When severely affected individuals and families fall out of connection with their communities — which tends to happen invisibly in many ways — the community loses an enormous amount of creative capacity, knowledge, proficiency, and lived expertise…
…but they may not realize it.
What they do tend to notice is that everything feels more difficult… and often, they’re not sure what to do about it.
Essentially, they are losing parts of the community body.
This causes confusion, dissociation, and stress.
We can relieve much of those difficulties by building bridges.
When we build bridges between individuals experiencing intersectional hardships and the greater community, many problems that before seemed sticky or impossible can be solved swiftly and easily.
Likewise, even the more difficult problems become rewarding challenges we can rise to and learn from together, growing our collaborative strength, actionable solutions, and personal know-how.
This bridge-building facilitates shared wisdom, connects families with needed resourcing, generates powerful collective capacity, and prevents more hardships from occurring (or compounding) — which in turn serves to stabilize all parties against the effects of current or potential adversity.
Articulating and sharing lived expertise allows us to learn from and collaborate with one another more effectively, especially when many of us have faced hardships that could make our most compelling proficiencies invisible or inaccessible to others.
Communication, trust-building, and cooperation are deeply important to our ability to build positive relationships and address societal challenges. These also directly alleviate the alienation and lack of connection that is unfortunately widespread in society.
Meaningful engagement between living beings brings bountiful benefits, especially when we ensure inclusive, life-honoring, respect-oriented opportunities.
For survivors of invisibly violent intersections,
Project collaborations and solutions implementation are completed and made fruitful in ways that are only possible when people with a wide range of unique strengths coordinate together.
A positive impact is made on all healing processes. For instance: Neurological repair, physical repair, and trauma recovery are most possible (truly miraculous) in the context of a caring, respectful collective body.
Vocational recovery brings survivors’ strengths into service to the greater community and increases economic vitality, where otherwise those strengths would be lost.
For community members fortunate to be protected from extremity,
Previously unforeseen difficulties can be planned for and addressed more quickly when and if they arise — both in terms of personal challenges and the challenges encountered by loved ones. Incorporating increased understanding with severely affected community members allows for the exchange of stories, wisdom, knowledge, and skillsets that are otherwise erased from community spaces and initiatives.
We experience added richness and improved ability to articulate our own or others’ lived expertise from a place of greater stability, which expands influence, collaboratorship, spiritual depth, and practical resourcing.
This is a rare set of intersections that most people outside them are still not directly familiar with, which means that social currency, income generation, and wealth-building for participants and in the community both benefit significantly.
For all participating,
We foster understanding, interconnectivity, and personal & collective growth.
Attuned, participatory relationships lead to transformative experiences as well as enhanced personal and collective outcomes.
Learning (or re-learning) how to express oneself improves success in healthy relationship-building, as well as many other facets of life and work.
Building and deepening the social fabric enriches all our lives, co-creations, and future unfoldings.
With special thanks to Johanna O’Tigham and to all those who have been continuing this important set of conversations with me.
Restoring the Community Body