Transformational Characters
“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.
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. Healing and change are inextricably linked, braided together interdependent processes of transformation.
Healing helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to.
Black bodies carry the weight of generations of trauma while continuing to experience traumas every day and too often we hold it silently. What happened is still here in the air and still here in our tissues.
When what we face overwhelms our ability to respond and/or to escape unscathed, or when we are given the message to suppress the body’s reactions, our nervous systems don’t know that the traumatic experience has ended and our survival response continues to exist in our bodies.
Intergenerational trauma can pass down most clearly through the ways our families interact.
How are boundaries set?
Are people humiliated or threatened?
What gets talked about and what goes unsaid?
How is love shown, and to whom?
Our home was both warm and, to me, randomly volatile. The fear was there every day, even if the violence wasn’t. I was somehow at fault for the abuse, at fault for my mother’s unhappiness. I was fundamentally bad.
I was left with a belief that belonging was innately dangerous - better to hide my own needs so deep that they would be almost imperceptible even to me.
Sending pain down the ladders of power
It wasn’t his boss who suffered the rage of his dehumanization, it was us - his family, those who had less power and recourse than he did, my mother first and then the children.
Oppression is the distribution and concentration of trauma into bodies and communities designated less powerful.
Some will have more to inherit from what history has handed down. And some will not have the capacity to address the part of it they hold.
Viewing trauma as a teaching tool and a frame for understanding individual distress and social challenges shows us:
What is too much for a human body to bear before breaking
What it takes to disarm our defenses
Which societal structures increase despair, and
How we might organize ourselves as a society to optimize individual and collective well-being
This way of examining trauma tells us what it takes to really heal.
The basis for freedom, for power, is a body where we can be alive and changing, to become people who can relate to one another and the world around us.
We can’t heal or act effectively under active threat, when our safety is not assured. We either find safety or create it with who and what we have. Belonging is about bringing us back into the world around us, and back into relationships with others.
To be resilient is to be engaged, creative, adaptive, and relational. You leave your control or hiding place and remember you are a part of this world.
It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work.
Healing brings us into relationship with others, and allows us to do the work that brings healing to the wider world. We could make room for authentic connection, timely repair, and intentionally build more trust and transparency.
Being open to healing is the basis of a kind of compassion that encourages others to step into the unknown of transformation.
As we start to feel safe with one another and feel like we belong together, we can relax into appreciating the fullness of life and our place in this ecosystem.
We can bring our transformed and transforming selves to the necessary work of building a better society for everyone.
Transformational Characters are those of us who are committed to the work it takes to heal ourselves, our lineages, and the systems we are a part of.
We are working together to transform ourselves and through our relationships to transform these systems toward justice and liberation, toward the ability to feel and be felt. Learn more and engage through The Practice Ground at The Embodiment Institute.
Each week our Sunday free community class meets to explore and share. Details and link are here. These are our reflections this week.
Can healing reach through the weeks, and months, and years, and free us?
I believe something comes back to us when we listen to and hold one another and when we take the time to learn ourselves and tend to.
What are some of the many ways systemic oppression affected your ancestors?
What unhealed wounds affected you through your ancestors?
In which ways are you presently a Transformational Character? What are some specific ways you might deepen into that going forward?