Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Dana Daugherty is a trauma informed therapist and organizational consultant who helps individuals and organizations heal, grow, and explore their intersectional identities. In this fireside chat, Dana dives deeper into the role of community in the mental health space and how to care for your mental well-being during difficult times.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Reflecting on her experience, Dana emphasizes how mental health is a unique experience from person-to-person and highlights the importance of acknowledging our emotions.
What does your role as a trauma informed therapist and organizational consultant entail?
In short, I’m often helping the helpers.
I facilitate healing, growth, and learning, and help people discover how to show up for themselves authentically.
In the private space, I like to say that I work with high achieving folks who feel marginalized or out of place. They might be business owners, entrepreneurs, activists, medical students, etc. I help them explore their identity and belonging, and guide them through healing and grief in addressing clinical symptoms such as anxiety and depression.
For my organizational clients, I work with healers, advocates, and program administrative folks who work in multicultural and cross cultural contexts.
How do we define “mental health?”
There’s the official definition of mental health by the CDC, which acknowledges how emotional, psychological, and social well-being impacts our condition, and how we think, feel, and act. Then, there’s the definition from the World Health Organization (WHO) that expands more on that definition and sees it as a complex continuum that varies from person to person. It’s experienced differently by each person, which means that help for people has to be customized.
The WHO also says that mental health is a state of mental well-being. It enables people to cope with the stresses of life, and realize their abilities to learn and work well and contribute to their community. That’s a huge piece because mental health is both biological and impacted by the environment. It impacts your interpersonal interactions and how you think about yourself.
What is your perception of mental health?
I used to work with a grassroots organization called National Alliance on Mental Illness. We used to say that mental health is a part of your physical health. Normally, when you go to the doctor, we often think about physical health as the neck down; however, we forget that our brain is attached to our bodies and that our mental state is a full body experience.
When I look at mental health, I see it as our emotions and the psychology of our brains that impacts how we think, feel, and act.
I also specialize a little bit in somatic therapy which looks into how mental health is showing up in our bodies and how they’re impacted.
What is somatic therapy?
It’s a modality that looks at how your body is impacted and how it experiences the world. A lot of my interventions with somatic therapy involve exploring what sensations show up in your body as you’re recalling something that happened to you. It’s a practice that works with kids and adults, but I mainly work with adults.
What’s your take on individualized mental health vs. mental health projected in society?
A lot of content on social media talks about mental health in an individualistic way. For example, they look at what your individual self-care looks like. There are valid points for taking care of yourself, but we also don’t think of ourselves as part of a larger unit—like a community—and how we interact with the world.
We have to think more about taking care of ourselves as part of a community. People sometimes think about individual self-care in a very capitalist consumerist approach, which is not always healthy. Self-care should be about helping ourselves feel better, so we can contribute or interact with the world in a better way.
In 2020, we were forced to slow down because of the pandemic. Also, as national uprising and awakenings happened around the world, we began looking at larger systemic issues that impacted our mental health. We’re looking at gender inequality, police brutality, capitalism, corporate greed…all of it.
People took note how much systemic factors really impact our health and our lives. They quickly realized that individual approaches to caring for your mental health weren’t actually enough.
How important is community care for our well-being?
We need communal and collective care. We need each other. We needed to heal—engaging with groups and communities through organizing and trainings were a couple of ways we learned and relearned healthy ways of relating to each other while being in collective care.
With this new awareness, we realized that we do need to come together and organize together. We need to protest or boycott together for the larger system to really hear what changes are wanted by communities and those individuals make up communities.
Also, organizations aren’t entities on their own, so it’s important to remember that individuals make up organizations. It’s the feeling of 1) being a part of a collective and knowing that your impact is greater with a communal response, and 2) realizing that you’re not alone can remind others to stay engaged.
This article by Dr. Ayesha Khan reminds us that care is a fundamentally relational practice. People look to self-care now as a revolutionary solution to our collective problems. I thought this was a great way of framing care because it’s not one-sided. It’s what you give to yourself and how we co-create together to help you and the community be well.
I also like how she says that all care is community care. Thinking of yourself as part of a collective shows that community care isn’t a means to an end. It’s why we are alive, and it gives us meaning and purpose.
Community and activism work encourages us to act on the causes we care about. How do we deal with burnout when it gets too overwhelming?
It’s helpful to think about the three 3 dimensions of stress: energy deployment, exhaustion, and reduced capacity.
There are many people in the field of sustainability who pride themselves on working around the clock for a cause. Activists and changemakers are sometimes so passionate about the work they’re doing because that particular part of their identity becomes so huge. However, a lot of these people are also not processing the solutions they’re creating because of burnout.
It’s important to think of yourself as a whole person and as ‘being an activist or leader’ as a part of what you do. Think of a pie chart—each part of the circle is all your identities. How big do you want those pieces to be for it to be in balance with each other? Remember, you have limited hours in a day and your whole self can’t only be an activist. It’s important to give yourself space and rest.
How do we reframe rest in a positive light?
When people think about the opposite of rest, they think about work and productivity, which tends to be capitalist ideals and values. However, we need rest to continue doing valuable work.
You’re not part of a machine. We need to reframe rest like the following: our brains need rest every day. If we’re able to stay awake for 24 hours, we wouldn’t be able to interact with people and do life well.
I think about something as simple as sleep, which is a daily practice that we're okay doing. If you’re not okay with doing that, ask yourself, “Why am I sacrificing myself and my health so much?”
Prioritizing sleep is a way for your brain to rest emotionally and physically. Your brain needs that space to be more creative, come up with new ideas, and consolidate the information we learn. If we give ourselves the chance to actually rest, we’re giving ourselves the space to actually be able to create.
Another way to reframe rest is to think about how you contribute to yourself. When it comes to burnout, it’s conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. You have to allow yourself to manage your stress in a way that gives yourself rest.
How can we understand climate grief, a feeling that is common among activists and leaders in the environmental space?
You can experience three types of grief: anticipatory grief (anticipating a loss will happen), disenfranchised grief (experienced after a loss and is often not seen as valid by other people), and chronic grief (intense grief reactions that persist over and do not improve over time). I see how climate grief is a combination of the three.
Climate grief is the psychological impact of an increasingly environmentally changing world. Grief is a natural response to loss and it’s unique to each person and/or community. It can be overwhelming because you wonder about your identity and your sense of belonging or place in the world. Since we are so interconnected, our grief is not just for the planet—it’s for the whole ecosystem.
Solastalgia is a new concept I learned that describes how distress or depression produced by environmental change are impacting people who are directly connected to their home environment. People are directly impacted and that distress is what creates the sense of loss that connects us to grief.
What are some strategies to process our mental health and build resiliency?
Know that each experience is unique and that any experience is valid.
Give space to feel your feelings. If you give yourself rest, you give yourself space for your grief to occur. It allows you to validate yourself. You can also have it be witnessed, so that it can be validated by other people too—that’s the communal collective part.
Also, take note of how you’re coping and ask yourself if it’s healthy. If it’s unhealthy, replace it with something you love and is healthy for you.
It’s important for people to realize how profound mental health can impact your ability to take care of yourself and others. Do not judge your emotions. Let it exist because your feelings are valid.
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