Self-Care Breana Cross-Caldwell, CI and CT RID VIEWS Columnist
Elevating Diverse Perspectives? Care for your nervous system As interpreters, we are charged with understanding and communicating diverse perspectives for most of our work. As professionals and citizens in this community, we also strive to be open to, consider and elevate the diverse perspectives of our colleagues. How does our nervous system’s capacity affect our ability to elevate diverse perspectives? Let’s take the example of an interpreting situation, where a deaf person is angry and feels mistreated by a hearing person. As the interpreter, my identity, my relationship with the participants, and my understanding of their feelings and needs may play a significant role in my capacity to hold space and do my job effectively while in proximity to their emotions. What’s your relationship to emotions? Suppose being angry is a state I’m familiar with, comfortable with, and I understand the purpose of anger in this context. In that case, I’m likely able to convey it more efficiently and accurately. In this scenario where my alignment with the emotion of anger matches the speaker’s, we might not consider this a ‘diverse perspective’ - as it is not inherently different from my own. If being angry is a state I’m uncomfortable with, either in myself or in others, or if I don’t understand its purpose in this context, then I am likely unable to be in proximity to and convey it without having some activation of my nervous system. What’s your relationship with the people? Emotion is one layer of this interaction that can be diverse. The identities of the people involved are another. When information, and especially emotion, comes from a person who holds different identities than we do (as the interpreter), it can become exponentially more difficult to understand and convey accurately. This difficulty is especially true if others in the situation hold undervalued identities, and the interpreter does not (Nieto & Boyer, 2007). Reflecting on and growing our capacity The Feeling Wheel represents the 360-degree range of human experience, and it’s a helpful tool in growing our capacity to conceptualize and convey diverse perspectives (Theodore, 2020). Bringing awareness to our experiences of feeling and being in proximity to different emotions grows our ability to stay regulated (Price & Hooven, 2018). One way to use it is to choose an emotion from the wheel and reflect: 27
