Activism and Mental Health: Why Is Activism Important

Feb 11

Activism as a Healing Path for Trauma Survivors

Activism is a powerful avenue for mental health and trauma healing and transformation, particularly for trauma survivors seeking to channel their experiences into positive change. It is crucial for survivors to approach activism and mental health with self-compassion, awareness, and a deep understanding of their triggers.

Activism and Mental Health: Why is Activism Important

Embarking on a journey of activism and mental health can often become a profound healing path for trauma survivors, offering a sense of purpose, empowerment, and community connection.

However, navigating this path while also prioritizing one's own emotional and mental well-being as a survivor requires a delicate balance. For activism and mental health, it’s essential to find ways to actively engage with important causes and advocate for change in one's community while simultaneously being mindful of setting boundaries, practicing self-care, and seeking support when needed.

Activism can serve as a transformative tool for trauma healing, as well as offer practical activist resources and strategies for survivors to advocate for change while honoring their own needs, activist self care, and well-being.

Why Is Activism Important

Activism in important because by actively participating in our communities and embracing activism, we, as involved citizens, possess the power to enact positive change on a global scale. Activism is important through shaping and influencing the world around us, survivors can find alignment with their core values, fostering personal growth and resilience.

One of the most potent change agents—whether it’s recovery from trauma, depression, anxiety, heartbreak, etc.—is to connect with the community and build social networks and this makes activism very important for survivors.

Activism is one of the best ways to connect because you connect with people who share similar values and are mobilizing and actively engaged.

You also get to share and celebrate the wins and changes that come about, as well as have a community that comforts and consoles each other with everything going on in the world.

Sometimes, activism seems to be the only action we can take, especially when things in the world seem far beyond our power and control as individuals to enact change.

Many of the things currently happening in our world are horrific, complex, and extremely difficult for anyone to take on individually. What I believe is really important is how much we, as citizens, come together to make our voices heard.

It makes people in power highly uncomfortable to see how much we are not okay with their actions. Communicating that to them in various ways will help shift our world.

We may not be able to change some of our leaders' direct decisions immediately, but we are changing the community around us.

We Got Us: Activism as Community Building

Survivors of trauma and violence find comfort in witnessing their community unite against violence, thereby fostering a sense of safety and support for them.

Activism is a beautiful way to show survivors the type of community they live in and that they are welcome there.

Our culture tends to pathologize anger and rage, claiming it to be bad or wrong. However, activism can help us feel, process, and express this anger.

There’s a lot of messaging out there that expects us not to be angry. There are also many gender-based stereotypes around who gets to express anger and in what way. It’s imperative to validate and connect with the anger that is there. It won’t simply just disappear.

Anger is an emotion that tells us that what is happening is not okay. It prepares us for our fight response. Anger can be incredibly powerful, generating a lot of energy, power, motivation, and mobilization.

Many of the world's significant movements—or likely all of the world's major movements—were born from anger.

What’s really powerful about activism is that it’s a way to act on our anger, express it, and allow it to move through us in a way that’s very self-affirming because it connects us directly to our personal values.

Activism is about connecting to social justice or community issues, expressing that connection, and taking action in the immediate moment.

On the other hand, it can be very emotionally taxing and triggering. We need to use skills while we engage in activism and participate sustainably.

We must actively work on preventing burnout while participating in activism because any kind of activism requires persistence.

When we burn out after a couple of months because things don’t move as quickly as we’d like or expect them to, it can wear on us that we’re doing all this work, and it feels like nothing is progressing.

If burnt out, we might return to our status quo and daily lives. We can get disconnected, and the movement will stall. We must care for ourselves to persist in our chosen activities and connect with our values.

Activist Self Care

Here are some Activist Self Care skills that can be helpful to us when engaging in activism in a way that is effective for us in our recovery and also contributing to our communities:

Activist Mindfulness
Art and Social Activism: Engage in expressive activities
Connect with basic activist self-care needs:
What is value based: Connecting activism to our personal values and long-term goals rather than short-term outcomes
Joy as Resistance: Engage in pleasant activities

1. Activist Mindfulness:

For activist self care, we must check in with ourselves every day.

