The Road to Hope and Healing
An Invitation
As this is my first post in the Substack Community, a word, first, about why I am starting the Hope and Healing forum . . .
. . . and why I am asking you to co-create a space in which we ask, for each of the many problems we are facing in our lives and worlds: What would healing mean?
1. Why Hope and Healing, and why NOW?
I am writing from the United States of North America at a moment when democracy is being dismantled, so I am especially concerned with how the long history of cultural and collective trauma in my country is crying now for healing. In this forum, then, one of the things I invite you to think about with me is what healing means for the future of democracy.
I am also writing after spending 15 years studying totalitarian dictatorship and its effects on people in Albania, and the ways that post-communist transition layered new traumas on top of cold-war traumas that have never healed. The story of what I learned through this work is coming soon in my current book, Time Travels through Albania: A Love Letter from the Future.
Time Travels is not simply about Albania, though. In fact, one of my primary points in Time Travels – and in Hope and Healing! - is that we are all deeply interconnected: my life and yours, my country and yours, my well-being and yours, are intertwined in ways that are often invisible to us. Time Travels shows these deep relations between Albania and the United States. In Hope and Healing, I flip the mirror and ask: what are the global currents that are flowing, from the past through the present, and how do we see these in the US right now? And as importantly: what does it cost us when we fail to see and understand these currents, and what they teach us about how deeply interconnected we all are?
Otto Scharmer elegantly describes the times in which we are living as a time of “accelerated breakdown and collapse.” This is a time of transition, “where one civilization is dying” . . . as we see in everything from climate destabilization and the “alarming loss of biodiversity” to the “symptoms of social system breakdown,” including “heightened levels of polarization, inequality, racism, violence, and war.”
In Hope and Healing, we will be exploring how we can meet this time of breakdown and collapse, with all of its loss, grief, confusion, and fear, as midwives to the future that we ourselves are birthing.
Hope and Healing is primarily concerned with this question of the future. What kind of a future do we really want? Do we want to go where our current roads are taking us?
I do not want to continue on the road of destruction, exploitation, fear, and hatred. For most of my career - first, as a Professor of Cultural Studies and Writing at Georgia Southern University, and then as a civil society activist in the Western Balkans – I sounded the rallying cry to wake up! Stand up! Fight against injustice, fight for what is right! I still believe this call is important, and I am grateful for the many sounding it. Here on Substack, I am especially grateful to Nate Silver, Mehdi Hasan and the Zeteo Team, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Joyce Vance, Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen at The Contrarian, Marc Cooper, and Anand Giridharadas at The Ink, as well as the Free Press, and the many, many important voices providing legal and political analysis, historical perspective, and the ethical call to respond to these urgent times.
At this stage of my life, though, I feel my most important contribution to the work of birthing the future is to shine a light on how we make healing the foundation for meeting the problems our world now faces. In Hope and Healing, my driving questions are thus:
What are the wounds, untended, that we keep repeating in our violences and destruction?
What needs to be healed - in our individual lives, our families, our communities, our societies, our institutions, organizations, and relations - so that we can evolve beyond the violences that have made us?
2. Resourcing a Community for Deep Systems Transformation
In 2022, I took the turn off of the road of “fight” onto the parallel road, still-being-cleared, of healing for regenerative futures. As is often the case in the turns we take, this road opened to me following a breakdown/ breakthrough crisis. After 7 years of working with civil society organizations in Albania to protect some of the last high value cultural heritage sites in the center of Albania’s capital city, Tirana, the Government of Albania illegally destroyed Albania’s historic National Theater. Shortly afterwards, the development interests set fire to another cultural heritage monument - a villa built 2 centuries ago that had also served as the first US Legation in Albania (1922 - 1925). In the face of blatant crimes and wanton destruction, an existential crisis overtook me. What had all of my activism accomplished? What good were my theories, my research? Where was the help that I had promised my Albanian colleagues?
