Twelve years ago this week, I made my first Restorative Empathy public offering. I had no idea I was stepping across a threshold into the most meaningful, joyful, connecting work of my life.
From the start, the Restorative Empathy tagline has been: “Transforming Domination Culture from the Inside Out,” because patriarchy, white supremacy culture, capitalism, and colonization—interlocking political and cultural systems of domination that harm us all in different ways—have been internalized, reenacted, propagandized, and invisibilized for so many generations that we cannot fully understand or heal our personal traumas without including those contexts.
For example, in healing settings that ignore systemic contexts, your depression, anxiety, numbness, or loneliness may be diagnosed and treated as personal pathology, without acknowledging the impacts you’re undergoing from collective and intergenerational harms. (In this way, healing settings can become just another agent for gaslighting us that systemic harms are our personal failings.)
Likewise, without naming the impacts of domination culture, you may believe you’re procrastinating when you’re actually resisting. Or you may be struggling not because you’re doing something wrong, but because you’re doing the complex and often messy work of carving out a nondominating, nonassimilating, liberatory life for yourself.
Every session I offer, no matter what emerges for us to explore together, has two underlying principles:
—In a culture where the interlocking systems of oppression relentlessly work to divide and conquer us, individual healing and collective liberation are inextricably linked—meaning neither can happen fully without the other, and working toward both is essential.
—When you have someone who welcomes, loves, and supports you in your genuine, contradictory wholeness; who absolutely believes you make sense; and who sees you and your loved ones in your contexts, you have the opportunity to transform domination culture in yourself (healing patterns of self-domination, self-recrimination, self-abandonment, and coerced assimilation/”shoulds”) and then transform domination culture in your relationships and our world.
I genuinely love every Restorative Empathy client—my entire being in deeply moved by the invitation to walk with you in your life, tending the hurt places, supporting the disoriented places, celebrating the joyful places. And over these years, I’ve noticed a few different (sometimes overlapping) patterns of who seems to most enjoy and benefit from my support:
—You’re already on a healing path, but you’re still hard on yourself or hurting in ways that aren’t easing up.
—You’re a supporter (healer, therapist, teacher, caregiver, activist) who needs a space where you’re lovingly and capably attuned to and held.
—You value ongoing, trauma-informed, warm accompaniment and resonant support.
—You long for an intersectional abolitionist leftist healing space where you have political shared reality and support in mourning, navigating, and responding to the collective troubles.
—You’re interested in exploring ancestral lineage healing, spiritually expansive perspectives, and earth-honoring animist practices.
If you feel called, let’s set up an introductory session! I’m already looking forward to our time together.
Much love and empathy,
Angela