To Transform Our Trauma, We Must Nurture Movements for Change

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“We really have a big opportunity right now to decide, within traumatic conditions and circumstances, how we are going to show up, again and again, for ourselves and each other,” says Tanuja Jageranauth. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with radical therapist Dorian Ortega and healing justice practitioners Tanuja Jagernauth and Chiara Galimberti about trauma, and some of the tools and practices that can help us heal.

Music by Son Monarcas & Heath Cantu

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about the ways that trauma and emotional dysregulation show up in our movement work, and how we can take better care of ourselves and each other. We will be talking with Dorian Ortega, Tanuja Jagernauth, and Chiara Galimberti. Dorian is the founder of F.L.Y. Radical Therapy; and the author of the forthcoming workbook F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E., A Workbook Guide for Love and Liberation. Tanuja, who is a longtime friend of the show, is a writer, facilitator and circle keeper, who shares frameworks for collective liberation and wellness through yoga and the creative arts. Chiara is a queer artist, writer, organizer and acupuncturist with two decades of experience in gender violence prevention, healing justice and politicized art. Dorian, Tanuja and Chiara are all part of my movement community here in Chicago, and they are people whose insights on mental health and healing have been very important to me on my own journey. In some of our recent episodes, we have explored some of the emotional crises that activists and organizers are facing. Today, we’re going to continue that conversation, and discuss some strategies and resources that might help us to cope and heal. As we grapple with the stress, grief and uncertainty of these times, I hope this episode can provide some comfort and accompaniment.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Dorian, Tanuja, Chiara. Welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Dorian A. Ortega: Thank you for having us.

Tanuja Jagernauth: It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for having us, Kelly.

KH: How are you all doing today?

DO: I am very present with you. I’m here, and excited to share space.

TJ: Likewise. I’m feeling really honored and grateful to be here with all of you.

CG: I’m feeling really excited to be here. A little nervous and yeah, trying to just let this unfold as it will.

KH: Well, I’m so grateful that the three of you could join me today. And I can certainly understand being nervous. Being recorded is weird. I still find it weird. But I am also really excited to share some of the ideas we’re going to discuss today. I know all three of you have some really meaningful perspectives to share about what people are experiencing right now, and how we can navigate in these times.

Could each of you take a moment to introduce yourselves and say a bit about your work?

DO: My name is Dorian. I am the founder of F.L.Y. Radical Therapy. F.L.Y. stands for “First Love Yourself.” And this therapy practice was created to center undervalued people in our society. And really excited to share that; it was inspired by the work that I have witnessed and participated in, in regard to community organizing or social justice, the work, and particularly in the arts and theater. Also honored to share that I attended plays Tanuja had produced and wrote, called How to Pick a Lock, and very much was transformed by that play and the work that I witnessed in theater, as well as the work by Chiara, who I also witnessed sharing messages in the form of beautiful graphic design.

Affirmations and storytelling have really inspired me to have a practice where these kinds of works can be included in the healing journey of therapy in ways that maybe have not been considered historically in mental health. The work that I do is really based in Chicago and centering on ancestral wisdom, liberation, womanness and Black and Latinx psychology. I’m very proud to continue to evolve in this work.

TJ: My name is Tanuja. I use she/her pronouns. I am also a human. I’m a playwright. I identify as a cycle breaker and a disruptor, using art and some of the other work that I do. I feel like I’m constantly learning and putting into practice things that I learn. And so I feel like a very dedicated student of abolition and transformative justice and healing justice in particular. I’m Indo-Caribbean. I was born in Guyana in South America. I was raised in Arizona, and then I came to Chicago in 2001, where I’ve been based since then.

I feel like it’s important to name that I’m a descendant of indentured laborers. I’m a child of survivors and a survivor myself. And in terms of healing and my relationship to healing work – as I’ve experienced many things, I’ve come to really honor and accept and celebrate that healing work can be so many things. And currently my work that can be considered healing is that I share yoga, I practice yoga, and I try to practice it from an intentionally anti-caste and liberatory framework, centering consent, accessibility and the agency of people who are in practice with me. So any sessions that I’m helping to facilitate, they’re less about synchronized swimming, right? Are we all doing the same thing? And they’re more about, what is each person consenting to in every moment?

I’ve had the honor of being in community with Dori and Chiara for years, and I have personally benefited from Dori’s talents and radical approach as a therapist. I’ve also absolutely benefited from the beautiful art and messaging that Chiara has gifted to the world.

And I’m grateful to be here with you all and really grateful for you, Kelly, as well. I feel like your art and the way you practice in so many ways is healing.

And the way that I think of healing work these days, in my opinion, it’s healing when we’re doing it with the intention of breaking harmful and abusive patterns and when we’re applying the basic principles of transformative justice, of preventing harm, intervening harm, transforming the conditions that enabled harm to occur, and then focusing on repair after rupture.

So I see everyone here doing this kind of healing work in so many different ways, and I’m honored to be in community with you.

CG: Hello, my name is Chiara. I use all pronouns. It has been a time of deep transition for me. So this question of even how to understand myself is very much in movement right now.

I am an immigrant from Italy. I came to the U.S. in the early 2000s with my kids, who were toddlers at the time. I was a teen parent, two twins, and have been really deeply shaped by parenting in the U.S. as a single parent and an immigrant, with kind of inside poverty. I lived in rural Indiana for a time when I first came to the U.S., and then I came to Chicago in 2009. I have worked in gender violence prevention and prison abolition for a long time, and came to healing justice through that, through the Allied Media Conference, through the work that Tanuja has been doing for a very long time. And I became a community acupuncturist and had a sliding-scale clinic during the pandemic.

