Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice

A Field Manual for Helping Professionals and Volunteers

Bobbi Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429603419
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Psychology

Recasting burnout as a crucial phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice uses real-world case studies to teach professionals and volunteers unique skills for cultivating resilience.

Viewing service and burnout as interdependent throughout phases of stability, collapse, reorganization, and exploitation, the book uniquely combines elements of adaptive resilience theory with contemplative practices and pedagogies. Drawing on the author's extensive experience working at the intersection of service and contemplative practices, this is the first book to demonstrate how and why professionals and volunteers can reframe burnout as an opportunity for resilience-building service. User-friendly case studies provide tools, skills, and exercises for reconstructive next steps. Chapters address personal, group, and structural levels of service and burnout.

Illuminating the link between adaptive resilience and burnout as a normal and useful phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice is a necessary resource for professionals and volunteers across a wide range of service settings.

Chapter 1

Rewriting the Story of Service and Burnout

When I slowly returned to service after my scrape with burnout, I decided to gather stories from others who had similar experiences: what it felt like; what people thought about it and themselves; who they told and how they described it; and where their burnout experiences took them. I want to know more about what happened to me. I held no illusions. I knew their stories might provide cover for burnout. They might call it something else. Some did. Some did not. But all of their stories took me in a direction I had not fully expected. They confirmed that I now needed to tell a different story of service, one that included burnout.

Meanwhile, my faculty responsibilities expanded to include working with graduate students. Three smart and creative students who took an American religious cultures seminar I taught asked me and a colleague from the Environmental Sciences Department at Emory, Lance Gunderson, to co-teach a class on religion and ecology the following semester. A dabbler in these fields due to my own love of being outdoors, I relied fully on Lance Gunderson, an internationally recognized ecologist. It was during this seminar (and a follow-up course) that Lance introduced us to Adaptive Resilience Theory (ART), a life and social systems model that became central to my work on burnout.

From an ART perspective, system collapse or breakdown is a crucial phase for long-term thriving.¹ All healthy life and social systems cycle through phases. One necessary phase for building resilience is collapse, and for our purposes here, burnout. From a very basic Adaptive Resilience perspective, a single cycle of a life or social system is composed of four phases: stability, collapse, reorganization, and exploitation. Systems go through many such cycles. Sometimes phases veer from their usual order. The theory began in case study data and continues refining itself through actual examples. These clarify and demonstrate how, when, and why each phase fosters aspects of adaptive change. Specifically, the collapse phase, burnout, cracks open previously untapped, even trapped or ignored, materials and energies. The breaking down or apart offers the system a kind of test. Is it resilient enough to conjure next steps, or new or revised configurations? ART views collapse as possible, released creative potential, the stuff of resilience. Continual stability eventually weakens a system’s adaptive capacities. Healthy systems require these disturbance phases. See the basic model in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Resilience Model. From Panarchy, edited by Lance Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Figure 2-1, 34. Copyright 2002 Island Press. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington DC.

To translate this to service, burnout is a naturally occurring phase of an adaptive and resilient service system. Not a sign of linear no-return failure, burnout’s painful pressures release potential for transformative reorganization. Tough times, even collapse, contribute to resilient thriving. Hard to imagine, right? When all hell is breaking loose, useful stuff does too? Yes. The pain and struggle still sears. The system’s meltdown causes real problems. But, if we can keep our heads, bodies, and hearts from only flailing or fleeing, we’ll discover untapped or reconfigured resources. Burnout’s potential plummets if we cannot value the change that birthed them.

Stability is not the only sweet spot of service. Resilience approaches highlight that we can’t know precisely how or what kind of adaptive states might emerge after a breakdown. But while in it, we can learn to trust and support the process, ourselves, and our service partners and communities. To stick with a resilience approach requires honesty and trust at every level of the system. That trust can help us settle into what’s actually happening with serious interest, even kindness, rather than panic. The principles and practices in this book explain how to embrace this approach and its work. We can choose to rebuild while rooted in difficult realities. We do not have to panic or judge ourselves or others, but we need resources for that work. This book finds them in the principles and practices of contemplative traditions in forms that anyone can embrace, secularized forms. Much more about this in the next chapter.

The following two case studies, one more general and one more detailed, demonstrate how, when, and why an adaptive resilience approach works and how contemplative values and actions contribute.

A General Case Study

Let’s imagine we live in a community with a growing population of people struggling to survive without shelter. A group of us decide to open a soup kitchen to provide one healthy meal a day, five days a week. We feel conflicted, but responsibilities for seven days a week overwhelm us. The response is strong from other community groups including several willing to offer space and kitchens. After a number of months, we begin to serve and get to know people facing homelessness. Steadily, the numbers grow and we reconfigure our work to meet the demand. As relationships deepen, we feel we cannot ignore other service needs, especially lack of basic toiletries and clean clothes. So, we open a small clothes closet and begin collecting soap, shampoo, and toothpaste from local volunteer service organizations, Kiwanis Club, Rotary, etc. Initially, the good people bringing these items also help us organize our distribution area. But within months their number wanes. Donations continue to roll in, but no one consistently restocks the shelves or hands out the goods. We worry about this, but have no answers. We’re all working at the max. Even as some pitch in extra hours to help stock this area, pressures mount. One core volunteer leaves. Others are starting to burn out.

