Collective care, we are wired for community

Shouldering one another up

Whenever I talk about self-care these days, I also include a conversation about collective care. For those who know me I am an advocate for self-compassion practices, for self-awareness and noticing our emotions, noticing our body, noticing what we need so that we can attend to our needs. That practice is sadly counter cultural. We live in our heads, forget we have a body, don't notice when we are hungry, tired, disconnected, too enmeshed and that causes a great deal of stress and lack of balance.

Whilst caring for ourselves is incredibly important, we are wired for community, we thrive when we are connected, we are grounded when we feel a sense of belonging and as Vikki Reynolds suggests "we all need people we can howl at the moon with!"

In these times, there is a limit to how much self-care will sustain you and sadly it can be weaponised in the context of unrealistic workloads, social injustice, an over emphasis on through put, transactional processes, inadequate resources, and service systems that are not designed to support the people who need us the most, the people we are here to serve.

We need to commit to addressing oppressions, shouldering one another up in the work and working in accord with our ethics.

It is never the work with clients that puts us at risk of burnout, it is the meaningless administration burden, the barriers to respect and dignity for the people we call clients, the commercialisation of health and social care, the toxic workplace relationships, the inappropriate use of power and the frustration with fragmented service systems.

Safety is not the absence of treat it is the presence of connection, in these times of global instability we need each other, we need the collective, we need solidarity teams, we need community, we are wired for it.

Time to de-colonise, challenge the stoic, push through, "suck it up" individualised mentality that puts all of the responsibility on individuals to "self-care".

We have much to learn from indigenous communities who have wisely recognised and honoured the importance of community.

If you have not yet read the National Strategic Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, be sure to look that up. The model of social and emotional wellbeing includes the body, mind and emotions, family and kin, community, culture, country and spirituality. So much wisdom in understanding of self, and all the connections neglected in our white colonised way of viewing ourselves and the world.

https://www.indigenousmhspc.gov.au/topics/social-emotional-wellbeing#aboutthistopic

"The problem of staying alive and healthy in the work currently gets constructed as a very individual project. Yet the issues are social and require collective actions and collective accountability". Vikki Reynolds