Mutual Aid, page 9
Signs of Overwork and Burnout
• High stress when thinking about tasks being performed by someone else who might do it differently, or the group coming to a different decision than we would make.
• Feelings of resentment: “I’ve done the most for this group” or “I work harder than anyone else.” This can include creating a damaging group culture of competition about who works the hardest.
• Not respecting group agreements or group process because we feel above the process as the founder or the hardest worker.
• Feelings of competition with other groups that are politically aligned or with other issues or activists that we perceive as receiving more support.
• Feelings of martyrdom.
• Desire to endlessly be given credit for our work.
• A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to “be important” to the group or control outcomes.
• Feeling overwhelmed or experiencing depression and/or anxiety.
• Feeling like we “have to” do all these things, cannot see any way to do less work or have less responsibility.
• Inability to let others take on leadership roles.
• Hoarding information or important contacts so that others cannot rise to the same level of leadership (this behavior is usually rationalized in some way).
• A life-and-death feeling that “it must be done the way I do it.” An extreme version of this can result in leaders sabotaging the group or project rather than recognizing that it may be time to step back and take a break from leadership.
• Paranoia and distrust about others in the group or other people working in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone. Feelings of “me against [members of the group/other groups/everyone].”
• Over-promising and under-delivering, which can lead to feeling fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.
• Having feelings of scarcity drive decision-making: “There’s not enough money/time/attention.”
• Having no boundaries with work—working all the time, during meals, first thing upon waking and last before sleeping, during time that was supposed to be for connecting with loved ones. Not knowing how to do anything besides work. Not having fun or feeling relaxed on vacation or days off.
• Dismissal of the significance of group process and overvaluation of how the group is perceived by outsiders such as funders, elites, and others.
• Being flaky or unreliable.
• Being defensive about all of the above and unwilling to hear critique. “I’m doing so much, I’m killing myself with work. How can you critique me? I can’t possibly do any better/more!”
• Shame about experiencing all of the above.
We also carry around fallback attitudes and behaviors that can undermine our principles, especially when we are stressed out and over capacity. These can be behaviors we learned from dominant culture and also roles we learned in our families. When we are stressed and overworked, these things can come out in damaging ways. It can mean we misuse or obstruct group processes, disappear from the work, or act from a place of superiority or dominance on the basis of gender, race, ability, class, or educational attainment.
How Mutual Aid Groups Can Prevent and Address Overwork and Burnout
Overwork is pervasive in mutual aid groups, and if we can move away from shaming and blaming ourselves and others and toward acknowledging it, we can support change. It is hard to confront another person about behavior that is harmful, and it is hard to be confronted about harmful behavior and listen to what is being said. The ideas below do not change that, but they may help individuals or groups create concrete steps to address the problems.
1. Make internal problems a top priority. The group cannot do its important work if it is falling apart inside, and it cannot do its work well if it is promising to do work it does not have the capacity to do. The internal concerns cannot wait until later, because the giant need the group exists to fill is probably not going to be reduced in the immediate future. This does not mean the group’s work needs to stop, but it may mean calling a moratorium on new projects and commitments so that the situation does not worsen, and so that people can carve out time for working on internal problems.
Groups working on internal problems might seek any of the following resources:
• Training in meeting facilitation, decision-making, consensus process, active listening, giving and receiving direct feedback.
• Facilitated discussions and training about how racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and other systems of meaning and control affect group development and culture, and how to change that.
• Collective planning of the group’s work so that participants build shared clarity on what the priorities are and what they have agreed to do and not to do together.
• Creating work plans for teams and/or individuals to figure out how to assign work fairly, assess workload, and plan out a reasonable pace of work.
• Conflict mediation between particular people or groups working with a facilitator who understands the group’s values and whom the people in conflict trust and/or see as relatively neutral.
• Work on building transparency in the group so that people know what each other are doing, and allied groups doing similar or related work know what the group is doing.
• Regularly scheduled conversations where people can hear from each other about what is going well and what needs work in the group’s dynamics, or can discuss issues or concerns about their own role and ask for the group’s assistance.
2. Make sure that new people are welcomed and trained to co-lead. This means new people are given a full background on the group’s work, understand that they are being asked to fully participate in all decisions, and have space to ask any questions they need to in order to participate. Ensuring that everyone is getting access to what it takes to co-lead is essential to building leadership among more people. Group members and the group as a whole will be better off if many people are leading, not just one or two.
