On the therapist's couch and in the streets: Politicized approaches to healing trauma and embodying liberation in the US and Canada

Politicized healing is a phenomenon emerging within contemporary movements for social justice intended to address the impact of intergenerational traumas, ongoing oppression, and state violence that impact marginalized communities. A turn to healing opens space for care and attention to embodiment as part of a politics of transformation. However, it risks subsuming projects about collective justice(s) into individualist, healthist paradigms, obscuring the role and responsibility of the state. In this paper I draw on interviews with thought leaders engaged in struggles for political and social transformation who insist that healers have a place in political strategy and action. My research demonstrates that while these change-makers have differing approaches to embodied healing and politics, the individual body is never just that. A focus on collective and intergenerational trauma allows for harms to be understood as relational, embodied, and political. Their interventions target new terrains, from the therapeutic encounter to the workings of the Medical Industrial Complex, as sites for political action, and imagine futures that make space for the tensions of individual and collective autonomy.