trauma - poisons - healing

i've just been reading this quite beautiful article: Dark Medicines: On Seeing Patients with Bad Habits. 

i've been thinking about being a domestic violence support worker as being a healer. about me having been a healer and having ended up quite broken from the work. about what i need to heal. i've been reading blogs by creative holistic herby healer types, mainly queer, all in the US as is often the way with these things (who are you, european ones?)

kirsten hale

dori midnight 

i've got some work supporting another gendered violence organisation to deal with vicarious trauma / burnout / compassion fatigue among their staff. and just trying to come up with the workshop is bringing up what i know nowadays are my own trauma symptoms.laurie perlman has some things to say about vicarious transformation - how healers can and must transform through trauma. the work will always change us so we must find our own ways to ground ourselves and stay connected in our own transformations. it sounds like a nice way to frame it. she's right. but how to stay on this healthier path?

i wish there was a culture of even thinking about supporting survivors as being healing work. and a culture of supporting us as healers. i wish it wasn't wildly far out for me to be seeking wisdom from holistic practitioners to bring back to this normie voluntary sector work. i wish all my colleagues weren't broken and we could support each other. i wish we could talk about how dwelling in violence and trauma seeps into us and what we need to do about it.

let's NOT start calling DV "intimate terrorism", please

really disturbed by the recent feminist articles (by Hadley Freeman, and in particular the one by Janey Stephenson) which point out that many people who kill lots of other people are also violent to their intimate partners. sure. so are many cops. so are many politicians. extending the definition of terrorism is carceral feminism. can we not.

Community accountability bookmarks

Love the idea of pods that the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective are using

The Toolkit developed by Creative Interventions

Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order critically examines grassroots efforts, cultural interventions, and theoretical questions regarding community-based strategies to address gendered violence.  This collection encapsulates a decade of local and national initiatives led by or inspired by allied social movements that reflect the complexities of integrating the theory and practice of community accountability.

This roundtable: The Fictions & Futures of Transformative Justice is just gorgeous. 

Closer to home, the Salvage Collective 

playing elsewhere

i've gone over here:

http://cleanerlight.tumblr.com/

tumblr's quick and pretty. it's suiting my scrapbooking wishes for now. it feels freer to be able to post up anything i come across that i want to refer back to, and some good debates about the kind of stuff i write about are happening there so i'll be able to discuss stuff in that format more easily.

also - i don't want to leave this blog forever, but it has fulfilled its original purpose - for me to figure out the links between domestic abuse and all the other forms of oppression that were on my mind. now those parallels seem so blindingly obvious that i don't feel the need to write that for myself so much now. though of course there is still so much to figure out about it all, and i will keep on writing.

explanation of entitlement of the day

it's a good long while since i quoted any Jensen, and there's nothing better than a good clear description of the mechanics of entitlement - one core trait of an abuser - to get me going of a morning:

"There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair about how it’s hard to make a man [sic] understand something when his [sic] job depends on him not understanding it. I think that’s true even more for entitlement. It’s hard to make someone understand something when their entitlement, their privilege, their comforts and elegancies, their perceived ability to control and manage, depends on it.

So much nature writing, social change theory, and environmental philosophy are at best irrelevant, and more often harmful in that they do not question human supremacism (or for that matter white supremacism, or male supremacism). They often do not question imperialism, including ecological imperialism. So often I feel like so many of them still want the goodies that come from imperialism (including ecological imperialism and sexual imperialism) far more than they want for these forms of imperialism to stop. And since the violence of imperialism is structural—inherent to the process—you can’t realistically expect imperialism to stop being violent just because you call it “green” or just because you wish with all your might."

- Jensen interviewed by Mickey Z. at Press Action (square brackets in original! i'm not really that offended by the universal 'he')

people have a better understanding of power

this article is very heartening!

"18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed."

- BBC Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

Dangerous Conversations

new & exciting 'zine project - 'Dangerous Conversations'
email: dangerousconversations(at)riseup(dot)net
deadline for contributions to issue one: March 2011

Dangerous Conversations is a project born out of the struggle to end systems of domination. Our involvement in movements described as anarchist, activist, horizontalist, and so on has been at times inspiring and at other times disillusioning and frustrating. This zine is not aimed at Anarchists
or Activists but at anyone who struggles against the many forms of domination that blight our lives: ableism, ageism, authority, capitalism, civilisation, caste and class systems, heteronormativity, islamaphobia, male privilege, speciesism, transphobia, white supremacy (and others that are
still unrecognised).

Dangerous Conversations is intended as an intervention in business as usual. We hope to collect texts and viewpoints that challenge the status quo in a way that, rather than (or perhaps as well as) provoking hostility, provoke constructive responses and discussion. We hope that, as much as possible,
the zine becomes a place to converse and to deepen affinity. By showing solidarity with others who also see the struggle as their own struggle, evenwhen we differ on the details, we can become stronger as a movement. Ours is a strength that comes through diversity and empathy for different viewpoints
rather than the imposition of dogma and distrust.

These conversations are dangerous to oppressors because they threaten their privilege. They sometimes seem dangerous to us too because they threaten our own privilege. Because of this, they are important conversations to have.

This first issue (‘What next?’) is to be a collection of different viewpoints on where this struggle should go next. We are inviting a range of contributors who we think have interesting and sometimes conflicting ideas on how we should proceed.

We hope that readers will want to respond to and involve themselves in the project by contributing to this conversation in whatever way seems appropriate. There are no guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate way to express yourself here. Submissions for future publication, participation
in the editorial collective, criticism and ideas are all very welcome.

- via Race Revolt