Healing is Political
When I say politics, what do you think of?
I see politics as about us, how we live, the systems we live in, and who has access to resources, freedom, and safety within these systems.
Most aspects of our lives are inherently political (healthcare, where you spend your money, education, cost of living, the news sources you engage with, access to menstrual products, the food we eat, housing, the quality of the air we bloody breathe and so much more).
Healing is not solely an individual process, it’s political because the systems we live within and political decisions impact our bodies and psyches. To ignore this is to bypass a huge part of our human experience.
* When I say ‘our’ I want to be clear about something. We are all affected by the systems we live within, but not all in the same way. They can either afford us privilege and/or cause harm, with overlaps that can compound for folks with multiple marginalised identities.
For transparency, I actually went through an ‘I don’t do politics’ phase myself. Which I realise now translated to something like ‘I have so much privilege that the current systems are largely on my side so I don’t even see that it’s all political, I don’t need to’.
The ‘wellness and spiritual’ spaces I was involved in contributed to this belief, and the individualistic conditioning that I’m still unlearning.
These healing spaces where political topics (like systemic oppression, genocide, ecocide) are either ignored, bypassed, or shamed as being ‘low vibe’ or ‘too negative’, are still sending out a deeply political message whether they like it or not.
A message that encourages absolving ourselves of any responsibility to each other, to the collective and that helps to maintain the status quo.
Here’s an example of the kind of stuff I was saying back in a 2018 facebook post:
‘It’s true that we all have the ability to control how we react despite some external influences being out of our control’.
No past me, that’s not true.
What I’ve learnt since is that if we see our struggles and expressions as solely individual without any consideration of the broader context, the political, the historical, relational, and systemic…
Then we’re likely going to be pathologising perfectly appropriate responses to absolutely abnormal experiences (both in ourselves and in others).
This can create blame and shame. Because if the dominant (inner or outer) narrative is that our ‘symptoms’ are all on us and not a response to a person’s lived reality and what has happened (is happening) to us, it’s more likely we will see ourselves (or others) as needing to be fixed ‘there is something wrong with me/ you’.
This intentionally diverts us from seeing that there is actually something wrong with the systems that caused or contributed to the harm in the first place.
Healing is political because the systems we live within can impact our ability to recover from trauma too, by shaping our daily reality and access to spaces or resources for healing (again either affording more or less access depending on how favored our identities are by the dominant culture).
Capitalism doesn’t stop for healing.
“...the people who came to see me each week needed the world to change, and not just how they felt about it. It's hard to heal when you're still being hurt.” Prentis Hemphill
You’ve probably heard me say that healing is a remembering of our innate wholeness. But how can we talk about wholeness without acknowledging the whole picture?
‘Healing is political’ doesn’t mean bypassing the personal either, healing is many things, it is multifaceted and paradoxical like we are. I see it as acknowledging that the personal and political are deeply entwined.
Healing is relational because we are. We are always in relationship with the world around us, that is our nature. To deny certain aspects of that is to deny who we are.
Look, my work is all about healing, I believe in it deeply and say none of this in a disempowering way, quite the opposite. Where the body holds trauma and pain, it also holds resilience, aliveness, wisdom and possibility.
But let’s keep creating space for compassionate honesty:
Is our healing driving us deeper into individualism and upholding oppressive systems OR is it orienting us towards connection and co-creating a more safe, just, and livable world for ALL?
Here are a few related resources:
Book recommendation for fellow practitioners - Dr Jennifer Mullan - Decolonizing Therapy
Short video from Dra. Rosales Meza on how western psychology programs us to prioritise self over community
Article about how Palestine’s head of mental health services says PTSD is a western concept where she asks the important question- ‘What is sick, the context or the person?’.