How Do ACEs Burnout? Volume II — The Furnace, the Second Wound and the Alibi

The Furnace, the Second Wound and the Alibi: How Institutions Burn Out the People They Reward
Volume II of How Do ACEs Burnout?
Why do institutions reward the very adaptations that eventually burn their people out?
Volume I asked what the professional brings through the door. Volume II asks what the institution does with it.
Drawing together developmental psychology, neuroscience, medicine, law, organisational sociology, philosophy and the science of childhood adversity, Olivier Branford examines how survival adaptations can become professional virtues: how hypervigilance becomes meticulousness, compulsive perfectionism becomes excellence, and the inability to stop becomes dedication.
The book develops the concepts of Trauma-Scouting, Trauma-Harvesting, the Respectable Sweatshop, the Affective Field, Trauma-Organised Autopoiesis, the internal Panopticon, the Second Wound and the Alibi of Not Knowing.
Its central argument is not that childhood Trauma explains all burnout, nor that institutions deliberately harm their people. It is that institutions may recognise, select, reward and amplify the very adaptations that make certain professionals vulnerable to exhaustion — and then attribute the eventual collapse to the individuals whose extraordinary performance they previously celebrated.
The institution may not have caused the original wound. But what responsibility does it bear when its ordinary practices perpetuate the injury?
This substantial, independently readable second volume presents the empirical research, the philosophical synthesis and the questions institutions have yet to ask.
Author: Olivier Branford MBBS MA(Cantab) PhD
Format: Downloadable PDF ebook
Volume II of the three-volume How Do ACEs Burnout? series.