Healing Alone vs. Healing in Community

When I held my LOVE YOUR TRANS SELF workshop in the spring of 2023, one piece of feedback stuck out to me. Essentially, the feedback was pointing to the general issue of self-love and self care being placed on the individual, instead of the community, and how that can hit in a workshop such as mine.

This is something that I think about all the time, in my private healing work, in my sessions with clients, and in my workshops and classes. In part because I think that in our current culture, concepts and words get meme-ified so quickly that the entire cycle of concept going mainstream -> concept being critiqued -> concept being dropped/becoming outdated can happen in a matter of days or weeks. It isn't enough time to sit with things, and the social media of it all means that we don't have enough space to parse out the nuance of just about anything, ever. Further, as soon as a concept makes it into the zeitgeist, if there is even a whiff of potential around it, it is co-opted by capitalism and sold back to us for profit. At that point, the original concept, no matter how good or helpful, becomes the fruit of the poison tree.

Toxicity in the World of "Healing"

Healing, and almost anything associated with healing, is like this. This world has been ravaged by colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy in ways that have left scars on many peoples. Following the work of folks like Resmaa Menakem, we all need healing on just about every level. Healing as an ongoing practice, as a reorientation, as a series of new ways of moving through the world. Yet, at least in this culture where I live, "healing" is a concept that is continuously taken up by capitalism via startups and seemingly endless forms of commodification, as well as by grifters, cultural appropriators, and even folks who are well-meaning but don't have the skill to create or hold a healing space.

It's a mess, and it leads to the flattening of ideas around things like "self-care" and "spirituality" and almost anything that can and has been used as a healing tool by anyone, ever.

Like many things, healing is a fractal art. (Deep gratitude and recognition to adrienne maree brown and her concept of fractals as put forth in Emergent Strategy). What we do on a small scale echoes out to the larger scale, what happens on the larger scale is also what is happening to us, to some degree. It is all interconnected.

Of course, it's easy to go into unhelpful and painful places in both the larger and the smaller scales of healing. There is a danger to going too internal, too focused on the self, where your own experience becomes your only point of reference and, especially when combined with privilege, you fail to maintain accountability. There is a space in that micro-level healing where you can get stuck in a cycle of "self-improvement" + "never enoughness" that spirals out into endless self harm under the guise of healing. Essentially, there are pitfalls.

But it is also possible to say "healing in community" when what you mean is "I don't feel valuable unless I am of service to others" and this, too, creates an endless cycle of self harm under the guise of healing. Pushing yourself into burnout and exhaustion and crossing your own boundaries is often a danger at both the micro and the macro level because that is what this culture has conditioned us to do. Healing is, in part, the process of learning how to not do that.

What is Healing, Anyway?

I've heard "healing" defined in so many different ways, and I think its one of those words that is big enough to carry different definitions and connotations. I do not think that healing is a process with a distinct ending and beginning, or with any linearity in the middle. Rather, healing is an energy, an orientation, and a process that we continually engage in. Sometimes it is facilitated by others, sometimes it comes from the earth, sometimes it comes from laughing or crying or taking mushrooms or other plant medicines. Sometimes, healing is just holding yourself quietly, sitting with yourself.

Having a chronic illness has helped me refine my idea of healing. Knowing that I can be experiencing devastating pain or other symptoms and I can still hold this body and whisper, "I love you I love you I love you." Knowing that I can feel very good for a long time and suddenly feel very bad and that this isn't a punishment or even a consequence of anything I said or did or ate. And also, knowing that if I do or eat or say certain things, it will take a toll, and I can avoid those things out of love and awareness and still not be perfect at it and that's also fine.

There's a fantastic discussion of healing between adrienne maree brown and Prentis Hemphill in this article, which I could read and reread and reread. I've learned a great deal about healing from both of them, and from other sources, such as "Who is Wellness For?" by Fariha Róisín, "Rest is Resistance" by Tricia Hersey, and currently, "Healing Justice Lineages" by Cara Page and Erica Woodland. My mentors in healing have also been the various practitioners I have worked with, for body work, acupuncture, breathwork, herbalists, my therapist, spiritual folks, and more.

I guess one way to conceptualize healing is a path where we recognize our wounds, past wounds and wounds as they happen, and work with that pain rather than shrinking away from it or trying to bury it. That's my definition today. Catch me again in a week, a month, a year, a decade.

Why Try To Heal?