This conversation seems really pertinent because I think that what happened is that I’ve really come to crash into the limitations of my own body, my own mind inside of pushing for transformation as a community acupuncturist and a healing justice practitioner.

I’ve also had this long relationship to culture work and art making, I think, as a way to feed my heart. And my hope is that culture work can be a piece to push for change.

I think that at a basic level, I’m grounded by a commitment to collective, embodied liberation, and the dignity of all of us who have been told that our lives are disposable and our bodies unworthy. I think that’s my compass in whatever it is that I put my energy in.

I’ve been in community with Tanuja and Dori for a long time, and Kelly, from a distance. I think of the three of you in different ways. What I witness is kind of this insistence on radical love as a way to move forward, not as a bypassing or a suppressing, but as a way to create and build towards the worlds that we know that we need. And even inside of dismantling and abolition, always asking, “What is it that we are creating?”

Tanuja has been somebody that has shaped my life in very, very deep ways – and I hope that it’s known, a huge part of why I came into acupuncture and Healing Justice. And Dori, I feel like I’ve witnessed this insistence on love, insistence on showing up for community, insistence on using tools that are imperfect in ways that serve community over and over and over again.

And I feel that in my struggle with Chicago in many ways, the three of you have been an anchor of believing that a place for me in this country and in the city is possible. So thank you for that.

KH: Thank you for those beautiful introductions. One of the reasons I am excited to have this conversation with you all is that we are part of the same community. We are connected by movement work, by artistry, and, in some cases, by the projects we have grown together. Our journeys through crisis, and the work of healing, also connect and overlap, in some ways, and it’s that work of recovery, repair, and the struggle to self-regulate in these times that I want to talk about today. But first, I think we need to talk a bit about what some of us are grappling with right now.

So, let’s talk about trauma. Many of us enter movements from a place of trauma, which shapes our politics, as well as our nervous systems and our reactions to other people. Can you talk a bit about what you have seen or experienced in this regard?

DA: I’ll start by saying that “trauma” is a big word, and I think it is something that I’m grateful we are unpacking as a society. I do want to give context to trauma. In the mental health field, less than 10 years ago, trauma was considered, or at least PTSD, post-traumatic stress, was considered an anxiety disorder or a type of anxiety disorder. And we are learning more and more the impact that I think historically and maybe ancestral medicine has shown us for a long time how we are all, our body is all connected and it’s hard to separate what we hold in our body and how that manifests based on what we experience when it comes to trauma. And naming trauma is important because I think maybe this word can be confusing. And what the definition of trauma, at least in the health field kind of refers to is an experience of danger, an experience that’s life-threatening, either first-hand or witnessed or heard.

And I think that as we continue to name and have names for what we experience as people of color, as people who are undervalued, I think it helps to give us this direction to understand what is it that needs to change in order for us to heal through the trauma. Because trauma is such an embedded part of society. I mean, our society was founded, or the United States or where we all live was founded on violence and genocide and severe generational trauma impact that we are still understanding and finally naming.

And I think that when we have names like “generational trauma” and when we have Black psychologists like Dr. [Joy] DeGruy, who coined “post-traumatic slave syndrome” as a name of what folks are experiencing based on generational trauma, I think that we can start to understand the complexities and expand our ways of how we treat each other when we start to use terms like “trauma-informed care,” or what I believe Dr. [Shawn] Ginwright refers to as “compassionate care.”

We as a society, I think in movement work especially, almost have to start treating each other like we have all been traumatized. And when we do that, we might humanize our experience a little bit more, but that means that because we are starting to name them, we need time. We need very intentional time to have those considerations. And it’s really hard to do that when systems are in a rush to make deadlines, to move things, to make sure that we are involved in these kind of changes that are happening, in laws or having to fight for certain things. It really makes having to sit and unpack and be considerate towards one another very difficult when there’s so much work to be done.

And so many people I notice cope with trauma in so many different ways, some healthier than others, where we give ourselves either the chance to be more open and compassionate, or because we are so busy and so pressed to grind and to move, we might have to cover up or maybe suppress the way that we might need to feel or unpack because something else is bigger or our value for getting this collective movement is higher in value than maybe the individual experiences.

So all of that mixed up is also not just society that we’re dealing with, these generational society impacts, but also how we grew up. And so we’re coming in with our own personal experiences of the impact of generational trauma in our families and then recognizing that history is kind of carrying that weight of trying to break cycles. It’s very complex. It’s hard, it’s tiring, it’s exhausting and sometimes feels hopeless, but I think when we have these conversations and we’re having this time to actually talk and unpack and really make that time, it’s like a wrench.

This conversation right now, unpacking what you’re doing, Kelly, and offering these gifts and space and time really is throwing a wrench in those systems. And so I just wanted to share that some of this work and what Chiara said earlier is about insisting on love, insisting that change has to happen, insisting that we make the time and space, insisting that we stop and we pause and we rest is such a wrench in the system. And it’s so revolutionary that I think we’re starting to see how revolutionary it is when we do stop and pause and have these conversations. This is healing.

TJ: Wow. I really echo everything that Dori just said, and I really appreciate everything that you laid out, Dori. In my experience being a participant in movements against various types of oppression for over 20 years, I’ve definitely seen a ton of in-fighting, lateral violence, abuse, excuse-making for sexism, white supremacy, seen so much personal disorganization, group disorganization, so much urgency culture, toxic individualism and all of it, and is all still very present right now.

Except the difference between now and when I got involved in 2001 is now we’ve got social media and everyone’s got a cell phone. But at the same time inside of movement, I’ve been able to meet incredible mentors, make incredible new friends. I met my life partner through movement, through direct action, when I took my street medic training. It literally changed my life and put me on a completely different trajectory.

And I really want to echo what Dori shared about the ways in which we show up to movement and the ways in which we show up for conflict can absolutely echo and really just be a reflection of what we grew up with. Growing up, I was always a fighter. I always ran toward the conflict. I’ve always been somebody who tried to intervene in a conflict situation and make peace. And as soon as I landed in Chicago, that is what I started doing.

I was working on the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline. Shout out to Rachel Caidor and Coya Paz and Vickie Sides for being my trainers and being my first introduction to radical Black theory and radical Black feminism. That has become the basis of everything that I do. But as a person skilled in crisis counseling, as soon as people got wind that I had that skill set and also space, the asks for mediation started coming in. And I want to say I fucked it up royally because I didn’t know then what I know now, which is when we’re given the gift and the invitation to help support people through conflict transformation, we do not need to do it alone. And there are some really good steps and procedures you can do before you even enter the room with people who are in conflict. And shout out to Mariame Kaba and Dragonfly Consulting for creating the “In It Together” toolkit.

But anyways, I’ve always been that person who intervenes and who fights, and that is what I carried into my work. And it is truly the work that I do today in many different ways and for better or for worse. And part of my work, shout out to Decolonize Nonviolent Communication, which Dori introduced me to, is asking myself, “Okay, when I have this impulse to jump in and be the “Captain Save a Hoe,” can I pause? Can I center myself? Can I ask what is going on with my body and what I need and really craft a centered response that is less of a reaction? And I’m going to be very transparent, this is a daily practice. It is challenging, and I really invite anyone listening and interested to check this framework out. Because as I mentioned, I’m a descendant of indentured laborers, the levels and layers of violence that live inside of my body, my family’s bodies, those are still with me every single day.

And it is a choice every single day to put a check on my own potentially violent and harmful impulses, right? So it is humbling work to do this. It is difficult work to do this, but I will say the benefits are worth it. And frankly, the consequences of not doing this work are painful. And I think we’re seeing it, we’re feeling it, we’re noticing it, and we really have a very big opportunity right now to decide within trauma, within traumatic conditions and circumstances, how we are going to decide to show up again and again for ourselves and each other.

I want to talk briefly about Healing Justice because we have referenced it and I do want to name Healing Justice is a framework that in many ways when I found it, when I was introduced to it by Cara Page, I was an acupuncturist at the time. I was working for the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, shout out to all the homies from YWEP. And the framework of Healing Justice just lit so many things up for me. And I do want to say that term, “Healing Justice” comes from Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective.

It’s a collective of organizers from the South and the work of Healing Justice does a few things. It’s aiming to respond to and intervene on what we call intergenerational trauma and violence. It is absolutely trying to transform the impacts of oppression on our minds, bodies, and our hearts through various pillars. It is working for transformation of our current world. And in Healing Justice Lineages, which is a book that was edited by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, they really challenge us to bring healing into our liberation work.

And I really invite people to check this book out because the way that they frame healing technologies, a healing technology does not have to look like, “I’m going to pay dollars to go to an acupuncturist so that person can heal me.” No, they really invite people to notice and put to use the healing technologies that we have all around us every single day. Because as we know, our ancestors, we wouldn’t be here if our ancestors did not have ways of healing and being resilient inside of oppression and genocide and so much violence.

And so a healing technology can be a dance party that you have. Right? It can be house music in Chicago, it can be potlucks. It can be anything that gets us together to help us release and access our humanity and break through the various types of barriers that we create and that are created for us. And so I do want to really lift it up and shout that out and name that in the work of Healing Justice, we have so many options and that opportunity to put our healing technologies to use with and for each other are present every single day. And I’m grateful for the framework because I think that if we really collectively activated it, especially here in Chicago, we could see some really beautiful outcomes. And I do see various organizers already employing different methods of collective healing in their work.

CG: Thank you so much Dori and Tanuja for grounding us in Healing Justice to begin this conversation first of all. That feels so expensive, expansive. And yeah, going back to the question, Kelly, about entering movement from a place of trauma, and what you brought up, Tanuja about Healing Justice, I am really thinking about how a search, a hunger, a longing for healing is what drives us into movement, actually, right?

So it’s like, yes, trauma shapes us and maybe it’s kind of like a fire in our body, bodies. And then it’s actually not the trauma that pushes us into movement, it’s a desire for change, it’s a desire for healing. And kind of thinking about my own life, I think that the healing in terms of framing it as the medical-industrial complex in my experience as a young child, was not healing me. Right? It was harming me. I was born disabled with a congenital disability that was due to pollution and environmental disaster in the town right next to my hometown in Italy.

And by the time I got to middle school, I had this kind of internal sense that I needed something and I did not know what it was. And that there was kind of this messy bundle of feelings and sensations in my body that had nowhere to go. And I remember going to Milan, to the squat there, to the occupied warehouse called the Leoncavallo that has been occupied since the 1970s. And periodically the cops try to kick people out. And when that happens, people flock all around it and protect it.

