357: Addressing the Mental Health Challenges of Doing Humanitarian Work with Dimple Dhabalia

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Oftentimes we start feeling like, well, who am I to complain about anything in my life? Because we start comparing trauma, basically. And so all the things that I went through in my life, I started to minimize. I'd be like, well, I can't complain about that. I mean, look at this person in front of me who's lost everything and has had to leave their home and this and that. And so not only are we kind of taking in the trauma and trying to numb it and do all these things, but we're also not healing our own because we minimize it and we say that it's not as big a deal compared to what others are experiencing.

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Welcome back, Pivoters. I am super excited to have one of our longtime BFF members, Dimple Diwalia, here with us today. Dimple is the founder of Roots in the Clouds, a boutique consulting firm specializing in using the power of story to heal individual and organizational trauma and moral injury. She's also a writer, podcaster, coach, and facilitator who brings over 20 years of public service experience working at the intersection of leadership, mindful awareness, and storytelling. We're here talking about her forthcoming book, Tell Me My Story Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self that's launching in February. And you can find her podcasts service Without Sacrifice that goes with the book and what would Ted Lasso do? Wherever you listen, Dimple, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Jenny.

What you're doing is so important and it feels like the world gets wilder and wilder. And we should say right here at the start that Dimple has worked in many different humanitarian roles, one of which was interviewing refugees who were seeking asylum and capturing their stories of intense Trauma and hardship, like unspeakable things. So we may have some sensitive content in this conversation that if that's not for you or not for you today or in this moment, maybe to revisit at another time. I so admire that work. I mean, all the work you've done in your whole career. I told you before we hit record, if I didn't know you, I would think you were 80, how much you've done. But one of those things was interviewing survivors of the Rwandan genocide. And I have thought to myself my whole life, I don't know how people do that work. Or let's say I have a friend who did social work in her early 20s with children who were abused. I mean, the. Just the scope of human suffering and trauma that they've experienced. And then you're there capturing story after story. You open the book saying, there was this time you couldn't sleep at night, you were having nightmares, as if these things had happened to you. So I guess I'm just wondering, like, how did you do this profession at all? Who is cut out to do this kind of work? How? I don't even know how to ask the question. It boggles my mind that anybody can do it. And yet it's such vital, crucial service work.

Thank you so much for that. And I always say that it takes a certain personality to do this work, and I am most certainly not unique in doing it. And there's a lot of people out there doing it and that do it much better than I did. It's funny, when I started my career, I actually worked as an attorney representing the Department of Human Services for the state of Colorado. And all my cases were kind of abuse and neglect based. And I had a boss at that time who would make us go through these vicarious trauma trainings. And I remember the first time that I went through that, and I was just this young, cocky attorney, and I was like, I don't understand why we need this. I can eat a sandwich and read my cases. And, you know, and that really should have been a red flag to me. But I think that there is this element of having to. I talk about this in the book. Like, you put up this wall of professionalism, so you learn to listen to the stories, take it in, and just focus in on the things that you need to focus on. Sometimes if you don't know how to do this, you start to actually take in the trauma of the other people that you're listening to or the people that you're serving. And that was kind of what happened with me is year after year, day after day of doing this, I was just taking in things that other people had experienced. And then the other piece of this was that a lot of what I was hearing in the stories that I was listening to was mirroring my own childhood experiences. And so not only was I sitting with other people's trauma, but I was sitting with my own without even realizing it.

And they probably didn't train you for that, I'm guessing. No.

So that's the thing, right? They gave me lots of training on how to interview people, how to be sensitive when I'm interviewing people, how to connect with people. But there was virtually nothing at the time saying what this work might actually do to me. And that was a shame, because I think that there was a certainly room for that. But it went on for many years where there was just no discussion of things like vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress or even something like moral injury. And it wasn't until I really started experiencing these things for myself, that kind of symptoms of these, what I call occupational traumas, that I really started advocating from within my organization to start normalizing it. Because it is a very real part of the work. But as somebody doing it and as somebody experiencing those things, you start to think that you're the only one. And it gets very isolating, and it creates a lot of shame. That was something that I really just thought, I cannot be the only person experiencing this. There has to be others who are as well.

