The Collective-Care Guide: Building Self-Care and Sustainability into Creative Community Work
in 2023, alongside licensed therapists SANDRA OLARTE-HAYES AND MANUEL CANTU, future front facilitated ITS FIRST-EVER Collective-Care Club.
Monthly, a group of psychotherapists and community members in justice-based creative and/or cultural work gathered to explore their personal and professional relationships to collective-care, self-care and sustainability.
We explored important themes such as trauma and the body, how shame and trauma impact how we treat one another in conflict, personal and collective transformation and why so many social justice-focused spaces cause so much harm. This guide reflects back what the group learned.
KEEP READING FOR a step-by-step guide ON realigning your values, boundaries and frameworks toward EMBODIED self-care and collective-care within your community work.
WRITTEN BY TEXAS-BASED LICENSED THERAPISTS SANDRA OLARTE-HAYES AND MANUEL CANTU, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY KAI ARNN (UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED)
STEP 1 —
finding your Narrative
(The Personal is Political)
BEFORE WE DISCUSS COLLECTIVE-CARE, LET’S IDENTIFY YOUR JUSTICE NARRATIVE.
There is a point in our lives when we widen our worldview and the panorama becomes nuanced and complicated. Seemingly benign systems we thought were supposed to heal us and protect us start to feel oppressive and exclusionary. The innocent “colorblindness” and heteronormativity some of us were taught as children gives way to realities of privilege and histories of harm.
For those of us engaged in justice-oriented creative work, there was a point at which all of this awareness became too much to bear. We could no longer sit back and allow the status quo to replicate itself. Whether for our own self-healing, the healing of generational trauma, or an attempt to leave behind a better world, we took up a cause.
But what happens when traumatized and wounded people all find themselves in the same spaces? With similarly primed triggers? As we examine our personal “why,” we can understand how our experiences and narratives inform our work, what moves us, and our lenses.
*What brought you to justice-oriented creative work? WHAT’S YOUR WHY? HOW ARE YOUR EXPERIENCES AND NARRATIVES INFORMING YOUR WORK?
CLEARLY UNDERSTANDING YOUR “WHY” HELPS YOU FIND CLARITY—AND STAY MOTIVATED WHEN THE WORK IS CHALLENGING.
For many of us, our pain brought us to this work and yet our pain and our stories also imbue our work with triggers and pain points. Our personal narratives lead us to invest ourselves deeply. Setbacks have a big impact on us and losses are hard on us because we care. Conflict and harm in spaces where we thought we would be seen feels disheartening.
So how do we find the motivation to keep going when things get hard? In our Collective Care Club series, we heard stories of disappointment followed by a re-grounding in one’s values and in the strengths of one’s communities. Doing this work with others has its challenges, but it also leaves us with ways to bolster one another when we need to. We find ways to have fun together and to relish the successes, even if they feel small. Many of us need time to step back from our work temporarily to get re-grounded in our own personal “why,” only to come back to the work and step back in when we are ready to.
SOMETIMES, WE KNOW OUR WHY—BUT NOT OUR “WHAT.” WHAT ROLE DOES YOUR WORK PLAY WITHIN MOVEMENT-BUILDING?
When figuring out how to help (or how your work helps), it’s always best to start with a few simple questions:
What are you naturally good at?
Maybe your skillset is creativity, you’re going to design a stellar social media campaign or flyers to get the word out. Perhaps you’re a social butterfly whose charisma and connections can help attract donors or get the right pair of eyes on your content. Lean into your innate abilities, and you can’t go wrong.
What feels safe for you?
When fighting “isms” and other foes, it’s important to not re-traumatize yourself in the process. Listen to what feels overwhelming and what you have the capacity to do. Perhaps being on the frontlines in a protest is a level of public-facing attention you aren’t naturally comfortable with. Maybe as an abuse survivor, you don’t cope well with raised voices or passionate debate. Be patient with yourself. You are so powerful and can show up for yourself and your community in a myriad other ways.
How do you show up for others?
