Beliefs, Understanding, and Commitments related to Resilience, Trauma, and Liberation

I believe:

Everyone deserves safety and belonging.

No one can promise trauma-free space.

Sometimes change feels like danger even when it is not.

Learning to differentiate when we are and are not safe is critical to working toward liberation.

Resilience:

  • Healing and building resilience happen best in relationship.

  • Safety and belonging allows our nervous system to regulate and optimizes our mental, emotional, and physical functions.

  • Practices I use in my work to create safety and belonging include:

    • Empowerment and choice (consent).

    • Identity-based awareness including cultural humility and responsiveness (sometimes called cultural competence).

    • Generosity and grace when people make mistakes or think they did something wrong.

    • Setting limits/boundaries if someone hurts others repeatedly without responding to feedback.

    • Encouraging questions so that people are not left out during conversations – particularly if terminology, acronyms, or concepts aren’t known to them.

    • Transparent facilitation.

    • Welcoming and actively encouraging feedback in multiple forms.

    • Meeting as many accessibility needs as possible.

    • Starting many events with a short embodiment practice to attune to our bodily experience.

  • Additional practices I use personally to support my own resilience include:

    • Co-regulation such as singing or dancing together.

    • Sharing meals with people.

    • Being with animals.

    • Prayer, meditation, and ritual.

    • Journaling.

    • Being in nature.

    • Discharging. Discharge is an important part of moving out of a trauma response and building resilience. Discharge can look like: walking, running, dancing, shouting, shaking, singing, sighing, shaking, humming and more.

    • Somatic experiencing (tuning in to my body).

  • By striving for safety and belonging, we are:

  1. Less likely to create new traumas.

  2. Supportive of people’s need to discharge and re-regulate if they are experiencing an old or new trauma.

  3. Supportive of people to learn, heal, and take action toward a more liberated world.

Trauma:

  • Is a physiological response.

  • Is an adaptation for survival that is sometimes maladaptive.

  • Originates from various experiences.

  • Can happen from a singular origin; over time from living in ongoing, chronic oppressive systems and/or stressful situations; or repeated small incidents that compound.

  • Can happen to bystanders, recipients, and perpetrators of harm or violence.

  • Impacts most if not all people to some degree at some time.

  • Recognizing signs of trauma is important.

    • Fight, flight, fawn, freeze

  • Learning what triggers a trauma response can help us stay more regulated and resilient in our work toward liberation (and in general).

  • Tuning in to their bodies can help us recognize when our nervous system is getting activated and gives us the opportunity to turn to a resilience practice and potentially avoid a trauma response.

Additional related core beliefs:

  • Showing vulnerability is a form of strength;

  • Empathy and humanization can change the world; and

  • What we practice creates patterns, patterns become culture. We are always practicing something. We can consciously choose to practice differently to change our culture.

Commitments:

In my work as a facilitator, I am committed to making space for trauma when it surfaces, avoiding new traumatic experiences, and supporting people to build resilience. I do not offer what some people refer to as a “safe space.” People often use this term to mean a space in which they are comfortable. In my work of challenging systems of social hierarchy that we have all internalized, discomfort is necessary.  However, it is critical to this work that we avoid moving from discomfort to shame. I practice empathy and will always support and encourage people to be brave and take risks – even and especially when it feels scary. I cannot guarantee comfort, but I do commit to addressing and supporting discomfort when it comes up. 

Somatic experience/body awareness is valuable in social justice/world building/change work because our biology affects our psychology. How we perceive the world is impacted by the state we are in. To support our movements toward liberation, it is important for us to practice tracking our internal bodily experiences and note when discomfort creeps in. When we start to feel uncomfortable, our nervous system can move into a maladaptive threat response which inhibits our ability to engage in the matter at hand. 

The more regulated our nervous system is, the better able we are to see solutions, think creatively, and communicate clearly. With increased ability to track bodily sensation, we can sometimes avoid a maladaptive threat response. We can remind ourselves that we are safe (if in fact we are), ground ourselves, and stay present to the learning without a freeze, flight, fight, or fawn response. When we become more attuned to our bodies, we can tell when we need to practice resilience.

Some credits:

I am greatly influenced by the works of adrienne maree brown, Sonya Renee Taylor, Prentiss Hemphill, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, and Starhawk. My political education and praxis comes largely from the Catalyst Collective’s Anne Braden Training, the programs of Comrades Education, Think Again’s Cross Class Dialogue Circle, and The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Additionally I am grateful to the following practitioners for my own resilience practices: Amanda Franz, Nuria Latifa Bowart, Dr Ivy Leibman, Dr Lisa Cepeda, Jean Guenther, and Carolyn Lewis, among many more.

These Beliefs, Understanding, and Commitments related to Resilience, Trauma, and Liberation were developed in the course “Growing Resilience: Being Trauma Informed” at The Everything Space in Montpelier, Vermont.