The Role of Healing in Equity Leadership
August 15, 2023
An abstract image of a feminine face gazing to the right. Her head is halfway submerged in a sea, and her head morphs into a green and purple tree with a swirling root structure. Below the surface the roots continue to swirl and merge with the neck. The sky is lightly cloudy and the image is framed by mountains in the distance.
“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.”
What is healing?
There are a wide variety of definitions and ways in which people understand healing that have medical, spiritual, and indigenous roots. We at NEP believe that healing is a holistic process and journey to restore and experience health and wholeness to one’s mind, body, and spirit. This transformative process acknowledges the harm, pain, distress, and suffering from the manifestations of historical and ongoing oppression. Therefore, centering healing allows individuals and communities the opportunity to transform past and current harms, pain, and suffering into personal and collective well-being. The healing process takes time, and it doesn’t happen the same way for everyone.
Levels of Healing
Oppression operates and manifests at different levels of a system. In response, healing can occur at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels.
Image description: From top to bottom: 1) A light green circle with an icon of a person meditating. Light green text box reads “Individual Healing.” 2) A dark green circle with an icon of two clasped hands. Dark green text box reads “Interpersonal Healing.” 3) A light green circle with an icon of a tree in front of a building. Light green text box reads “Institutional Healing.” 4) A dark green circle with an icon of a globe with interconnecting lines. Dark green text box reads “Structural Healing.”
Individual Healing: At the individual level, we must commit to an ongoing process of healing from personal harm and internalized oppression (i.e., acting out of oppression on one’s self). Healing at the individual level is about regaining access to your full capability and promise as a human.
Interpersonal Healing: At the interpersonal level, we must heal from feeling separate and cut-off from the interdependent ecosystem of our world, which is a byproduct of white supremacy ideology and a source of trauma. We can also think of this as our connection to our larger collective; a conscious intention to flourish and reconnect to our ancestors, to Mother Earth, to one another and to ourselves.
Institutional Healing: At an institutional level, we must acknowledge harm and restore agency throughout the system. It involves an intentional, shared and explicit commitment to creating a more loving, just and resilient system.
Structural Healing: At the structural level, we must 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. 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 sectors and across institutions.
Why is healing important?
Healing is the work of coming home to ourselves again and again; it is a practice of recentering, reconnecting, and restoring. Because oppression is persistent and systemically interconnected and reinforced over time, our attention to healing must also be intentional and persistent. Advancing equity work requires continuous healing from the phenomena of oppression that emerge from foundational ideologies of white delusion, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cis-hetero patriarchy. We must interrupt and disrupt these pillars of oppression in order to tap into resiliency, access agency, and express the fullness of our humanity and interdependent fates. We are then able to live into the values of justice and liberation and root ourselves in the interconnectedness and collective humanity which pave the path we will travel home.
In his book, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, Shawn Ginwright, Ph.D highlights that as a society, we generally don’t do a good job at preparing, teaching, or training people how to be vulnerable, cultivate empathy, practice self-reflection -- all the stuff that makes us human. Ginwright asserts that healing, restoring our humanity and care for ourselves and others is the only real pathway to justice.
When our emotions and wellness are not tended to we may act in uncaring, unproductive, and unintelligent ways. Thus, healing must be centered as we work collaboratively towards personal and collective transformation and liberation; it cannot wait until our systems are redesigned. As a matter of fact, attending to healing is a critical process as we collectively transform our systems into equitable, resilient, and liberating environments.
The process of healing supports us to do the following:
Restore and experience health and wholeness to our mind, body, and spirit (Jackins 1994).
Lead in alignment with our values of liberation and justice
Tap into our full agency (i.e. recognize the values and ways of being we aspire to embody and commit to “soul care” rituals, routines, and practices to live into this)
Creating space to honor, create, and deepen relationships with one another
Fosters/rebuilds sense of belonging in community
Build/repair relational trust and collective efficacy
Live into our interconnectedness.
“When we are together, we create infinite possibilities, not just for our survival but also for our ever-expanding abundance.”
Implications for Leaders
By committing to creating substantive change to advance equity, we hold that an essential part of a leaders’ role is to create conditions, routines, rituals, and structures to attend to the healing and well-being of themselves and those in their community. We are all harmed in different ways and to different degrees by systemic oppression, and when we do not examine that harm and work to heal from it, we inevitably and most often unintentionally perpetuate harm in our work. However, when we attend to our own healing and well-being we increase our agency to lead from our power, and by extension can support others to do the same.
The work of a leader for equity is not to heal others. Rather, our work is to foster conditions that honor the humanity of others and that allow space and support for others to choose whether, when, and how they will heal themselves. This work requires intention and empathy. It requires respect for the autonomy and ability of others to exercise their own agency. And this work requires patience and understanding that healing is a journey, not a destination.
While there is no manual for healing, we foster conditions for healing by:
Compassionately listening to our thoughts, fears, speech, actions, feelings, and beliefs from a stance of curiosity. (Jackins 1982)
Inviting each person to show up as they are, and welcoming their gifts and their limitations and boundaries
Prioritizing time for the group to define together how they want to work together and what they want to work towards
Creating agendas that make space for different access needs.
It is possible to achieve more just, equitable, and liberated systems. The work of creating systems committed to principled action, collective wellbeing and thriving begins in our imaginations, and through persistent practice and intentionality to center care, healing, and interdependence, it will move us closer to liberated systems.
Questions for Consideration:
What do I draw on when I engage in the process of my own healing work?
What am I holding (thoughts, feelings, beliefs) that I’d like to release? What would I like to tend to and nurture?
What are some commitments I’d like to make in support of what I’d like to live into? How does it feel to allow myself to make room for this in my life?
What is a relationship in my life that I would like to tend to (e.g. to the earth, to an individual, to communities) ? How will tending this relationship support me to tap into the fullness of my humanity and agency?
How might I support others to bring awareness to how the accumulation of distress is impacting their well-being and work?
How might I create opportunities in the collective spaces I influence for people to explore and release emotions that are impacting their ability to take action on things that matter to them?
Learn More
To learn more about the role of healing in equity leadership, join us at an upcoming Attend to Healing workshop or course, or bring a team to our Leading for Equity Institute.
References
A Conversation With James Baldwin. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-0v89g5gf5r.
Jackins, H. (1982). Fundamentals of Co-Counseling Manual: (Elementary Counselors Manual): For beginning classes in re-evaluation counseling. Rational Island Publishers.
Jackins, H. (1994). The Human Side of Human Beings: The Theory of Re-Evaluation Counseling. Rational Island Publishers.
Ginwright, S. A. (2022). The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves. North Atlantic Books.
Menakem, R. (2021). My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies. Penguin Books.
Zhu, M. (2022). Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy and Connection. Hardie Grant.