And I remember, I think I was 11 or 12 and showing up in the streets to protect this place that was so important to the community, and experiencing, I think what I now understand as something called a somatic opening or a catharsis or something that attended to what was in my body that was bundled up and ready to explode. And instead of it harming me or harming anybody, it was used to protect this thing I love, this place that was so important to me with other people at my side. And that in that moment of being in the street, there was a transformation that was happening where my pain, my rage, had a place to be put that could actually make the world more of what I needed and more of what the people around me needed.

Being in the streets provided a place to channel the anger that I had. And movement gave me the tools and the words to connect my individual experience to systemic dynamics of power of an oppression. It showed me that the violence that shaped my family and the society that I was in was not random or a curse, which is what it felt like a lot of the times. It was the result of systems of power and oppression that played out in my daily interactions. And that affected the very ground I was born on, the ground that was contaminated with chemicals brought to my hometown by a German multinational company after the laws were relaxed, kind of like what happened with NAFTA.

So I think about how movement gave a ground for me to contextualize my trauma and also to transform it, and that it pulled back the curtain of isolation that I was in. And I think that trauma puts us in so that I could see myself as part of a constellation of struggle for liberations of generations of people who had pushed against similar conditions. It gave me strength and it gave me purpose, and it gave me a back, like I could feel who was at my back.

I also grew up in a family that had a history of anti-fascist organizing during World War II. And so it gave space for the complicated reality of harm and also transformation being both present in my body. And also the last two things I would say about how trauma shapes the way we show up in movements is one that has been a long road of realizing how much mistreating my body in service of movement was a trauma response and even longer to begin to learn other ways of moving through the world.

And two, that the way that we respond to each other is deeply shaped by nervous system reactions that were cemented trying to keep us safe, and that orient us toward hypervigilance and being adrenalized. And that can start to feel normal, this kind of constant stress, or even right. And I’m curious about how that overlaps with the excitement of movement of being in the struggle and how it can recreate patterns of getting stuck in that stress mode and turning against each other or mistreating ourselves or our own bodies.

And that part of that transformation has also been realizing that orienting towards ease, towards joy, towards trust have been states that my body has had very little experience with, and that actually somatically I perceive, perceived and perceive as threatening. And that when I try to take my armor down, it actually sends my body into a panic, like I don’t feel safe. And that finding ways to regenerate safety as being necessary to creating connection and to foster spaces of vulnerability where I can let people in, which I think is the work of movements right now. It’s to be able to build right relationship to each other, to move through conflict in generative ways and risk getting close to each other and having a stake in each other’s survival. And it’s painful to realize how much complex PTSD has gotten in the way of connection because it’s shaped our body for protection and closing in over connection for survival reasons.

And to know that this protective shape, this contraction can be weaponized to fragment us or simply keep us in isolation and ineffective and self-sabotaging or destructive to ourselves or to each other. And coming back to Healing Justice and politicize healing, to me, it’s also kind of this meeting point between facing trauma and doing it not only for the sake of keeping our spirits intact, but for the sake of building together toward liberation.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying, Chiara, about how the work of movements right now is about being able to act in right relationship with each other, to move through conflict in generative ways, and to really learn what it means to have a stake in each other’s survival. That’s all really messy work, and I think our trauma responses, our defense mechanisms, and the alienation that has been imposed upon us under capitalism are getting in the way. And these are fundamental concerns, because we can talk all day about revolution, and what the world should look like, but if we can’t learn how to build relationships across difference, and we can’t navigate conflict, we aren’t going to make any of our big ideas happen. We have to be able to disagree without lashing out or burning every organization to the ground.

I think people who are extremely reactive often ground themselves in righteousness. Like, I am reacting in this really intense way because I’m right, and you’re wrong, and to hell with you and anyone who cannot see that. This moment of conflict is now the dividing line between good and bad people. But that mentality creates a politics of exclusion, where instead of building the power we need to change the world, we are constantly voting people off the island. But establishing an exclusive realm of the righteous is not the end game of organizing. That’s the opposite of what we are trying to do. To make change, I have to engage with plenty of people who are going to piss me off, and whose behaviors are going to trigger my defense mechanisms. I’ve been there, so many times. I’ve been too abrupt, or aggressive, or written people off when I shouldn’t have. I’ve also been unfair to myself, in the ways Chiara described, seriously harming my body, for the sake of movements — and Chiara, I appreciate what you said about how that is the product of trauma as well.

For me, a lot of the patterns I had to break were the product of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a condition that can happen when we experience prolonged and repetitive exposures to traumatic events. For many years, I reenacted patterns of behavior that for me, had become hardwired survival responses, or ways to maintain my dignity, or sense of self, in traumatic situations. If something about a new situation felt like one of those prior traumas in some way, it would que up my old responses, even when they were horribly mismatched to what was actually happening. With a lot of work, I’ve broken a lot of those patterns. But, it’s still something I have to be conscious of, all the time, whether I’m reacting to what’s actually happening, or to what it’s surfacing for me.

In recent years, I’ve also struggled a lot with post-COVID brain fog, and I really want to name the ways that impaired executive function impacts people involved with movement work. The term “brain fog” almost sounds innocuous, but when you’re an organizer and something impacts your ability to plan, organize and prioritize – that’s pretty earthshattering.

Whether someone has always struggled with a condition like ADHD, or whether they’re mind suddenly moves more slowly than it used to, or fogs up entirely, due to COVID, or perimenopause, or any number of issues – these can be life-changing and life-shaping struggles within our struggles. Managing our attention, and managing our impulses – this is pretty key stuff when relating to other people. These issues can impact the ways in which we’re able to respond, during moments of crisis, which can lead to frustration, misunderstandings, and other issues. So I wanted to ask you all, in your experience, how are struggles with executive function showing up in our movements? And also, how are people responding, when the people around them are struggling?