3. Establish mechanisms to assess the workload and scale back. How many hours is each member working? Is it beyond what they can do and maintain their own wellbeing? Did they actually track their hours for a week to make sure they are aware of how much they are working? Assess the workload and scale back projects until the workload is under control. Create a moratorium on new projects until capacity expands. Enforce the moratorium—no one can unilaterally take on new work for the group or for themselves as a member of the group.
4. Build a culture of connection. How can the group’s meeting culture foster well-being, goodwill, connection between members? Eating together, having check-ins with interesting questions about people’s favorite foods, plants, movies, or politicizing moments may feel silly at first but makes a big difference. Bringing attention to wellness into the group’s culture means helping members be there as multi-dimensional people, rather than just as work or activist machines. People need to build deep enough relationships to actually be able to talk about difficult dynamics that come up, or those dynamics will fester.
5. Make sure that the facilitation of meetings rotates, including agenda-making and other key leadership tasks. Rotating tasks can help us address unfair workloads and transparency concerns. Making sure everyone is trained on how to facilitate meetings in ways that maximize the participation of all members of the group can help. Whenever there is a danger that just a few people will dominate an important conversation, use a go-around rather than having people volunteer to speak. Quieter members speaking up can really change the dynamic.
6. As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture of overwork. It is not one person’s fault, and everyone may be feeling the different forms of pressure. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the pressures and dynamics that lead to overwork or to an individual’s dominating or disappearing behavior. Create a shared language for the pressures the members may be under so they are easier to identify and address moving forward.
What Individuals Experiencing Overwork and Burnout Need
In addition to creating group approaches to burnout, we can take action in our own lives when we recognize our own symptoms of overwork and burnout. This requires us to work on changing our own behavior and that we be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit, to control, to overwork, or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained lifelong contributions to the movements we care about, and receive the love and transformation that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoid judgment, recognize the role of social conditioning in producing these responses in us, and patiently and humbly experiment with new ways of being.
The compulsive worker, over-worker, or control freak might come to understand their needs in the following ways:
• I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behavior, and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something in a new way. For example, these people might remind me that even though someone else in the project will do this task differently, it is better to let them do it so they can build their own skills and I can use the time for something healing that has been missing from my life. These people might help remind me that it will be okay if I say no to a task or project. These friends can help me give love to the wounds underneath my compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior, reminding me that I am worthwhile and my value does not hang on what the group does, how much work I do, or what other people think of me.
• I need supportive people who can also point out compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior or ideas when they hear them from me or see me engaging in them. It can be difficult to receive such feedback, but it is truly a gift.
• When I get feedback from friends or collaborators about concerns they have, I need to resist the impulse to defend myself or critique the way they delivered their message. This feedback, including any anger they express while sharing it, is likely a sign that others think I am a leader and that what I do matters. They are doing the hard and uncomfortable task of raising a concern because they see me as a person with influence. I can remember that, no matter how it is delivered, this feedback is an investment in me and in our work, and an act of love. I can seek out a friend separately to process the difficult feelings that receiving this feedback brings up. The need to avoid acting out my defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative, is especially important when I am in a position of privilege of any kind and/or have more developed leadership in the group or project.
• If I hate everyone I’m working with or feel like I am going to die or like I have to stay up all night working, this is probably about something older or deeper in my life, not about the current work/workplace/group/coworker. If my heart is racing, if I feel threatened, if I feel like I can’t get out of bed, if I feel like I can’t speak to my coworker or I’ll explode, I am probably experiencing pain deeply rooted in my life history. To get out of this reactive space, I need to devote resources to uncovering the roots of my painful reactions and building ways of being in those feelings that don’t involve acting out harm to myself or others (including the harm of overworking). The first step is recognizing that my strongest reactions may not be entirely or primarily about the work-related situation directly in front of me, and being willing to slow down to explore what is underneath.
• I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part of healing the world. What that looks like is different for everyone, and could include individual or group therapy, 12-step programs (including Workaholics Anonymous), exercise, bodywork, spiritual exploration, art practice, gardening, and building meaningful relationships with family or friends. Whatever it is, I have to engage in a gentle way and be careful that it does not become another thing to perfect or to try to be the leader of. Pursuing a healing path can be a way to practice doing things because they feel good rather than because they accomplish something.
