Sh*t To Help You Show Up June 21, 2024

What it Takes to Heal

Over time, I have come to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one or the other, but both. We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture and succumb to what we are unwilling to face. — Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

I’ve told the origin story of this project at length before, but it can be summed up like this: I grew up in a family that was deeply concerned, in its structure and focus, with transforming the world around us. Sadly, my parents were so far ahead of their time they didn’t understand the necessity of committing to their own personal healing in order to create a family that would model the love they wished to see in the world. No one did in those days. So instead, our love for each other was tainted by trauma and violence just the way love so often was (and still is) in the world.

I interpreted the discrepancy between the ideas about love, non-violence, justice, and equity that we were espousing publicly and the conflict and disconnection from each other we were living privately as indicative of a lack of integrity. And it was that. But the cause of the discrepancy wasn’t a lack of earnest desire for a different world than the one in which we found ourselves or a lack of love. I believe the cause was a cultural misapprehension that both my parents had internalized about how change happens.

Integrity, by which I mean the practice of integrating into the fabric of our daily lives our most deeply held beliefs about and dreams for the world, is an embodiment practice. Why? Because our bodies are where our trauma lives. Our bodies are where we feel and heal. If we refuse to engage with our emotional and physical pain, to learn to listen to what our bodies are constantly trying to tell us about our past and present reality, then we will inevitably constrict and undermine any conscious ideals we may commit ourselves to for the good of our relationships and communities.

Author, healer, and activist Prentis Hemphill recently published a book that is, as (favorite of this project) adrienne marie brown names it, medicine to aid us in this work. What it Takes to Heal¹ draws upon Hemphill’s extensive experience as a therapist, somatic practitioner, social movement leader, and person just trying to learn how to show up fully for life, to talk about the necessary interweaving of personal and social transformation. As Prentis might name it, it is a book that models a healing orientation toward change, posing the question, What if healing, individually and collectively, were the organizing principle for our work to change the world?

To orient in this way, we would have to connect to our bodies, admitting all the ways in which we are injured by our current reality. Prentis describes oppression as “the distribution and concentration of trauma into bodies and communities designated less powerful.” But even those bodies and communities deemed more powerful aren’t left unscathed. How could they be when the organizing principles of our modern reality are extraction, commodification, and exploitation? The only way to engage with other people in those ways is to create hierarchies of human worth and separate yourself from those you wish to exploit. Those you hope will carry the trauma that you imagine you can escape from. But the separation itself is trauma. No one gets out of these systems unharmed.

If you’ve ever participated in transformational work in any way, from mass protest to trying to change something in your family or neighborhood, you’ve likely encountered “personalities.” I don’t mean the challenge of working collectively when everyone has a different perspective and way of being. I’m talking about how what can be accomplished collectively is constricted by the capacity of individual people to work through their emotional material, question their reactivity, and be openly vulnerable about the ways in which all of that is hard.

We tend to chalk this inability up to personality as if our learned self-protective behaviors are our inherent identity, instead of remembering that anything learned can be unlearned.

But to engage in that work of unlearning, individually and in community, is often seen as obstructive in change-making spaces. And it can be, particularly if those people with greater degrees of power hijack group processes to soothe their discomfort in the face of change or accountability in the name of “healing”. (Part of how our culturally-encouraged, external orientation manifests is that dysregulated people attempt to regulate other people instead of themselves to feel better.) But bringing our work to operate from our authentic selves into our relationships and community even as we are trying to make change in the world is a different orientation entirely.

Prentis writes about telling an activist colleague they had started therapy and the response was, “Are you becoming one of those people? Soft and always talking about your feelings?” Externally, they turned away. Internally, they found themselves wondering, What was I ultimately fighting for if not a world where I could sometimes be soft?

Prentis names those people who commit themselves to interrupting familial and cultural patterns of alienation and disembodiment and transforming them “transitional characters.” Transitional characters don’t fix everything. None of us, Prentis counsels, can heal all that needs healing in our single, individual lifetime. Transitional characters, however, work to be a link in the chain of personal and social transformation. To leave the world and the people they love better off than they found them. To do their part to consciously heal the wounds of their lineage.

I believe most, if not all, of us who’ve found our way to this conversation are transitional characters. I am doing my best to be a transitional character. The medicine that Prentis offers through this book to support this work is two-fold. They provide a concrete template for how we approach our portion of this transformational work and they illuminate why it matters.

For so long those of us concerned with transforming culture have focused all our attention on the brokenness and injustice of our external reality. But if we aren’t also transformed as we work to make change, how do we ever imagine we’ll be able to sustain the more humane and integrated systems of the future we hope for?

If you’re more of a listener than a reader, Prentis recorded an audiobook version. You can also listen to them talk in-depth about the ideas from the book on two podcasts— We Can Do Hard Things and Becoming the People.

What are you working on transitioning in your lineage?

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1. To support this project whether or not you’re a subscriber, you can purchase the book through the Let Your Life Speak affiliate, online bookstore at bookshop.org. All the other books we’ve discussed over the years are also available there.