DO: Thank you for sharing that. I have witnessed and also experienced probably confusion and maybe some shock when I have witnessed people in movement work, perhaps respond in aggressive ways or maybe impulsive ways or forceful ways, pressuring ways. And in what I’ve witnessed in movement work, this has been a witnessing of the way that leadership towards a goal or towards trying to convince people how important something is. So some of this has looked like this reenactment of pressure or reenactment of urgency and maybe a lowering of a value of your individual problems or your individual needs because the collective is more important or more valuable.

And if you’re not able to patch up and be a part of the movement, they’re almost as this exclusion of people who might not be able to function at a level of force, at a level of pressure and lack of perhaps even nutrition or sleep. And so what I’ve seen is that being kind of a recipe for disruption or for dysfunction in a collective movement. I’ve been a part of that. I’ve witnessed. I have personally responded almost in shock or almost in denial and sometimes have felt like I was being gaslit or maybe what I’m seeing or justifying people’s behavior because the movement is so important or romanticizing of movement work that almost excuses behavior of abuse.

And so some of it has also looked like, “This is temporary, this is a temporary sacrifice and it will end soon.” But the arc of activism is almost like a cycle, in these situations, like a cycle of an abusive relationship where it can be really beautiful and things can be really transformative and loving and honeymoon-like when the goal is accomplished and celebrated even. And then kind of right back into the cycle of manipulation or maybe abuse when there isn’t consideration for that pause or time to unpack or to check in or to see if people have their needs met. I’ve witnessed people even become unstably housed or even hospitalized because of the pressure of this work. And so what people can sustain, what they can do to protect themselves and feel safe in their bodies has been in conflict with the collective goal.

Sometimes people might stay in these situations because, again, there’s a lot of stake, a lot of stake in that movement work. So for some people, even with neural diversions challenges who might center truth seeking and understanding and process and time and observe and kind of see, “Hey, this isn’t working,” if that is dismissed and not included as a way to structure things differently, there’s just, again, a recipe for dysfunction.

And then it almost seems like, again, we’re replicating these power and control dynamics that are systemic in our society. And it becomes really disappointing and can leave people really grieving when they have to leave those spaces because of a health concern, it’s almost like some people will leave because it’s been so dire. And then maybe that leaving is recovery for some time. And so these are things that I have seen in movement and also have personally witnessed and been a part of and a little bit of how that has shown up.

TJ: Thank you so much for that, Dori. Yeah, from my perspective, and again, everything I say, I say with love and so much compassion because I’m also a part of these things, I have absolutely been the person who has been emotionally dysregulated and shown up in that way. And so in movement, I’ve absolutely seen all the manifestations of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, really normal responses to trauma. We come to this work seeking healing and seeking community, as Kiara has mentioned, and building off of what Dori just shared, when we’re not able to move through conflict and transform conflict and repair after rupture, I’ve seen people leave movement. And so on top of losing that purpose and losing that ability to help change the society and improve it, you’re also losing community. And that can be devastating, not just to individuals, but to the movement as a whole. And I just really want to name that first.

But one of the best tools that I’ve found and that has really helped to guide me is the article from Tema Okun about white supremacy culture, I think it’s called “Still Here.” And I found this article in 2020. They’ve since updated it, but they really spell out the characteristics of white supremacy culture, and then they offer antidotes to that. And it may not be all-inclusive or complete, at the same time, I find it a really helpful guide. And so I know from my own experience and from what I’ve seen, when we are dysregulated, we default naturally to what is comfortable, what is familiar. And as so many of us have grown up in the soup of white supremacy culture, that’s what comes out. And so it manifests as toxic individualism, power hoarding, really rooting decisions and actions on fear and so on.

I think I’ve seen a lot of operations breakdowns, and so the really necessary details fly out the window. This happens in my own life when I am not regulated. So we’re not keeping up with our calendars, we’re forgetting things, and that’s so frustrating. Logistics for our own lives and events kind of go out the window, things get wild. And so we kind of end up in a cycle of scampering and frustration and disappointing people, and that creates conflict and harm. And then for some of us, if we’re not able to understand what’s going on, we can truly fall into cycles of guilt and shame. And we’re not pausing to be like, “Okay, what is the intervention on the system and the structure we’re in? What structures and systems do I need to put into place to support me in these moments?” We just are like, “I’m failing. You’re failing. We’re all failing.”

And ultimately, it keeps us in this reactive mode where it’s not conducive to creative thinking. It’s not conducive to cooperation. It’s not conducive to patience or even visioning and dreaming. And so much of our work, it requires visioning and dreaming of another world. And so I appreciate when people say, “We really need to activate our imaginations and envision the next world.” Yes, yes to that. And also it’s a little bit of a setup if we’re saying that to people who truly cannot access that because they haven’t… Their bodies are in a completely different state. We cannot intellectualize or think our way out of a trauma response. It has to be moved through, settled on that physical body level.

So I agree with what Dori was saying too. The more education we can give to each other and ourselves about trauma, how it works for ourselves and others, and practicing that access intimacy, shout out to disability justice organizers for teaching me that phrase, access intimacy, where we are really real on the real about our access needs, our own needs, and then we’re sharing them with each other. And Kelly, I have to shout you out because in any project I’ve worked with you on, access has been very much present and the needs of our bodies and beings is part of the equation, and I’ve always appreciated that.