You mentioned the storytelling program that you helped pilot and implement later for humanitarian workers. But the fact that when you're in the field, there's no release for those of you who are hearing the stories and let's say, interviewing asylum seekers, I would imagine there's this whole jumble of emotions where you're partly needing to numb out, but you're also needing to show intense, extreme empathy, which is genuine, not saying it's false. And also then whatever suffering because vicarious trauma you're then experiencing after, let's say, at the end of the day and you go back to your room, there's no outlet. And yet, I would imagine, I would say to myself, well, it could be so much worse. I wasn't the one that went through that. There's really nothing I should need to do or say. And yet it's just the complete opposite. And as you talk about in the book, that you need an outlet to be able to tell the stories that you've heard or some kind of format to keep that energy moving Rather than just stuffing it all down and trying to pretend like it's okay or that just because you weren't the one in the situation, that there's no ramification from hearing these stories over and over.

Yeah. I mean, so many things about what you just said. So, first of all, the outlet piece. Absolutely. I cannot tell you the number of people that I've worked with in this field and just across when I was in government service who have chronic health conditions, autoimmune issues, things like that, that I really believe are the direct result of the stress and trauma that we're kind of holding within ourselves. But the other piece of this is this idea of numbing and whatnot.

The amount of, like, drinking that happens in these kind of overseas assignments and things like that is just staggering because, again, it is kind of the outlet. I think people are getting better about incorporating more exercise and yoga and meditation and things like that now. But at the time, and even still, I will say that it's not common. And so I think it's just much easier to just zone out and try to forget about it. But the other piece of what you just said is oftentimes we start feeling like, well, who am I to complain about anything in my life? Because we start comparing trauma, basically. And so all the things that I went through in my life, I started to minimize. I'd be like, well, I can't complain about that. I mean, look at this person in front of me who's lost everything and has had to leave their home and this and that. And so not only are we kind of taking in the trauma and trying to numb it and do all these things, but we're also not healing our own because we minimize it. And we say that it's not as big a deal compared to what others are experiencing. And that's one of the things that I really, in the people that I've worked with really try to hit home is, you can't compare trauma. Trauma is trauma. So we have to be able to understand that our trauma is just as devastating for us as others has been to them. And it's not something to compare. And having said that, you know, yes, it could be worse, but that's not what we're here to do. We're here to serve. But then we can also take care of ourselves in the process.

That seems like something that our inner child. Right. Trauma is trauma, and yet our mind as adults just be like, okay, oh, your parent picked you up late from school. I could just totally see that comparison. And yet the inner kid doesn't know the difference. There's a heart there. There's something that needs to be healed. I remember seeing a documentary once and the image was so graphic. There were no trigger warnings at this time. The story was so horrible, I never forgot it. To this day, I still have flashbacks and nightmares from this one documentary that I happened to catch. I think a roommate was watching it on tv. And I'll often get mad at my husband if he tells me sort of gruesome facts about the news or the world at night, because I won't maybe not even not be able to sleep that night. I might not forget it for the next 20 years. You mentioned that there's a certain type of person that can do humanitarian work. I'm actually curious, what skill is it when it is skilled and it's not just numbing out? How does anybody metabolize this while doing this kind of work? And I know, I mean, that's what you wrote a book about, but maybe you could tell us the journey for you of learning how to do that in a healthy way while still doing it at all.

Or.

Or is it the kind of thing where people churn out after a couple years because you've gotten all you can take? Like, I know that was the case at Google. When people were having to review websites. They were called search quality engineers. You have to look at the worst offending websites on the Internet and make sure they aren't coming up in ads or search results. And these are very, very, very tough jobs.

