Disciplines:
One of the many reasons BIPOC folks have abandoned Western medical models of talk therapy is that it hasn’t helped them heal and, in some cases, keeps them stuck in PTSD, reliving traumatic experiences over and over again. BIPOC may not be the only folks who experience this but the underrepresentation of mental health care workers and the consequent lack of understanding of common BIPOC experiences within the system is another reason folks can be further traumatized rather than healed in talk therapy and other Western modalities.
Hence, many BIPOC turn to or search for culturally appropriate healing support. When they find something culturally aligned, it is often somatic in nature (that is). Other features of many BIPOC healing traditions involve ancestors, community, nonhuman relatives, and/or spirit helpers in some way as well as processes involving artistic practices, ceremony, and a clear analysis of interpersonal and social power dynamics.
It is often noted that the work of achieving social justice and equity is intrinsically healing. I’m not sure that’s true across the board.
What concerns me is whether activities like scholarship, research, activism, and storytelling are in whole or in part retraumatizing. Particularly in academia, scholars are expected to 1) isolate and 2) segment themselves in the interest of theorizing and critiquing, which are intellectual activities that too often shut down the heart. Your feelings don’t matter to academia, only your solo cerebral endeavours. The isolation of the academic is a given as the goals are to win degrees, professorships, tenure, notoriety as an expert, lauded publications, etc. in a contest of critiquing previous work and stamping new or modified theories on them. Meanwhile, as stories are uncovered, reclaimed, analyzed, or reframed, the heart cannot help but be engaged, feeling to various degrees the humiliation, confusion, anguish, rage, and pain that our ancestors and contemporaries have experienced in resisting colonialism, imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and other injustices.
It’s doubtful that most involved with these activities would argue that digging up, documenting, protesting, and sharing lesser-known and/or undervalued stories of injustice, resistance, and vanquishment are not stressful activities that have a contractive impact on our nervous system and other physical processes. Especially as the systems that devastated our ancestors and their societies still rule over us. Yet most of us recognize the importance of these ancestral stories and the importance of uncovering and sharing them. So what does the academic or the researcher or the social scientist or the activist do with all that ancestral, vicarious, and ongoing trauma?
Are we taking enough care of ourselves and each other so as to do this work in a way that is healing and not re-traumatizing, for the individuals doing it as well as the communities gifted with these precious stories? Especially as we cannot rely on academia or the health care system to provide culturally appropriate healing. Do we know enough about our cultural healing practices that have been outlawed, ridiculed, culturally appropriated, colonized, and sometimes genocided out of living memory? When we find culturally appropriate healing resources, are they financially and geographically accessible? Are those of us alienated from our communities by various colonial and genocidal mechanisms (such as, enslavement on another continent, residential schools, 60s scoop) welcome back into communities that offer the healing we seek?
It's important to understand that healing encourages us to feel our emotions, not suppress them in the interest of scholarship. We feel not to further fragment our nervous system but to calm it. We are meant to get unstuck in time not further mired in the past. Authentic healing processes tell us we are not our ancestors’ traumas. Effective healing is meant to help us detach our identities from the wounds we have experienced, not bind them together. Wellness does not look like a dependence on pharmaceuticals but may involve illegal or restricted psychedelics that allow us to interact with entities beyond the material realm. Healing isn’t about stigmatizing, labelling, fixing, or disconnecting, but rather connecting, accepting, allowing, and restoring the flow of life force within and without. It’s finding purpose in adversity to expand and not contract consciousness. It is serving and being served by community.
So it’s worth looking at how collective healing practices ensure that no one can weaponize our grief, sadness, rage, shame, or any other emotions that arise in these processes in order to harness them for lateral violence, war, or anything in the service of injustice.