And I do want to shout out Spring Up. They’re a beautiful collective that does trainings through Bluelight, and they have a really great tool on self-care and safety planning that you can do for yourself. And then you can share it with trusted homies and you can really break it down, like, “What are your indicators that your stress levels are getting to the point where you are not functioning the way you want? And then how can we press pause at that time to support you?” These are real practices that we can put into place.

CG: Beautiful, thank you. Wow. Yeah, both what you’re bringing up, Dori and Tanuja, about kind of these cycles of falling apart and collapse, and also white supremacy culture and production is really making me think about the connection between conditional belonging, trauma and collapse inside of movements. And that at a basic level, trauma teaches us that we are unlovable and unworthy and that we have to do something to belong or something to be safe. And I’m thinking about how the fact that trauma has taught our bodies that they are unworthy or not inherently worthy or that they need to do something to be accepted, plays into dynamics in movements where we feel a sense of conditional belonging, where we have to produce or we have to offer, or we have to be in service to be able to be part of community. And I’m wondering, what would it feel like to have issues with executive functioning or to have issues with health and not feel afraid of losing community? Like, how do we hold each other in falling apart? And I felt that personally really intensely in Chicago, and I think just in movement in general that when I was not okay, when I was not able to keep the clinic open when I was having health issues, that it meant isolation, it meant losing connection, it meant not feeling part of the movement.

And my dream, and I think also the way in which we break apart how racial capitalism has fragmented us is that we move towards unconditional belonging with ourselves in our own bodies and with each other. And then the question inside of that is, what structures do we need to build together to be able to hold each other inside of the falling apart part? And when I think about how you asked about executive functioning, Kelly, and how Complex PTSD shows up in the body, I think a lot about contraction and this loss of control that PTSD has felt like a force to try to keep me safe has actually kept me small and isolated, and to equate this connection with safety. And that has looked like, at times, having a hard time going outside or driving to the grocery store, or just kind of having this pervasive sense of fear that filled in each step of my life and my day, and even perceiving others as a threat, perceiving friends as a threat sometimes, and the work of moving through these feelings that have felt too big.

And part of why they feel too big is that because they’re out of time, like that PTSD, in many ways, works like a time machine. So that kind of all the things that have not had a chance to be felt because it wasn’t safe to feel them are stuck in my body, and then they come out like a pressure cooker in these really big ways. And that to learn to feel them and to learn to kind of unfreeze, I had to come to terms with the fact that I really couldn’t do it alone. And that accompaniment is needed and hands that know how to hold a body like mine, and people who have had their back, the work of attending to transformation grounded in liberation, grounded in collective liberation, not just in individual healing. And I think that this is where the work of politicized healing comes in, which I hope we can talk about later and I’ll stop there.

KH: I am holding so much gratitude for these insights. So what are the tools and strategies that can help us navigate these issues that we’re describing?

DO: So one of the basic tools that I really enjoy and I really think is basic on an individual level is the breath and pause and stillness. I think those simple, accessible tools give us an opportunity to see if we can listen to our bodies and respond to what we might need and to give ourselves a chance to regulate so that we can see what the next step might be. I have really appreciated the movement and somatic work that is hand in hand with trauma healing, understanding how important it is to calm the body, ease the body, soothe the body, feel soft. That soft landing and that safety has been really key to finding our way through.

I also think affirmations, hugs, grass, herb, rest, sun, clay, writing, water, backup support, feeling uplifted by our communities is super key. That radical hope, that love is really helpful. Those are helpful tools. I think ancestral knowledge, like giving our ancestors a shout-out for being able to really just use their resources to the best of their ability to survive and exist and create and resist. So I really do think that learning that history is important and remembering that history is important. And thank you so much, Tanuja, for naming so many frameworks that exist because of the knowledge that people have done the search or the research that people have done. We have toolkits, the toolkits that Tanuja has been naming that have been created by the researchers and activists in this Healing Justice work, like yourself, Kelly, and Mariame’s work, and Let This Radicalize You.

Projects like Icarus Project, who use their work to radicalize some of the most severe cases of mental health like schizophrenia and uplift people who would deal with those mental health challenges to also organize and take ownership of their wellness by challenging how they can interact with medication in a way that feels like it aligns with their beliefs and values and consent over their bodies. Really challenging systems like psychiatry to really serve people in the way that they’re supposed to. These kind of educational frameworks have also been really helpful. Knowledge and power, building resources for people to feel like they can empower themselves and also advocate for others.

I want to also share that I’m contributing to that work by creating a framework on love and liberation as a workbook facilitation with prompt guides. These kind of tool kits have been really helpful for us to have options and hope because it can feel very dire in the moment. But when we’re dialoguing and coming together in this kind of way, collectively, and sharing resources with each other, this is very medicinal when we get these opportunities to share and connect with each other – I’ve written so many things down that Tanuja and Chiara has mentioned, so I’m so grateful to keep adding these tools to my toolbox and to share them with others. We are each other’s medicine. And I think that’s what liberation healing is about.

TJ: I want to plus-one everything that Dori just shared. I want to offer a couple additional conceptual tools. One, nature: We are nature. We, yes, can go out into “nature” to access different spaces that allow us to breathe fuller breaths. Also, we ourselves are nature. So developing practices and tools that help us connect back to ourselves can be truly supportive and transformative and just centering and grounding, especially in these times when we have so much external inputs and distraction.

