Healing Is Never Neutral

Opening

It’s been two years.
Two years of watching, reading, and aching deeply. Two years of wondering how to keep showing up for healing when so much of the world is being undone. Gaza’s sky still burns. The grief continues to grow. And in quiet moments between clients I find myself asking: What does it mean to be a therapist, a healer, in a time like this? I am holding my own pain and rage; what does it mean to hold our collective emotions as a therapist?

I hold these questions in my body. They live alongside the stories I hear each day ~ the rage, the tears, the silences that stretch between us. The war is not somewhere else; it echoes here within the nervous system, in the ways we brace, go numb, dissociate, and despair. We all feel the tremor of power, even when we cannot name it.

I write this as a white, queer person on occupied land, trying to remember what responsibility feels like in the flesh. Silence is not a neutral act. It’s a form of consent, a quiet alignment with power. Speaking up is powerful and liberating. Not because I have the answers, but because staying silent feels like a fracture I will not bear.

This is a love letter to the living ~ to those resisting, tending, and rebuilding everywhere the earth trembles beneath violence. I write out of devotion, not certainty. Out of longing for a world where healing isn’t something we do in private rooms, but something we practice together, through justice, through grief, and through care.

The Refusal of Neutrality

I have never believed that healing asks us to be neutral. My work has always lived in the space between tenderness and truth and in naming what systems try to erase. Therapy, for me, has never been about detachment or quiet endurance. It’s about accompaniment: walking with, witnessing fully, and refusing to turn away.

In this moment, the refusal of neutrality feels more urgent than ever. The language of balance under the weight of genocide. To stay quiet is to allow violence to disguise itself as order. Neutrality is not peacekeeping, it’s participation.

In the therapy room, I see how global violence ripples through the body: the tightening jaw, the sleepless nights, the dread that lives under the skin. Our nervous systems are porous; the grief travels. What happens to a child in Gaza, lives in all of us. The body remembers even when the headlines fade.

To refuse neutrality is not to reject calm, but rather, it’s to root that calm in justice. It’s to hold space for truth and let compassion stretch wide enough to include accountability. This is not about rage alone, but love ~ fierce, tender, world-remaking love. The kind that insists: We belong to one another, and I will not look away.

Interdependence and Guesthood

The story of Gaza does not exist apart from the story of this land beneath my feet. The patterns repeat: occupation, displacement, the erasure of story. I live and work on stolen land, land that has carried the weight of other people’s grief and the resilience of their survival. To name that is not symbolic; it’s a reminder that liberation cannot be partial. What we heal in one place reverberates in another.

Interdependence, to me, is not a theory, it’s the pulse of the living world. The breath that moves through tree roots and ocean tides moves through us too. I am learning that my healing is bound to the soil’s healing, to Gaza’s healing, to every place where the earth and her people are still trembling. The lines we draw between here and there, us and them, are illusions that keep us small.

Guesthood, then, is a practice of humility. It’s knowing that I walk on land that is not mine, that my belonging depends on my willingness to repair. It’s listening to the more-than-human world — to water, wind, and root — as teachers of reciprocity. In my work, I try to honor this same ethic: to move gently, to listen deeply, and to remember that healing does not end at the border of the self.

If interdependence teaches anything, it’s this: none of us are free until all of us are free. The body knows this truth already, it’s the mind that tries to forget.

The Therapist’s Task: Holding and Witnessing

Every day I sit across from people whose bodies are carrying more than words can say. Grief that vibrates beneath the skin. Fear that catches in the throat. The quiet exhaustion of trying to stay soft in a world that rewards hardness. This is the work ~ not to fix, not to interpret, but to witness. To hold what is unbearable without collapsing into it.

Lately, that task feels heavier. The grief of the world seeps in through screens, through conversations, through the spaces between appointments. I feel it in my chest sometimes, a pulse that isn’t mine alone. And still, I keep returning to the same truth: to bear witness is holy work. To sit with another’s pain without numbing or explaining it away ~ that is resistance.

In the room, we name what lives beneath the surface: the anxiety that mirrors the state, the despair that echoes the headlines, the fatigue that comes from living in systems that never stop demanding. We practice feeling without turning to stone. We breathe. We remember that staying embodied — even in grief — is an act of defiance.

Healing, in this sense, is not about returning to calm. It’s about building the capacity to stay with what is real. To grieve in full color. To let the heart remain porous. I think of this as sacred labor, a kind of tending that insists our humanity is still possible, even now.

Embodied Accountability & Ongoing Work

Accountability, for me, lives in the body. It isn’t a declaration or a brand of goodness, but a posture. A daily return. A willingness to feel the discomfort that whiteness, thinness, and able-bodiedness have taught me to avoid.

I carry privilege in my skin, in the ease with which I move through rooms, in the safety I am granted without asking. My task is to stay awake to that ease, not with guilt, but with responsibility. To let it become a resource for redistribution, not insulation. I study, I unlearn, and I repair. I return again and again to teachers who remind me that the work is never finished: Resmaa Menakem, bell hooks, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown, Layla Saad, Patty Berne, and so many unnamed others whose wisdom moves through conversation, art, and care.

Embodied accountability means allowing the body to be the site of transformation ~ trembling, softening, and expanding. It means slowing down enough to notice where defensiveness arises and asking what it’s protecting. It means letting humility become a muscle.

Professionally, it shows up in how I teach, supervise, write, and practice therapy: naming whiteness, inviting complexity, allowing the unease to show while disrupting the comfort of silence. Personally, it shows up in how I listen to friends and colleagues of color, in how I redistribute resources, in how I step back when it’s not my voice that’s needed.

Spiritually, it is the quiet offering I keep returning to: May I be a good guest on this land. May my work help more than it harms. May I remember that liberation is not mine to own, but ours to nurture.

This, to me, is what love looks like in motion ~ not purity, not performance, but presence. The long, imperfect practice of repair.

A Blessing, Not a Bow

There is no neat ending to any of this, only the choice to keep returning to what is true. I don’t believe in closure, not for grief this expansive, not for injustice this ongoing. I do believe in the slow, quiet labor of keeping our hearts open when the world keeps breaking.

So I offer this not as a conclusion, but as an offering:
May we learn to listen beyond our comfort.
May we let our grief become a bridge, not a wall.
May we hold one another in the soft spaces between action and rest.
May we remember that liberation is not a metaphor, but a muscle we build together through courage, repair, and the small daily acts of refusing to look away.

I do not know what comes next. But I know that love — the fierce, justice-seeking kind — is still possible. It lives in the streets, in the classrooms, in the therapy rooms, in the poems, in the quiet insistence that we belong to one another. And so I will keep tending. I will keep speaking. I will keep listening for the world that is still trying to be born ~ offering what I can to help it breathe and expand.

In the soft labor of repair,