Building a Healing System
Since last month’s article, I’ve had several conversations with friends and colleagues about what it looks like to incorporate healing practice into our lives and our work. This included the opportunity to organize learning sessions for Climate Critical’s third Care to Repair retreat for Black Women leading in climate and environmental justice work, which focused on how we understand, experience, center and support rest as an essential part of our leadership. Throughout these conversations and experiences, the thought that keeps rising to the surface for me is the need to create systems that make rest, care, and healing possible.
It doesn’t work to just try creating these practices on our own – because we’re fighting against systems of oppression, not solely individual behavior patterns or quirks. Structural oppression tries to individualize our struggles and treat the traumas we experience as isolated incidents. But we know that the damaging patterns and messages in our lives are the regular and predictable impacts of a system designed to dehumanize us, reinforced through all the institutions around us: our families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, media, and more. An individualized response to a systemic issue is a setup for failure.
So when it comes to healing, we have to set up systems with multiple components that feed into and reinforce one another to increase their likelihood of success. (The idea of self-reinforcing systems as a key to strategic success has stuck with me for many years after reading this Harvard Business Review article defining strategy.) The easiest way to talk about it is to describe some of the components of my own healing system and how they’ve worked together to support me over the past few years.
My Healing System
One day I’ll make this into a nice diagram, but for now I’ll briefly describe how some of these things work together for me.
My weekly therapy, daily prayer and Bible reading, and regular reflection sessions with friend-colleagues* are structures that I feel particularly proud of instituting for myself and remaining committed to as a core framework for my healing. These spaces give me regular places to process my emotions, receive counsel and accountability, and gain clarity on what’s important to me and how I want to live my life. They help regularly restore my emotional, spiritual, and intellectual energy when I feel depleted. The insights that come out of these spaces have helped me make major changes in reshaping my life toward healing, rest, joy, and deep fulfillment.
My family and my ride-or-die friends are the core of the supportive network within which I can do rest and healing. These people remind me that I’m loved for exactly who I am. They check in on me and let me know that I am seen and that I matter to other people. They are those with whom I get to indulge most in my love of play and silliness. They are the people who know the most about my many dimensions as a human, from my nerdiness to my depression and anxiety to my sexuality to my spirituality. We model together what it means to practice intimacy without shame, have hard conversations, and successfully resolve conflicts. This is the group of people who help me to know that a world based in love instead of fear is possible, so that I can keep working toward it in my public life.
My friend-colleagues with whom I do consulting and training work have always been a core part of making my work feel more joyful than arduous. They help me to understand that I can be a whole human and not cut off parts of myself in order to fit into oppressive definitions of who I “should” be in public space. And after the trauma of a very public attack on my work and reputation from a former friend-colleague, the friend-colleagues I continue to work with have reminded me that I’m still great at what I do, that my leadership is still needed, and that I am not defined either by my mistakes or the false narratives that other people want to place on me. They’ve given me the opportunity to rebuild my ability to provide for myself and my family through my work – and to rebuild my sense of self as a public leader. Critically for leading from my identity, they remind me that there are people willing to follow the leadership of Black and Brown women and who have a clear analysis around how and why our leadership is so often demeaned and undermined.
My engagement with the Political Healers community is part of my public work, but I mention it separately because it’s also a learning community for me when it comes to developing and incorporating new healing practices into my life. Through the Political Healers Leadership Team and Training Team, and as a regular participant in Political Healers activities, I am continually discovering new ways to practice care and healing for myself and for others. I ring these practices not only into my private life, but also regularly incorporate them into my consulting practice and other public work. My peer counseling community is a more recent addition as a community of practice for healing; it’s been hugely powerful over the last year for my private life, and I am also finding ways to bring the emotional discharge tools I learn there into public space.
Reading is always at the top of my list when anyone asks me what I do for fun. Since I was a child, I’ve always been the person who brings books everywhere. I particularly love reading fiction and I’m a huge sci-fi buff; an unexpected joy from the pandemic was discovering my local library’s e-book catalog and devouring sci-fi written by women and people of color. Fiction is a core way that I observe, process, and explore human behavior – both who we’ve been, and who we have the potential to be.
I’ve also been reconnecting with the ways that travel, especially international travel, brings me tremendous joy and is an important part of my healing. I especially like being able to live and work in a place for several weeks; it tickles me to do daily tasks like shopping in a different culture and language. Last year, I was blessed to be able to travel for the first time to the island in the Caribbean where my paternal grandfather was born, connecting in a whole new way to my heritage and identity as an Afro-Latina.
Together, these elements help me to renew and sustain my intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social, and professional energy. Sustaining my physical energy is a place where I need to strengthen my healing system. I struggle a lot with body shame, so caring for and maintaining my body tends to drop to the bottom of my priorities, especially when I’m stressed. As my healing system continues to evolve, centering my physical health more is a place where I want to build new practices that make physical maintenance a joy instead of a chore.
What makes my healing system so effective and robust is that it has many different components and involves a lot of other people. That's how it provides resilience during extremely difficult times. The pieces work together, and if any one aspect isn't available at a given time, other components help carry the load. More importantly, when I am struggling to navigate a difficult period, I'm never doing it alone; there are people around me who remind me of my value, provide alternate perspectives on what I'm facing, and remind me of my practices. The mere fact of their presence is a counter to the shame and isolation that structural oppression requires to keep us living in its narratives.
What’s your healing system? Who's part of it? Where is it especially strong, and where are you looking to build new practices? Feel free to share in the comments!
Brandy H. M. Brooks (she/ella) is the Founder & CEO of Radical Solutions LLC. Brandy is an Afro-Latina organizer, educator, and facilitator with 15+ years of experience in social and environmental justice, nonprofit management, and leadership development.
* I define “friend-colleagues” as people who I’ve met through my public life work and with whom I’ve also developed strong personal relationships over time. They are not the only people whose relationships with me combine both the personal and the public – that also happens with my family, with my ride-or-die friends, and with other friends – but I’m naming this combination as an important part of what has made my reflection spaces and my work with them in the public arena feel particularly healing during the past few difficult years.