Secondly, I really want to lift up the role of joy as a tool, seizing joy, cultivating joy, saying, “Fuck it. Let’s do something fun.” Elliott Fukui, in a previous “Movement Memos” episode, really lifted up the beauty and the power of identifying what is fun for you. Do that, cultivate that, and you’ll not only find people. But I’ve personally experienced the transformative power of literally choosing to put down the things that are stressing me out so that I can go take a walk with a loved one or just do something fun that has no “purpose.” It can be very transformative, and then it allows me to jump back into the fray afterward.

Then finally, I want to lift up a project that I co-facilitate with Kelly. About a year ago, we created a project called “Understory,” and I’m a forest girly. My father Ramesh Jagernauth and my mother Sarojnie Jagernauth, coming from Guyana from South America, the lush jungles of the Amazon rainforest. They moved us all to a desert in Arizona. So as often as they could get away, they took us to northern Arizona, where we could hang out in the trees and the forest, and that body memory of feeling flanked and surrounded by trees and sheltered — that lives in me.

So when we created Understory, we wanted to create a similar kind of space. Obviously virtually, it’s not the same, but in our biweekly gatherings we meet every other week, we try to evoke this area. Understory is the area under the canopy of a forest where you can access all the shade-tolerant trees. It’s a little bit darker. The light is filtered through the leaves, and you can see and access ferns, and mosses, and fungi. It’s a space of decomposition, but also really important growth.

So in these gatherings, we’ve created a structure that stays the same. So that predictability is really supportive to folks we’ve heard. We do a few things. We ground ourselves in our minds and bodies a little bit. We check in, and there’s usually a reading that we share from fiction or abolitionist writing, or poetry, sometimes music. Then we talk about it, and we deliberately create a space of accompaniment, of welcome, of acceptance, of belonging. We’re trying to create, right? Like you belong as you are, as you show up, you are perfect, but we also find this space to be a space of practice.

So we’re practicing checking in on each other and being vulnerable. We’re practicing checking in with ourselves when we do get activated and then asking, “Okay, what’s going on here? What intervention do I need, or am I just uncomfortable, and I have some tools I can use to move through it?” We name specifically that healing and harm can occur in the same space. Shout out to Susanna Barkataki, who was my yoga teacher training instructor who first gave me that language. I really appreciate it because it’s true. In spaces where we feel safer, that’s when certain things can emerge, and it’s really important to be attentive to that.

We practice complexity in the space. We honor divergent thinking, and we really try to make space for people to ask questions that they cannot easily ask in other spaces. So it’s been a beautiful space. Every time I personally go to Understory as a co-facilitator, I always leave feeling better and more accompanied and like I have access to community. That has been my assignment for years to really unpack and unlearn an exile narrative that comes from probably a lot of places. Understory has been a really powerful space where I’m giving my system evidence to counter my own isolation and exile narratives.

CG: Thank you so much, Dori. Thank you so much, Tanuja. I also was thinking about this idea of harm and care coming from the same place as something that has been really present in trying to build tools to counteract that narrative in my brain and in my body, and how that shows up in movement as well. And in talking about how to come back to the ways in which Complex PTSD shapes our bodies toward contraction and activation and fear sometimes of situations of joy and connection, or vulnerability, which then are actually the keys to repair and healing.

Connection is also the key to building strong, aligned, pleasurable, effective movements as well. We can’t push for what we need to push for and toward if we are fragmented inside ourselves, inside our spirits, and with each other as well. I do really think that that dynamic comes from growing up in environments where care and harm came from the same source and that I can feel how my body expects harm to come actually when somebody offers care, which has made friendship hard, it’s made relationships hard, and it’s made comradeship difficult as well.

It’s been really hard to admit it because at some point I was like, “Oh my God, do I not want to be happy? Do I not want to be connected?” But that’s not it. It’s like I desperately want to be happy and feel care and connection, but it’s a relearning of that. Then it’s building inside and outside of us containers that can foster, as you said, Tanuja, a new narrative and can actually offer evidence of belonging and evidence that care can come and harm can come as well, but it’s not the same kind of harm that we experienced as little ones. It’s not the kind of harm that will distort our spirits, that we can withstand harm and we can transform it with different tools and that we can do it to together and to build more and more evidence of that and more and more concrete examples.

I think about theater of the oppressed actually inside of this, of rehearsing for the revolution, and how do we rehearse for belonging? How do we rehearse for narratives of care, and that being part of healing. I have to kind of name again, Healing Justice, just because that’s one of the places where I felt it concretely. I want to name Cara Page, and Susan Raffo and Adela Nieves Martinez in Detroit and the Healing Justice Practice Space at Allied Media Conference as one of those places where I felt that accompaniment and where I felt that possibility of transformation.

When I think about the space, I was there at the conference; I was having a whole ass amount of shit showing up, and I didn’t know what to do. And I showed up at the Healing Justice Practice Space, and Autumn Brown was there; actually, I did not know them at the time, but they were the person who greeted me and told me to sit down and get tea. Then somebody came to get me and the practitioner that was there, and I entered the larger room of the Healing Justice Practice Space. There was tables laid out, there was curtains, there was music. There was an altar with movement, ancestors, and flowers and plants.

I could actually hear people whispering, people crying. In my body, I felt a recognition of belonging that needed no words. I think part of that was this sense of being in a room with bodies that were shaped under similar conditions, of bodies that had to learn dignity inside of conditions that told us we were not worthy and we were not dignified and we did not deserve to be alive, quite frankly. And I think of Understory as another one of those spaces where we don’t need to tell each other the whole story of our lives, but there is a sense of shared shaping that also leaves enough room for difference.

