Bearing Witness While Staying Human

I am writing this as a mental health care provider in long-term recovery—from addiction, from periods of profound mental illness, from the kind of internal fragmentation that happens when survival becomes a full-time job…

I am also writing as a Black, Queer, culturally and ethnically diverse human being. As a Jungian and social-emotional researcher. As someone who knows, both professionally and personally, what it means to live in a body and a mind that has learned to stay alert because safety has never been guaranteed.

Right now, many of us are hurting.

Jewish communities are grieving and afraid. Black and Brown communities are bracing—again—for harm, erasure, and blame. Queer and trans communities are scanning rooms, schools, streets, and policies for signs that we are no longer welcome or safe. People in recovery are feeling the ground shift beneath their feet, wondering whether the fragile scaffolding of safety, routine, and hope can hold under the weight of collective stress.

The death of Renee Nicole Good has landed like a rupture—one more name carried into a long lineage of loss that never seems to receive adequate time, care, or reckoning. And layered onto this are recent political incidents and acts of violence that amplify uncertainty: Who is safe? Where is safe? What spaces can still hold us without harm?

As a clinician, I am trained to sit with distress without rushing to fix it. As a person in recovery, I know how dangerous unspoken fear can be. As a researcher, I understand how collective trauma lives not only in headlines, but in nervous systems.

What many people are experiencing right now is not weakness or overreaction—it is threat response.

When violence, hate, and instability surface—especially when they target identity, belonging, or survival—the psyche does what it has always done: it scans for danger. Sleep becomes elusive. Irritability rises. Old symptoms reawaken. Cravings return. Dissociation creeps in. Faith in institutions, systems, and even one another begins to fracture.

From a Jungian lens, these moments activate the collective shadow—the parts of society we refuse to integrate fear, rage, supremacy, abandonment, dehumanization. When the shadow goes unexamined, it gets projected. Entire communities become symbols rather than humans. Violence becomes justified. Silence becomes complicity.

And the cost is borne—again and again—by those who already live closest to the margins.

To the Jewish clients, colleagues, and community members holding grief, rage, and ancestral terror in their bodies: your fear makes sense.

To Black and Brown communities who are exhausted from being resilient, from mourning publicly while surviving privately: your anger and numbness are not pathology.

To Queer and trans people wondering if visibility has once again become a liability: your hypervigilance is an understandable response to a world that keeps debating your right to exist.

To those in recovery who are white-knuckling sobriety or stability right now: the urge to escape pain does not mean you have failed—it means you are human.

As a provider, I want to be clear about something we do not say often enough: you are not meant to metabolize this alone.

Safety is not just the absence of violence. It is the presence of attunement. Of community. Of spaces where grief does not have to be justified, explained, or minimized.

If you are finding it hard to locate “safe places” right now, I invite a gentler question: Who helps my nervous system settle—even a little?

Sometimes safety is not a location. It is a person. A group. A ritual. A moment of truth-telling without correction.

From a social-emotional perspective, what heals collective pain is not denial or forced positivity—it is witnessing. Naming what is happening. Allowing complexity. Refusing to flatten grief into slogans or silence.

For those of us who are helpers, healers, and clinicians: this moment calls us not to perfection, but to integrity. To examine our own fear, bias, and burnout. To avoid neutrality that harms. To remember that professionalism does not require emotional disappearance.

For those who feel lost, scared, or untethered: you are not broken for struggling in broken systems.

And for all of us—across difference, across pain—I believe this remains true:

Healing does not mean the world becomes safe overnight. It means we become more skilled at finding one another in the dark.

May we choose presence over paralysis. May we protect our recovery, our identities, and our humanity with the same urgency we bring to protecting others. May we keep telling the truth—even when it trembles.

You are not alone. And your pain deserves to be held with dignity.