What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

by Prentis Hemphill

the extra effort it took to translate myself

We can carry our pain like a secret. We learn somewhere along the way that we are to blame for our own hurt, our shame, the feeling that we don’t belong. We bottle these secrets up, push them down, because we don’t have the time or space to look them in the eye or to fall apart. We find ways to cope, drowning our histories in substances or overwork, but we forget how, over time, the past and our efforts to stifle it erode our focus, our ability to be present, and our sense of power and agency in the world. Concealing this pain wears down our capacity for vulnerability and connection, and eventually our bodies, too. Our stories need airing out and places to land.

the people who came to see me each week needed the world to change, and not just how they felt about it.

There was something disingenuous about trying to fit each client’s emotion neatly into personal therapeutic rooms when what they were feeling was never only individual.

It had given me that, the sense that we could do something to change things. As much as I wanted individual therapy for every one of my clients, I wanted them to have this feeling, too.

I saw again how connected we all were by those stories we held, by our grief for our dead.

What are we going to do about all this grief?

a conversation on healing justice.

there was something about being with people with shared purpose that made me more courageous

“What will it take for us to heal?” The term “healing justice” was one many of us had started to use as a way of understanding the role of healing in social movements. It came from a framework offered years earlier by Cara Page, a healer and an organizer who had worked in the South and had come to understand that our spiritual and healing practices had always been necessary to our survival, and that our care for one another had always been political. The work that Cara and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective had done was an inspiration for many of us who had similarly found our way to these questions of care and healing and what they had to do with the freedom we’d been talking about for so long.

“What will it take for us to heal?” wasn’t a question that took us away from serious social change. It was a question that showed us where we were headed and how to get there, what it could feel like. What was being proposed wasn’t just social change or isolated healing, but both, at the same time.

healing justice director

to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together.

the chaos offers something else, an opportunity for recalibration, realignment, and reshaping.

“transformational character” refers to the person in a family who takes on the work of interrupting and changing generational patterns. We become who we are in part because of the family system that shaped us, but we can become even more of who we are when we resist, when we take a look at where we’re from, where we want to go, and then begin to transform our future. It’s a fascinating concept to me not only as a therapist but also as someone who has tried to take on this role in my own family and in community organizing. I believe we can decide to transform every system in which we are embedded—our families, our communities, our places of work, our schools, our organizations, our institutions—if we seek out and are given the support to heal and act.

This book is written for the transformational characters of this moment, for the changemakers. Those feeling stirred by what’s going on in the world and who want to get involved but are overwhelmed by the idea or unsure. Those who are already involved in change work, brought to it by wanting to end injustices that have happened in their own lives, and exhausted by facing the trauma again. Or those who see how the culture of change work itself has replicated some of the patterns around exclusivity and shaming that they wanted to address in the first place.

The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as institutional, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural.

It is a guide to show how we can become people who can live with more feeling, more balance, and more power, to point us in the direction of solutions, and to give us what we need to show up.

to accompany and support your healing and leadership.

move toward our best visions and dreams for healing our relationships with ourselves, with one another, and with our planet.

She was a home to me.

we come into the world with meaning and that there was history in my skin.

Most of the Brown people hiding out in the pages of our textbooks didn’t have names—they were the necessary masses being driven off land or chained to it. The chorus, not the main characters. According to our lessons, we hadn’t made real contributions, were not yet people. Not like those whose names and pictures and accomplishments made history.

Her story lifted off the page and called everything into question—the legality, the morality, the humanity of this history.

I don’t think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in another realm altogether, the realm of dreams and imagination. A realm that I might also call spirit. A place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve, through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole. And with our visions in place, we can realize them through what follows, our commitment and the steps we take toward them.

a world where the accepted order of things could finally be exposed as brutal and inhumane.

how she learned to trust her dreaming and how she committed deeply enough to stay the course.

How she did so wasn’t only a matter of technical or tactical skills. Harriet Tubman had visions—messages directly divined to her from God.

Dreams in which routes to freedom and warnings of impending danger revealed themselves to her.

When we live in the past, we can no longer learn from it. It’s this process of learning from our history that is most threatened today, and our failure to do so dooms us to repeat our mistakes.

that they had paused their lives to create and hold open this portal, to make this new time happen. One world had ended the day that Mike lay in the streets and another one was rising from it, taking shape.

Here were two movements, separated by ocean and land, with barely any knowledge of each other, connected through my witness and an invisible, emerging timeline. This, for me, was proof of the possibility to reshape time, to use new markers, to map a way to a new future.