The Trauma of Activist Leadership: Why Leaders Are Sometimes Sick and Dying

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, community settings. Too often the ones in leadership positions are subjected to lack of respect for their personhood, 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 or showering or even basic breaks throughout the work-day. They feel guilty on vacation. They leave no out-of-the-office message 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. Most leaders have no boundaries with the work - they do not know where the work ends and where they begin.  This course offers a way to be in a healthy relationship with one's purpose.

In this recovery workshop, you can expect to:

• Unpack the saying: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest”-Fannie Lou Hamer, the truth contained in that statement and who is responsible for the harm that leads us to these states of believing and of being.
• 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, our vacations.
• 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?
• Learn how to live in the belief that healing starts with healthy boundaries, and we cannot work on community based values without starting with the individual. Our own healing insures we won’t let our communities down.
• Reclaim our collective voice from the clutches of trauma