What I Learned from 17 Years of Research on the Effects of 9/11 and the Connection to Addressing Our Current National Crises

The brain works in amazing ways. Earlier this week, I had this internal need to re-read the first paper I ever published - 17 years ago - under the mentorship of Dr. William Sedlacek, a white male professor who had committed his career to studying racism and improving race relations in college settings. 

Perhaps as a triggering effect in response to increasing long-lasting concerns over the health and racism crises in our country, my brain sent a message that it wanted more answers. 

Nearly two decades later, on the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I am marveling at the similarities between what I was describing in that paper and what's happening now.

Although I have spent the most recent decade of my career focusing on the long-term impact of 9/11 on Veterans' post-deployment mental health, I wrote this first paper from another angle about the impact of 9/11: the immediate increase in prejudicial attitudes and hateful acts toward groups considered threatening in the U.S. in response to a national crisis... and what to do about it.

What I realized is that there one unexpected underlying connection between the research on (1) post-deployment mental health (especially post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD), (2) national crisis, and (3) prejudice and racism. That connection is about what we have learned about the effect that intense fear and prolonged distress has on our brain and sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight system) and then how the brain processes that threat. 

Under trauma and major crises, there is a part of our brain that constantly evaluates not only the immediate threat to our survival, but also anything else it believes could potentially exacerbate or further perpetrate the threat.

That part of the brain categorizes everything as "safe" or "not safe". Then it guides you toward either fighting against or avoiding anything categorized as "not safe" to limit future fear and pain.

While this is a completely natural human response, we know from many studies on trauma exposure - whether that be combat, terrorism, or a threatening pandemic - that our brain can sometimes overcompensate in an effort to sufficiently protect us.

• Remember your neighbor's scary dog that bit you once and you decided you hated and would avoid all dogs forever, even the tiny little friendly ones? (No? That was just me??). This is the brain overcompensating to keep you from having that experience again... even though most dogs are not dangerous.

In fact, our brain won't just overcompensate by judging which people and situations could potentially be dangerous... It will even judge and categorize the thoughts we have that could be threatening! 

It will then fight against or avoid those thoughts that feel unsafe, even if the reality is that they are just thoughts. 

The problem is that our thoughts happen so fast, they become automatic or "unconscious" as some would say.

These "unconscious" judgments (biases) our brain creates to keep us safe leads us to fear and avoid all people, places, and things deemed unsafe. 

Without identifying, questioning, and challenging these constant automatic reactions, this part of our brain could eventually hold us back from living our lives to our fullest, engaging in meaningful relationships, and even fulfilling our hopes and dreams.

Thankfully, just because that part of our brain computes its algorithm for your safety, it does not mean we shouldn't evaluate its accuracy. 

That computation is coming from a very basic part of the brain that was built for survival only. 

Over time, however, our human brains have developed much more nuanced capacity well beyond survival mode. 

Our brain now has an additional amazing capacity for self-reflection, learning, plasticity, and adjustment. 

It has the capacity to seek love, self-esteem, and relationships.

Our pain, anger, and fear continues to have an important place for self-protection. But as we know, even when we seek love, self-esteem, relationships, and new positive changes in our lives, we still experience fear and even pain of loss. Yes we choose in those cases to overlook it because we know we can only achieve those positive experiences by working through the fear. 

So our brains clearly now have many options for what we can choose to do in response to these emotions. 

Our greatest under-utilized human strength is the ability for "metacognition" - that ability to oversee and evaluating our thought processes. In this case, the ability to slow down and catch our unconscious biases (those quick basic overcompensating judgments of safety), evaluate their accuracy against current reality and context, and allow ourselves to take risks for the opportunity to gain new human capacity and connection. 

Why would we want to do that? Because not everything we are automatically doing to keep ourselves safe is as self-protective as we think. It's causing some of us to cause great harm to ourselves and to others. 

The paper I wrote was not about what we can't do. And it was not about ignoring or dismissing our fears and experience of threat.

It was about what we CAN do to create the kind of positive culture around us that can proactively reduce the impact of these national crises on further deterioration of our valued human connection.

We need that more than ever.

Categorizing people and overgeneralizing from one experience or situation to ALL people, situations, or thoughts that remind us of a past pain will push us further from fulfilling that need for connection and support we all have.

Our desire for self-protection is legitimate. Our insistence that the only way to achieve safety is by avoiding or fighting everything our early survival-brain might be afraid of severely limits our capacity to grow as humans.

When we face these national crises, whether they be the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the current coronavirus health pandemic scare, our early survival-brain's desire to shut out all people, places, and thoughts that appear different is hurting us. 

Coming together to support each others' combined survival is the solution. 

As a psychologist, I often think about how to help people stop hurting and self-sabotaging and instead start facing their fears in order to live their lives to the fullest.

As a leader, executive coach and consulting psychologist, I extend this further to helping people understand how to garner the resources and support needed to navigate within complex systems that force us into constant survival tactics. 

The answers are often similar: Start with connection instead of division. 