I think that’s where it’s making space for care and difference and harm inside of containers where we build trust with each other. Part of building trust is being able to mess up and repair. It is not about control and it’s not about inflexibility. It is about staying in relationship through change. To get super concrete, the last couple of tools that I wanted to offer come from generative somatics, and B Stepp in particular is the practitioner that has been at my back in this work and that we tried to do this practice where they said, “Just sit and feel for joy. Remember a time where you felt happy and go there.”

Sure enough, my body freaked out. I was putting myself in a happy memory, and instead what happened was that the voices in my head started saying, “That’s never going to happen again.” Yeah, just like the catastrophizing. So the joyful memory actually stressed me out. So B was like, “All right, we’re going to try something different, which is to practice okayness,” because joy is actually dysregulating, I think for a lot of us that have experienced a lot of trauma because we don’t trust it.

So this practice of okayness was literally just sitting there finding one place in my body that felt okay, and I remember it happened to be my right knee. So I was sitting there feeling my right knee, and it was just kind of warm, kind of tingly, not painful, and to just practice staying with that sensation of okayness and then if it felt ready to let it spread, to let spread the okayness to my leg and then up my torso and then to my shoulders. So I’ve been actually trying to do this practice of okayness every day. So I just want to offer spaciousness for the continuum of tools and feelings. We don’t have to go to pleasure, and joy, and abundance. That can feel like a lot. We can just go to breath and presence.

The practice of self-responsiveness has been really difficult actually inside this body. What I mean by self-responsiveness is knowing what my body needs when and then to actually follow it. So I feel like I would be laying in bed really thirsty and uncomfortable and not move and not get water.

That capacity to move through discomfort has been really useful in movement, has been really useful for pushing and struggle, and also it has a cost that ends up fueling patterns of collapse and disconnection. So starting really small and literally in the middle of the night being like, “Oh, I can turn my body. I’m uncomfortable. My shoulder is numb. I can turn my body.” It’s wild how practicing simple self-responsiveness like that has actually led me to have a different voice emerging in my head that is less harsh, that is kinder, and that is attending to my bodily needs instead of pushing at the expense of okay.

KH: Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate what you all have said about Understory. I also really experience it as a space of accompaniment and a space of rehearsal where we can be held in our humanity and also try to practice the values and ideas that are supposed to inform our productive work. Those ideas can’t simply be fleshed out in meetings and spaces where we’re getting work done. We also need these spaces to break down ideas, to experience renewal together. So I am really grateful for that project. I’m really grateful for this conversation, and I appreciate you all so much for joining me today. Thank you for being here.

DO: Thank you for having us, Kelly, and for the work that you do and for all the work that you all do, and so incredibly build.

CG: Yeah, really big gratitude for taking the time and for being in this experiment of life and building together.

TJ: Yeah. Thank you all. This has been so beautiful and affirming, and I’m taking lots of notes away myself. Thank you.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for that conversation, and for the work that Dorian, Tanuja and Chiara are doing in our communities. If you identify with any of the emotional struggles we described in this episode, I hope you will prioritize your well-being, and find the care and support you need. If you need some guidance on that journey, please check out the show notes of this episode, where we will be including a list of resources that you can explore. Whether you’re trying to transform conflict, heal from trauma, or simply hold space for grief, there are frameworks and tools that can help. And while I know that therapy isn’t right for everyone, please remember that there are radical therapists like Dorian out there — and therapists like mine, who aren’t the least bit radical, but who can hold the complexity of difference.

I hope that you will experience this arc of episodes about mental health and healing as a call to nurture the soft parts of yourself — the parts that feel other people’s pain, and respond to it. That kind of care is crucial to the sustainability of our movements. Ultimately, if we want a just society, we have a lot of harm to heal, and we carry a lot of that harm with us, in our bodies, in our hearts, and in our minds. So, let’s do what we can to care for ourselves and each other, and to heal together.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

Resources for mental health and healing:

• NYC Transformative Justice Hub Self-Guided Self-Care. This document provides grounding practices, resources and activities that can help us navigate moments of emotional activation and tumult.
• Revolutionary Aftercare: Levels of Crisis and Points of Intervention from the Wildseed Society. This resource is a proposal for “building a healing infrastructure to complement our existing fighting infrastructure.”
• Acupressure At-Home Care For All is a DIY resource.
• Healing in Action: A Toolkit for Black Lives Matter Healing Justice and Direct Action. “This toolkit was created to collate, condense and share the lessons we have learned.”
• Centering Practice with Toni-Michelle Williams (short video)
• Breath is a Reciprocal Relationship with the Earth – with Kasha Ho (video)
• Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective Resources
• The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci K. Haines (book)
• Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci K. Haines
• Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma & Politicizing Your Practice by Dr. Jennifer Mullan (book)
• Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety by Cara Page and Erica Woodland (book)

Resources for conflict resolution and communication:

• In It Together: A Framework for Conflict Transformation In Movement-Building Groups from Interrupting Criminalization and Dragonfly Partners. “This toolkit provides a step-by-step diagnostic tool to assess conflict in movement-building organizations and groups and provides strategies, tools, and resources to transform that conflict.”
• The Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication Workbook is “stocked with activities, exercises, and ideas to explore our relationship to communication, our bodies, and each other. Using a trauma-informed approach, this workbook encourages readers to deepen our emotional vocabularies so that we can work towards a more enlivened, healthy interdependence.”
• Communicate Better – “A self-paced communication course to build trust and ease in the relationships that matter to you.”

Referenced:

• “White Supremacy Culture – Still Here” by Tema Okun
• Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice by Mia Mingus
• Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy
• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks