Wearing our wounds: Cultural practices in healing spaces. Limiting or liberating?

In the circles I run in, where there is a pursuit of collective healing and transformation, I have noticed a cultural practice emerge.

When asked to introduce ourselves, when I meet new colleagues or peers for the first time, there is a cultural practice of doing so by leading with our trauma. “Hi. I’m Liz. This is the shit I’ve gone through…”

This practice reflects shifts in our collective consciousness, aiming to destigmatize emotions and reclaim the experiences that shape us. It is a testament to our efforts to co-create a more trauma-informed culture, where the reality of things like historical trauma and intergenerational trauma, the effects of climate change breakdown and systems of oppression, as well as our stories of community healing and collective resilience are integrated into our understanding of the world, and therefore how we move about it.

When we do it, when we include our trauma in our introductions of ourselves, we show that we’re down. We’re in the know. We belong to this club-of-trauma-understanding.

However, there are also other dynamics that this cultural practice inspires that have me thinking. In what ways are there unintended consequences to making our wounds, collective wounds and individual wounds, central to our introductions in healing and social justice spaces? Does it always empower us, or does it risk unintentionally keeping us tethered to our pain in some ways? Does it become some sort of badge within our collective healing spaces that signals if someone is in or out?

The conversation around trauma, collective healing, and emergent cultural practices is vast and nuanced. In my full essays on this topic (part 1 & part 2), I unpack how, as much as I get and appreciate where this cultural practice is coming from, there are ways it just doesn’t fit for me. I unpack the hidden dynamics I notice within it and share the invitations I pose to myself on ways to be in relationship with it. Ways to support its continued evolution as an emergent cultural practice. Because we are all co-creators of it.

Join me for the full discussion on my Substack blog. I’d love to hear what you think. The importance of collective healing, collective consciousness, trauma-informed culture, and emergent cultural practices, and how to consciously participate in these things in a way that supports our continued collective evolution.

Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation that’s needed in the world. Welcome 🌿