Beyond Personal Healing: Why Reclaiming Your Power Requires a Public Conversation About Justice
A person can learn to breathe through a difficult moment and still need the conditions of that moment to change.
They can develop self-awareness while living with financial insecurity. They can rebuild confidence while facing a process that gives them little opportunity to be heard. They can practice forgiveness and still deserve an honest account of what happened.
These possibilities belong in the same conversation. When we separate them, we ask healing to carry responsibilities that also belong to relationships, institutions, and public life.
As a certified holistic healing practitioner, I believe in the value of attending to the whole person. My work brings together reflection, spiritual inquiry, creative expression, and the discipline of rebuilding. As that work develops toward holistic justice, the question becomes more demanding: how fully are we seeing a person if we attend to their inner life while leaving the conditions around them unexamined?
This is the public question at the heart of RECLAIM, my campaign against abuse of power. Reclaiming agency means strengthening our capacity to choose and examining whether meaningful choices are available to us.
The Whole Person Lives Somewhere
The language of holistic wellbeing often emphasizes the connection between mind, body, and spirit. I want to take that commitment seriously enough to include where a person lives, how they earn a living, whose decisions affect them, and what happens when they ask for help.
The World Health Organization’s 2025 World Report on Social Determinants of Health Equity identifies living conditions and access to power, money, and resources as major influences on unjust differences in health. Its account places public policy and social arrangements inside the discussion of wellbeing, alongside the care an individual receives.
For holistic practice, I believe this carries an ethical implication: context belongs in our understanding of the person seeking support.
Consider someone who is afraid to leave a harmful workplace because their income supports their household. Teaching a grounding practice may help them approach a difficult decision. It does not create another job, replace lost wages, or make reporting misconduct safe. Those needs remain even when the practice is useful.
The practitioner’s responsibility is to recognize the difference. An individual’s capacity to cope deserves support. The conditions demanding so much coping deserve scrutiny.
This also changes what we mean by personal responsibility. People retain the ability to make choices within constraints, and those choices matter. But responsibility must be distributed according to actual power. A person seeking help has different options from the organization controlling their employment, access to services, or complaint process. Treating those responsibilities as equal conceals the imbalance that needs attention.
What Healing Practices Can Contribute
I bring my practitioner identity into this conversation because inward work matters. Reflection can create room to reconsider a belief. A chosen spiritual practice can offer meaning. Music can give someone a way to express what ordinary conversation cannot yet hold. These are dimensions of human experience worth protecting without turning each one into a medical claim.
Research also gives us grounds for measured claims about particular practices. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that meditation and mindfulness may help with some symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. It also describes uneven research quality, mixed findings, and possible adverse experiences. Its guidance recommends using these practices alongside appropriate care rather than delaying or replacing it. (NCCIH, 2022)
That combination of possibility and limitation should inform how practitioners speak. Evidence about a defined mindfulness intervention cannot automatically validate every offering described as holistic, energetic, or trauma-informed. Nor does a person’s difficulty with a practice prove that they are resistant to healing.
In the approach I advocate, people can question an interpretation, decline a practice, or seek another kind of support. Their agency should grow through the relationship. The practitioner should be able to recognize when a need calls for a licensed clinician, legal professional, or another qualified service.
I also want to distinguish becoming calmer from becoming safer. These can support one another, but they are different outcomes. A person may feel settled in an environment that still exposes them to harm. Another may remain distressed after reaching relative safety. Neither emotional state, by itself, tells us whether the surrounding conditions are acceptable.
My ethical concern begins when composure becomes the price of being taken seriously. A person should not have to perform serenity before their account receives a fair hearing.
When the Response Becomes Part of the Harm
Abuse of power raises questions about what happens after someone seeks protection. Who receives the report? Who controls the records? Can the decision-maker review their own conduct? What would make it possible to challenge the outcome?
Psychologists Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd’s paper on institutional betrayal examines how trusted institutions can contribute to traumatic experiences and subsequent distress through their actions or failures to act. Focusing substantially on sexual harassment and violence, the authors argue for attention to institutional context in research and responses to trauma. Their work gives us a way to examine the role of an institution beyond the conduct of an individual perpetrator. (Smith & Freyd, 2014)
This does not mean every disappointing decision is betrayal, or that an allegation settles the facts. It means that the process itself deserves examination. Fair investigation and humane treatment should reinforce each other.
Imagine a complaint system that offers no clear timeline, no explanation of who is responsible, and no accessible way to ask for an update. Even before we know the merits of the complaint, we can question the design. Does it allow a person to participate? Can errors be corrected? Does someone have authority to act when the process stalls?
For my work, this is where healing and governance meet. Support may help someone manage the uncertainty of waiting. Institutional responsibility requires asking whether that uncertainty is necessary, who benefits from it, and how it can be reduced.
The Hidden Work of Obtaining Help
There is another form of effort that discussions of recovery can overlook: the work required to obtain assistance.