Mindfulness doesn’t just involve meditating, calming the mind, or practicing guided imagery. Sometimes, mindfulness is just a moment of pausing, taking a breath, and asking yourself what your body and mind feel—simply noticing and taking stock.

When we check in with ourselves mindfully, we become conscious of any needs that might exist.

Do you need any skills to cope?
Do you need to ground yourself?
Do you need to move your body?
Do you need rest?
Do you need connection?

What do you need right now, and how can you provide that for yourself?

This mindfulness of our needs helps us practice self-awareness. It allows us to make more intuitive decisions about how to engage at any given moment.

That can be powerful with activism, so we can engage, connect, take action, rest, and cycle through those steps effectively to sustain activism in our lives.

Something that can also be essential for trauma survivors engaging in activism—particularly public activism (marches, protests, etc.)—is to be mindful of your sensory needs.

Trauma can make our senses much more sensitive or hypervigilent.

Some helpful measures to reduce overstimulation include wearing noise-reducing earplugs, having a weighted blanket at home or in your car, or having stuffed animals, fidget toys, or anything soothing to you on hand.

As we’re going through and engaging in activism, we want to titrate our exposure and be very specific with our exposure to whatever it is we’re engaging in.

So, suppose we’re engaging in gender equality or women’s rights activism. In that case, we want to be very specific in our engagement and give ourselves measurable, manageable doses.

We should take in a bit at a time and back away from exposure when we feel like we’ve had enough before we get overwhelmed.

We want to prevent burnout, but we also don’t want to get overexposed and develop vicarious trauma from bearing witness to too much too quickly. If we take the time to understand the exposure level we can take, mindfulness will help us observe this and recognize when we hit a wall.

We want to connect with like-minded people for emotional support in this process, which is why activist communities can be highly beneficial. They share our values and understanding of the world and can help us during emotionally distressing events.

There will be a lot of disappointment with activism because it is a way of pushing back against systemic issues. Sometimes, the movement takes a while. Getting emotional support from a community will help us keep going in a way aligned with our values.

2. Art and Social Activism: Engage in expressive activities

Art and social activism have a profound impact in the world and with trauma healing. Art and expressive activities for social activism can include painting, writing, singing, playing an instrument, dancing, etc. All of these things help emotions flow through our bodies.

Art and social activism is about activating anger, rage, and big emotions, potentially including intense grief and distress. Having expressive activities where we can move those emotions through will help us stay on track and avoid burnout.

You don’t have to pressure yourself to write the next great American novel. It can simply be journaling, writing down thoughts, or writing a quick poem without any expectations.

If it ends up being something you’re really proud of and want to share with people, that’s great!

However, simply slapping some paint onto a canvas, coloring in a coloring book, scribbling some quick drawings onto paper, dancing around your living room, or anything that helps you feel that sense of movement or release of the emotion is just as effective!

3. Connect with basic activist self-care needs

Activist self care needs include eating, sleeping, drinking water, feeling emotionally regulated, attending to physical and emotional needs, and effectively avoiding mood-altering substances.

This is important because we want you to be as alert, aware, and present as possible when engaging in activism so we can make timely decisions about how to engage. This also prevents exacerbating political anxiety

4. What is value based? Connecting activism to our personal values and long-term goals rather than short-term outcomes

Value based is when we connect activism to personal core values and work toward long term goals rather than prioritize short term outcomes. Short-term outcomes may motivate us to become engaged—we’re not okay with what’s happening and want to ensure this changes in the next election. This might mobilize us, but we also want to connect to our long-term goals.

It is essential to ensure that we connect to long-term goals and values so that we can persist and sustain ourselves.

Frequently, with activism, short-term outcomes turn out differently than we want them to. They might, but more than likely, we’ll get some, but not all, of what we’re looking for. We may not see any of that change just yet, but we don’t want to give up just because it didn't turn out a certain way.

We don’t want to give up or relent. We want to keep pushing, so connecting long-term goals and personal values will help us continue.

For example, you may have a personal value around women’s sexual health and access to sexual healthcare.

Recently, we have seen all kinds of legislation governing women’s access to healthcare.

