Page 38 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Fundamentals of Collaboration 7

unilateral, such as characterized by prejudice, contempt, or other feel-
ings that engender an “us–them” attitude. This includes the presence of
overt deception, manipulation, and the bad-faith intention of one party
to use the other parties without their consent to pursue clandestine goals.
While there will inevitably be both goodwill and rancor in the normal
process of relations—and, in fact, rupture and successful renegotiation
around conflict leads to stronger collaborative relationships (Winnicott,
1992)—unmitigated bad will inevitably leads to irreparable breakdown in
collaboration when necessity no longer moves groups together. Another
factor that will disrupt collaboration is deliberate sabotage by one group
or person toward another. While this is so self-evident as to almost seem
not worth mentioning, it is nevertheless sadly common and noteworthy as
a factor to bear in mind and try to mitigate when possible. More effort is
required to restore broken trust than would have been required to prevent
the breaking of trust in the first place.

A Basic Framework: Trauma, Dissociation, and Enactment

Trauma is nearly always an intimate aspect of disaster, at least for some
of the involved people, organizations, and communities. It is helpful to
understand some basics of trauma and dissociation theory, therefore, in
order to understand the most effective ways of approaching collaboration
in the presence of traumatic experience and its consequences. Trauma, a
hotly debated concept, has many definitions. For our purposes, we can
understand trauma as an event or experience, which passes a “tipping
point” (Gladwell, 2002, pp. 7–9) of distress in which usual process becomes
disrupted to the point of being overwhelmed. Exactly where this tipping
point comes into play varies according to many factors: type of trauma;
extent/intensity of trauma; presence of mitigating factors, such as innate
hardiness and good support structures and routines; and factors relating
to vulnerability, such as prior history and innate factors (Yehuda, 2004).
Traumatic experience may lead not only to functional impairment but
also emotional distress and behavioral and relational consequences, any
of which cannot be contained or articulated (Van der Kolk et al., 2005).
In the absence of being processed and spoken of, traumatic experience
instead may become displaced, avoided, and fragmented—a process
known as dissociation (Howell, 2008)—literally a disruption of associa-
tional processes, which normally function both for the individual mind
as well as for groups of individuals communicating within organizations