We as social creatures often serve a specific role in our groups and offer unique ways to support others. Here are a few different ways you might support your community:
Being a good listener
Giving people space to debrief and process
Leading people
Delegating, transportation, etc.
All rights reserved. Visit www.socialchangemap.com for more information and usage guidelines.
Illustration by Kai Arnn
How do YOUR experiences help YOU in YOUR work? and in what ways DO THEY MAKE YOUR WORK DIFFICULT?
When we look at the ways we show up for others and what feels safe and comfortable for us, it may become clear that we gravitate towards certain roles and that some ways of working towards change may come more naturally than others. To create real and lasting change, our movement ecosystems require a variety of different roles and forces. It is okay to be drawn to some roles more than others.
We also recommend asking yourself if the roles you inhabit and the patterns you embody in your work and personal life are still working for you.
How are these roles influenced by your history?
Is trauma a part of that story and are there ways in which your trauma narratives are showing up again or impacting where you feel most comfortable?
Are there ways in which the roles you are drawn into are harmful to you?
Are there other ways in which you would like to try to show up?
Sometimes the roles we are comfortable in and good at are the ones we had to step into when we were younger.
STEP 2 —
identifying SYSTEMS
THE systems WE LIVE IN
where can you FIND cultures of harm within your work?
When one lives as a minoritized individual, it is easy to externalize some of the problems and barriers we face toward achieving justice and representation within our creative and cultural work. However, cultures of harm are often the same cultures we “live in,” making harm difficult to address within ourselves.
Harm happens even within marginalized and oppressed communities and identities. Because harmful ideologies and practices are often culturally encouraged and even celebrated by the social norms and practices of the systems we navigate daily.
For example, hustle culture, perfectionism and individualism (“pulling yourself by your bootstraps”) are all personality traits or practices that are lauded in capitalist societies, especially in the United States. And these traits and practices can be affirmed for an individual or group of people, even when they’re causing harm.
Once we can acknowledge the systems we live within, it becomes easier to fight against the harmful mindsets holding us back and rededicate ourselves to communal healing.
WHAT DOES centering SELF-CARE AND COLLECTIVE-CARE LOOK LIKE?
Leadership
Transparency
Connected communication
Trauma-informed
Non-punitive
Accountability
Attention to process
Affirmation of the whole self
Congruence between written values/mission and experienced values/mission
Art by Melanie G. S. Walby
can you dismantle systems of harm, while working with theM?
If access gives us a way into dismantling a system, but we only get access through privilege and power, it’s important to acknowledge the internal conflict which may arise. Guilt and imposter syndrome are prevalent among minorities who inhabit places of wealth or predominantly heteronormative, White-dominant spaces (like creative industries and arts and culture industries). Others will reinforce this by telling BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ individuals and women they don’t belong there; this happens often enough that you start to believe it.
Collectivist values tell minoritized people they should feel bad about succeeding and making it out of communities that are still struggling. Still, choosing how to work within or without a system comes with its contradictions and questions:
When does “playing the game” further marginalize our causes?
When does refusing to “play the game” further marginalize our causes?
How do we spend our valuable time and energy on combating what we disagree with, as well as uplifting what we do?
How do we design our lives for more ease, joy and abundance?
How do we ensure our choices don’t solely make our lives more difficult (leaving no dent in the broken system, policy or discriminatory cultural attitude we’re hoping to change)?
Are we trying to solve a problem without the necessary resources, support, self-care or community-care solutions?
what are Your options WHEN YOUR WORK IS CONTRIBUTING TO systems misaligned with your values or goals?
If you can’t change the harmful environment you’re working within—but also can’t leave—it’s of the utmost importance to figure out how to adapt and protect yourself within it. You do not need to re-traumatize yourself. Decide on your ultimate goal and what you’re willing to risk or lose to achieve it.
Example: You’re observing or experiencing racism within a community space. Calling it out might feel necessary and urgent, but if it ends up in retaliation that leaves you ostracized or jobless, are you better off? Are the consequences things you can live with? Or will the lack of a paycheck further marginalize you and your family? For some, speaking up is the only option. For others, professional blacklisting or temporary unemployment could have devastating consequences.
