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

by Prentis Hemphill

There’s something revolutionary about creating a space for people to lay down what burdens them. 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.

as much as each client needed room to heal and tell their stories, 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.

I saw again how connected we all were by those stories we held, by our grief for our dead. We had come to march for justice, angry at systems that had broken generations of our people, that still murdered boys like Trayvon and refused him his innocence. It was painful how many stories we all held, how everybody had a ghost.

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.

This question I’d been asking, “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.

Over time, I have come 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. Not one or the other, but both. We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face.

Chaos is a constant, terrifying us with its uncertainty. But the chaos offers something else, an opportunity for recalibration, realignment, and reshaping. This moment is ours for the taking.

In family systems therapy, the term “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.

Our greatest challenge is to not allow our ruptures and breakdowns to become new sites of trauma for one another.

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.

I am most interested in what I can never know, how she learned to trust her dreaming and how she committed deeply enough to stay the course.

Visioning is an uncovering of potential. It’s revealing what is already there and trying to become, if only we believe in it.

What we allow ourselves to imagine, what dreams spring from unlikely relationships, is the beginning of the future.

Want attaches itself to objects we think might make us happy. It fills in gaps we think we have. But longing is something else. It comes from deep inside and is not easily satisfied with things. Often it sits underneath our wants, the thing we desire that we might be most afraid to say.

Longing is personal and, in that way, a part of what might be an authentic self. We tend to long for what our bodies need in order to heal and feel whole. Visions are rooted in longing.

Trauma can take the capacity for longing, for visioning, from us. By necessity it keeps us shortsighted, tied to the past and focused on tracking and assessing dangers in the here and now. In PTSD research, it is referred to as “a foreshortened sense of future,” a hypervigilance that leaves little room for dreams or visions. While the short term, the immediate, can appear to us in vivid detail, the long term, the future, is hazy. When we can’t perceive too far ahead, it’s impossible to imagine that we can shape what comes and create a future we’ve never seen.

Commitment is the path between your vision and this moment. It is the day-to-day building, practice, and intention that transports you forward to that changed place, whether it’s internal or external to you.

To what and to whom are you committed? What do you long for? And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?

Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be conjured.

Through the years, I’ve learned that, more than anything, presence is a kind of permission for honesty.

Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation. To ask if we can heal at the same time that we engage social change is, to me, like asking if we can love at the same time we make change, if we can make music or eat food. How could our personal development ever truly be at odds with social transformation? How could it happen without it?

Healing, or care, is still essential for guiding the how of what we build, the visions for the world, and is the principle for how we navigate the challenges therein. When we commit to social change, we remember that systems can perpetuate and create harm, or they can foster healing and resilience.

Most of the time, we come to the work of making the world anew because of the pain this one has caused. Our wounds can give us the initial surge to fight back, though this energy is fueled by our most frightened, defended, and adrenalized selves. Ultimately, it’s not sustainable. The wound grows even as we use it, eating away at the person who holds it, acidifying all we do.

We are most powerful when sourcing our energy from possibility, from our visions, not from the pain we know, but from the world just outside of what we can now see. Our energy is most potent when we make room for our grief and anger, when we allow ourselves to feel, and our direction becomes clearer.

When social movements and social change organizations face significant external political pressure and backlash, it can turn inward, and they can fracture along the lines of individual and collective unaddressed traumas. They break apart in places where we are replicating patterns that harm others and ourselves. We cannot ignore our wounds, nor can we work over or through them, nor mine them for energy. Instead, it’s through an orientation toward healing and repair for ourselves and others that we recover our capacity for feeling, for relationship, and, with that, the ability to strengthen our bonds and work together. Then we can create and lean in to visions for ourselves and a world beyond our fear. As we attempt to reconfigure the world where it has been unjust and where our systems and beliefs have hurt us, so must we transform ourselves, our values, our cultures, our actions, and our spirits.

trauma breaks apart our ability to experience safety, belonging, and dignity. That these needs are core to our ability to develop as human beings, grow, create, engage with others and the world, and express and protect ourselves.

In my sixteenth year, I was sexually assaulted twice, both times by boys I considered my friends. I know very clearly that none of it was my fault, but I also know that I had gotten accustomed to having my body too close to the fire, to the rage of my father. I befriended boys with tempers that I tried to quell, who took more than they gave, because it was familiar to me. I had learned to seek connection at the expense of my bodily safety, to lose my own limits in order to belong. Eventually, transgression became familiar, a fact of relationship. I learned to quiet my body’s responses, a wince, the desire to pull away. I could numb my own indicators that I’d had enough. The abuse my father acted out on us was a predictor and a preparation for other violations.

Trauma spreads and transmits beyond our individual bodies. We are social, interdependent beings, communicating almost constantly with one another about how safe we are, how threatening, how willing we are to connect, and how likely we are to leave. So when our past invades our present, as is the way with trauma, we inhabit our current relationships according to the concerns, fears, pain from another time.

