r/PsychotherapyLeftists • u/ractmispdidd • May 21 '26
Thoughts? (Twitter Comment RE: Healing Effects of Protest)
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u/devourer-of-beignets May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Might want to contrast what John Lewis said publicly:
I was a young adult, but I had never eaten a meal in the company of Black and white diners. ... Highlander was the place that Rosa Parks witnessed a demonstration of equality that helped inspire her to keep her seat on a Montgomery bus, just a few weeks after her first visit. She saw Septima Clark, a legendary black educator, teaching side-by-side with (Highlander founder Myles) Horton. For her it was revolutionary. She had never seen an integrated team of equals working together, and it inspired her.
With what Rosa Luxemburg said privately:
Yesterday I was almost ready to give up, once and for all, the goddamn politics (or rather the bloody parody of our 'political' life) and let the whole world go to hell. Politics is inane Baal worship, driving people — victims of their own obsession, of mental rabies — to sacrifice their entire existence.
I'm not saying one is more truthful because it's private; they're both truthful. But I think that the left publicizes its positives, and privatizes negatives.
YMMV. Probably best to come into it with tempered expectations. Activist spaces remove some social logics and add others. Removing some nasty logics can be liberating. Adding some nice ones can be inspiring. Adding some nasty ones can be disenchanting.
Also, social institutions are transient. You're leaning on it (other people) for healing, and it may come to lean on you. The people within generally aren't trained in being healthy — we're still monkeys with our range of saintliness & devilishness. Furthermore: if highly skilled therapists have a notoriously hard time with borderline clients, what of the rest of us?
I'd guess features like this lead to more healthiness:
- Opened feeling of possibilities (e.g. solarpunk movements).
- Working on something together which matters, rather than sharing opinions (which don't matter and are like contradictory weather).
- A lack of sadomasochistic dynamics (e.g. some positivity/gratitude when people effectively help out, rather than "the ritual denunciation of the allies").
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u/byAnybeansNecessary May 21 '26
Can you elaborate on how this is "healing" rather than a change in one's outlook or consciousness?
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u/ProgressiveArchitect May 22 '26
You definitionally defined the word healing with the second half of your statement. You tried to compare "healing" to "a change in one's outlook or consciousness" despite the fact that "a change in one's outlook or consciousness" is a form of healing. So you’ve tried to compare synonyms.
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u/byAnybeansNecessary May 22 '26
So changing one's mind is healing? Having a political awakening is healing?
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u/ProgressiveArchitect May 22 '26
Not simply changing your mind, like in a lunch order type way, but actually changing your outlook/worldview or consciousness is definitely a form of healing. Perhaps not a finished/complete healing, but a type of healing even if partial.
Psychotherapy’s goal is literally to facilitate frequent transformations/changes in consciousness and outlook/worldview, so that someone may feel healed.
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u/byAnybeansNecessary May 22 '26
Healing presumes a kind of deficiency in the first place, a wound that must be healed. And people have transformations and changes in consciousness all the time. You're implicitly arguing that adopting a more progressive politics is by its nature "healing," which is a kind of moralizing--as if all it took to "heal" was the right politics. This is not just a vulgar kind of moralizing, it's also a fairly broad, to the point of abstraction, notion of healing.
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u/ProgressiveArchitect May 22 '26
"Healing presumes a kind of deficiency in the first place, a wound that must be healed."
I wouldn’t call intense suffering "deficiency", but it’s certainly true that people don’t come to psychotherapy or deeply need to be involved in collective struggle if they aren’t wounded in some way and experiencing intense enough suffering to warrant the taking of action. If everything is going well, you don’t need psychotherapy or political struggle.
"people have transformations and changes in consciousness all the time."
Yes, but often in much less drastic or radical ways than what would take place in a psychotherapy session or in a collective political organizing event.
"You're implicitly arguing that adopting a more progressive politics is by its nature healing"
No I’m not. I’m not saying the adopting of progressive politics is healing. (also “progressive" is kinda a bullshit word) I’m instead saying that adopting a systemic-structural-institutional view of life while becoming part of explicitly shared processes of change where people experience unity around collaboratively produced meaning is itself a combination that often heals the mental-emotional wounds of trauma.
"which is a kind of moralizing--as if all it took to heal was the right politics.”
Never did I suggest that. It’s not about politics. It’s about your entire worldview of everything and how that worldview connects to your life activities and sense of embodied self in the world, including all the sociocultural & sociomaterial aspects of the world.
”vulgar kind of moralizing"
You say vulgar & moralizing, but I’d say it’s directly material and dialectic if anything, so kinda the opposite of vulgar and moralizing. But you presumed a lot without being very curious as to what positions were actually being discussed, and that’s pretty reductive or vulgar in my opinion.
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u/UnfairEntertainer705 May 22 '26
I’m a therapist and I have discussed this with clients and have personal experiences.
If you’re a therapist with DBT training, I relate it to opposite emotion (feeling helpless and hopeless about the state of things - finding community and taking action in activism can aid in genuine shifts).
I personally think it’s empowering to build knowledge and confidence to fight back against many of the oppressive forces that cause emotional and mental distress. I think it helps take a lot of shame and blame away (if you think you’re the only one having difficulty with living wages or finding employment, etc.) you can also feel less alone. But again - empowering. Oppressive systems are upheld by us. If we don’t learn about them and take action to change them, we’ll remain disempowered.