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(Originally posted on my LinkedIn page on September 11, 2020)

Acknowledgments: I'd like to thank Dr. William Sedlacek for his early impact on my career. He had taught a class that helped me better understand social identities and their respective impact on privilege - a class that ultimately inspired my thesis, then my desire to write this particular paper after graduating, and effectively led to my own life-long journey in understanding and supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across my work and community life. Thank you also to Susan Longerbeam, then postdoc, who help me publish this paper in 2003.

Solutions to 5 Common Networking Challenges for Women

We all know networking is important to leadership success. Yet many women struggle with using and accessing networks. This not only holds them back in their professional growth, but could also significantly interfere with their success in moving a high-stakes or high-visibility project forward. 

There are several reasons why networking doesn’t always get utilized well by women. In my own work, many talented women still view the concept of networking as some kind of sleazy, inauthentic interaction. 

In addition to this “moral judgment” about networking, some interesting new research indicates that “gendered modesty” also holds women back from networking. That’s the idea that women are socialized to act more humbly about their accomplishments and value.  

There is an assumption that the act of networking requires you to show off, self-promote, or market yourself—things that the women I’ve worked with generally experience as fake, excessive, or inauthentic to who they are. This leads women to instead network in ways that feel more authentic—often with a focus on relationship-building as the primary goal, rather than on exchanging knowledge and access to resources. 

The downside is that the benefits of networking (e.g., access to new, needed resources) are often lost to women who use this relationship-oriented method as a means to an end. 

Of course, there are also external structural barriers to networking that interfere, such as being excluded from networking and social events in the first place. 

But what is within our power is how we perceive, use, and access the networks that are available to us, as well as actively creating more networking opportunities.

Here are five common challenges and recommendations for how to start using networking more effectively, and in ways that can feel genuine. 

Expand Your Focus

At these events, women are often less likely to engage with attendees before and after the meeting. Some call this less-structured time “white space,” taken from the visual arts field, in which the amount of uncluttered space around the image is just as important to creating a visually appealing product as the image itself. 

That white space, when people are just milling about waiting for the event to start, during breaks, and right after the meeting, is the best time for good, effective networking. Men do more of this type of networking, which leads to connections, decisions, and can even set up the outcomes of a meeting. Women, on the other hand, are more focused on the actual purpose of the event, seeing it as the primary goal without realizing all the opportunities they are missing happening in the white space. 

You can create a world of new opportunities not previously available to you at those events. 

Adjust Your Biases and Mindset

If you restrict your view of networking by using words like fake, slimy, sleazy, and self-promotional to describe it, you are essentially removing a potentially powerful resource away from yourself. 

Instead, be open-minded. You can still use networking for relationship-building, while also recognizing it as an opportunity to expose more people to what you do and what your strengths are.  

Acknowledge and Address Fear

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." If fear of the unknown, shyness, or social anxiety is what is holding you back from activities such as attending a new networking event with people you may not know, the techniques behind exposure therapy might help. 

In exposure therapy, which is one of the most widely used, research-based treatments for a wide variety of anxiety disorders, you have to keep moving in the direction you most want to run away from: your fears. 

It works by showing you, over time, how your fears are often much worse than the reality of a situation and interfere with success. Sometimes this is best done in small increments, like starting with smaller events until you are comfortable enough to go to larger ones. 

For some events, you may be able to bring a friend or colleague along with you to ease into the situation. 

Working With (and Valuing) Introversion

Introversion is different from being shy, socially awkward, or suffering from social anxiety. If you are introverted, you don’t necessarily worry about other people’s negative judgements of your self-worth; it’s just that you prefer and appreciate more quiet inner-thought. You enjoy one-on-one conversations that are deep and meaningful and abhor small talk. 

So the concept of networking for introverts creates an image of unwanted, painful small talk with too many people in non-meaningful ways. 

In this case, the goal is to create space for these kinds of meaningful, one-on-one conversations. 

I would argue that the best networkers are introverts, because some of the greatest value can be had from these intimate, deep conversations about your personal vision, goals, and aspirations for your career. 

You Can Be Strategic and Authentic at the Same Time

Going back to that idea of our negative moral judgment of networking feeling fake or self-promotional, how do we make networking feel more genuine or natural? 

Once you meet someone at a meeting that might have similar interests, ask for their business card and reach out to them later on LinkedIn and/or email. Ask them if you can find a time to meet (or have a phone if they are not local) to learn more about their work. And approach these outreach activities with genuine interest and curiosity. 

When you start with genuine interest and curiosity about someone else’s work, the conversation flows easily from there. You are likely to identify things you both have in common, at which point you can share what you do—not in a self-promotional way, but in an educational way that is likely to also convey your excitement and pleasure at having found a common interest or goal in your respective jobs. 

You can then share any goals or aspirations you might have for your career, things you are most passionate about, projects you are working on, etc. 

The difference here is that you did not go into the conversation with a pre-conceived plan to sell someone on something you do. So the fake, sleazy, self-promotional feeling does not play into the picture. 

On the other hand, remember that for this to be effective networking, you are not setting up the meeting just to make another friend. This should still be seen as a strategic goal to expand your knowledge base of information and resources available, and to identify potential common professional interests that could lead to future opportunities. Stating this upfront is also okay to do, and may help further improve a feeling of networking as a genuine endeavor.    

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This post was originally published on Psychology Today on April 6, 2019. Copyright Mira Brancu/Brancu Associates 2019.