meaning Making, came out earlier this year.
I think this impulse to compare comes from this sense that what you're going through is not legible to other people. So we often sort of demean our own suffering because we don't think that it's worthy in the eyes of society, or culture, or our peer group. I think the way to cope with that is to listen better. So rather than being in a space, where it's like, "Oh, you say you're suffering? Well, listen to my suffering," it's, "How might I hear what you're saying with a recognition of who you are, and where you're coming from, and what you need in the moment, and then also offer my testimony about where I am, and what I need, and who I am in the moment?"
—Samira Rajabi, author, All My Friends Live in My Computer
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Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers ideas for how to listen more deeply and stop trying to “fix” things for the people in our lives. For more tools and practice tips for staying present to others’ pain, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Samira Rajabi 0:00 I don't need you to be happy about the hand that you've been dealt. I don't need you to go back to normal, whatever that is. What I think is hopeful about trauma is this opportunity that where there is something that breaks, we can take those pieces and try to make something else.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:29 Hello, and welcome to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and today I'm talking with Samira Rajabi. Samira is a professor of media studies and an expert on trauma. And so today we are going to talk a lot about pandemic trauma and what it means to give ourselves, and each other, space to process that and to grieve our losses, even those losses that feel ambiguous, or that we've told ourselves we should just get over because other people have it worse. This interview is really meaningful to me, because trauma is something I've been thinking, and reading, and writing a lot about over the past few months, specifically: what does it look like for our models of leadership to become more trauma-informed and trauma-aware? And the more I talk to people like Samira, the more I realize that this, this is really the heart of my own work: creating more humane organizations by helping people process their experiences and helping them become better able to support others through challenging times.
1:25 And you know, this episode dovetails so neatly with our last one with Alla Weinberg because it is once again all about allowing us to feel what is happening in our bodies, what's changing within us and around us. So if you enjoyed that one, you will definitely want to hear this. Before we get to Samira, I do want to give a brief content warning, though: this episode touches briefly on pregnancy loss. And it also talks about a lot of health issues and trauma more generally. Nothing graphic, but always take care of yourself.
SWB 1:56 Samira Rajabi is a researcher, a trauma expert, and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado. Her new book is called All My Friends Live in My Computer, and it's all about trauma and grieving in digital spaces. Samira, trauma and technology are actually some of my favorite topics, like seriously, so I can't wait to talk about them with you. Welcome to Strong Feelings.
SR 2:16 Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
SWB 2:19 So I'd really love to start with hearing more about how you got to this place. How did you first get interested in trauma? And how did that become part of your work as a researcher in media studies?
SR 2:29 So I think all of it really stems from my own experiences. So like many other academics, I wanted to understand something I was seeing in my own life. So first, I tried to study trauma, without understanding that that's what I was studying, from a lens that was really outside of myself. I went through different things during my undergraduate experience that had to do with my body and the safety of my body in physical space on a college campus. And I wasn't ready to name those things or confront those things, and so I decided to look at how women across the world dealt with violence against their bodies. And that's why I went back to get a master's degree because I wanted to understand how there was a world where there was such uneven attention to the way bodies could feel safe, and then uneven resources to help address that for different kinds of bodies.
3:22 And so that's what I was trying to understand, and I was just one of those people that thought, "I need to know more about this, I need to know more about this." And it wasn't until I went back for my PhD, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and happened to be in a gender studies program where they were reading a lot about disability, that I started to understand what I was going through as traumatic and that access to the language of disability studies and gender studies really started to give me an understanding of how my own body was experiencing these things that were very uncharacteristic of other 26-year-olds in graduate programs. And so I decided that if what I was reading, even when it wasn't directly related to what I was going through, could be helping me so much and helping me feel available to the world again in a particular way, that maybe it was worth digging into. So that's kind of how I came to trauma; I just went through a lot of things I didn't see everyone around me going through, or if they were going through it, they weren't talking about it. And I wanted to shine a little bit of light on it.
SWB 4:26 Yeah, I know that you've talked about how once you were diagnosed and as you were going to treatments, you really turned to online spaces to get information and to get support, and I'm curious what role did that play in you starting to come back to yourself during that time?
SR 4:42 I figured out my diagnosis with my sister's help before going to the doctor because I had had enough, at that point in my life, MRIs that had, like, fairly okay results to know that if you get a call from the doctor that day that's opened up a 7am appointment for you, it's probably not great.
SWB 4:59 Yeah.
SR 4:59 So my sister's a doctor, and I realize now how unfair this was to do to her, but I asked her to look at the scans with me over FaceTime. So I figured out what my tumor was. I was living alone, and I had nowhere else to turn at 11 o'clock at night, after buying myself a DiGiorno Pizza and some lipstick, because that was my obvious coping mechanism. And I was like, "I know what I'll do, I'll go to the supermarket." But after that, 11pm, the pizza had been eaten in its entirety, I had nobody to talk to. It was too late to call anybody. There was nobody who I felt comfortable saying, "Hey, me and my sister discovered this thing on my scan. I'm 99% sure this is what I have. And I don't know what it means for me at all." So I went online, and the words that she had given me—she had texted them to me so I had them written down on a little scrap of paper, so I could keep Googling them—was all I had that was tangible in that moment. And so that night, I found somebody on YouTube who had the same diagnosis as me, was one of the few people who had it around my age, and suddenly, I was like, "Okay, he's doing this. If he's doing this, I might be able to do this," right?
6:10 And so suddenly, just immediately, I felt less isolated in it and less scared to be in it. It doesn't mean I wasn't scared anymore. I definitely was. But I just immediately felt less alone in it. And my brain is always doing this thing where it builds connective tissue between the things I've been through and the things that I'm witnessing other people go through. And it felt so familiar to all of this stuff I'd researched in my master's program about people contending with violence against their bodies. In developing countries, they couldn't speak it out loud, but they could find a way to convey it through mobile telephone technology. And I thought, "Oh, that's weird." Like, in the back of my mind, there was just this like, "Oh, that's kind of weird." So I tried to understand that more.
SWB 6:55 And then that led into basically focusing in on the way digital media works, or supports people with trauma?
SR 7:02 Absolutely. I was not the most tech savvy person in the world, right? I knew I had a certain amount of digital literacy, but I thought, if this is helping me in such a profound way, there's something here, there's something that's going on. And as I started to see these more structured communities come together around a variety of illnesses or life experiences, that's when I realize this isn't just my isolated experience, because I was lonely at home one time, these platforms are affording us something. And so I thought that that was worth understanding, if nothing else, so we could catalyze it and use it more deliberately moving forward.
SWB 7:38 Yeah, you know, I was listening to the TEDx talk that you gave, which, by the way everybody, it's very good. It's about how trauma unmakes our world. If you want to look for that, it'll also be in the show notes. But in that talk, you say something about how, like, we need people who can sit in the shit with us during those rough times. In your research, how did digital spaces help people do that?
SR 7:57 I think there's still some of this impulse, but less of that impulse to fix you, especially because it helps you find access to other people who might be suffering in either the same way or similar ways to you. So, nobody in my immediate vicinity had a brain tumor. And nobody at that point had dealt with this type of illness that has sort of invisible disabilities it places on you, and it's hard for people to see you look really capable, right? So people put this narrative of like, "You got this, you're okay, everything's fine," on you when it really, really doesn't feel fine. And I found with these online communities were people who had been dealing with something similar enough that there was less of this impulse to do that. So that in some ways felt like sitting in the shit with you because people weren't saying, "You're a fighter, you got this, don't worry about it. Just-move-past-it attitude, mind over matter, whatever." It was more like, "I see you, I hear you, I'm with you. I've been through something, here's what helped me." So it was less about making it go back to normal and making you go back to normal, but more about just allowing you space to give testimony.
9:07 And I think that what's also really interesting about entering into that space, when you come into a space because you've gone through something really life-altering, nobody in that space knew you before that, right? So they're not trying to return you to the kind of this way that you were before. They're just knowing you as you are now and because these spaces are so ephemeral, right? We go into them, and then we go out of them. They just kind of exist there in particular moments, and they leave little traces for us that we build on. It's not something that is so deeply coded by who you were, or who you are trying to be, or who you're trying to show the world that you are. It's just this sort of, like, momentary sitting with each other in a way.
SWB 9:52 At its best, technology which can be so problematic...It's like at its best, it can create these ephemeral spaces in ways that, like you say, allow you to be who you need to be in that moment and not have, like, I guess, past understandings of self imposed upon you. Yeah, it's so interesting. I'm wondering if this is maybe a good time to talk about something that you talk a lot about in the book, which is sort of like, what do we mean when we talk about trauma? Because I think you've started to hint at this idea of: it's not about going back to your past-self to process what's happening to you. It's more like understanding where you're at now. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about the way that you think about trauma and that sort of rift in the world that it creates.
SR 10:33 Yeah, so I like to think of trauma really broadly because I think thinking of trauma really capaciously allows us to work with, and study with, and understand a whole host of experiences, even if they might be different from our own. And I built my definition off of a scholar named Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, and their work is incredible. It's a book from the late 80s called Shattered Assumptions. And it's about how the moment of trauma is that moment where your assumptive world, or sort of that world-making schema that you had, breaks apart. So something happens that these sort of routines we have of our day to day, or our ideas about the future break for some reason. So for me, I was 26 years old, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. So this idea that I would just live until my career hit a certain point, and get married at a certain age, and do this at a certain age, and, you know, be old, kind of went away.
SWB 11:27 Yeah.
SR 11:28 And so I had to figure out a way to exist in a world where those assumptions seemed true for most of the people around me, but they could not capture the reality of my life anymore. And so that, to me, is where a trauma happened. And that can happen for a whole host of medical reasons, psychological reasons, social reasons, cultural reasons, political reasons. And so that's why I wanted the definition of trauma to be broad and wide and have the capacity to capture a lot of different types of suffering.
SWB 11:57 Yeah, that makes me think about something you talk about in the book, which is "symbolic trauma," which I think maybe sometimes doesn't get counted. So things like political and cultural violence. And I know, you've talked about your family's own experience with the Muslim ban, and members of your family being barred from entering the US because they're Iranian. What's important about labeling those kinds of events is traumatic as well?
SR 12:19 For one thing, it allows us to recognize that in all traumatic experiences, there's a politics to it in the sense that there's power involved. So even if you're experiencing a medical trauma, there's a certain degree of politics in terms of who gets access to resources for medical help and things like that. But on the flip side of it, putting the language of trauma on those experiences allows us to know that not only do we need political, social, cultural solutions to those things, but people are actually suffering. There are real, material bodies suffering from this thing that happened. And so we have to address that in our solutions, we have to acknowledge that we can't just undo the travel ban and say, "No harm, no foul. We're all good here." We have to also recognize what does that do to people who identified as American but no longer feel safe doing so?
SWB 13:08 Yeah.
SR 13:08 Right? How might that change their reality? And it does something, it hurts people.
SWB 13:13 Right. It comes back to what you said before where there's a "before" and there's an "after," and in the before maybe you felt like you belonged, and then the after you have all these questions, and you don't go through life in the same way. Yeah, I think that this concept of like, "what counts as trauma" is really compelling right now because I've been thinking a lot about pandemic trauma, which I think we can talk about what exactly counts or doesn't count as pandemic trauma, but I think in general, you know, there's so much pain and so much suffering, and so many people who very much are experiencing a rift in their understanding of the world. But then the other day, I read this article, which I sent to you before this interview from the Atlantic called "The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now." And it was basically arguing that like trauma books are flying off the shelves, but that they're not going to be useful to people who are dealing with pandemic stressors, that those are not really traumatic. And so I had some strong feelings when I read that, and I think you're the perfect person to ask about this: What counts as trauma right now? Is all of this trauma?
SR 14:09 I think so. I think if we're going to take my definition of trauma that I've built from what I've read of trauma being kind of a rupture that unmakes your world, right? Unmakes the reality you thought you lived in, of course, this is trauma, right?
SWB 14:22 Yeah.
SR 14:22 Like, we went from going to work every day in person, for a lot of us, to not being able to leave our house without fear of dying. If that's not traumatic, I don't know it is. And I don't know that it's the same thing as somebody who watched a loved one suffer from COVID-19 through a screen because they couldn't have physical access to them. Of course, there's different levels and degrees of suffering that people went through, but it's all traumatic. It all makes us feel unable to exist in the world in the way that we thought we could. We all have to do some mental, emotional, physical, cultural work of remaking our world so we can figure out what it looks like to live in it, and so that we can figure out a way to survive in it. So I absolutely think it's all trauma.
15:11 You know, I read the article that you sent, and I don't know that it's necessarily for me, or for that author, or for you, or for anybody else to say, "This book has no way to be of service to you because your suffering doesn't reach the degree of the suffering that's in the cases in the book." Who am I to say that recognizing the different embodied effects of anxiety, for example, one of the books in the article is The Body Keeps the Score, which is about how our bodies hold onto pain and anxiety. Who am I to say that you're not having manifestations of that in your own life and that this might not help you at the very least understand some aspect of what's happening to you? And I don't think we have adequate language for all the different types of trauma that people go through and the degrees of suffering, and that's what I try to capture with "symbolic trauma." But that doesn't make it any less important in the life of the suffering person.
SWB 16:06 Yeah, I think that this idea of also, you know, trauma being embodied, I mean, that's absolutely something I see people going through in the pandemic, maybe at a lesser extent than somebody who's having like, I don't know, wartime flashbacks, right? Like, that's a different experience. But I talked to people all the time who have said that they've found that they are realizing that they've been clenching their fists, and jaw, and they're tight all over, and that's things that are being held in the body, and sort of understanding that has been powerful for them in being able to sort of process what they're going through. And that makes me think about, you know, well what does it look like to start to process some of our experiences? I think a lot of the content that I see that is about trauma jumps directly to PTSD, right? Post-traumatic stress syndrome, which is very much long-term, compounded trauma. What's the space that's between experiencing a traumatic event, and then not necessarily ending up with PTSD, but needing to work through it? What does that look like?
SR 17:03 I mean, I think for me, what I'm realizing with like, sort of a long-term trauma, like the pandemic, to me that in between sort of, like, trauma and either healing or diagnosis with PTSD, or some other kind of "endpoint," which I don't think there's a great end point to trauma, that's just not how life is or how humans are, is grief, right? And we do this thing where we feel like we're not supposed to feel; we're not supposed to feel our trauma if it doesn't rise to the level of kind of a "supposed to" of trauma, or what trauma should look like, or what we're told trauma looks like. But if we don't allow ourselves to feel it, then we don't allow ourselves to process and then grieve it. So I think that kind of in between space for me is grief. And grief doesn't always have a clean thing that you're grieving; there's not always a clean space that you're grieving. So that's why I've been working a lot with ambiguous loss theory, which has led me to this idea of ambiguous grief, which Pauline Boss is the author who works a lot on ambiguous loss. But this idea is that your grief may be physically absent but psychologically present. And that still matters, right? We still get to feel that, and we still get to understand what that feeling means for our reality and our day-to-day life.
SWB 18:26 I'm so glad you mentioned ambiguous grief because it was actually through an interview you did with Anne Helen Petersen for her newsletter “Culture Study,” which is also one of my favorites, about ambiguous grief and other things. And in that, you know, you talk a lot about that idea of something being physically present, psychologically absent, psychologically present, physically absent, and I'm wondering if you can explain more about what those different kind of combinations mean, and why that creates an ambiguity for people?
SR 18:53 Yeah. So I actually came to this set of theories, again, because of one of my own experiences, and just to warn you, it's about pregnancy loss. And so I experienced a pregnancy loss, and I was trying to understand what it was that I was actually sad about: was it the physical loss itself? Was it the loss of the idea of what that was supposed to have meant for my life? Or was it somewhere in between those two things, right, this physical loss or this loss of this anticipated event, or this expectation of reality? And that's sort of what an ambiguous loss is. I'm grieving this baby, essentially, that is physically absent, but is so psychologically present for me. But in other ways, it can be like, if you're grieving something, like, you have a family member that's dealing with dementia, and they're physically there, but there's something that's absent about them.
SWB 19:49 Yeah.
SR 19:49 There's these different ways of being in grief. And actually, as I was reading about this stuff, doing my research, and also doing sort of this self-work that I do through my research, I realized that we were all sort of navigating this ambiguous grief in terms of the pandemic because so many people at that time, it was kind of midway through 2020, were writing about what they thought that they would be doing.
SWB 20:16 Yeah.
SR 20:16 What they thought that they would be feeling, who they thought they would be feeling it with, how they thought the holidays with their family would go. How some hard aspect of their life, you know, somebody was sick, and they thought that they would get to spend a Thanksgiving with them, but now they know that they can't. That person was still there, they're still managing their sickness, but there is a certain loss there. And that loss to me stems back to that trauma of the wound of the pandemic, right, what that took in our day to day life. So I think it's ambiguous because we can't totally name it. And we don't know how to talk about it. But we know that it's there. And we feel it.
SWB 20:57 I think something you mentioned earlier is so relevant there: how quickly people will get into that comparative mode of like, "Well, I shouldn't complain, other people have had it worse. That shouldn't be a big deal. You know, I'm just disappointed because I didn't get to go to my friend's wedding or whatever. Like, that's not important in the scheme of things." On one level, there's a truth to it, right? Like, yes. Okay, if you're going to try to like stack rank suffering, sure, not going to your friend's wedding isn't the worst thing in the world. But it sounds like we lose so much when we jump to that mode. Like, we lose so much ability to process what we're going through. And I'm curious, how do we approach that instead of getting into this comparative mode that shuts us off, what is a way that we can actually look at those losses and kind of hold them in our hand and take stock?
SR 21:41 Yeah, I agree with you in the sense that like, obviously, they're not the same degree of suffering: missing an event that you were excited about versus a life loss.
SWB 21:49 Yeah.
SR 21:49 We know that.
SWB 21:50 Yeah.
SR 21:50 But I think this impulse to compare comes from this sense that, like, what you're going through is not legible to other people. So we often sort of demean our own suffering, because we don't think that it's worthy in the eyes of society, or culture, or our peer group. And so I think the way to cope with that is to listen better. One of my favorite authors is named Lisbeth Lipari, and they write about listening. And one of the things they say in their book is that listening brings another human into being. And so rather than being in a space, where it's like, "Oh, you say you're suffering? Well listen to my suffering," it's, "How might I hear what you're saying with a recognition of who you are, and where you're coming from, and what you need in the moment, and then also offer my testimony about where I am, and what I need, and who I am in the moment." And so really being able to bring that person into being by allowing them to share what matters to them, and recognizing that maybe that's not something that would hurt me or cause me to suffer but choosing to believe someone in what they tell us. And so I think a lot of it is about being present in the space of listening.
SWB 23:04 Yeah. And I think I'm hearing, getting to that very deep level of listening that's beyond the sort of judgmental part that's like, "Okay, is this person right or wrong? What do I think about this?" and it's much more about like, "Okay, I'm just hearing your experience and assuming that if you're telling me that this is what it felt like for you that this is what it felt like for you."
SR 23:22 Exactly. And I mean, it's this thing of like, your experience isn't about me, it's about you. And you're sharing it with me because you trust me in some way, or you want to share space with me in some way, even if it's online. And so making you legible, making it something that you can feel seen in is a lot more productive for all of us than sort of trying to litigate, who gets to suffer and why.
SWB 23:48 What a miserable project, right, trying to litigate who gets to suffer and why when it's not as if you taking time to heal and to process your suffering does anything to my ability to have the same. There's not like a limited amount of space to process our grief.
SR 24:04 Exactly. And to say, like, "Oh, you missing your best friend's wedding, for example, makes you sad," is not also at the same time meant to diminish all kinds of real horrifying suffering that's out there. Me saying, "I hear you, I acknowledge you, and I feel with you," is not to say, "I don't feel with those people because this is what suffering is." It's not an either/or. Multiple things can be true at the same time; there are catastrophic levels of suffering around us that we need to pay attention to from, like, racial politics, and violence, and lots of harm happening on real bodies, right? Also, at the same time, people are suffering losses in their everyday sort of mundane routines. And that matters, too.
SWB 24:49 I love this idea of it not being an either/or, like getting stuck in those binary thought patterns are things I talk about a lot with people, and I think it's so common to feel like you have to pick one. It's like, "Is yours worse or is mine worse?" that there's somehow like a, like a limited amount of compassion to go around.
SR 25:06 Exactly, like, empathy is not finite, right?
SWB 25:08 Yeah.
SR 25:08 Like, I don't have a finite amount of care I can give and then be like, "I'm done caring! I've cared about my five people today."
SWB 25:17 Yeah.
SR 25:18 I mean, obviously, you have boundaries around yourself, so you can also care for yourself and give compassion to yourself. But we can care about a whole host of varied and interesting things.
SWB 25:29 Yeah, you know, something that this really brings up for me is also kind of like, okay, what do we make of this time? You know, if we get out of that competitive mode, we stop saying like, "Okay, is this actually worthy of grieving?" and we actually sit down and we give ourselves space to process it. You know, you talk about how if trauma is something that unmakes the world, that then this is also an opportunity to remake your world. And I've definitely seen people talk about, like, post-traumatic growth, and then other people kind of deride that as like, oh, you know, toxic positivity, focusing on the silver lining. That's not really what I hear, though, in what you're trying to say. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about what you mean when you talk about remaking your world?
SR 26:13 I appreciate that question a lot because I think a lot of the toxic positivity is like, "Fix it, overcome it, be better from it. Or even if you're not, be happy about it." I don't need you to be happy about the hand that you've been dealt, whatever that hand might be. I don't need you to go back to normal, whatever that is. What I think is hopeful about trauma is this opportunity that, like, where there is something that breaks, we can take those pieces and try to make something else. And so thinking about the current way that people are talking about work, for example, and spaces of safety at work and spaces of care at work, I think we're at an inflection point where we can say: this world of productivity we've understood has been unmade in some ways. Not in every way, we still see the world churning forward with a particular logic to it. But it's been unmade in some ways, and we're at this inflection point where we can say, "Let's be deliberate about the way we make this world. Let's not just fall back into patterns that feel comfortable because they're familiar. But let's try to say, 'Well, everything's been undone, we can make something new from it.'"
27:23 So I think, for me, world-making is a hopeful project because it's not about a return to normal, it's actually about breaking apart kind of this status quo understanding of what was in order to build something that's a little bit more flexible and a little bit more capacious in terms of who gets to be a part of it, and belong in it, and have power within it. What that looks like is different depending on the scenario, but I know for me as a person who is healing from an illness, for example, that world-making had to do with even just the basics of how I spent every day, how much time I give to self-care in a day. I don't go into a workday anymore without taking 30 minutes to do some kind of physical activity that helps me with my physical pain. And I used to forego that for the sake of productivity. But that enters me back into a world that is trying to return to a normal that didn't serve me and that I couldn't fit within. And so it's about a deliberate kind of being in space with yourself and others that thinks about what didn't work kind of continuously so you can think of what might work in its place.
SWB 28:33 Yeah, I love that so much, especially, you know, I think a lot about work culture, right, and the ways that work culture was not functional for so many people. I mean, even just the basics of so many people's commutes, and just like a miserable 90 minutes each way in traffic kind of thing. But also, how many people were just functionally left out of, you know, professional spaces because of things like disability and lack of flexibility or accessibility in workplaces. And there are so many opportunities to remake the world, like at an individual level, and to remake the world at sort of that macro level, and what I really love about the way that you talk about this is that it feels like as soon as we allow ourselves the space to really look at what we are going through and sit with what we've been through, and you know, look it dead in the eyes and kind of take stock of it that that space just kind of shows up.
SR 29:22 Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit sitting in the shit with yourself, right?
SWB 29:25 Yeah.
SR 29:26 It sounds really horrible, but you can't change anything about yourself if you're not willing to look at it, right?
SWB 29:31 Yeah.
SR 29:32 You can't figure out how to remake something if you're not willing to look at the broken parts. And that's not fun, and it's not easy. But I think on the other side of it, there is some hope and some possibility, even if the recognition becomes what we had was ableist and exclusionary, and I can't fit within it. At least with that knowledge, we recognize that something wasn't working, and so I might not be able to change my body, but I can try to work to change the system my body works within.
SWB 30:04 Yeah. It also sounds like a space to get so much more kind of emotional distance from it, where it's like, "Oh, wait, this isn't necessarily my fault that this isn't working for me. I'm operating within this system," and it becomes sort of easier to see the world that you were living in once it's broken.