I mean, they definitely are. And I don't know what makes it this way for people. Like, what makes us able to do this work. I would say that we are very grounded in emp, but I think a lot of people are grounded in empathy. But there's also this desire to want to serve in this way to help people. And so I often look at, like medical professionals. So during COVID they were out there in the thick of things. We didn't know enough about COVID at the time. And they were there serving and taking care of people and often were the last person that a person saw before maybe they passed away. There was so much happening and the choices that they had to make. We talk about this idea of moral injury, having to make choices or do things that go against our own deeply held morals and beliefs. That was like running rampant through the medical profession during COVID I've kind of come to believe through writing this book, though, is there's a lot of things from our own kind of childhoods. Things that we experienced, things that we saw, what I call our shaping stories. So the things that shaped our worldview and our view of who we are within that world, I think those shaping stories have a lot more influence on whether we choose a profession like this than not. And to your point about seeing just one graphic image and having that stick with you, this is the other piece of this is that people often think, I know I did. So when I was on assignment in Zambia, this was about six years into my job interviewing asylum seekers and refugees. And I couldn't control my emotions during interviews anymore. I wasn't sleeping. And if I did, I had really, really graphic nightmares where, like you said, like, I was reliving the stories that I had heard and I was just drinking a lot and just doing whatever I could to kind of stay away from experiencing this. And there was just this feeling that there was something wrong with me and that everybody else around me was doing okay. So what's wrong with me? And the thing is, there's nothing wrong with me. It's just that, again, because of the stories that have shaped me and my own survival kind of reactions, these stories hit me in a different way. So they always say, like, this is why 10 people who are sitting in a room together can experience the exact same traumatic event and have 10 very different reactions, because we're bringing so much of our own kind of storytelling to what our experience is. And so this is why some of my colleagues had no problems doing this work. And some of them really, really struggled. And we had people who after a year or two years, were leaving. And especially now, we see the kind of revolving door on this, not just this work like the work that I was doing, but across sectors where people are serving other humans. We're seeing a lot of people just tapping out because it's too much. And there isn't an infrastructure that's set up to provide this kind of what I call a holistic, human centered duty of care within organizations. And so that's part of the problem.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The book is structured around a process that you've developed and I'm wondering if you could give us maybe the high level of the five stages that you have found can help people move through this type of work in a healthier way, a more sustainable way.

So there's five parts. First is shaping. So I just mentioned kind of what our shaping stories are. And those can start in childhood. They can also happen later in life or throughout life. And then surviving is really kind of our nervous system reaction. So we have certain patterns that we fall into. And again, many of those have started as when we were children. And they've created neural pathways in our brain. So when we encounter a similar event or our nervous system and brain believes we've encountered a similar event, we will default back into those survival reactions. So we all have heard of fight or flight, but there's also freeze, fix and fake. We tend to have patterns in different situations.

I love that you included that, by the way. I just have to say I'd heard Fawn as maybe another one. Not just fight or flight, but then fix and fake. Oh, those are so good and important. Like either putting on a mask and faking who you are, how you feel, or fix and over functioning. So I was really happy to learn that from reading your book.

Thank you. Yeah. And we don't think about those as default reactions or survival reactions, but yeah, absolutely. And then part three is seeing. And so this is the point at which we start to notice, Right? We start to create a little bit of mindful awareness around not only what our shaping stories are, but also how we tend to react in those situations. And then part four is shifting. And so shifting is tricky because the mindful awareness is great because now we start to notice when things are happening. What are my patterns, how am I reacting? The problem with shifting though is it can be a very painful place sometimes because once we start noticing, we start noticing everything and so shifting our behaviors so we can make new choices. It doesn't happen overnight. We have to keep coming back and doing it over and over in order to create new neural pathways that will eventually become our new default responses. But for every kind of two steps we take forward we will backslide inevitably. And so part of shifting is self compassion. So it's having that compassion to say, you know what, it's okay, there's nothing wrong here, I'm going to try again and I'll just keep working at this. And then once we kind of get through all those phases, we get to the point of sharing. And sharing to me is really where healing happens. Because sharing our stories, number one, when we speak our stories aloud. Bernie Brown talks about this all the time, right? When we speak to our shame, it loses its power over us. And so a lot of our stories are based in shame and judgment. The more that we can share those with other people, the less that they kind of hang over us and control our actions and our reactions. But there's also something very, very powerful about sitting in community with others. And it doesn't have to be a huge community, right? It can just be two people sitting together. But there's something about having your story witnessed by someone else and vice versa, that just has a lot of power. And it's all based in neuroscience. There's all kinds of hormones that are released when we engage in sharing our stories. Because we are as human beings, we are hardwired for connection, belonging. And part of how we do that is through sharing our stories with others. And so if you think back to our prehistoric ancestors, storytelling was a way of survival because they told stories about the berries that were poisonous, or over there is where that saber toothed tiger lives or whatever. And so it's been built into our neurobiology. And so we feel this inherent need to share our stories with others because it gives us that sense of connection and safety that is fundamental to our survival as human beings.

