What It Takes to Heal

On how a mix of somatics and therapeutic practices can help heal from personal and generational trauma. By Prentis Hemphill.

Much of this is about somatics and talk therapy, mixed with Prentis’ activist background.

Standout Quotes #

Other Highlights #

• Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.
• Healing happens in moments as simple and profound as this, when we are able to tolerate, feel, and express something in our relationships that before was out of our reach.
• survival does not necessarily ensure resilience.
• One of our elders, Alta Starr, would say that instead of thinking about resilience as the way we cope after trauma, we should think of it as our birthright, how we come into this world. To be resilient is to be engaged, creative, adaptive, and relational. It’s to remember that you are a part of this world.
• Healing is not a place you can arrive to. And whatever you call it, it is the ongoing work of enlivening our interiors, waking up our souls. Healing is an orientation to living rather than a destination.
• Healing is not an easy process. The things that suffocate us and haunt us are persistent and pervasive. Between a rock and a hard place is no place to live.
• Others would rather stay focused on justice than come home to face whatever unresolved tension or pain they carry.
• Healing ourselves is not the end of the line but brings us into relationship with others, and allows us to do the work that brings healing to the wider world.
• I told myself that I wouldn’t follow anyone whose vision for the future didn’t show up in their day-to-day life in how they cared for themselves and the people around them.
• 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 time to learn ourselves and tend to what we find. Through healing we can change both the past and the future.
• I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.
• “And what’s the cost,” she asked, looking up, “of stopping the tears?”
• “I’m safe enough to feel what needs to come.”
• Behaviors become automatic with enough repetition.
• Here are some principles that guide me and that I’ll discuss at greater length during the chapter:
  • What we practice, what we do over time, can eventually become automatic; that is, it no longer requires our thinking to execute. We just do it. Something is truly learned when it is embodied (whether it’s riding a bicycle or having the capacity to trust someone).
  • What we embody may be aligned or misaligned with our values or may be helpful or harmful to us as we learn and embody practices both consciously and unconsciously over time.
  • We can build our awareness of what it is we do automatically, how we do it, and how it came to be—which gives us the possibility to change.
  • We can increase our ability to feel our emotions rather than deny them and allow ourselves to feel what we deeply long for in ourselves and the world.
  • To transform and become who we intend to be more often, we have to practice being who we are becoming.
• But knowing something alone does not produce changed behavior, and when we try to impose new ideas on a body that has its own logic and cares, they won’t
• When we rely so heavily on our thinking as the sole basis for healing, we miss the resource, the wisdom, and the reality of our bodies.
• I spoke through my body to the nothingness, letting it devour me and birth me again.
• But our reactions always answer to a memory.
• Reactivity and the binaries of threat and safety limit what it is we are able to dream and experience in our lives.
• Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are.
• Studying somatics awakened in me the proposition that I might not need to tame my body.
• Our society has gone through too many traumas while commanding that we deny our grief and our compassion. Our feeling of it all. Our processing of it and getting to the other side, bringing our new insight into ourselves along with us.
• Healing always happens through relationship, whether it is relationship with a therapist, a tree, or a grandmother.
• Inauthenticity is sometimes rewarded. It’s a set of defenses learned over time.
• Many of us learned over time that it was safer to make our own needs secondary to keep someone else happy. When we focus so much on someone else’s contentment, we can deprioritize and quiet our own feeling. We lose a sense of who we really are other than who we need to become for another’s sake. When we give ourselves away so often, we can start to believe that who we really are is the guilt and shame we feel on the other side of those interactions, which only reinforces our self-abandonment.
• “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
• Over the years, despite the evidence of repeated past disappointments, my hurt feelings had held on to the idea that my father might, or at least should, change, and my rage had spawned more from the heartbreak of him not meeting my needs than from any lingering damage from his behavior. I had wanted him to acknowledge his mistakes. To apologize and make things right. So for years I had fought with him, and even when I stopped speaking to him, I had fought him in my mind until I found the strength to accept that he might never change. And it was then that the foundation cracked and the walls came tumbling down. I grieved. For the child who had never felt safe, who had internalized that they were unlovable because they’d never felt love in the way they dreamed it was possible. Finally, I felt the emotions I had been protecting myself from, that I had stopped myself from feeling, and it made room for me to get down to the work of tending to myself. I started to crave a different kind of love, love that didn’t require me to question my lovability or to try to make myself lovable for someone else. Love that strived to meet my needs. Most important, I started a primary relationship with myself and learned how to attend to me. I took myself out and did things that I liked. I took responsibility for myself, my anger, and my joy. I learned how to maintain my integrity, not compromise
• In my pep talk to myself in the car outside the diner, I kept saying, I choose what to share, I choose what I respond to, I choose when to leave.
• again. I was trying to keep his words out of me.
• All of this may be inherited, or it may be learned, but all of it can be remade. The choice is ours.
• We reach for one another from the beginning.
• Charles Feltman, author of The Thin Book of Trust, defines trust this way, as choosing to make something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.
• Because of how we’ve seen people use the power we give them, we assume that power is only domination and exclusion, not generosity and protection.
• We create the family structures we need. We have grandmothers who are second mothers, cousins who are more like siblings, and uncles our own age.
• James Baldwin wrote: “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
• “Who in the end is more human than you or me that we should plead for acceptance into their version of humanity? I am not just like them and I am human still.”
• supervisor, who explained to me that empathy was a way of being with another person and allowing what they are holding to touch you.
• Fixing, after all, is just another way to stop feeling.
• if we are unwilling to feel for someone in their grief, we are, in essence, unwilling to know them and know ourselves. And if we are unwilling to know someone, if we’d rather keep a safe distance through sympathy or apathy, we likely won’t know how to have their back when it counts.
• I was tempted to provide a checklist of tasks and tips on how to be a great ally or accomplice in the fight for justice, but any lists you need have already been written. And to be honest, I believe they provide cover for the deeper transformation, the fundamental change that is necessary for their advice to stick.
• We don’t really change on account of good ideas, no matter how much we may wish to, or because we hope to be perceived as politically correct, or even because we truly want to find a way to make things better.
• none of them ever hit home until I showed people that gender is not something that only queer people are afflicted with, that gender is an experience all of us are navigating at any point in time.
• We are already kin, whether we like it or not. So how can we live as though our living depends on one another?
• Another’s pain can never relieve our own.
• Often the scale of our reaction and how imminently we perceive the threat directly correlate to how much residue we hold from the past and how much or how little healing we’ve done. Our past can maintain a hold on us that amplifies slights and misattunements, that judges events as crises even when they are not.
• Neither innocence nor guilt can describe a person, as they are not identity traits or accurate descriptors of who we are in relationship, and yet we treat them that
• they are not grasping for understanding, but for the safety of innocence.
• Innocence, as our society uses it, is not a concept created for true safety and care. It is mostly a way to safeguard against responsibility.
• When we strive toward proving our innocence, we protect ourselves from really understanding our roles.