Insisting that another world is possible while flooded with the message that this world is inevitable can be disheartening and exhausting. Fighting powerful actors can arouse anxiety and leave us feeling unsafe and afraid. Nurturing mental health while active in transformative social movements is challenging. But it is possible with the right support.
Capitalism is making us sick. Racism is making us sick. Colonialism, ableism, transphobia, sexism, and other forms of violence and oppression are making us sick.
Therapy as a profession often focuses on helping people develop the strength and wellness needed to better navigate these and other
conditions we live under. However, many among us yearn not only to heal as individuals in order to better withstand the conditions that shape our daily existence, but also to transform these conditions to create a more just world that better meets our collective needs.
Therapists need to understand and be responsive to these and other priorities and commitments that organizers and activists (and many who might not identify as either) bring to therapy, in order to effectively support their mental health.
As your therapist, I will work with you to explore how you can deepen your involvement in social movements in ways that work for you - in ways that keep you feeling nourished and powerful, and prevent you from becoming depleted and cynical. I will join you through the challenges and contradictions of making movement work a central part of your life while also nurturing your relationships and attending to paid-work commitments. I will be present with your grief when the work you are doing feels insufficient to create the changes you yearn for. And I will support you to cultivate authentic faith that the vision you hold is possible and worth fighting for.
Anxiety can be an overwhelming experience to bear. It can take control of our thoughts and disrupt our capacity to experience joy and pleasure. However, you can change your relationship with anxiety. With the right support, you can live with your anxiety rather than living under its power.
I will work with you to understand your anxiety better. I will support you to decipher messages or demands your anxiety may be trying to communicate with you. Was there a time when your anxiety supported or protected you from something? Is your anxiety supporting or protecting you from something now?
I will work with you to explore different ways you can relate to your anxiety - different choices available to you. When anxiety begins to rise within you, does it respond to compassionate attempts to soothe it back down? Or, is its more effective to follow the energy of your anxiety up to an apex after which it drifts back down under its own weight?
Invisible to others, chronic pain can consume vast amounts of our mental and emotional energy, while narrowing the possibilities that feel available to us. Chronic pain can evoke fears about the future ("how bad will this get 10 years from now?"). Chronic pain can make it hard to feel compassion and warmth, both toward ourselves and toward others. With the right support, you can change your relationship to the experience of pain, while fortifying the parts of yourself your pain is attacking.
Seeing a therapist for support with chronic pain does not mean your pain is in your head. Your pain is real, in your body. However, the thoughts and feelings your pain arouses within you can impact the ways you experience it, in your body. I cannot take your pain away, but I can support you to understand how you are relating to your pain now and to explore other ways you could relate to your pain that might serve you better. When needed, I will simply be present with you and the pain you experience, which for most of your waking hours you have to hold alone.
William Ruhm LICSW