Still working from the old model of service with its straight-line growth, we expect demand will only escalate. We worry that our commitment will not match the demand. We need more volunteers. And volunteers who will stick. To use a natural systems analogy, our service to people without shelter began as an open field with lots of potential. Soon, what we cultivated in that field did so well, we planted a few other things. Meanwhile, other plants simply arrived by natural selection. The natural trend suggests ongoing growth. But in fact, natural systems do not just keep exploding and expanding. At some point, the system will be stretched beyond its capacities. Or a natural disaster, a forest fire, will hit. The system will be derailed from ongoing growth. It will have to adapt, find other strategies for thriving. We believed otherwise. We believed not only that we could just keep expanding, but also that we should. Of course, we could not match the steady growth.

If we had known about and embraced a resilience approach, we would have seen a very different picture. Even at the first signals of breakdown, we would pause to assess. The number of volunteers is going down. A few people are burning out and leaving. Time to be honest. Our service is outstripping our capacity. Of course, even using the old model, smart service directors might try to pace growth of service. But growth remains a good and expected thing. So, even if you’re slowing down, keep growing. A resilience approach stays in reality. Periods of steady stability, including ongoing growth, will eventually hit a collapsing point. So, what to do that fosters adaptation? You could convene a conversation with all the stakeholders including guests, local neighbors, volunteer supporters, and involved city officials.

The agenda of such a gathering: face our limits, recognize our emerging breakdown. Then the questions make sense because they’re rooted in reality. Can we draw more from the volunteers and staff we have? Can we recruit new volunteers – enough of them? How much pressure can the space tolerate? How will we keep the supply of toiletries and clothes going up? With these questions on the table a range of options emerge – again, rooted in reality. Is it time to limit our service? Is it time to temporarily stop and rethink our model? Do we terminate service completely or can a downsized program go on? Do we need additional experts, new construction, better funding approaches? All of these recognize that collapse is emerging, but at this point, it has not flipped the system into full-on burnout. Real choices await.

This story of service does not assume that we can do whatever service asks of us. This narrative embraces values of giving, but it is not a moral tale of unending selfless dedication to the point of collapse. Resilient service assumes that our service system will not continue as is. Something will trigger a reversal, a blow-out, a stop. We will burn out; and likely you’ve experienced this painful reality. Likely, you’ve lived this story and the counterintuitive old approach of denying or turning our backs on impending collapse. We choose the fantasy of limitless capacity and disturbingly with a semi-righteous tone. Pressures build. Programs and people break down. Burnout.

From a resilience perspective, our soup kitchen can re-learn service as including burnout. We can adapt instead of linearly pressing forward no matter what. Now’s the time to learn from the smaller collapses and alter our goals and actions. We can build adaptive responses focusing on the interplay of change and persistence, unpredictability and predictability.² These are next steps, but of a new kind compared to the old endless trudge forward when times are bad. When we deny burnout, we cork the flows of adaptive capacity building, and our service systems and our lives turn brittle and unresponsive. We need service and burnout systems that can “experience wide change and still maintain the integrity of their functions.”³ Working many different factors and operating over several different scales (both spatial and temporal), we can learn that breakdowns generate different adaptive cycles.⁴ We can give up the old story and discover alternative approaches to offering services to people living without homes.

With this adaptive resilience lens changing how I viewed service and burnout. I dove into more case studies of life systems adapting after crises.⁵ Those narratives expanded the range of factors contributing to burnout. Sometimes, our emotional wiring is so over-stretched that it breaks loose and so does all hell. Other times, the work disintegrates because translations of local needs fall on deaf ears at state or regional levels. Burnout can arise from team tensions, an inability to get on the same page or to positively leverage real differences among team members. People get to the same destination from multiple angles. Burnout corners that diversity instead of treasuring it. In other cases, space issues alone can collapse good work.

The case studies taught me to pay more attention to details, those tell-tale signs of impending burnout or barely glowing resources amid the rubble of collapse. So often, we’re drawn to the dramatic blow-ups of service burnout. But it’s often at the finer levels of service strain that we discover the linchpin pieces that do not require a lot of work to begin rebuilding. For example, in an elder services setting, tensions between volunteer medical students and full-time staff continued to escalate. What was triggering the slowly growing failure of a program that originally had more volunteers than needed and now struggled to find help? The details reveal a small but very sore spot: outdated forms and too many of them. The students said nothing because they did not want to disrespect the staff who seemed utterly wedded to those forms. The staff didn’t even recognize that the forms were an issue. They just saw the number of volunteers dwindling, which meant fewer volunteers becoming irritated filling out more and more antiquated forms! In a good effort to just keep going, the old story, burnout, grew – though unnamed. Once we finally found the issue, buried in the glowing coals of burnout, we began to reorganize and go forward.

Other cases of burnout are much tougher to move through. They remind me of what ART calls a systems flip. When a collapse overwhelms a life or service system, it can literally flip. An example is a section of the Everglades shifting from salt to fresh water. Usually, some massive disturbance is required to set off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Facing Burnout
• 1. Rewriting the Story of Service and Burnout
• 2. Contemplative Principles and Practices: Putting Adaptive Resilience to Work
• 3. Willingness/Not Willfulness
• 4. Not Taking In/Taking In
• 5. Moving Stability
• 6. Not All Up to Me/All Up to Me
• 7. The Edge of Earshot
• 8. Naming the Unnamed
• Index