It therefore becomes paramount to determine your disruption strategy. How can you challenge the status quo in a way that doesn’t endanger your standard of living or ability to feel safe in your professional, communal or creative spaces?
Ways to do this:
Solidify your emotional boundaries
Build a safety network or conduct a care mapping exercise to visualize safe connections around you
Seek mentorship and guidance outside of the workplace
Also important to note—even seemingly affirming community spaces, values-driven creative organization and mission-driven artistic work can be marginalizing and/or unsafe, depending on the lived experience, expertise and embodied values of your peers. Be cognizant of how your peers are carrying their own trauma into the work.
STEP 3 —
addressing trauma
the science of oppression
SELF-CARE AND COLLECTIVE-CARE LIVE IN THE BODY—AND SO DOES TRAUMA.
where does trauma influence your work?
Trauma is the body's response to an event it perceives as life-threatening or terrifying. Essentially, anything that is too much, too fast, too soon, too long or too little can lead to trauma.
Trauma is not just the event itself but also the person’s experience and emotional response to the event that lead to a post-traumatic stress response. Two people might experience the same event and respond very differently, to the point where one might experience post-traumatic stress and the other might not based on each one’s protective and risk factors, experience of and emotional response after the event.
The body plays a key role in a person’s response to trauma. Trauma is at its core an experience of powerlessness—of not having the power to keep oneself safe.
The body did not have the experience of being able to protect itself and when this happens, trauma responses become stored in the body’s tendons, sinews, muscles, nervous system and organs.
You may experience inflammation, digestive issues, recurring illness, muscle stiffness, or pain (among other ailments). It may feel hard to trust your body and your body might activate from zero to one hundred in the blink of an eye. It may feel hard to trust your body, as though it betrayed you.
The brain is also actively involved in a person’s trauma response. When a person experiences something profoundly scary, the brain and body reacts by:
Activating the amygdala (the brain’s fear center)
Inhibiting the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for executive functioning including attention, judgment and impulse control)
Inhibiting the hippocampus (the brain structure that encodes and stores memory)
Stress hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline, and norepinephrine are secreted
Heart rate increases and intensifies
Blood pressure, blood sugar, and inflammatory protein levels increase
The protective mobilization of nutrients occurs and blood flow patterns to the brain change
These reactions happen so quickly to mobilize the body to keep itself safe that most of the time, they have occurred and we have responded before we are even consciously aware of what happened.
Below are just some of the longer-term impacts that trauma has on the nervous system and the brain:
Trauma causes epigenetic changes via gene methylation. These changes don’t necessarily change a person’s genes but change how those genes are expressed, particularly those involved in the stress response and physical health. These epigenetic changes can be passed down to one’s children as an intergenerational footprint of trauma,
The hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) shrinks.
Reduced gray matter in key areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (the brain’s fear processing center).
Overactivation of the microglial cells which then release neurochemicals that lead to neuroinflammation and destroy neurons as well as leading to chronic inflammation.
Trauma ages people at a cellular level by eroding telomeres (the protective caps which sit at the end of DNA strands and keep the genome healthy and intact). Their erosion increases the likelihood of diseases.
Decreased GABA (Gaba-Aminobutyric Acid). GABA helps people feel relaxed and calm.
Weaker connections between the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampus and amygdala which can lead to an increased likelihood of mental health challenges.
What is important here is that trauma has long-standing and pervasive impacts on the body and the brain. It transforms us and puts us in a constant state of fear and reactivity that is outside of our awareness and our control.
Trauma also comes in many forms. It can be acute (one event that happens once), chronic (a similar type of trauma that reoccurs over a period of time), or complex (exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events that continue to occur over a prolonged period of time). Complex trauma can happen interpersonally, but many marginalized people experience it systemically. Threats to one's life doesn't have to be physical or happen all at once, and systemic oppression and discrimination such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia are examples of threats to one's life that are legislated into society as well occurring interpersonally.
Your personal traumas may have been the spark that called you into movement work or creative cultural art-making.