Oppression is the distribution and concentration of trauma into bodies and communities designated less powerful.

Every person who has experienced trauma interacts with every other person’s trauma. It is a tangle that impacts everything we do. Our struggles extend into our families, friendships, and communities, into our places of work and worship, our organizations, and each person’s trauma becomes entwined and interconnected with everyone else’s. Even when we see this matrix of pain and intend to relieve it, what already lives in us undermines what we are able to do. Is it any wonder that the changes we try to bring to our communities, to the world, the things we try to build, sometimes splinter?

Many social justice movements, whether stated explicitly or not, are, in part, an effort to heal. People are drawn to them, looking for an end to the same unfair treatment and perpetual trauma experienced in their personal lives.

Whoever we are, we pour our stuff into our work. We bring our habits, our coping mechanisms, behaviors, and patterns to whatever it is we do, and that becomes the basis of the cultures we build. When we focus on external change without tending to internal transformation, we act out the worst of ourselves in the places where it matters most.

Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.

Healing happens in moments as simple and profound as this, when we are able to tolerate, feel, and express something in our relationships that before was out of our reach. It reinstates our abilities to choose something other than what our fear dictates. It will not make us perpetually nice or necessarily peaceful, but it will help to make our responses correlate with what is happening now. Healing, I often say, helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to.

But survival does not necessarily ensure resilience.

To be resilient is to be engaged, creative, adaptive, and relational. It’s to remember that you are a part of this world.

It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay an active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we’ve accrued. Healing ourselves is not the end of the line but brings us into relationship with others, and allows us to do the work that brings healing to the wider world.

We know somewhere in ourselves what is fractured in us and our world and that the necessary redirection of our species will not be achieved by a change in just our thinking or only through our smartest ideas. It won’t be a performative change either. Instead, this change that we are called toward requires something of us that is radical and relational, cellular and generational, that brings us closer to one another and is measured in the very feeling of our lives.

When we stifle our emotions by thinking that they’re too messy or inconvenient; when we measure our body’s value by its thinness and productivity; when we feel that we or people we know are undesirable or disposable because they are disabled; when we see the nonhuman natural world only as raw material for products to be consumed without end or renewal, we are operating inside a paradigm that dehumanizes and objectifies.

Everything that happens happens in our bodies. Everything we feel, say, think, risk, every connection we ever have is experienced there. Our bodies are the expression and container of our lives.

As much as mass protests and direct action are about putting strategic pressure on opposition, they are often a gathering space for our grief and pain because they are too big to feel alone.

Relationships are our interface and could be our remembering. They are most alive when they are chosen, shaped, made, not according to who we should be or are trying to be but according to who we are.

People-pleasing is the habitual need to shape-shift according to another’s demands, and its root is often gendered or otherwise developed in us by needs we had as children. Many of us learned over time that it was safer to make our own needs secondary to keep someone else happy. When we focus so much on someone else’s contentment, we can deprioritize and quiet our own feeling. We lose a sense of who we really are other than who we need to become for another’s sake. When we give ourselves away so often, we can start to believe that who we really are is the guilt and shame we feel on the other side of those interactions, which only reinforces our self-abandonment.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

I see people all the time who bring others back into their lives after distance and assume that the relationship and their proximity to each other should revert to what it once was. Instead, ruptures should inform the shape of relationships going forward. We should relate differently based on what’s happened, now that we’ve learned something about who the other actually is and who we are. If not, we risk falling into the same patterns that didn’t work before.

Trust is the bedrock of human coordination, collaboration, and repair, and without it, as social beings, it can be hard for us to accomplish much of anything with one another.

Trust is a risk we take with one another to do something bigger than we could have done alone.

It taught me a lot; namely, that you begin with an idea, a vision, but it’s the everyday work that produces the real lessons and the real change. The space between inspiration and what we might call the result is where things become surprisingly unwieldy, and beautiful, painful, and miraculous. Mainly, it’s where we become someone different from who we were when we began.

In order for healing to happen at scale, on a societal level, we need tangible and significant changes to our institutions and to the underlying culture we live in. To get there, we all have to dirty our hands and become involved in the making of the world in far deeper ways than we’ve been taught are possible. And it all has to be done with one another.

Healing in solitude eventually brings us home only to realize that what causes us pain, what causes many others pain, are issues much bigger than our singular lives—and those issues remain: income disparity, generational trauma, isolation, the slights and violence of being made a marginalized other. Such widespread systemic and historical injustice limits our capacity, and even when we are able to address trauma through individual healing, it’s not enough. Only when we come together to shape, dismantle, and rebuild the world can we start to end the ongoing cycles of collective trauma caused by systems obsessed with profit and not the well-being of all humans and the planet. We can’t change the world if we do not heal what has become embodied in us, and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don’t change, too.