Beatha Coaching

TRIGGER WARNING: this post contains references to potential trauma triggers

In my recent blog posts I have been exploring grief in academia and the need to acknowledge how many losses can characterise our progress in the sector. In today’s post I want to take a closer look at the griefs that emerge from the embedded inequalities in the sector. I’ll discuss these griefs as trauma, because the impacts they have as well as the silence that surrounds them contributes to the chronic state of emotional dysregulation that many academics find themselves living in.

What is trauma?

Trauma is commonly divided into Big T(rauma) and Little T(rauma) – for more on this you can watch the first part of my recent webinar on trauma in historical research, which you can find here. Put simply, Big T(rauma) is the effect of significant events that may be traumatising, such as conflict, natural disasters, the death of a loved one, or an accident. Little T(rauma) is not, as the name can suggest, more minor forms of trauma, but is rather the outcome of systemic and long-term experiences which produce repeated traumatising impacts on someone. Little T(rauma) includes partner abuse, childhood abuse, racism, homophobia, sexism, poverty, ableism, and toxic working conditions. These are not minor experiences of pain and discrimination; rather, they can happen over a long period of time, come from deeply embedded inequalities in the systems in which we operate, or be very hard to pin down.

Microaggressions are small, repeated acts and expressions by others that emphasise difference, and reveal the conscious or unconscious bias of the speaker. They may arise from a complete lack of awareness, or be deliberately discriminatory acts. Microaggressions can be traumatic in and of themselves, but the pressure to respond and to educate, and the emotional exhaustion that always having to explain and defend yourself carries, are also trauma factors. For a deeper discussion about microaggressions and embedded systemic trauma, especially in relation to how these affect mental health and the provision of therapeutic support, I would direct you to a recent episode of the podcast, Mindfully Healing, by trauma experts Micheline Maalouf and Nadia Addesi which you can find here. It is well worth listening to. Within academia, microaggressions are a common way in which the implicit culture and value structures of the sector are maintained. Because microaggressions stigmatise based on perceived membership in or exclusion from a group, they act as verbal structuring devices to indicate acceptance and rejection. In social terms, exclusion from a group always comes with an element of risk and will be perceived as threatening by our nervous system. But where our financial security and job prospects are tied to inclusion the stakes are compounded. Microaggressions around neurotypical work practices, mental health, and educational or cultural background, for example, all increase the potential for symptoms of trauma to emerge as a result of constantly having outsider status confirmed.

How does trauma manifest?

Trauma emerges first and foremost in our bodies. Our nervous system and brain are engaged in a constant process of neuroception – this is a scanning of our environment for clues about our safety that occurs outside our conscious awareness. Effectively, the nervous system’s role is to keep us safe by governing our responses to everything we encounter throughout our day. The ns will activate sympathetically in response to an identified threat and energise us to take action, and then subside back into rest and digest when the threat has passed (for more on the operation of the ns including the freeze response that occurs when we are overwhelmed, see this earlier post). The experience of trauma, however, disrupts the regulation of this process by identifying many more clues from our environment as threatening. For example, an experience of a racist microagression from one colleague may result in a constant feeling of anxiety and threat (sympathetic activation) whenever in that colleague’s presence. This response may extend to the environment as a whole, making attending meetings or even walking into particular buildings stressful and disruptive experiences. Although cognitively we may know we are safe, when we carry trauma our ns activates preemptively to protect us. The ns also responds reflexively. If, for example, we have responded to microaggressions in the past by freezing, or by appeasing and de-escalating the situation, these may be the responses we drop into automatically even if we actually want to respond in a different way. In turn, this autonomic reflexivity can compound the trauma by increasing our feelings of pain and shame. Toxic workplaces are employment settings where employees are under constant assault from potentially traumatising behaviour and treatment, which results in a state of chronic dysregulation in the nervous system, and the ensuing feelings of stress, anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, pain, and exhaustion.