Public administration scholars Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey describe administrative burden in terms of learning, psychological, and compliance costs. People must discover what a system requires, bear the emotional costs of interacting with it, and complete the necessary steps. Their framework helps explain why the existence of a service and the ability to use it are different questions. (Moynihan, Herd, & Harvey, 2015)
Applied to rebuilding, this distinction is consequential. A referral is only a beginning if a person cannot understand the eligibility rules, take time away from work, or assemble the requested documents. An organization can offer a resource while leaving the hardest work of reaching it to the person least able to absorb another demand.
I would therefore ask institutions to evaluate the effort they require from people seeking help. How many times must someone repeat the same information? Are instructions understandable? Can staff explain a decision? Is assistance available when a person encounters a barrier?
These are practical questions about dignity. They also expand what an ethical practitioner can notice. When someone struggles to follow through, we should be curious about the obstacle before interpreting the struggle as a lack of commitment.
What I Mean by Holistic Justice
In my manifesto on holistic justice, I connect personal ethics with the design of institutions. Here, I want to make that relationship more concrete.
I use holistic justice to describe an ethical approach that considers the full consequences of harm and connects personal recovery with fair processes, material support, and the prevention of recurrence. This is the perspective I am developing across my work. It draws on established fields while expressing a commitment about what our responses to harm ought to include.
Its central test is whether people regain meaningful room to live. Has the immediate danger been addressed? Can they make decisions without coercion? Is there a fair way to examine what happened? What support would help them recover stability? What must change so another person does not encounter the same failure?
No single profession can answer all of these questions. A practitioner may support reflection and self-trust. An attorney may clarify rights and legal options. A public administrator may improve access or oversight. Community members may provide practical help and belonging. Coordination should respect these different responsibilities and the person’s authority over their own participation.
There are limits to what any outcome can deliver. An institutional finding may leave grief unresolved. Meaningful personal recovery may occur without an apology or formal acknowledgment. People deserve support in either circumstance; their future should not be held hostage to another person’s willingness to admit harm.
At the same time, someone’s recovery does not cancel the responsibility to investigate a failure or prevent its repetition. Resilience is an achievement belonging to the person who develops it. It should never become an institution’s excuse.
Rebuilding Across the Five Stages
My Five Stages Framework offers a way to organize this work: Foundation, Disruption, Reconstruction, Integration, and Expansion. I use these stages as a reflective guide, allowing people to revisit needs as circumstances change.
Foundation asks what makes life more secure now. That may include a grounding practice alongside reliable housing, food, income, and people who can be trusted. Disruption creates room to name what has changed and distinguish personal uncertainty from failures in the surrounding environment.
Reconstruction concerns the practical rebuilding of agency. It can involve learning, seeking qualified advice, restoring routines, or developing options that previously felt unavailable. Integration asks how those changes become sustainable in daily life, including how a person relates to power, trust, and responsibility. Expansion makes room for a future that contains more than managing the aftermath.
That future might include creative work, education, intimacy, public participation, or simply a quieter life. Recovery does not obligate anyone to become an advocate. The freedom to decide how much of one’s story to share belongs within the meaning of reclaiming power.
For those who do choose public work, the framework also raises a leadership question: how will we use the influence we gain? Being harmed does not make us incapable of harming others. Ethical leadership requires ways to question us, correct our errors, and limit our authority.
Choosing Love in Public Life
Choosing love is the philosophical center of my work. I understand it as a commitment to human worth that must survive difficult circumstances, including anger, conflict, and the exercise of authority.
Love of self includes taking one’s own experience seriously and seeking support without treating the need for it as a failure. Love of others includes care, honesty, and respect for their freedom to disagree. Love of all asks how those values appear in systems that affect people we may never meet.
In public life, that commitment requires fair procedures and accountable decisions. It leaves room for consequences without making humiliation their purpose. It recognizes that forgiveness, reconciliation, and institutional accountability are separate questions; people should have meaningful choice about the first two, while organizations remain responsible for their duties.
My music and creative work belong here too. A song can invite reflection and make a public concern personally felt. My song “Trust in Love” carries that invitation within RECLAIM. The artistic work opens a space; the educational and civic work must give that space substance.
I want RECLAIM to hold both the private act of finding one’s voice and the public question of whether that voice can influence what happens next.
Peace of Mind and the Conditions of a Life
“Peace of Mind is the New Luxury” expresses something I value deeply. As my work moves further into holistic justice, it also becomes a question about access: what would allow more people to experience peace without having to purchase distance from every source of insecurity?
There is an inward practice of peace, and there are public responsibilities that help sustain it. Predictable processes, responsive services, material stability, and limits on arbitrary power all belong in the future I want to help build.
The next step in holistic practice, as I see it, is to become more attentive to both. We can support the person in front of us while remaining honest about what our support cannot resolve. We can help someone recover self-trust while asking whether the institutions around them deserve trust. We can care for the effects of harm and work to reduce the conditions that reproduce it.
Reclaiming power begins wherever a person can begin. Our collective responsibility is to make the next step more possible.
References
Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43–69.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. (2022). Meditation and mindfulness: Effectiveness and safety. National Institutes of Health.
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. Read the full paper.
World Health Organization. (2025). World report on social determinants of health equity.
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