Crisis Management

This chapter describes ETM theory for psychological trauma's effects on:

1. crisis managers
2. organizations that manage traumatic events and their outcomes

Terms used in this chapter to discuss ETM Crisis Management theory depend on explanations provided in About/ Theory/ Psychological Etiology and Etiology Reversal.

Introduction

Psychological trauma affects crisis managers and their organizations somewhat differently, respectively, from lay men/women and their families (see About/ Theory/ Families).

Unlike the layman, the crisis manager carries two existential identities into the traumatic event. One is personal and the other is the system of values, beliefs, images and realities inculcated by training as preparation for the event.

When the manager experiences the traumatic event, there is, because of the assiduous professional preparation, little or no damage to professional existential identity. A primary goal of the professionally inculcated identity is to provide the manager with a system of psychological protections to personal identity operational functioning so that the difficult tasks confronting the manager can be accomplished.

Unlike laymen, the crisis manager must, usually in order to care for others, overcome the trauma-causing situations and restore safety and security. Despite the professional identity's protections, however, contradictions to personal identity still occur. Moreover, in the process of providing the protections, the damage to the manager's personal identity may, and usually does, go undetected.

An additional problem for the manager can ensue: where the damage to existential identity for the layman is retained in memory via ordinary defenses, the damage to the professional is retained in memory through the application of extraordinary defenses. These extraordinary defenses can and often do include the professional protections themselves: crisis management training and organizational policy and procedures that direct performance during and following the high stress activities.

If the protections do not include reversal of the etiology affecting the personal identities of its managers, the organizational protections can, like families' protections, become controlled by the individual etiologies that eventually combine to produce a collective and often destructive effect on the protective trainings, policies, and procedures. As occurs for individual and family management controls affected by trauma, the crisis management organization's protective measures can, themselves, also become an extension of the trauma's controls -- the organization is managed by the problem, which because of the trauma's influences then appears to be unmanageable.

This chapter explains these processes, trauma's effects on individual and organizational management, and describes how to establish controls that reverse etiology early on and in the process prevent the organizational controls from becoming the new problem.

Individual Crisis Managers

Unresolved trauma that affects the crisis manager's personal existential identity will foster development of the first and second psychological trauma patterns: respectively, the contradiction of personal values, beliefs, images, and realities and the retention in memory of loss resulting from the contradictions. The following paragraph provides a few examples of how on-the-job traumatic events can contradict personal values, but not contradict professional ones.

During combat, death of an associate or the requirement to kill another person are events and activities that are professionally accepted -- a part of the professional values, beliefs, images, and realities. Where military and law enforcement personnel expect such events as a prospective function of the job, personal beliefs that people should not kill each other and that there should be continuity of life exist in personal indentity as the opposite of the death of associates or the requirement to take life.

Similarly, deaths resulting from homicide and accident are also expected by professionals who have to address the deaths and provide society's administrative responses to the resulting problems. But again, personal identity expects life and continuity of it.

The losses experienced because of the contradictions to personal identity are the same as those that would be experienced by a layman. They include self-esteem, self-worth, trust in and respect for people, role model images of how people, populations, civilizations, families, parents, spouses, children, and social leaders are supposed to act.

The manager's emotional cycles felt in conjunction with the loss are also the same as those experienced by laymen. The emotions presented in the grief cycles are shock, disbelief, fear, anger, embarrassment, shame, rage, hurt, guilt, sadness, and mourning.

The retention in memory of patterns one and two will eventually produce survival responses that are manifested first as additional contradictions to personal identity, and then later as contradictions to professional existential identity. These survival responses and their contradictions to both identities produces the third psychological trauma pattern.

Examples of survival responses that contradict personal identity include; withdrawal from spouses, children, parents, other family and friends; projections, through explosive behaviors and other interactions, of the emotion comprising the patterns onto spouses, children, parents, other family and friends; the refusal of caring/love and the inability to give either; incomplete control of thought processes related to personal interactions; increasing paranoia; and the application of selective truth-telling; lying as matter of routine.

Examples of contradictions to personal identity resulting from the survival responses can include the following. Family members are supposed to be involved with each other, to care for one another, to control one's thoughts and emotions, to treat loved ones fairly, to have courage against inner fear so that it does not control all perception, and to be honest -- not lie to loved ones.

Examples of survival responses that eventually contradict professional identity can include: confused thought and erratic behavior, wide emotional swings, inflexible and inaccurate interpretation of rules, fusion with victims, burnout, alignment with perpetrators, impaired judgment, illegal or unethical use of power, social self-destruction, suicide. Confused thought and erratic behavior, inaccurate interpretations and appraisals and poor judgment contradict professional values and beliefs that the affected crisis manager is supposed to think clearly, behave responsibly, plan intelligently, and use good judgment. The professional image contradicted is one of high standards in the delivery of quality work. Wide emotional swings undercut professional beliefs in the value and importance of emotional control. Fusion with victims or alignment with perpetrators contradict values, respectively, of professional separateness/distinction and proper conduct -- the maintenance of objectivity. Illegal or unethical use of power contradicts professional values, belief, image and reality that relate to professional oaths and allegiances to the profession and the public that is being served.

The third pattern, that is, the contradictions to both identities will result in the experience and likely repression of additional loss and accompanying emotional cycles in the professional identity -- the formation of the fourth psychological trauma pattern. The patterns are defended in the subconscious through the same paradoxical system of control that defends laymen, except that the cognitive strengths underpinning the part of the paradox that is trying to prevent the trauma's resolution is reinforced by the crisis manager's use of cognitive-behavioral controls provided during training to help the person to do the job while the traumatic event is occurring. That is, the controls adopted from the training and that are needed to help the person to do a good job, paradoxically reinforce the survival dynamics that prevent the trauma's resolution.

Crisis Management Organizations

Trauma's etiology is not only retained incrementally in the individual subconscious of the system's members, but the etiology is also retained in the collective subconscious of those members. That is, the system's professionals share the same trauma-causing experiences and if not the same specific experiences, at least like experiences. The individuals comprising the system share the retention of the same 4 psychological trauma patterns -- almost identical contradicted values, beliefs, images and realities, similar losses and the same emotional cycles.

The collective retention of the trauma produces systemic survival responses similar to the ways families are affected. Management controls become politically polarized in the leadership, and polarized between the leadership and the public; fusion in relationships is offset by intense interactional conflict; turf battles are common-place; boundaries between individuals and professional roles are eroded. Projection and counter projections occur to the extent that bureaucracies become even more rigid and paranoid. Low morale occurs with the focus of the cause of the low morale being the clients, the public, the organization is intended to serve. A surreptitious conflict, us against them, between the managers and the public evolves.

These contradictions produce organizational liabilities. Some are: the prospective destruction of property, the harm or death of associates or other innocent people, the increased propensity for violation of civil rights, alignment with perpetrators through corruption, the loss of order within the society, and the tendency to give up the goals of the organization or program on the basis that they are unattainable -- the experience of futility and the development of fatalistic attitudes.

Synergism

Aside from the effects described in the previous two subsections, there is another dynamic affecting crisis managers and crisis management organizations that requires some interpretation. While managing treatment team operations, we observed that there was a direct relationship between the treatment of families with high numbers of sources of trauma affecting the family and the manifestation of increasing degrees of treatment team survival response. In other words, the more sources of trauma affecting a family, for example, the more people in the family affected by chemical dependency, and the inclusion of other sources of trauma like incest, battering, homicide, suicide or combat, the greater the survival response required or manifested by the treatment team: meaning the greater the probability of pairing, fusion between therapist and family member(s), counter transference, team member incapacitation, and altering of the treatment plan (giving up or allowing diversions from the goals of the therapy).

Also, multiple families presenting with multiple sources of trauma had an even more destructive influence on treatment team operations. These relationships between greater numbers of sources of trauma and treatment team systemic and individual survival responses were codifiable by mathematical formula, which I eventually found could be utilized to predict treatment team behavior following exposure to certain numbers of presenting instances of trauma.

This formula, which historically was presented in our schools, but which presentation has been discontinued for lack of time, is also not presented here. Although the specifics of the math demonstrate the predictability of the relationship between multiple client traumas and treatment team behavior, the formula is not necessary (and the mathematical presentation requires considerable space) to make the general point. It is:

larger amounts and more intensely experienced traumas will predictably affect treatment team operations adversely.

We hope that it will suffice to emphasize 4 principles about this relationship.