On that note, you share in the book, I'll just read a little excerpt. How challenging that was even for you, even knowing this, creating and putting the book together. There's chapter 19 on becoming whole. Starts with tell me your story. I'd said those words to thousands of people over the years, and yet the first time the invitation was extended to me, I felt my throat tighten and my heart race. How was the process for you of excavating what's in the book? Because I know you had shared some of your stories more from your professional life publicly, but there was a lot more in here that's from your personal life that must have been difficult to confront, let alone share.

On the one hand, it was very cathartic to finally write those stories down and get them out from inside of me, but oh my goodness, it was Scary. It's still scary because I talk about how, like, so many people offered up a very curated version of my life to everyone I met. So I curated certain stories, I shared certain parts of myself. But there is definitely something freeing about sharing all of this. I hope that it's helpful to people like, you don't have to go out into the world and share every bad thing that's happened to you. That's not at all what this is about. But I think that if we can be honest with the things that have happened to us or that we've experienced and figure out ways, even if it is just sitting down and writing them out for ourselves, but some way of getting those stories out and actually sitting with the pain of them, because that's part of it, right? Why do we numb? Why do we run away from things? It's because we don't want to be with that pain. But if we can sit with the pain, we have to sit with the pain in order to move through the pain and get to the other side of it. If we don't do that, we're trying to get around it, and we won't, like, it'll always eventually, like, rear its head back up at some point. It was definitely an interesting process for me to go through that. I had a really great community, which I felt very safe in that space, which was good. And that made it a little bit easier to kind of walk through these things. But I will say, I remember when I sat down to write the chapters about my dad, and especially the fact that he had been institutionalized and stuff, I had such a breakdown. I was at a writing retreat when I wrote that section. And I remember just crying and the whole community coming to kind of sit with me. And gratefully, nobody was trying to fix it for me. Nobody was trying to do any of those things. But it was just people there in community with me to witness what my story was, how that impacted me. And I will say that through that process, I felt myself really starting to heal in ways that years of therapy and years of other relationships and things like that have not been able to do. And it just was really, really powerful.

Isn't that fascinating? I know you talked about the neuroscience of it, and I believe there's a book Pennebiker. We'll put it in the show notes. But that years of therapy, years of therapy, and yet there was something that was still unlocked when you read that out loud at the writer's retreat and were heard by other people who. Very important aside, we're not trying to fix it or give you advice or tell you what to do.

And the other part of our writing is that when you sit down to write your story this way, I'm not going to remember this correctly, but there's something about when we tap into a memory in our brain, it is connected to other memories that we may not even realize are there. And so what was really interesting to me was, for example, in my shaping stories, there's a story about othering that I shared from when I was a child, and I had forgotten about that completely. And I was writing about something very, very different when that memory popped up for me. And so that's the other thing that's really interesting to me is how when you go through this process of tapping into your brain and picking a memory and then the kind of doorways, it opens up without you even realizing it.

I wanted to ask you about that from a craft perspective. The stories you tell, even from your early childhood, are so vivid. And we can smell what your mom was cooking, how you were feeling. I don't know. I'm just curious how you tapped into that. Was that surprising to you that you could remember that much detail? Do you just have that kind of mind? Or do you think it's that because those were such traumatic moments, in many cases that they retained more vividly in.

Your memory, they talk about this idea of core memories. I think a lot of what I wrote were my core memories that had a significant impact on my life one way or the other. And so I think that was part of it. For the stories where I was kind of older, I actually had kept a lot of journals and stuff, and so the ones from when I was really, really young, I could kind of feel what I felt back then. And I kind of filled in the other pieces as I wrote. But I remember what that sofa that I was sitting on felt like. I remember that it was scratchy and that it. What color it was, things like that so that I could fill in. But what I felt like in that moment of my neighbor coming to yell at me, like, that's something I do remember. I had kind of blocked it out for many, many, many years. But it was such a core memory, and it was such a pivotal moment in my life of feeling like, oh, I don't belong here. Those kinds of things stick with you in a way that other experiences maybe don't.

You mentioned this idea of core memories, and you've probably looked at a lot more of the research than I have or those of us listening Would you say that core memories are from what you would call more negative events? How do you come to understand that bank of core memories? Because what I've read on that is that it is the moments that are more heightened. And those tend to be the moments where we feel afraid or we're in danger, because that's how our brains are wired to be anxious and look for what's wrong so that we survive rather than remembering, let's say, the peak.

Bup.

Bull.

I don't know. Maybe we remember peak experiences in equal measure. What's your take after diving in?

