The work of healing

I never thought I would end up in the healing business. As the daughter of a doctor, and given (carefully constructed) stereotypes about Asians, going to medical school was really only ever a fleeting consideration, and in fact, my father discouraged it. I don’t think he wanted my sister or I to go through the pain of working within a system that prevents you from providing the very healing that is supposed to be your calling.

Yet here I am, and while I would never describe myself as being in the “healing business,” at least not without a lot of caveats, we are not licensed medical professionals after all, the way I see it is that the work of diversity, equity and inclusion is in fact the work of healing, individually and collectively, from the trauma of systemic oppression.

I’m a creative at heart, not a healer. But I strive to use my creativity to facilitate transformation that is healing.

What we spend a lot of time doing is connecting people with their agency, to make the choices they can, and to advocate for their needs without harming others.

There is so much magic in creating a space for people to speak and be heard. It’s not always pretty. It’s often uncomfortable. But I find such relief and healing in truth telling… in a world where we are socialized to do anything but.

Of course, truth telling isn’t something you can just do. It takes slow and steady work to build the kind of safety that honors the bravery of truth telling by those our systems of power least protect.

And truth telling is often weaponized as well… and what appears as truth telling is actually a a distortion where different marginalized groups are pitted against one another. Often we are so entrenched in our experience of trauma due to one aspect of our identity that we cannot see how this trauma is driving us to be complicit with or active perpetrators of oppression and violence in other ways.

It’s what happens when trauma and power intersect.

Our trauma can make it hard for us to see where we wield systemic power.

It can also make it hard for us to see where we have agency.

Which brings me back to how we spend a lot of time connecting people with their agency.

Something we often see is folks becoming so entrenched in what LaVoya on our team describes as “self-centering victimization.” Most often it’s in non-Black folks and is also steeped in anti-Blackness. It’s white women, in their trauma from patriarchy, becoming tools of white supremacy. It’s Asian folks, in their trauma from white supremacy, becoming perpetrators of anti-Blackness. Its anti-semitism, wielded as a tool to cause violence to Black women (see Claudine Gay is only one of the most prominent recent cases).

We have to heal our trauma.

We have to be able to name it, move through it, and self-regulate and self-soothe through our trauma responses so we do not further perpetuate that trauma.

We have to be able to name the ways we have been hurt, and also affirm our own humanity by seeing ourselves as more than victims - we may not always have great choices but we do have choices. We get to have needs and we deserve to have those needs met, but not at the expense of others, especially those who are more systemically marginalized. We get to give other people the dignity of making their own choices rather than trying to manipulate or control their choices. We get to take responsibility for our own choices without internalizing blame for the things that are beyond our control.

We get to find the middle path between assuming everything is our fault, to assuming that nothing is. Victimhood leads to finger pointing which leads to blame which leads to a kind of abdication of agency that only serves to dehumanize ourselves and others.

There is a grief process. We have been talking more and more about grieving as an important part of the process of healing, and an important part of the process of decolonization, which we see as the process for all of us to free ourselves from the systems, values and controls of oppression and domination in order to shift towards a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging where we all have what we need to do our most energizing and impactful work and live our most meaningful and rewarding lives.

This is the work.

Banner photo by Taylor Rooney on Unsplash

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