Finding my way through this crisis brought me to the work of collective healing. This is, as I said, a parallel road: we do need fearless investigative reporting, rigorous research, deep intellectual analysis, committed and passionate activism - these are all crucial for meeting the grave challenges of our historical moment, and Hope and Healing is informed by this work and will meet, head-on, the urgent crises we are now living.
But, for each of the problems we turn into and face, our focus in Hope and Healing is: what are the legacies of cultural and collective trauma that brought us here? What would healing mean for the problems we are facing?
The two pillars guiding me as I explore these questions are my training as a collective trauma facilitator with Thomas Hübl and the Pocket Project and my study of deep systems transformation with Otto Scharmer and his team at the Presencing Institute.
For an exquisite practical application of Hübl’s work, I encourage you to subscribe to Matthew Green’s Resonant World.
For more on Scharmer’s work, I encourage you to follow the Field of the Future Blog.
For a Substack publication highly resonant with healing collective trauma for regenerative futures, see Karen O’Brien’s Quantum Social Change.
It is one thing to speak, in the abstract, about healing as a foundation for our work; it is another thing altogether to maintain emotional, psychological, and intellectual equilibrium while working on the front lines of our most entrenched injustices. When we are in the face of war, violent oppression, abuse of power, a wall of lies seemingly impenetrable to truth or reason, how do we remain calm, hopeful, clear, joyful?
Prentis Hemphill offers an inspiring and compelling account of how to face “the complexities of our time with joy, authenticity, and connection” in her book What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves can Heal the World.
Hemphill’s work will thread throughout much of what I write about in Hope and Healing.
3. What We’ll be Doing
For the first few months as Hope and Healing debuts on Substack, I’ll be establishing a baseline for what I mean by making healing the theory and practice of our ways of knowing, being, and doing. This is a two-part process. Before healing as a way of knowing, being, and doing can take root, we have to dig through the layers of collective trauma that have made us and our world.
As Adam Lerner elegantly explains in From the Ashes of History, we live in a world of mass violence, in which “international political systems” both “inflict this violence and are subsequently tasked with interpreting and responding to it.” As such, the collective trauma from mass violence shapes both “political cultures and the institutions that govern them.”1
Much of what we will be thinking through, then, is what Thomas Hübl calls the architectures of trauma sculpting our current ways of knowing, being, and doing. This means looking at how totalitarian dictatorships arise; how we learn to see each other as enemies and lose our ability to make alliances; how abusive power uses fear, confusion, and threat to dominate and control people; how this fear and confusion spread through lies and propaganda and rely on people becoming exhausted and giving up – giving up on knowing the difference between truth and lies, giving up on being able to make a positive difference in their lives and world, reduced to using all their energy just to survive.
To explore these issues, I will be using:
On-the-ground examples from Albania that reflect current events in the United States and illustrate collective trauma and the need for healing;
Podcasts with colleagues on-the-ground around the world discussing architectures of trauma and architectures of healing;
Live chats and reader engagement opportunities, where we co-create what we are doing here, where we want to begin exploring, and co-evolve our explorations;
Workshops where we learn to understand and apply deep systems transformations practices (including those offered through the Presencing Institute).
I want to travel a road of healing, towards a regenerative future. I hope you will travel this road with me. If you want to travel this road, you can subscribe in many ways.
As a free subscriber, you will have access to my weekly posts, which will include links to research and relevant examples of hope and healing in action.
As a paid subscriber, you have the opportunity to be an active member of the Hope and Healing Community via live discussions, Q & A with podcast guests, focus groups and round tables, and the discussion forum where we co-create our ways of making healing the starting point for our social engagement.
I hope you will join me as part of the critical mass clearing the path towards a future that heals what is wounded and regenerates a thriving future for life on our planet.
You can read more about the paths to hope and healing that guide my work at www.healingknowing.com.
See Adam B. Lerner, (2022), From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics, Oxford University Press, p. 5.