I think especially in this culture, in this moment, where it feels like we are all consistently being traumatized and re-traumatized, healing can feel like an impossible day dream or a fruitless pursuit. But healing allows us to be in relationship with ourselves, with our earth, and with one another. It is not a zero-sum game where we must only think about ourselves or others. Rather, it is a dance, a process, a spiral. You do not have to love yourself in order to love others. But you can learn to love yourself a little better, and apply that to your relationships with others, and grow in your mutual love, and then apply that to your relationship with yourself, etc.

You can learn through your own healing to hold friends, family, and community members through their healing processes - not because you are an expert, but because you have grace for the messy process of healing, and how opaque and painful it can feel at times. You can recognize and hold space for the wobblyness of it, for the ups and downs, for the fact that it takes the time that it takes.

My personal healing journey has lead me to more fulfilling relationships, a deeper sense of purpose, to more grace for myself and for others. It has lead me away from capitalistic/supremacist concerns about accomplishment and has allowed me to lean further into who I actually am. Leaning into my own self has in turn brought me into deeper relationship with others who share values with me but who also hold me in my growth and healing and evolution.

Healing as a practice and an orientation toward life has changed everything for me. This is part of why I do what I do.

Healing Alone vs. Healing in Community

So practically speaking, what does it mean to move away from this false dichotomy?

Healing that is focused on yourself and done in solitude (or with a practitioner one-on-one) does not have to be thought of as THE way that healing is accomplished, nor do I believe that this is healing "alone." This type of healing can be undertaken as part of a larger project of learning to be in right relationship with the earth, with community. It can be undertaken as part of a process of healing ancestral wounds and/or trauma. This type of healing work can allow you to build the toolkit that you, specifically, need in order to function in community/group spaces and remain in line with your values.

Similarly, being in community, experiencing the magic of your energy mingling with others, the alchemical reactions we create in one another, can expose you to all sorts of new information, or new perspectives on things you thought that you knew and understood. Being in community can help you to test your newly developing skills for self regulation and maintaining your boundaries and listening to your body. Being in community can allow you to see other people functioning in ways that are exciting to you, and can broaden your imagination and perspective of what is possible.

In my experience of healing, you can not solely heal alone or in community. There is the healing that you do in the quiet and solitary spaces of self. There is the healing that you do with partners, with close friends. There is the healing that can come through family, chosen and blood. There is the healing that happens in the large context of a bigger, broader community - what it can feel like to have a whole group of folks show up in the same time and place and singing together or dancing ecstatically or building a community garden or offering precious acts of service to one another or to the earth. There is the healing that we do on a planetary scale, both in small acts (like picking up trash on a trail or the beach) and large acts (like huge campaigns to change law and policy or take down corporate super polluters).

I recently read a newsletter from Fariha Róisín discussing abolition and healing and how one of the most comforting things about abolition is how it requires acceptance of ourselves and others. Acceptance that we are messy creatures who do many things, and that some of those things are beautiful and powerful and others are painful and in direct contradiction to our values. To me, this is the meat of this discussion on healing.

We heal ourselves so that we can heal community so that we can heal the world so that we can heal ourselves, knowing that this is not a direct linear process but rather a constant state of weaving in, around, and through. And this concept of weaving is vital, because it allows us to circumvent the idea that all of this work and healing has a finite and well-defined end point. Another gift of chronic illness is learning a deeply felt, somatic sense that you do not participate in healing so that you can reach a point of "I am healed." Healing is a lifetime process, and probably will be for many many generations. I believe as long as humans exist, we will need healing.

No One Heals Alone

I wanted to write a section here on the issues and tensions around the idea of "the healer" or working as "a healer," but as I began to write, I realized that would be a totally different post and require many more words to elucidate. So instead I will say this. Healing is a thing that cannot happen in total isolation, and also, humans are not our only allies in the healing realm. If you, for example, lack community in your area, or if you have been deeply harmed by humans and don't wish to go to them for healing on any level, or even if you simply need to build up to that…that's fine!

I think that every earth-thing holds healing magic and power. Connection with nature, with animals, plants, dirt or rocks…even going outside of earth and connecting with stars and other celestial bodies can bring tremendous comfort. Further, you can reach to your ancestors - not just human ancestors, but all the many forms an energies that are ancestral to you. There are many ways to seek healing that don't require other humans at all, but that can be the foundation of an incredible practice.

How will you begin dancing toward healing? What support will you bring in?