Dissonance & disenfranchised grief

Describing academia as a toxic workplace feels particularly unsettling because of the mismatch between behaviours that lead to trauma and discrimination occurring in a setting ostensibly dedicated to educating and informing. There is a cognitive dissonance when departments celebrating decolonisation continue to hire predominantly white, male academics for permanent positions on the basis of their research records, apparently without irony pursuing diversity and inclusion charters whilst ignoring the systemic inequalities that shape departmental staffing. In the UK a lot of these problems are rooted in the 1985 conservative government’s shift toward universities operating like businesses, with successful research institutions rewarded financially and those that centred on teaching being reduced to second rate status with less funding. In subsequent decades, hiring based on research has become entrenched, whilst teaching posts became poorly paid and insecure stepping stones to the idealised permanent position. The catch-22, of course, as every precariously employed academic knows, is that teaching posts leave you financially insecure and without the means or time to do the research necessary to secure a tenured contract. With women and people from ethnic-minority backgrounds disproportionately appointed to non-permanent posts in which they have no job security to ensure care for dependents, no maternity leave, and often an expectation of relocation even for a short-term nine month post, the demographic makeup of departments (72% male and only 20% poc in the UK*) is continually reproduced by hiring committees who see no incentive to hire for potential and investment over a record of achievement.

So far so sector wide, and largely a result of institutionalised pressures and performance metrics. However, the potential for trauma really lies in the attitudes of colleagues toward these problems. Disenfranchised grief, as described by Bordere (2017), is the silence surrounding a population group’s experience of trauma that cannot be fully expressed or acknowledged because of a cultural rhetoric that denies its existence. Wherever people are operating within systems that were not designed for them, there is a disenfranchisement that occurs in the limiting of the space given for the expression of their pain and loss. Disenfranchised grief is also a form of microaggression, because it denies the reality of another’s experience of inequality. In academia, the myth of meritocracy still remains, but in a particularly questionable form. Toxic individualism, that makes it the responsibility of the stigmatised to overcome the limitations imposed on them externally, is constantly expressed in higher education settings. In the advice given to junior teaching faculty, for example, such as: just do less (paid) teaching; do your research in the evenings and weekends; improve your ‘branding’; do less teaching prep so you can spend the time on research. The persistent failure to recognise the profound costs of such advice, if followed, to someone’s health, work quality, and personal relationships, is often compounded by a quiet rhetoric of shame for failing to succeed, to the extent that anyone considering leaving academia to pursue a career in another sector, a normal choice for most people, is discussed as someone who ‘didn’t manage to make it’. Without wishing to overuse the term, this narrative is gaslighting, because it denies the fact that very real problems in the sector are blocking the career prospects of anyone who doesn’t conform to a narrow academic stereotype, and that these problems are replicated at departmental level between academics, not just by the institutions and management.

Looking at the sector now, from the perspective of a mental health professional, I am comfortable in my decision to describe universities as inherently traumatising institutions, particularly to women, people of colour, those with visible and invisible disabilities, and those from a non-traditional academic background. But for many years working inside academia, as a research administrator, a postgraduate, a teaching fellow, a lecturer, I experienced the dissonance, but found it hard to identify and express exactly what I was feeling. One of the side-effects of trauma and disenfranchisement is the tendency to internalise, to look inwards for the problem and the solution as something we ‘should’ be able to fix ourselves. The invalidation of our own trauma (eg – I’m just lucky to have this job…) keeps us trapped within the grief cycle and unable to move forward and find meaningful alternatives to our situation. It was only when I really started to examine the conditions I was working in, and the context that was shaping my less than ideal experience, that I felt able to articulate what was wrong and what I wanted to do about it. This is why grief is so important – to move forward we have to acknowledge and feel the real and profound losses we have incurred.

If you would like to start this process of finding clarity, I have a 50 minute webinar on Dealing with Disappointment in Academia that may help: you can purchase it here. If you already know that you are struggling, do get in contact with me using the form below, or make contact with another mental health professional who can support you. I also run a monthly membership for women in academia to find community, connection, and clarity. You can find out more about the membership (which has a sliding price scale depending on your academic position) here.

Thank you for reading. Please do like and share this blog, and consider supporting my free and low cost content by buying me a coffee.

Contact me here:

*Emma Irving, ‘Oxford University’s Other Diversity Crisis’, Economist (1 March 2023)