Content warning: genocide (no details or descriptions).
I’ve been trying to write this post about community for over a month now.
Weeks filled with continued watching and protesting against the ongoing ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide of Palestine. Congo. Sudan. Tigray. The ongoing genocides of Indigenous people everywhere. Black people everywhere. LGBTTSQIA people everywhere. Disabled & chronically ill people everywhere.
Weeks filled with rage and grief that have no translation. Months of rage and grief. Years of rage and grief. But truly, this has been going on since colonization began. Our country exists because of the violent colonization of Indigenous people. Rage and grief are appropriate and healthy responses to a world built on colonization, genocide, and violence.
How do we hold this?
As a therapist, it’s my job to help heal. But when the world we live in is rooted in ongoing violence and oppression, how do we heal? What does healing look like in a world designed for destruction?
Responsibility to Speak Out Against Genocide
The US is waging and involved with multiple genocides and ecocides. Ongoing. Abroad, and here on occupied Turtle Island. As a clinician, it’s my ethical responsibility to learn about these. To understand how they impact us as individuals, as relationships, as communities. How surviving this violence carries across generations and borders and time to influence us without measure. To understand how the mental health industrial complex was built on such violence, perpetrates such violence, and continues to uphold such violence. To unlearn what I’ve been taught. And to speak out against it.
As a human being, it’s my moral responsibility to understand the interconnection of our worlds. Because even though we can say we’re not, it doesn’t make it true. Our money funds genocides, our choices as a consumer upholds genocides and resource extraction, and our silence in the face of oppression is complicit with harm.
As a white person living on occupied Turtle Island, it’s my moral responsibility to understand my role in all of this. And to do all I can to stop and divest from it. To unlearn what I have been taught, to be accountable, and to contribute to the reclamation of this world from the powers that colonize, genocide, and destruct.
This is also healing.
I have struggled to know how to find and hold the beauty, magic, and joy that I truly and deeply feel is our birthright – is revolutionary – in a world ignited in flames. I still have no answers here.
What I do know is that no amount of “love and light”, focusing on “positive vibes”, believing we can be “neutral”, calling for “peace”, or silence will save us. We are complicit. How do we come together to face this – and make sustainable, lasting change?
Divest from Community that Does Not Serve
The best reminders I have received during this time has been to divest from the communities that do not serve – and engage with those that do. There have been numerous mental health orgs that have been silent and complicit. GAYLESTA & Bay Area Open Minds are the two most devastating to me as a queer, non-binary clinician in the SF Bay. Both failing to take a stand as LGBTTSQIA mental health orgs to support the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues, clients, and greater community in the face of genocide. Censoring and tone policing. Refusing to even say the words “genocide” or “Palestine”. Unable to see their own complicity.
We may remember – the whole LGBTTSQIA movement was build by the lives, spirit, and labor of QTBIPOC communities – then co-opted by white supremacy and capitalism. The whole mental health field was co-opted from Indigenous, Black, and People of the Global Majority – and continues to be used to censor, pathologize, and institutionalize them today. We owe our very existence to their lives, spirit, and labor. As the sign says – Queer (and Trans) people anywhere, are responsible for Queer (and Trans) people everywhere. Our liberation is forever interconnected. This is also healing.
Calling Out Complicity to Genocide
Melody Li of Inclusive Therapists and Dr. Jennifer Mullan of Decolonizing Therapy recently published an open letter to the mental health field. In it they call out orgs that are complicit to genocide, lay out the violent and colonizing history of the mental health field, rightfully demand an end to the complicity of the mental health field, and lay out action steps for real accountability and change. Many of us, of many different mental health fields, identities, and locations, supported in the creation of this letter – through statements, fact checking, info gathering, and more.
This letter has been a rallying cry for those of us who are speaking out. We are not alone. This is also healing.
Rooted in this rallying cry for liberation, we must keep co-creating change. And to co-create change, we need community. Where can we place our energy so that it may mutually grow and build?
Unlearn Isolation and Individualism
There are no fast solutions to this. These systems run deep. However one thing I know to be true, is the need for liberation focused community. Black, Indigenous, AANHPI, and People of the Global Majority have taught us this. Disabled people have taught us this. LGBTTSQIA people have taught us this.
We rise together.
White supremacy, imperialism, and colonization thrive on isolation. These systems need us separated, overworked, traumatized, and distracted in order to function. Competing against each other for resources that are abundant. Lacking the energy, time, support, and capacity to come together in community. This makes us much less likely to revolt.
But we’re waking up. And the revolution is here. So how will you learn to be in community? This is also healing.
Prompt: What Blocks Us From Community
First, we need to unpack what we’ve been taught about community, and how it has prevented us from belonging. This week’s prompts will explore just that:
- What did you learn about community growing up? Was it a place of connection and resilience? Of fear and control? Was it seen as unnecessary, with the focus on you and your immediate family? Was community only seen as something to take from, compete with, or sacrifice to?
- What did you learn about what it takes to connect with, nourish, and grow mutually reciprocal community? Who modeled these skills? Who didn’t?
- What importance did community serve your ancestors? When were they cut off from their connection to community – how and why? Or when did they re-enter into their connection to community- how and why?
- Given all of this – what messaging, fears, or reservations do you carry about being in community now? What needs healing?
Further Support
I do believe in us. I do. And I do believe we as humans can move through this time to a place of justice first. To justice that grows love, interdependence, accountability, reparations, healing, and soulfulness. Justice that builds peace. I am honored to be building that future beside you.
As always, if you would like individual support on your healing journey as a joyful, radical empath, intuitive, or sensitive, I am here for you. Please reach out. Additionally, you are welcome to join the waitlist for Soul Sanctuary, my new ecospiritual and expressive arts group for LGBTTSQIA empaths, intuitives, and magic makers on the path to liberation. As a queer, enby, intuitive therapist, I deeply understand the challenges of this journey. I would be honored to support you.
In Healing and Justice,
Phoenix
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