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What It Takes to Heal
What It Takes To Heal ABISBOOK Cornerstone Press.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 12, 2025
If you have any doubts if this is for you, just read the acknowledgements first. It is.
Are you becoming one of those people, SAATAYF?
What was I ultimately fighting for if not a world where I could sometimes be soft?
Strong emotions were often forbidden in public by an unwritten order. An illusion of safety by wearing the mask, Unjustified, Precarious, and bound by someone else’s aggressive definition, Required to make the inhumane socially acceptable. Empathy, mutuality and connection are dangerous to injustice. We all have ways of interacting with the world, our masks, but we know that the masks are not the true shape of our faces
On trust: Relationship is not some transcendence space, it’s the trenches.
To really really care about the harm that happens, to help common place, the silent abuses of children & the vulnerable, What it says about the culture, and when we put the onness on the individual to transform and nothing on the culture & people that makes this abuse endemic, it does nothing to stop this from happening again.
While social media has been an incredible tool for activation Around social change movements, it has been a real obstacle for engagement… It is much easier to make people fearful online than it is to make people willing & able to understand the systems & take Thoughtful & coordinated action against them…breadth isn’t the same as depth. Social media is designed to cultivate the reactionary, the dopamine hit, less able to help sustain attention & build relationship across difference.
If we can’t bootstrap our way into dominance, we end up living alone…Any individual’s sense of disconnection (aka vulnerability & isolation) has consequences to the whole. The way we’ve set it up now, what has substituted for true belonging is proximity to power… Belonging as we know, can be retracted… Do we protect who sits at the head of the pyramid, or build a stronger wider power?
On enslavement: an adjacent & subhuman species set apart. Massive psychological, emotional & spiritual that no policy shift could change.
.. A story of what the destruction a lie can do. How people can be traumatized & terrorized Out of their selves, and yet reshape what is really humane, and how others Must fall from the lie of innocence to become tender, listening & human again.
Petty & profound, family found & foraged, making them our very own business,: Oddkin: (Donna Haroway): staying with the trouble, unexpected nonrecipricol and exactly what we meed right now
Expand our sense of WE
Expansion is more an orientation than a goal
On conflict: there's something inside we can use, about ourselves, about the world
... Malladona patrisse Somnet says conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deeper.
Conflict can be: retractable, an opening, strengthening, generative…
On fear, could this not become courage? Fear could be a skill we practice. When taking it on, it becomes who we were versus who we could be.
On courage: it is courage when we insist on being ourselves, in agency, when the world is set against us. Courage is contagious and naturally widens you. Courage that is genetic and connective. Fannie Lou Hamer Attended a voter registration workshop in 1963 We’re attempting to get lunch. She was put in jail brutally.
En Mississippi Were they saying, and in darkness I shall not be moved like a tree Planted by the water, I shall not be moved. Later. Sometimes it seems like to run the truth today. Seems like I might be killed. I’ll fall 5’4” in the fight for freedom and I will not be backing off freedom. I will not be backing off.
“We have to engage in both.” I took it then to mean that election days were our sole opportunity to engage politically within the system because it was our only Democratic outlet. Only later did I really understand that decades of pressure from people just like my grandmother… Regular, every day people making it happen.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs on love, juxtaposed with, if you are a serious person, you do not talk about love, Love: love has changed me fundamentally…. Courage directs our actions, but love gives our actions their meaning.
This review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Are you becoming one of those people, SAATAYF?
What was I ultimately fighting for if not a world where I could sometimes be soft?
Strong emotions were often forbidden in public by an unwritten order. An illusion of safety by wearing the mask, Unjustified, Precarious, and bound by someone else’s aggressive definition, Required to make the inhumane socially acceptable. Empathy, mutuality and connection are dangerous to injustice. We all have ways of interacting with the world, our masks, but we know that the masks are not the true shape of our faces
On trust: Relationship is not some transcendence space, it’s the trenches.
To really really care about the harm that happens, to help common place, the silent abuses of children & the vulnerable, What it says about the culture, and when we put the onness on the individual to transform and nothing on the culture & people that makes this abuse endemic, it does nothing to stop this from happening again.
While social media has been an incredible tool for activation Around social change movements, it has been a real obstacle for engagement… It is much easier to make people fearful online than it is to make people willing & able to understand the systems & take Thoughtful & coordinated action against them…breadth isn’t the same as depth. Social media is designed to cultivate the reactionary, the dopamine hit, less able to help sustain attention & build relationship across difference.
