The Healing Power of Community

For the best part of two decades I worked in and with communities to create solutions to issues facing members of the community, create connection between community members and mobilise assets to create change that mattered. This work was led by the community with me taking a much smaller role in the facilitation of change and helping to open some stuck doors when asked to do so.

This was incredibly rewarding and sustainable work. Sometimes it was achieved with government and funding support or through the mobilised and connected assets of the community.

During this time I came to believe that the answer to any issue or perceived problem is community. I also came to understand that community is where we heal from trauma. It is when we are in relationship with others that we heal. This is not to neglect the important role of medical advice and therapy but without living in community we can never truely heal.

This is the underlying theme of my book Finding Strength in Numbers.

Over the last three or four years I have been working in programs and services aimed at supporting those impacted by trauma. Initially, this work was in monitoring distribution of funding to agencies and groups working on reducing Adverse Childhood Experiences with a focus on the first thousand days of life. This is an important window in development where our brains are growing and changing rapidly.

I have worked, more recently, with people who are highly traumatised and who often act out their trauma. Many struggle to survive day to day financially. They often show a litany of addictive behaviours. Many have great people skills. Most are also incredibly proficient in “working” the system. This is not something negative but portrays incredible resilience.

One of the things missing from their lives is a connected and positively supportive community around them to nurture, support them through difficult times and nurture their healing process. Certainly many have a social network around them but it is a network of others held captive by their own trauma. The result is they enable each other’s trauma based behavioural responses and trauma remains untreated.

Funds are directed towards a number of programs but the building of a supportive, nurturing and healing community seems low on the priority list even though it is the best tool we have in reducing trauma, both personal and collective.

Of course many highly traumatised people are reluctant to build a new community around them and that may mean abandoning long term relationships and even family if they are going to heal. Additionally, the experience of many is that relationships are often viewed as a commodity of exchange i.e. what do we each get out of this? Their experiences have shown how easily they can be hurt. They have learnt to manipulate situations and relationships to survive and do not easily trust others. Often, they find themselves in the situation where the only people they have some trust in are those paid to work with them. But workers are not friends.It is even more important that we, as a society, focus not on the social problem but on building healing communities.

Since I have published Finding Strength in Numbers I am even more convinced in the power of a healing community. Let’s focus on building these communities so that our healing can begin.

For Australian readers Finding Strength in Numbers is available by clicking this link: https://py.pl/1LblyS

For other readers it is available on Amazon and a number of other sites.