Reader,

Three weeks ago, I wrote about how accessibility and accountability are not the same thing. We may want more clients from a particular marginalized community to work with us because we genuinely want to support them, but sometimes offering them a place in our practice is not actually the most useful form of support we can provide. Sometimes the more liberatory use of our privilege is contributing to changing the systems that marginalized people in the first place.

Last week, I wrote about how we do not get to simply declare ourselves allies. That piece landed hard for some people, and I understand why. It is uncomfortable to consider that a label we have used to describe ourselves may actually belong, at least in part, to the people and communities we are trying to support. But that discomfort is not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is the beginning of something worth paying attention to.

Because underneath both of these ideas, there can be a lot of grief.

There is the grief of realizing that we may not have been the allies we thought we were. There is also the grief of realizing that we may not get to help people in the ways we imagined we would. And for those of us who entered helping professions because we genuinely want to help, that can be a surprisingly painful thing to sit with.

Sometimes, I say this lovingly, our egos get bruised by the reality that the help we are offering is not the help that is wanted. Or that the help that is needed is not something we can provide through our professional role. Or that the most useful thing our privilege can offer is not access to us, but access to something beyond us.

And there is grief in that realization.

(I am an existentialist at heart, so of course I see grief everywhere.) But I also think grief can be useful information here. It can tell us that we are letting go of an identity, an expectation, or a story about what it means to be a “good” helper. It can mark the space between the work we thought we were going to do and the work that is actually being asked of us.

The question then becomes: what do we do with that grief?

We feel it. We let it move through us. And then, eventually, we compost it.

Because if we sit in the grief without allowing it to become movement, it can turn into fragility. We can become so focused on how uncomfortable it feels to be wrong, to be called in (or out), to discover our limitations, or to realize that our help is not wanted that the center of the conversation quietly shifts back to us.

That is not where I want us to stay.

I want us to be able to take that grief, that bruised ego, that disappointment, that “oh shit, I really hadn’t thought about it that way” moment, and turn it into something more useful. Maybe the work looks different than we imagined. Maybe our role changes. Maybe we stop asking, How can I get more people from this community into my practice? and start asking, What can I do with the power and access I already have that might make their lives less constrained by this system?

That is not giving up on helping. It is expanding our definition of what help can look like.

And this is part of the cycle of liberatory work: learning, acting, getting it wrong, grieving, adjusting, trying again, and continuing to build. There is no final destination where we become perfectly liberatory and get to put our “good ally” badge on our lanyard forever.

So here is the question I want to leave you with:

Hit reply and tell me what comes up. I read every response, eventhough it's taking me a little while to write back, and I genuinely appreciate the reflections you trust me with.

With liberatory care,

Silvana

​​Liberatory Letters | The Practice of Liberation | Decolonize Your Practice​

PS. Something new is coming soon, and I've been working on it for a while. I'm creating a self-paced field guide for clinicians who are ready to look beyond the individual client and explore the many conditions that shape healing. It's for those moments when you know therapy alone cannot hold everything someone needs, and you want a more expansive and creative way to think about where healing can come from. It' a guide for these times, when burnout, impossible caseloads, and unrealistic expectations deplete us from our capacity for imagination and creativity in the therapy room.
​Sign up for the waitlist here and be the first to know when the field guide is released!

PPS. The next installment of The Practice of Liberation goes out on September 7. This is a more personal space where I talk about decolonizing the personal in order to decolonize the professional. In this issue, I’ll talk about being disconnected from land and culture, how this happens by design, and what we can do to reconnect and unlearn colonial ways.
With every installment, subscribers also receive reflection prompts, a 10-minute embodied practice, and this month’s book recommendation, as well as access to all previous POL issues.

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⬆️ Let's connect!