Levels of Healing: Individual, Interpersonal, Institutional & Structural

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.” — Resmaa Menakem

Individual Healing

At the individual level, we must commit to an ongoing process of healing from personal harm and internalized oppression. Internalized oppression manifests in many forms. It can lead to self-doubt and believing the stereotypes you hear about yourself and your family, your racial, cultural, or ethnic group. It can undermine your confidence, your agency, and your willingness to bring your full self to school, work, and other endeavors that matter to you. The chronic stress of living in oppressive systems that don’t see, value, or protect you limits your emotional range and your ability to think intelligently. Healing at the individual level is about regaining access to your full capability and promise as a human.

“You are strong enough. Strong enough to feel everything and still carry on.” — Gail Marie

Healing from internalized oppression can feel scary, because you have to go there - you must unpack varying levels of trauma that almost always begin in childhood. There are many ways for individuals to work through their racialized trauma to engage in their own healing: journaling, meditation, therapy, body and breath work, art, music, etc. But at some point, healing from racial trauma cannot be accomplished in isolation; we are social beings who need to connect  and be listened to in community. What is an early memory of race that pained or confused you? Where does that experience, those feelings, live in your body? How did this experience disconnect you from your humanity? What do you need to metabolize, release, or shed to be free? Sharing your story - including your pain and trauma - with others in a brave space that allows for meaning-making, acceptance, forgiveness, and surrender; fosters agency and promotes healing at both the individual and interpersonal levels. 

Interpersonal Healing

“Whatever the problem, community is the answer. How we are together in our relationships is the solution. When people are anxious and scared, we withdraw from one another. Listening helps us lean in and hold one another.” — Margaret Wheatley

At the interpersonal level, healing is facilitated by storytelling, listening to and believing one another. It is a conscious intention to reconnect to our ancestors, to Mother Earth, to one another and to ourselves. Feeling separate and cut-off from the interdependent ecosystem of our world is a byproduct of white supremacy ideology and a source of trauma. Our most profound need is to belong, we cannot flourish without experiencing a sense of belonging to a whole. Mother Teresa long warned us that “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” 

Creating conditions for sharing personal narratives and deep listening, a container strong enough to hold the emotional charge of racism, first within racial affinity and then across differences (age, race, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexual identities, etc.) is necessary to build deep relationships that support our continued healing.

As people share their stories, their relationships change and deepen. We learn we have all been impacted by systemic oppression, some of us have perpetuated it and caused harm, and we all have healing to do. Practices like constructivist listening allow people to be available to each other as they process and heal. Holding space for people to listen and be listened to and share their stories without question or interruption is fundamental to our collective healing.

Creating the conditions for deeper and more authentic interpersonal relationships across differences sets the stage for institutional healing. 

Institutional Healing

“We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

— Rebecca Solnit

Healing at an institutional level involves an intentional, shared and explicit commitment to creating a more loving, just and resilient system. Healing at the institutional level is about acknowledging harm and restoring agency throughout the system. Most people are keenly aware of who has control, authority, voice - who makes decisions. Institutional healing involves generating and implementing policies and practices that proactively disrupt historical patterns of racialized and gendered power and participation and catalyze new ways of working together. 

A consensus-driven process for constructing and committing to core organizational values and developing community agreements can be powerful mechanisms for institutional healing. The articulation of an organization’s core values and community agreements cohere people around a collective vision of what we stand for and how we want to be in relationship with one another to do our work. These values and agreements are explicitly developed and brought to life by the group, not by an external authority. Staying together through the (often-messy) process of co-creation can set the groundwork for truth-telling, reconciliation and healing at the institutional level. 

Structural Healing

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If we create conditions for healing within institutions, we set the stage for the inter-institutional truth telling and organizing necessary for structural healing. This requires us to take a clear eyed look at how we got here and understand and acknowledge that our laws, policies, and practices inequitably distribute society’s burdens and opportunities (education, healthcare, housing, policing, food access, voting, etc) and hold in place racial inequity and harm. They were not designed to serve all people. Who they benefit and who they harm is racialized by design. We did not get here by accident and we will not create equity by chance.

Interrupting historical patterns of inequity and racialized outcomes within and across communities requires leaders who can see and connect the ways in which structures work to create or delimit opportunity across sector and across institutions. Leaders who understand the power of structures focus on the outcomes structures produce, not the intentions of people within them.

Healing is capacity building - when we attend to healing we expand our ability for ourselves, our organizations, and our movements to evolve and grow, and it ensures that change is sustainable, grounded, and rooted in community needs, desires, and dreams.