It may be what keeps you going when the work is frustrating and feels hopeless. It may be deeply healing to transform your trauma into action, and yet we cannot ignore the profound impacts that it has on our spirits, bodies, and ways of being and feeling safe with others.
some forms of trauma may be personal—while others may present in a community due to shared experiences of a system.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are childhood experiences of trauma (emotional/physical/sexual abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, etc) that are directly linked with long-term health impacts in adulthood, both mental and physical. More recently, research has added to the list of risk factors—it now includes racism, bullying, community violence and growing up in foster care. This underlines how ACEs play a huge role in maintaining systemic oppression, particularly in the way they sustain ableist power dynamics and disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
Groups who are more likely to experience ACEs are ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ individuals and people living with less access to education or below the poverty line.
We can’t talk about disability justice without talking about trauma. ACEs are also connected to social outcomes like unemployment, socioeconomic status, and other markers of privilege and access to systemic power. Therefore, we also can’t talk about capitalism or poverty without talking about trauma.
what can trauma responses look like?
Many of us have likely heard of “fight or flight,” but did you know there are three more common stress responses? Here they are, defined:
Fight – Just how it sounds, this response to trauma is active, reactionary, and may even be aggressive.
Flight – Folks responding in this way are trying to find the exit and get as far away from the scary thing as possible. They may choose not to engage and remove themselves from a situation until they are regulated enough for resolution.
Fawn – As the name suggests, this stress response is akin to becoming as sweet as a baby deer, doing your best to calm everyone down and reach a sense of safety again. This could manifest as people pleasing, physical affection, and flattery.
Freeze – Have you ever been in an argument and found that you weren’t able to articulate yourself as clearly as you want to? For some reason, you’re so overwhelmed and flooded by adrenalin that you’re unable to respond. This is one way we can freeze under stress. Sometimes it looks like shutting down, becoming unresponsive, or even dissociating and forgetting where we are.
Dissociate – Sometimes stressful situations are so intense that our brains literally force us out of our body to avoid having to experience all of the emotional or physical pain. Afterward, this could lead to us being unable to remember entire events in extreme instances, or for things to feel like they happened to someone else or in a dream.
why do we need to be mindful of when/where/how trauma responses show up within our work?
The personal is political. For many of us, we are called into justice work because of our personal experiences with injustice. We tell our stories, amplify those of others, and fight to impact policies that could reduce human suffering so that other people and families don’t have to endure what we have survived.
But when we are in the work because of our pain, it also means that our somatic reactions to the traumas that brought us here are woven into the sinews, tendons, muscles and nerves in our bodies. In our social justice work, we find ourselves continually confronting the same topics, themes, images and stories that have hurt us.
Taking power over these stories and using our voices for change can be deeply healing, but continually leaning into confronting these narratives means that the work itself can be wrought with triggers. A meeting can be deeply activating when it hits too close to home. Public experiences when faced with possibilities of violence or lack of social safety can cause huge amounts of re-traumatization to our nervous systems.
Additionally, when individuals come together to work towards a common goal, they are not always going to agree on how to achieve it. Disagreements and conflicts will arise. Brains and bodies regularly respond to conflicts and threats of social rejection with fight, flight, freeze or dissociate responses (as though they were life-threatening events).
It’s important to be mindful of trauma when designing or facilitating community work in creative and cultural spaces.
When you add previous trauma into the mix, conflicts are likely to escalate more quickly and become explosive. Sometimes the damage is irreparable and can lead to conflict in movement spaces within groups of people who re-traumatize, activate, ostracize and push people to leave the community.
*IS ANGER A TRAUMA RESPONSE?
Anger is an emotion that has become taboo and vilified, but when we break it down, anger is simply a funnel emotion for sorrow. When one experiences anger, they are really experiencing a more activated and raw version of sadness and hurt. Often we are told to temper ourselves, silence ourselves and ignore our anger.
Societal narratives take this further and tell us that people of color are dangerous when angry (think of culturally analyzed stereotypes like the “angry Black man” and “angry Black woman,” for example).
White supremacy culture and other cultures of harm often teach us that only certain people are allowed to be angry. (For example, in the Collective-Care Club that led to this guide, someone shared their personal observation that a White person in a certain space was able to raise their voice and complain and still be seen as a go-getter, while a person of color showing the same behaviors was labeled threatening and aggressive.)
Examining our relationship to our own anger is important because at the end of the day, anyone engaged in social justice work is doing so out of some kind of anger at viewing the injustice in the world. Anger has a place and a vital role in justice work—it motivates us, spurs us to act instead of remaining apathetic, and helps us enforce important boundaries for ourselves and others.
The task is knowing when anger feels appropriate and valid, then figuring out how to channel it to prevent further harm and even self re-traumatization.
STEP 4 —
FINDING YOUR APPROACH TO Action
Many Paths, One Goal
WHERE DO YOUR VALUES AND GOALS FOR CHANGE SHOW UP WITHIN YOUR WORK?
Let’s take a bird’s eye view for a second. You’ve decided now that you have a mission, a goal and a cause to lift up. How do you want to do that? Are you more inclined towards individual activism or are you ready to join or start a group? Here are some examples of what action looks like:
Individual Activism Examples
Donating to causes you care about
Interpersonal and community advocacy
Civic action like letter writing, voting and sharing your personal story
Creating art (music, visual art, film, etc) about the causes and viewpoints you care about
Discontinuing support of problematic brands
Supporting businesses owned by minoritized populations
Self-education
Group Activism Examples
Community art-making and cultural affirmation
Organizing and strategizing with an existing group for better policies or processes
Mutual aid and pooling resources toward the causes you support (whether that’s money, connections, knowledge, or otherwise)
Community and public education
Community fundraising
Political action like lobbying or canvassing
WHICH ACTIONS ARE YOU TAKING?
storytelling, community work and art have always had a relationship toward justice and movement-building.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Throughout history, there are examples of movements taking off that created ripple effects and shifted world paradigms. The civil rights movement throughout the 50s and 60s which worked to dismantle systemic racism, the gender equality fight of the 70s, the Chicano movement, the response to the AIDS crisis, to mention only a small few.
These movements were not only driven by political players, but by disruptive artists, cultural workers and icons who went from anonymity to becoming the face of an entire movement, the way Sylvia Mendez at 9 years old helped pave the way for Brown vs. the Board of Education.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful actions we can engage in. Across centuries, propaganda, art and even folktales have all conspired to create dangerous stereotypes and promote fear of the “other.”
As we slowly transition into a mediascape and literary landscape where more diverse artists, creatives, cultural workers and storytellers have room to tell their own stories, we do work to humanize ourselves.
So, How can you find power and joy in your story?
Telling the world about how our communities have been hurt is important, but a side effect of always ingesting stories about our pain is that we start to feel hopeless. We suddenly get flooded by our own suffering, whether it’s through the news or the stories we consume through television and film.
The minoritized individual is equated to a tragic figure, therefore “joy” becomes a radical act for these communities. Not only as a beacon of hope to tell others they too can overcome their tribulations (even if it’s only momentarily), but to scream to the oppressor that their scare tactics will not defeat us.
People in power count on their own systemic control (and our own self-oppression) to render us powerless, demotivated, and stripped of all ability to rally. When we allow ourselves moments of joy in between the fighting and advocacy, we allow ourselves to be fully human. We are able to celebrate the beauty in our cultures, our neighborhoods and those we hold dear.
So, the next time you feel guilty for laughing at a joke or smiling while there is so much going on in the world, remind yourself that moments of joy are as integral to your work as anything else.
STEP 5 —
embracing resilience
Restorative and Transformative approaches
Pursuing values-driven community work within creative industry, as well as arts and culture spaces, COMES WITH conflict.
How we respond to disagreements, as well as harm and violence, matters when we are trying to do community work in a trauma-informed way, prevent burnout for ourselves and others, s well as practice the very values we advocate for. Let’s identify some of the difficult things that can happen within community-driven work:
Conflict occurs when there is disagreement over ideas, issues, or values. This is a normal part of humans’ social interactions, often requiring facilitation to resolve.