If we can’t bootstrap our way into dominance, we end up living alone…Any individual’s sense of disconnection (aka vulnerability & isolation) has consequences to the whole. The way we’ve set it up now, what has substituted for true belonging is proximity to power… Belonging as we know, can be retracted… Do we protect who sits at the head of the pyramid, or build a stronger wider power?
On enslavement: an adjacent & subhuman species set apart. Massive psychological, emotional & spiritual that no policy shift could change.
.. A story of what the destruction a lie can do. How people can be traumatized & terrorized Out of their selves, and yet reshape what is really humane, and how others Must fall from the lie of innocence to become tender, listening & human again.
Petty & profound, family found & foraged, making them our very own business,: Oddkin: (Donna Haroway): staying with the trouble, unexpected nonrecipricol and exactly what we meed right now
Expand our sense of WE
Expansion is more an orientation than a goal
On conflict: there's something inside we can use, about ourselves, about the world
... Malladona patrisse Somnet says conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deeper.
Conflict can be: retractable, an opening, strengthening, generative…
On fear, could this not become courage? Fear could be a skill we practice. When taking it on, it becomes who we were versus who we could be.
On courage: it is courage when we insist on being ourselves, in agency, when the world is set against us. Courage is contagious and naturally widens you. Courage that is genetic and connective. Fannie Lou Hamer Attended a voter registration workshop in 1963 We’re attempting to get lunch. She was put in jail brutally.
En Mississippi Were they saying, and in darkness I shall not be moved like a tree Planted by the water, I shall not be moved. Later. Sometimes it seems like to run the truth today. Seems like I might be killed. I’ll fall 5’4” in the fight for freedom and I will not be backing off freedom. I will not be backing off.
“We have to engage in both.” I took it then to mean that election days were our sole opportunity to engage politically within the system because it was our only Democratic outlet. Only later did I really understand that decades of pressure from people just like my grandmother… Regular, every day people making it happen.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs on love, juxtaposed with, if you are a serious person, you do not talk about love, Love: love has changed me fundamentally…. Courage directs our actions, but love gives our actions their meaning.
This review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
October 22, 2025
First few chapters resonated, but the rest was not as profound as I was hoping. Found the writing style hard to follow. Still some nice points
“Trauma can take the capacity for longing, for visioning, from us. By necessity it keeps us shortsighted…”
“… I always wondered who held them that night… when the wave of grief came. Who listened when they were messy, or when their story was incoherent? Without that kind of support, I knew that trauma could metastasise into a way of being.”
“Trauma can make belonging contingent or dangerous, leading us to seek isolation or supremacy”
“… when our past invades our present, as is the way with trauma, we inhabit our current relationships according to the concerns, fears, pain from another time.”
“Healing is not an acclimation to unjust conditions”
[what is the cost of holding in tears?] “… something you pride yourself on shows you that it’s really a coping mechanism of a scared child.”
“The tissues and muscles that can hold on to a trauma can also learn a dance, can live out a vision, can pick up a habit, can grow and age.”
“Trauma can take the capacity for longing, for visioning, from us. By necessity it keeps us shortsighted…”
“… I always wondered who held them that night… when the wave of grief came. Who listened when they were messy, or when their story was incoherent? Without that kind of support, I knew that trauma could metastasise into a way of being.”
“Trauma can make belonging contingent or dangerous, leading us to seek isolation or supremacy”
“… when our past invades our present, as is the way with trauma, we inhabit our current relationships according to the concerns, fears, pain from another time.”
“Healing is not an acclimation to unjust conditions”
[what is the cost of holding in tears?] “… something you pride yourself on shows you that it’s really a coping mechanism of a scared child.”
“The tissues and muscles that can hold on to a trauma can also learn a dance, can live out a vision, can pick up a habit, can grow and age.”
November 24, 2024
Honestly, meh at best. The author wants to be profound and moving but in my opinion isn’t. A few beautiful quotes but usually taken from another source. Not my favourite
January 30, 2025
Everyone should read or listen to this book.
February 24, 2025
At times heavy, this is a great read any time. Glad I read it this Black history month.
July 14, 2025
Just okay, not what I expected.
July 22, 2025
Inspired a lot of self reflection
September 5, 2025
Inspiring & relevant read as a therapist
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews