Many of us who go into fields like conservation, healthcare, social work, and education do so from a place of trying to build what we've needed but did not have.

In those fields, whether in grassroots organizing or formal employment, we meet leaders who possess qualities we longed for in another figure from our past: care, passion, responsibility, a tendency to action. So we may get into the habit of idolizing these people, believing they are more than human, a kind of savior. While we might not openly admit it, we might unconsciously feel they could save or rescue some part of us that needed saving but was never noticed, or was noticed and neglected. We may go through cycles of pedestalizing mentors, teachers, movement leaders, clergy, romantic partners, and other people in our lives, and being let down or even harmed by them. This is usually a pattern with roots back to our childhood or young adult years.

I believe this grief and pain is the foundation of my immune dysregulation (autoimmune) illness, and one of the roots of intergenerational trauma that has been passed down for at least 4 generations of women in my maternal family line. It is rooted in foundational attachment trauma from abuse and neglect, a mother-wound. And I see this mother-wound showing up in the way many humans engage with our ecosystems and our original earth mother.

This is the core of my somatic practice: showing up for my own body system first, so I can show up for the world without seeking a savior in it or pretending to be one for others.

I tend to my own wounds so I can face the world’s wounds without collapsing into idolatry or despair. To gradually, or immediately, cut ties with organizations and people committed to harm and destruction, to profit over wellbeing, as I am able to. From this grounded place, my care for the planet becomes a conscious choice from my overflow, not a desperate plea from my deficit. This is how I learned to show up for myself to show up for the world. As Grace Lee Boggs said, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

I have some thoughts on why this cycle–the pedestal, the disappointment, the fall, the shame–came into my life and I want to share more about how I was able to recognize it, and eventually move beyond it. Not to "overcome," but to really truly linger in witnessing my own pain as a youngling and grieve. To engage in the full on crying, wailing, and personal rituals of grief, for not having ever truly been cared for and held in compassionate care by my family of origin.

Many of us in helping and conservation spaces carry this same longing for a wise protector, for a decisive savior, into our relationship with the planet and the movements to save it. We pedestalize charismatic leaders, visionary NGOs, or the very concept of ‘Nature’ itself as a perfect, resilient parent we never had, hoping it will finally provide the safety we crave.

I feel this longing in the grief of having my reasonable needs to feel special and be seen and celebrated for who I am, disregarded or met with disdain as a child. The grief of having my need to feel safe and secure in a unit of care be spat upon and actively, intentionally inflamed with abuse. So that it then made perfect sense that I was clinging to others, seeking a savior. I was trying to survive, to have any feelings of belonging and safety. I did in fact need to be saved and nobody came to save me. Nobody noticed, despite my distress, and if they did notice they chose to do nothing or were thwarted. And that is a tragedy.

It's not an exaggeration. I was not, and I am not today overreacting. That part of me has real distress that was never addressed properly during the time I was little. And I do not live in a world or society where community care on the deep level I truly need is available. The world is too broken and most of us are so traumatized and in survival mode that abundance does not actually exist as a reality for me, or likely for you –not in the ways we deserve. Which is another injustice and tragedy, and one which generates justifiable, righteous rage.

I have to truly grieve the injustice of it all, to grieve it again and again periodically. To grieve as an action, not an intellectual exercise.

To grieve how I never deserved that experience, how I don't deserve this cold and unfeeling individualistic society I live in now. I have had to allow myself to truly see my own despair, to deeply feel it in my body, to learn where it lives, and be familiar with where it sleeps. Controversially for some, I finally had to allow myself to be angry and enraged with my caregivers. Despite knowing their own wounding that led to it, they were wrong in passing that wounding on to me. They are deserving of the anger and rage I feel, given they chose to abuse and neglect me. And while I may never express this rage to them, I can express it to myself, and I can practice somatic strategies to express this rage so it doesn't continue to live inside my body, causing my body to attack itself in despair instead of healing.

We are allowed to be enraged with the power structure and people upholding it.

I've worked with this rage by going to rage rooms and breaking things, screaming, working somatically with the heat in my solar plexus with movements like the Woodchopper, and even rage piñatas. I want to emphasize these practices –and there are many– are embodied ones, not intellectual. I typically do not talk about my rage, I don't find that helpful, it only stirs me up. I need an embodied practice to tend and release that fire of injustice. I still have to have an ongoing rage practice, and I expect I will always need one. And slowly, by layers, I am working through the anger, the shame, the grief and despair. From the past and also the present.

This grieving of my personal, abandoned youngling is the foundational practice. It is how I learned to hold despair without shattering or imploding. And now, when I feel the tsunami of grief for the burning jungles and the bleached corals, for the planet that also wasn't saved while in its distress, I am on familiar, somatically mapped ground. I am not overwhelmed by the climate grief because I have already learned, in my own body, how to wail and rage to survive.

This rage is not just personal fuel. It is the same incendiary fire that burns when I l hear about another virtue-signaling climate summit, deforestation along the border for cattle ranching, and climate movement leaders who abuse their power over others or steal money from their organizations. It is the somatic energy of anger and rage: a boundary against harm and destruction. My personal rage practice keeps that fire from burning me up from the inside with inflammation, releases the heat, and helps me channel this rage into action (like creativity) so my anger can be a focused strategic force, not a debilitating energy that erupts as inflammation in my joints and skin.

Then, emerging from that in cycles (this is not linear at all), I come to a firm and unwavering resolve to be for myself today, however unfair that is, what I never received as a child. To put myself first always by default, to set boundaries and hold them fiercely. To acknowledge and mindfully engage out of overflow and not out of deficit when others or the earth need help, because I will not abandon myself ever again.

For me, putting myself first always has meant choosing not to take on permanent responsibilities for other living beings. My job now is to reparent myself, especially in a dynamic where community care doesn't exist culturally. For me that also meant formally ending my relationship with my family of origin because I could not reconcile the harm done to me with an ongoing relationship where the harm would never be acknowledged, and where it would continue. And today, I do not put up with mistreatment in any of my relationships, including with employers.

I also find with time that I no longer desire to put anyone on pedestals. Even though the urge sometimes rises up to cling to someone, I notice it and pause. Then I can tend to myself. I recognize the urge as evidence of an unmet need. I know that means I need time to offer my wounded self deep compassionate care and holding for however long I need it. I am able to do that, sometimes requiring withdrawing mindfully from others, "going off the grid," while communicating that is what I am doing, and why I am doing it.

I now manage this cycle without moving into actually clinging or pedestalizing others anymore, while seeing their humanity and flaws. I recognize that erasing another's flaws and idolizing them was a protective mechanism I needed as a child to continue to love the people hurting me. However, I no longer need to do that. And it feels like a huge relief.

I also want to be clear that I fully consider myself mid-process with this. While I have made noticeable progress, I am still stumbling through this and make many mistakes. For example, I have still occasionally found myself in abusive and extractive dynamics with people who have narcissistic tendencies. And yet, I often realize it after a short while and am excellent at naming harm, and exhausting every option of seeking recovery and support.

A note on Belize: I am being met, from connections outside Belize, with immense compassion, validation, love, and support with expressing my grief and rage. In my experience of this country, however, Belizeans are not welcoming of these expressions of rage, truth-telling, and resistance to abuse from women and femmes yet. Culturally, there is a tacit acceptance of violent machismo, including patriarchal abuse and control of children, women, and ecosystems in Belize, a mother-wound that results in somatic collapse that I am witnessing, and that I grieve as well.

I see my role as a foreigner from the US as a witness. I don't believe it is my role to initiate climate action or liberation-focused cultural change here. I am sitting with that, as a person of action and a truth-teller, and wondering how long I can endure that role, knowing that my full humanity and my natural gifts are not welcome to be expressed here. I am expected to be small, compliant, and silent, even by other women and femmes, or to face social exclusion. While this is normalized for Belizeans, it feels dehumanizing to me, especially because this silencing is based on gender roles enforced by an overwhelming culture of unchallenged and unaccountable radicalized patriarchy.

So, I am grateful for my international connections and support every day. It could also be much worse, and I recognize that. I am in no way claiming to have "achieved" or "overcome." But I am moving towards something other than collapse and resignation with intention. I do not, nor will I ever accept an abusive status quo for myself, for women and other marginalized genders, children, and other humans and animals, or for the ecosystem anywhere. I do wish there were more accessible resources to help us learn how to address these types of politicized liberation movements somatically, and that is one reason I've chosen to write about this topic here in such detail.

Truthfully we should not have to bootstrap our own recovery from trauma. We should not have to "re-parent" ourselves. The fact that so many of us have to do this is another injustice on top of injustice.

I have needed to piecemeal together my healing process over the last 15 years through scholarships and incomplete information, sheer force of will, and humbling myself to the point of questioning whether I can even maintain my human dignity. That is an injustice and complex trauma experience in and of itself. And I know tens, maybe hundreds of millions of us are in nearly the same situation. And yet, we must reparent ourselves because we are the ones we have been waiting for. And nobody is coming to save us from this collapse. Most of us, collectively and individually, especially here in Belize, must save ourselves.

So when the heat dome settles over Belize and my autoimmune body feels the threat of collapse before the news reports it, I no longer look for a doctor to fix it. (In fact, the last time I did, the doctor in Cayo told me to go back to my country.) I pause and feel the rising panic and heat in my chest. I tend to it with my breath, from a swamp cooler if needed. I water plants with whom I have developed spacial relationships with aloe vera and coconut water. I witness the plants and creatures for whom no one comes to rescue, and I feel and express deep empathy and grief with them. I allow the grief to flow in tears for the dying chicozapote tree, and I connect with the soul friend who also feels and can witness my withering. This is my practice. My goal is not overcoming the crisis on my own, but changing my relationship to it through tending my relationship with myself. Moving from a terrified child awaiting rescue, to a grounded adult participating in collective care of my ecosystem within my capacity and sphere of influence.

It is fierce self-love that drove me to tend to myself and to create these practices to tend to my grief and rage. It is this fierce self-love hat convinced me that I am worth every ounce of energy I put into my own trauma recovery. I appreciate and am grateful for that formidable warrior spirit. I think it was a gift my ancestors have given me in this life because I really needed it to survive. (I have my North Node in Aries in the 6th House for those who enjoy astrology.) And also: nobody should ever need to be that way to experience recovery from trauma. We all deserve to have community care available to tend our soul wounds from childhoods without sufficient care.

Grief and rage are part of my spiritual practice to cultivate the inner transition required for effective and sustainable outer action.

The climate crisis forces us all to face profound betrayal by systems, leaders, and our own collective collapse and inaction, overwhelming grief, and justified rage. Many of us, when experiencing climate anxiety from collapse, are like dying stars, where our inner collapse mirrors the outer collapse of the ecosystem. What I am suggesting here is not to linger in this repeating collapse cycle, but to engage in the natural rhythms of our bodies’ grief and recovery through ritual somatic practice. To develop spiritual practices and rituals of rage and grief, to contribute to more capacity for wellness in our bodies and the ecosystems we inhabit. To become the ones we have been waiting for.

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