SR 30:20 Oh, totally. And that's why I argue there needs to be an understanding of power within our understandings of trauma because if two people with very different intersecting identities go through the same thing, one of them might have great access to resources, and the other, perhaps a trans woman of color, for example, might not, and we have to care about that. And we have to recognize that that's not about personal positioning within trauma. It's not about your attitude, or your ability to get better, or your desire, or even your commitment to go into the doctor on the right schedule. It's about resource access, and systems of injustice, and structures that are exclusionary, and to recognize them that also helps people, I think, give themselves some compassion and some care, but also figure out where their effort in remaking should be focused.
SWB 31:15 Yes, I could talk to you for three more hours about your work on trauma, but I can't on a podcast because that's just rude. So if people want to learn more about you and get a copy of All My Friends Live in My Computer, where should they go?
SR 31:29 I have a website; it's https://samirarajabi.com/. It's just an OK website. I made it myself. And that is not my expertise.
SWB 31:36 That's fine.
SR 31:36 But also, I'm on Twitter all the time. My handle is @srajabi, but also the book is at every major bookstore online.
SWB 31:46 Awesome, thank you so much. And I will make sure that all of that information is also in the show notes, so folks can just click it.
32:01 So Samira, we've talked a lot about your research and about the book, and I'd love to come back around now to a little bit more of your own personal experience navigating the trauma of chronic and prolonged illness. And one of the things you've talked about, we touched on earlier, was like how well-meaning people can be. Like, "Oh, you're a fighter, you're so strong." Right? And how unhelpful that was for you in the moment. And so I'm wondering, what was actually helpful to you when you were in those most crisis moments?
SR 32:32 Yeah, I did find that kind of rhetoric really unhelpful because I was kind of like, "How do you know it's gonna be fine?" And also, because I was so tired of fighting. I didn't know what I was fighting. I felt like I was angry with my own body, which was anger with myself, which didn't really serve me. So I think one of the most powerful moments...my mom tends to be a really positive thinker type of person, and it serves her really well in her own life. And so I would never dare to say to her that that's not effective for her. But there was one morning before my first brain surgery, and for the most part, every time I told her I was scared, she was like, "No, you're not, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine," which is her way of dealing, I get that.
SWB 33:10 Yeah.
SR 33:10 And I appreciated it for what it was. But the morning before my surgery, it was 4am, we're getting up to go to the hospital, my parents have traveled to Arizona where my surgery was with me, and I'm in the dark, sitting on the edge of her bed with her. And I felt nauseous, I felt sick, and was asking her if she thought I could have antacid. And my hands were shaking, and she could barely make out kind of the shadows have my hand shaking in the dark. And I said like a little kid, I was like, "Mommy, I'm so scared."
SWB 33:10 Yeah.
SR 33:26 And all she said to me in that moment, she grabbed my hand so tight, and she just said, "I know, me too." And she didn't try to fix it. She didn't try to make it different than what it was. She just told me that she got it. And she was there, you know? And so, you just let people know that like, "I'm with you." My dad wrote a poem once about a friend on a bike ride who was losing his balance, and the words he used were: "I have you. I have you, like a hand on your back, I have you." I think that's what people need. And if you're not ready to tell them that you're there, maybe a question: what do you need in this moment? And they might just say they don't know. But at least it highlights to them that you're trying to show up. You're not trying to fix them, or change them, or fix the situation, or be relentlessly positive in the face of it. You're sitting in the shit with them, right? Like you're just being there in a way that says like, "I see, you're a person, and you're going through something, and I can't fix it. But I can love you."
SWB 34:47 I'm tearing up a little bit which will probably not come through quite on the podcast. But yeah, that's powerful. And I think we don't give enough of that to the people around us oftentimes.
SR 34:57 Sometimes it's just sharing space right?
SWB 35:01 Yeah.
SR 35:01 It's just sharing space and letting people know that you see them.
SWB 35:06 And if somebody out there is listening who's going through it themselves right now, like, they are in the shit, what would you say to them?
SR 35:15 I would say that I see you, and I know it's hard. And it's okay that it feels hard. And it's okay that it feels like it sucks right now, it's probably not going to feel like this forever. And I would say, try to talk to people. Try to talk to your friends, try to talk to your community, try to talk to people online, try to talk to professionals. But don't sit in it alone, because you don't have to.
SWB 35:43 Samira, thank you so much for being here. And thank you so much for that. That's been so powerful to hear.