1. Any individual, family, or group of people influenced by psychological trauma will carry with them a negative synergism that paradoxically both protects and hinders the individual, family or group by helping them to resolve the traumas and at the same time prevent the trauma's resolution.
2. The power of this synergism is great and becomes proportionately greater with the amount and intensity of the trauma: the number of sources of trauma.
3. The synergism functions as its own psychological entity and it will confront, and can even demolish, efforts to help that do not take its force into consideration.
4. The converse is also true; when the treatment team does recognize the negative synergism's influences and also does adopt appropriate strategies for the team to countervail that influence, then the negative synergism can be reversed and the opposite will occur: the synergism will act to accelerate the resolution process.

"Appropriate strategies" refers to the crisis management team's thinking, planning and acting in concert toward the goal of resolving all of the trauma the management system encounters, including both the trauma that affected the people the team is supposed to manage and the effects of that trauma on the team.

ETM, including its use of TRT, is designed to provide crisis mangers and the organizations for whom they work the appropriate strategies to reverse the negative synergism effect.

Traumatized System Dilemma

If trauma etiology is allowed to become long-term, individual and survival responses will present as contradictions to standards for system conduct/behavior. System management has to use behavioral control methods to constrain the contradictions: maintain order.

Subsequently, any focus upon etiology can be interpreted as an excuse for aberrant behavior and illegal conduct. The excuse can't be tolerated if the behavioral method for maintaining system order is to be successful.

Thereafter, the system is required to ignore trauma etiology least its reversal prove the behavioral, including the responsibility and accountability, methods to be inherently flawed management responses to trauma.

The dilemma: Ignore trauma etiology and ensure continuing presentation of system survival responses, which require more behavioral constraint applications and ever greater ignorance. The system and its members are precluded, and without even knowing it, from learning their way out of the dilemma. It is self sustaining.

System Dilemma Solution

There appears to be no answer to this dilemma. But it can be easily solved by

1. reversing near-trauma etiology immediately; stop the addition of future presenting individual and systemic survival responses.
2. reversing long-term trauma for humanitarian reasons: the trauma etiology is a liability of the organization -- anybody can understand that idea.
3. declaring survival responses to long-term trauma etiology to be only likely theory; as a rule, continue to hold employees responsible for their behaviors while reversing the etiology in a parallel management continuum ("As a rule" means that while an employee is participating in an ETM clinical etiology reversal activity, some temporary adaptation -- tolerance for profound grief experienced during the clinical procedure -- is required by system management. But that temporary tolerance would not be much of an adaptation when compared to the pathological adaptation the system would otherwise have to make in response to individual and systemic survival responses).

If your organization applies itself to finding and reversing all trauma etiology resulting from employment, then the referenced dilemma will no longer exist. There won't be any more survival responses to unresolved trauma.

And trauma-affected employees cannot use PTS as an excuse for aberrant behavior where the etiology has been reversed. No etiology -- no symptomatic survival responses. Etiology reversal has the paradoxical effect of appearing to weaken the behavioral method, but in the end actually strengthening it and the authority of those who would employ it.

See ETM Strategic for a discussion of how to implement ETM theory for reversing near- and long-term trauma etiology, and restoration of operational functioning of crisis managers and their organizations.

ETM Ethics

Use ETM ethics when applying TRT to crisis managers (or anyone).

Generally, ETM requires, among other things, the disclosure (before the therapy is applied) of the therapy's goals and the methods used for achieving them. This disclosure is made to the end user of the therapy, the trauma-affected crisis manager.

Importantly, although the early etiology reversal method will have positive organizational effects, for example, system hysteria and chaos resulting from traumatic events will be ended, the application of TRT must be accorded to individuals existentially: because the trauma has occurred and the etiology needs to be reversed because it exists.

In that regard, never tell a trauma victim (or make via policy the primary reasons for the applications of TRT) that the therapy is being applied to make the trauma victim a better police officer, counselor, therapist, or manager supervisor, or to make the institution operate more efficiently (save money). If such instructions prevail, either the individual therapy applications or the motivations for installing ETM, the referenced paradoxical systems of control defending the individual etiology will be supported. The etiology will not be reversed. And if it is not reversed, neither will be the system etiology. Trauma induced systemic behavior will predominate the organization's management efforts.

The basis of ETM is caring for people who have been hurt. If this tenet is emphasized as primary and followed accordingly, managers can enjoy operating a system that is not disrupted by trauma.