I don't think we do. I think we have an inherent negativity bias. Again, that's an evolutionary survival mechanism that was created to help us survive the bad things that we encounter in life. And so we have this kind of built in thing already. And what I've learned through the research is that negative experiences imprint on our minds immediately. And so that's why, like, they stick with us. But then to counteract one negative experience or emotion, we have to have almost up to like between three and six positive emotions or experiences to counteract that. And when we have that positive experience or emotion, we have to actually be present to it for 12 seconds or more for it to actually imprint in our minds. And so if you think about how quickly we tend to move through life. So even for example, in this past week where, you know, like I've been doing book stuff and celebrating little milestones and stuff, I've had to be so intentional about stopping and being present to how I feel in that moment and taking in the good because it's really easy to just blow by it and move on to the next thing. And so we have the capacity to build up a bank of positive core memories so that those outweigh the negative. But it has to be very intentional in order for us to do that.

One of the most powerful parts of the book is the manifesto. And I really loved your story of kind of sharing a lot of this for the first time. And I love that you're closing the book with this manifesto of how we can improve the health and again, sustainability and the experience of humanitarian workers. I know that's what your new substack is dedicated to as well. What's your hope that as this book makes its way into the world, what's your greatest wish?

My greatest wish definitely is to have that kind of positive impact. I really want to make service without sacrifice the norm and not the exception, because we need people to do this work. And sadly, now More than ever. And I don't know why we wouldn't take care and extend that ethos of care that many of these organizations are. That's like their mission. Why wouldn't we extend it to the people within the organization? So really, at the end of the day, putting the human back into humanitarian work is really what I hope will come out of all of this.

And I love that. Service without sacrifice as well. I'm just calling this out. And even if it's not malicious on the part of the people doing these jobs, it has most certainly been neglected. Just like you share your story of having an autoimmune condition, all of a sudden your body starts failing you, and it's up to you as an individual to assess why, when in fact it's pervasive across these types of fields. So I just love that mantra for everybody to remember who's doing this kind of work of service without sacrifice. And even the title, tell Me My Story, it's like, oh, it makes so much sense when you realize how much energy you had spent saying that to other people. Tell me your story. If you could give listeners one experiment to try in the next week or two, let's say, along the lines of service without sacrifice, what would it be?

Tying in? Kind of the seeing piece of this. Try to see if you can notice just one moment during your day where maybe you're just trying to push through and just kind of stop and allow yourself to just take three really deep breaths. Like close your eyes for a minute, take three nice deep breaths, let your shoulders settle, and then just come back and see, like, how you feel. And I know people sometimes laugh about this idea of taking breaths, but it's such a great way to reset our nervous systems in real time. And the more that we start to kind of intentionally notice those moments where we're just pushing through, pushing through, pushing through, we can start to see what those patterns are. And that's kind of the first step. So that's what I would definitely encourage or invite people to do, is start to notice.

And they could also listen to the other podcast that we didn't mention. What would TED Lasso do for any TED Lasso aficionados? What is that show about? Because TED could put a smile on anybody's face.

Oh my gosh. That is, I think, my all time favorite show, which is why I created a podcast.

I love that.

What Would TED Lasso Do Explores each episode through the lens of leadership and positive psychology. And especially season one is such an incredible case study in leadership. So I actually created the podcast. I invited a friend. So we actually talk about each episode and the themes that we notice and we tie it back to different research and positive psychology. We talk about different leadership styles, things like that. And it is to this day one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on and I have heard from a lot of people that they've enjoyed listening to it. I will say that TED is to me the epitome of a human centered leader, which is what I think we really need in all of these organizations. Right. Is we need human centered leadership.

Absolutely. Well, what a great lens to study it through. I'll make sure to put the links to all these in the show notes. And grab your coffee. Grab your coffee. Yes, grab your coffee and a copy of Tell Me my story. Challenging the Narrative of Service before for self, either for you or somebody that you know who works in a human centered, service oriented profession. Did I get that right, Dimple?

Yep, you absolutely did.

Okay, amazing. And we should give a shout out to your sister as well, who designed the brilliant cover and is just such a special person in her own right. And I just love reading about the two of your relationship as well.

Oh, thank you, thank you. And I'll just add that the book is available for pre order now.

So awesome. Yeah, thank you so much Dimple. And big thanks for doing the work that you've done all these years, decades now. And to everybody who's here with us listening, thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny Blaze.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

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