Healing The Trauma of Activist Leadership

The Reconciliation Center in partnership with Restore Forward, are curating a space for leaders around the urgent topic: The Trauma of nonprofit leadership and the high rates of morbidity and mortality among leaders on the margins.” We will examine what it means to work under relentless expectations and conditions inside and outside of our organizations and communities.

This workshop will bring together directors from various demanding social justice, health, and healing fields, living under toxic conditions inside and outside of our organizations, clinics, and community settings. Too often, the ones in leadership positions are subjected to a lack of respect for their personhood and disregard for their grief, their fears, their pleasures, or their joys. They are often the most depressed, the most suppressed, the most accommodating, the most sacrificial, the most burdened, and saddled with the challenges of their organizations and their communities. Some go days without eating, showering, or even basic breaks throughout the work day. They feel guilty on vacation. They leave no out-of-the-office messages because they are never out of the office. They operate under constant guilt and the belief that if they put the work down, “they are abandoning someone or that someone could die.” There is a constant fear of failure. Leadership can be lonely, and there are so few trustworthy people to turn to in times of crisis. 

Furthermore, many leaders struggle with codependency and a lack of healthy boundaries with their work - they do not know where the work ends and where they begin. They then grapple with the consequences of such a dynamic, particularly when we attempt to control others as a response to our trauma and grief. This caucus and convening offers a way to be in a healthy relationship with one's purpose.

Objectives:

Within workshop leaders will:

• Examine how the culture of perfectionism leads to isolation, self-punishment, and hinders personal and collective growth.

• Look at how past traumas and societal expectations indoctrinate us with the culture, practices and thinking of perfectionism and the implications for our leadership

• Learn techniques for embracing imperfection and cultivating a sense of abundance, capability and flow.

• Learn strategies for confronting personal and professional codependency.

• Develop steps towards recovery, reflection, transformation

Participants will learn strategies for shifting from control to interdependence, fostering mutual support, and shared responsibility. This includes understanding the value of collective effort and the importance of allowing others to fail and learn.

In this workshop, you can expect to: 

1. Unpack the saying: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest”- Ella Baker the truth contained in that statement and who is responsible for the harm that leads us to these states of believing and of being.

2. Examine the tension between boundaries and accessibility–the narrative that everything should be accessible, including our bodies, our time, our intellect, our space, our weekends, our emotions, and our vacations.

3. Learn how we can build confidence in our “no”? and unlearn the notion that “if we choose ourselves, are we putting lives on the line because of it?

4. Learn how to live in the belief that healing starts with healthy boundaries. We cannot work on community-based values without starting with the individual. Our own healing ensures we won’t let our communities down.

5. Reclaim our collective voice from the clutches of trauma

6. Connect, build and heal with other leaders, deepen trust and relationships.  Cost: FREE Register HERE