Organizing Emotions, Healing Trauma

How skillful feeling can transform organizations

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

People who experience trauma sometimes stop feeling, and for good reason: Going numb can protect a person from overwhelming and unbearable circumstances. As I write about in my second book (due out later this year), organizations and workplaces respond similarly to trauma. In these contexts, whole groups and systems become numb. They expunge the skills required to metabolize emotions into caring action.

To stop feeling can be important for survival, but when unfeeling becomes the norm, it creates additional problems. Amidst ongoing trauma, people and organizations can forget how to feel altogether. What starts as a temporary block of emotion becomes permanent. Organizations and people learn that to feel is a risk, a liability, and a weakness. But the opposite is true.

We live in times of trauma. And in times like these, remembering how to feel is a powerful way to support justice. So too is being with others who are remembering, who are slowly learning how to feel again after having forgotten.

Remembering how to feel can be painful. If you’ve ever spent time outside in brutally cold weather, you may be familiar with the numbing feeling that creeps into your fingers. At first, it hurts. But eventually, you notice the pain less and less. You stop feeling the cold as your fingertips freeze, and your awareness of the discomfort goes away. Everything seems fine, and you continue with whatever you’re doing outside. Later, when you go back inside where it’s warm, your fingers lose that numbness. As they thaw, they start to tingle, and then they hurt and burn. The return of sensation can feel more intense, and more painful, than the numbing. Thawing from the frozen emotions of trauma is similar. Sometimes everything feels worse before it feels better. But that temporary pain is better than permanently freezing and forgetting how to feel.

Feelings are wise. Audre Lorde’s words are relevant here. In an essay called “Poetry is not a Luxury” she says,

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. … We can train ourselves to respect our feelings.

Two things are important in this passage. First, Lorde knows that relating well to feelings is a skill. In a traumatized and traumatizing culture, feeling gets written off as flighty, unreliable, and reactive. But using just our heads without also attuning to our hearts disconnects us from our values. History gets erased when people forget what their bodies feel. They can then ignore lessons from the past. For these reasons, I so appreciate the term emotional intelligence. It highlights that working with feelings requires acumen, just like working with thoughts.

Second, Lorde emphasizes that feelings prompt change. They move people to action. In times of trauma, we need to feel so that we can act. Emotions teach us what is right in a particular moment, what we have lost, and what we want for the world. They help us to understand what we might yet create.

Sometimes, people think that feelings are individual things, ephemera that we experience alone inside our isolated skin sacks. Though people do have internal feelings of their own, emotions are also collective. Emotions connect a person to larger, cultural structures. For example, when a person feels shame about their body’s shape or size or appearance, that shame is related to what a society deems acceptable, normal, and worthy. Emotions are one way, among many, that social systems show up in people’s everyday lives.

The feelings associated with trauma—including going numb and not feeling—also link people to society. Specifically, trauma is “the hinge between systemic structures of exploitation and oppression and the felt experience of them.” When people live in times of trauma, their emotions teach them something about systems of violence. Emotions also provide ways to respond to those systems of violence. Working with feelings can create social change. As Cvetkovich puts it, “structures of feeling…can bring into being alternative cultures.” I don’t exaggerate when I say that learning how to feel, and refusing to stay numb, can reorganize the world.

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash

Even more directly, feelings are political. As Corrigan says, “Feelings are translated into politics… [they] scaffold and amplify to create political moods.” They are at the root of social movements where “expressions of new feelings” create tangible differences in democracy and push back on state violence. Feelings catalyze social and political transformation.

Despite the power of feelings, people or workplaces or organizations or entire cultures sometimes scoff at emotions. They like to make decisions based only on reason, but that’s not possible. Human experience just isn’t that pure. Years ago, management theorists recognized the limits of rationality. Using the term bounded rationality, they highlighted that organizational decision making always involves some amount of uncertainty. No organization can consider all relevant details before acting. But it can consider many details, and it can consider them with care.

Building on this work, scholars in my area of expertise—communication studies—developed the term bounded emotionality. Like the term bounded rationality, it emphasizes that organizational actions and decisions cannot rely on reason or emotion alone. Both ways of knowing have limitations. But noticing emotion in organizations is important and crucial. When organizations allow feelings to be one guide for decisions, those organizations support relationships, interdependent connections, and community.

But not just any expression or approach to emotion will do. Emotions can be used to manipulate people. And some emotional practices reinforce organizational whiteness and block anti-racist change. So simply encouraging more emotional expression in organizations isn’t the goal. Instead, organizations need to develop feeling practices that situate emotion in the context of history, power dynamics, and inequity.

I’ll say this crucial thing again: Relying on rationality is useful and important, but people and organizations cannot be rational without also being emotional. As so much research has shown, an emphasis on reason at the expense of feeling amplifies inequities based on race and gender. And as I explain in my forthcoming book, when organizations (or people) disavow feeling and empathy, they are exhibiting a trauma response. Much like humans, organizations might desire to be numb amidst atrocity. Being in that state for a little while can be wise because it supports survival. But when that temporary numbing becomes permanent, and embedded in organizational systems, organizations that experience trauma become organizations that create trauma. When they forget how to feel, organizations foist abuse and additional forms of violence onto their workers and other organizations.

When organizations work skillfully with feelings, they improve the bottom line. Organizations that value emotions see increased creativity, better decision-making, higher performance, and more impactful collaboration. In a workplace that respects emotions, employees are more likely to support organizational change, and so the whole company becomes more adaptable and resilient. In workplaces where the emotional climate is characterized by joy, gratitude, excitement, and warmth, employees are more satisfied with their work and more committed to the organization. That satisfaction and commitment reduces turnover. Although management plays a role in creating effective emotional climates, small interactions and the minor things people say to one another are incredibly powerful. Healthy emotional climates need not be designed from the top.

But there’s another important reason for people and organizations to become skillful with emotions, one that goes well beyond profit margins. When people and organizations know how to feel, and when they develop feeling practices that support justice, they build a world with less violence and where people thrive. For me, that’s ultimately what organization and organizing are about.

If you and/or your organization are interested in growing your emotional communication skills, I can support you. Please reach out about my coaching and consulting.

Stay tuned for my next newsletter. It’ll be out on April 7, and I’ll be posting about a communication skill known as perception checking.

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