SR 35:49 Thank you. And just thank you for sharing space with me, I just have felt in your podcast, but also in this last hour with you today that you genuinely share space with people. So I appreciate that about you.
SWB 36:00 Thank you.
SWB 36:05 Something Samira talked about in the interview that I want to turn back to is this concept of deep listening: where we get out of this place of judgmental or comparative listening, where we're just waiting for our turn to speak or where we're just waiting for a moment to make it about us, and instead allow ourselves to be fully present for another person and to accept their experience, even if it doesn't match our experience. That is a hard skill. Like, it is a really hard skill. I will tell you, I've been working on it personally for maybe three years, and I think I'm a lot better at it than I used to be. But it is a lifelong practice.
36:37 So for today's You've Got This, that is what I want to talk about: How do you start practicing that deeper listening? How do you stop trying to fix things? And how do you instead do what Samira says is so powerful: sit in the shit with someone? So here are a couple of things that I've learned. The first skill is self-management. So when we are listening to others, we have all kinds of our own feelings and reactions, like we just do, it is human. That is what it is. Self-management is the practice of noticing those things in the moment, so noticing what's happening in your brain, noticing yourself get distracted, noticing any feelings that come up, and then learning to hold them for later so that you can stay present with this other person instead of getting involved in your own agenda, instead of making it about you.
37:22 That might mean, for example, recognizing when someone's story has triggered a memory of your own, and then being able to just sit with it. So, that is not to say that when someone tells you about their experience, you should never offer up your own similar experience. There can be power at times in saying, "You're not alone. Me too." There's a reason #meto has been a movement, right? But when someone is suffering, and when someone is opening up to you about that suffering, the first order of business has to be simply being there with them, hearing what it's like for them, holding space for them because they deserve to be seen, and they deserve to be heard whether or not you've had a similar experience. Like, their experience isn't only valid if you've had the same one.
38:03 Okay, second, another tool for deep listening here is to just acknowledge and validate what the other person is telling you. This does not mean you have to agree with them. You don't have to say, "Oh, you deserve to feel upset." After all, that's actually not yours to decide. Like, we do not get to choose which emotions other people are allowed to have. They just have emotions all the time. And it's also not about judging whether their perspective is right or wrong, whether their experience is one that they deserve to have because that's not really what matters here. This is not about what is right or what is wrong. Instead, it is about saying things like, "It sounds like that's been really hard," or, "I can hear how hurtful this has been to you," or, "I can see how much pain this has caused," or, "I'm sorry, you're going through this." You might notice that none of those require you to agree, or to have the same experience, or to say that this is how you would feel if it were happening to you. It is all about them and just acknowledging that this is what it's like for them.
39:01 You might also want to affirm to them that it's okay—or maybe not even okay, good—that it's great that they're opening up to you, that this is an okay and positive thing for them to do. Saying things like, "I'm so glad you're telling me about this," or, "Thank you for trusting me with this." People often carry a lot of shame or fear about opening up; this can help quell some of that. And it's also really helpful to reflect back the things that you're hearing. So to demonstrate that you're really listening to them and that you're seeing them, picking up on the actual words they're saying, especially if you notice that they're repeating the same word a few times because you might hear them say the same thing over and over, like, "This is bewildering," or "Gosh, I just feel so devastated." And you can pick up on that with something like, "Oh, I understand how devastated you're feeling right now." That helps them really have it click into place that you are listening.
39:55 Now, I will tell you listening in this way with less judgment, with less focus on fixing stuff and instead more focus on staying present for what the other person is experiencing, it takes practice. It can feel a little awkward or uncomfortable at first, and you have to do it a bunch of times before it starts feeling more natural. But I can tell you, it can be life-changing. I have a couple tools to help you get started over https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast. Check those out, and thank you so much for listening.
40:28 That's it for this week's episode. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at https://www.activevoicehq.com/ and get all the past episodes show notes and complete transcripts for every episode of the show at https://strongfeelings.co/. Today's episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Philly's own Blowdryer; check them out at https://blowdryer.bandcamp.com/. Huge thanks to Samira Rajabi for being our guest today, and thank you for listening. If you like our show, please make sure to give us a rating and maybe even a review wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. See you next time.