As Your Future Therapist, I Can Offer You This Bandaid
Mental health care is crucial, but let’s not pretend therapy alone will fix our problems.
After going back and forth on the decision for the better part of four years, I finally decided to switch careers. Turns out, being an anarchist is not, on its own, a career, and the paying jobs adjacent to the organizing I like doing are consistently exploitative, competitive and politically watered-down. Plus, I got tired of fighting. Every inch of political work, both within grassroots organizations and throughout society at large, is steeped in trauma. These systems and the way we operate within them are traumatized and traumatizing, and if we don’t directly address that trauma, nothing is qualitatively going to change.
So, I’m becoming a trauma therapist. I still plan to do therapeutic work in ways that engage communities, expand autonomy and encourage deep reintegration with the more-than-human world, but it’s clear to me we need to address our trauma directly. Liberation is an experience that can only be authentically felt, or it doesn’t exist at all. We give up so much of our power to systems that dominate us out of habit and belief, and we give in to patterns of trauma response so often because we lack the awareness and skills to choose otherwise.