• I need to stick around. It may be tempting to disappear altogether from a group if relationships have gotten difficult and I am experiencing negative feelings about myself and others. If I want move toward a more balanced role in the group, or even transition out altogether, I need to do so gradually and intentionally. I need to transfer relationships and knowledge and skills that I hold and make sure that my transition is done in a way that ensures support for the people continuing the work.
Conflict
Working and living inside hierarchies does not teach us how to deal with conflict. Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others’ wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others. Our culture teaches us that giving direct feedback is risky and that we should either suppress our concerns or find ways to manipulate situations and get what we want. We are trained to seek external validation, especially from people in authority, and often have few skills for hearing critical feedback, considering it, and acting on what is useful. To survive our various social positions, we internalize specific instructions about when and how to numb our feelings and perceptions, avoid giving feedback, disappear, act defensively or offensively, demand appeasement, or offer appeasement. As a result, we are mostly unprepared to engage with conflict in generative ways and instead tend to avoid it until it explodes or relationships disappear.
Conflict is a normal part of all groups and relationships. But many of us still seem to think that if conflict happens, it means there is something wrong—and then we seek out someone to blame. If we do work we care deeply about with other people, we will experience conflict because the stakes of the work feel very high to us, and that conflict is likely to bring up wounds and reactions from earlier in our lives. This may mean we revert to oppressive scripts and power dynamics from the dominant culture.
The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or to blame, and the more we can normalize conflict, the more likely we can address it and come through it stronger, rather than burning out and leaving the group or the movement, and/or causing damage to others. Some of the reasons that conflict can be so pitched in social movement groups include:
• We have the strongest feelings about people who are closest to us. We are more likely to be up at night stressing about a conflict with a friend or collaborator than thinking about the mayor or some other person whom we have a more distant relationship with.
• When we come into movement spaces with high expectations and desires for belonging and connection, disappointment is likely.
• Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence that we are different or are being slighted or left out.
• Even good experiences, like finding a space that breaks our isolation by joining a group with others who share our values or identities, can bring up our conditioned thinking and feeling. We might feel like we don’t deserve it or like we are fraudulent. We might even unconsciously make up stories about what other people are thinking about us.
• Mutual aid work, by definition, responds to intense unmet needs and brings stress and pressures that can heighten feelings and provoke reactive behavior.
Given that conflict and strong feelings are inevitable if we are working on something we love with people we care about, what can we do to cause less harm to each other and our groups? How do we hold the strong feelings that come up, and how do we survive the conflict without being our worst selves to one another?
Here are three ways to check in with ourselves, get perspective, and act based on our principles when conflict is coming up:
One. Get away for a quiet moment to feel what is going on inside. This inquiry could also include talking to a friend or writing things down.
A lot of times when we perceive some kind of threat, we go on autopilot. That autopilot could take the form of a obsessive critical thinking about another person, selfhating thoughts, disappearing, picking a fight, getting lost in work, getting wasted, or obsessing all night and not sleeping. Whatever it is, it can help to ask ourselves about what kinds of feelings are coming up. Paying careful attention to ourselves can stop us from going with the autopilot reaction that might not be aligned with our intentions, purpose, or values and might damage our relationships.
Two. Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we are having strong feelings and they deserve our caring attention.
It can be easy when we are hurt or disappointed to decide that another person caused our pain. Certainly, others’ actions and inactions stimulate feelings in us, but what feelings get stimulated, and how strong they are, has a lot to do with ourselves and our histories. Often, when something really riles us up, it is because it is touching an old wound or raw spot.
Three. Get curious about our raw spots.
We all have raw spots—things that bother us because of the insecurities we carry or the way we were treated as kids at school or by our families at home. Other people do not know our raw spots—we sometimes do not know them ourselves—so people are often surprised at the impact of their actions on our feelings. We can become curious about our own raw spots, finding origins in childhood experiences, the cumulative impact of microaggressions and systemic harm, or other sources. When someone brushes a raw spot, we can have a big reaction—sometimes acting outward toward them, sometimes harming ourselves. The trick is to realize that our raw spots belong to us, rather than us being hostage to them, and that we can experience the feelings, notice them, and decide how to move forward, rather than having the feelings drive our behavior.