Harm happens when a significant negative impact or injury happens to someone. It can be emotional, physical, sexual, financial, or spiritual and oftentimes results when one party has systemic power over another or privilege and that power is abused.
Violence occurs when the harm is intentional and causes significant disruptions in a person’s life. While there is a distinct difference we have seen how easily conflict can escalate to harm and violence when our traumas get activated, especially in social justice spaces.
When engaging in community work, it’s important to distinguish between conflict, harm and violence. By distinguishing between these different types of exchanges, we can work to prevent further conflict, harm and violence within our communities and community work.
how can we address harm and conflict when it arises in our community work?
Restorative Justice
Restorative Justice is an approach to violence and harm that draws from indigenous principles of interconnection, mutuality, inclusion, and shared decision-making. This approach focuses on repairing interpersonal relationships at the micro-level after harm by meeting the needs of people who have been harmed. Important principles underlying restorative approaches are:
Harms are violations of people and interpersonal relationships
Violations create obligations
The central obligation is to “make things right,” not to punish or make the person who caused the harm suffer
These principles lead to questions:
Who has been harmed?
What do they need to heal?
Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?
Exploring the answers to these questions can help us take a restorative approach to conflict and harm, bringing people together to repair relationships, listen deeply, and repair what has been broken.
There is a strong focus on people who have caused harm taking accountability, whether this means restoring the person who was hurt to wellness or giving a meaningful apology and taking accountability.
Transformative Justice
Relationships, however, don’t occur in a vacuum and are impacted by the context of systems of oppression we live in. Transformative Justice-based approaches to harm go one step further by trying to repair the harm while also acknowledging the role of both interpersonal and systems-based trauma in creating the conditions for harm to occur and perpetuating more violence.
For example, if someone steals breaks into someone’s home in order to steal so that they can feed their children: yes, there is value in bringing together the person whose home was broken into and the person who stole from them so they can share the impacts the incident has had on them (financial impacts not feeling safe anymore, feelings of violation etc.), but a Transformative Justice response would also look to improve the societal and systemic conditions impacted their ability to meet their family’s needs.
Because transformative justice-based approaches acknowledge that the violence caused by oppressive systems are root causes for harm and that state policing systems reproduce violence and create trauma primarily in minoritized communities, Transformative Justice-based responses to harm do not involve state systems that have the potential to cause more harm and instead involve community members and resources in the response.
This often involves creating support teams called “pods” around different community members involved in the harm. Each pod might have a specific focus, such as supporting the person who caused the harm in their personal transformation and healing while also holding them accountable, or supporting the person who has been harmed emotionally while also connecting them to needed resources.
*Additional Reading and Resources on Transformative Justice —
BALANCING A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELF-CARE AND COLLECTIVE-CARE IN COMMUNITY WORK CAN BE HARD. IT’S NORMAL TO EXPERIENCE ROADBLOCKS. IT’S NORMAL TO MAKE MISTAKES.
Transforming our communities and the systems in which we create and organize involves transforming how we create justice and our responses to harm. How we are with one another and the values we embody when things get hard really matters.
But it is incredibly difficult to work through conflict and respond to harm in a way that is restorative, non-punitive, and transforms everyone involved, because we are deeply embedded in cultural narratives of retribution where we are told that punishment teaches us a lesson and that experiencing pain will reduce the likelihood of further wrongdoing.
Fear of “getting it wrong” and being rejected socially makes us tighten up and revert to old fear-based responses, and our trauma responses and shame showing up when triggered make it that much harder to stay grounded in our values.
REMEMBER—Trauma lives in the body, and So doeS healing and justice.
So, WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE TO BRING SOME OF THESE EMBODIED QUALITIES INTO YOUR APPROACH TO SELF-CARE, COLLECTIVE-CARE AND COMMUNITY WORK NOW?
Leadership
Transparency
Connected communication
Trauma-informed
Non-punitive
Accountability
Attention to process
Affirmation of the whole self
Congruence between written values/mission and experienced values/mission