The short-term outcome may be, “I want to make sure my governing bodies, the people in power, know that I am not okay with abortion bans, and I’m going to push back against these bans.”

But we don’t want to stop there. The movement needs to keep going.

Why is there a high mortality rate and a disproportionately high mortality rate for women of color who are giving birth?

We need to get down to the bottom of the racism, sexism, and misogynoir that exists in the medical field entirely.

5. Joy as Resistance: Engage in pleasant activities

Joy as resistance is another seemingly obvious skill to employ when engaging in community activism and pursuing social justice issues is to engage in pleasant activities.

Many times, especially when we’re getting busy with activism and experiencing political anxiety, we can look back and realize we didn’t do anything just to have fun and enjoy the moment.

Doing something unrelated to activism to enjoy yourself and your life, connect with others, or engage in something that feels good or brings up positive emotions is really powerful.

Those positive emotions provide fuel to continue pursuing justice as well as help buffer any potential traumatic exposure and political anxiety.

It’s important to remember that we’re multifaceted people who may have values related to social justice, but those are not our only values. Maybe we also have creative and relationship values and want to be active in all of those.

Engaging in pleasant events is a wonderful way to incorporate more of our values regularly.

Activism Fatigue

Activism fatigue can set in when we work hard toward our goals. Activism fatigue can also interfere with us continuing long term work. There are many different ways to engage in activism and avoid activism fatigue. Pick one or two topics or one or two specific actions as your focus points.

So, maybe you like gathering with your community and marching. That’s great! Look into what marches are being held in your area, create signs, and stock up on any equipment you may need to stay safe.

Or maybe you have specific issues you want to get involved in—for example, women’s sexual health, non-violent communication, abolishing prisons, etc. Whatever the issue, connect with one or two and dedicate effort and time to the cause.

This is important because there are so many things we connect with, care about, and want to help with, but we are also limited in our time and energy resources and we want to avoid activism fatigue.

If we give a little bit of time and energy to everything, everything will move rather slowly and activism fatigue sets in, but if we give time and energy to one or two things, we can make significant movements with those issues.

Also, understand that other people in our community will focus on the topics we don’t focus on. Connecting with communities focusing on these different topics can be constructive without necessarily engaging with them directly.

It can be a great way to stay informed and reassure you that things are progressing.

You can take action by protesting publicly, participating in marches, sharing social media content, etc. When it comes to social media, make sure you remain educated and up to date, mainly because people often engage with boycotts and social media in a very short-lived way and, therefore, has a limited effect.

Engage in them in a way that is realistic for you.

How to Get Involved in Activism

How do we get involved in activism? First, find methods to get involved in activism that work for you and are realistic for your time and energy resources.

Many people feel social media isn't the best way to connect with others. That doesn’t mean they’re apolitical or not socially engaged, but we can use our relationships to engage politically and socially.

You can get involved in activism through having conversations with family, friends, peers, and community members, hosting discussion or book groups, connecting with different local organizations, etc.

You can create educational content that people can engage in, such as fliers, songs, or signs to get involved in activism

If able, consider making financial contributions to organizations aligned with causes you are passionate about.

While well-known entities like Planned Parenthood engage in impactful social initiatives and direct services, I encourage you to research smaller organizations dedicated to similar causes, actively seeking donations.

Some smaller organizations, especially local nonprofit organizations, do not get the publicity, notoriety, or donations they need to operate effectively. Often, it is the small organizations that make the most change in the world around you. Research some local organizations engaging in the activities or values that are important to you.

Get involved in local politics, even if that is just voting in the local elections. Your vote in those elections carries a lot more power, and often, we’ll see a lot more change through local policy and politics.

It can be rewarding to see some of the candidates and politics you support take off and make changes. You can also call your representatives—local, state, or federal.

Another way to get involved in activism is to provide direct services to people who are affected by the issue you engage with or are also engaged in activism work.

This can include providing support groups, transportation, meals, and help out with support services. Direct services can be compelling and supportive in keeping our activists engaged and working to meet the needs of the people facing the issues directly.

One of the most helpful things we can do to get involved in activism is provide support for vicarious trauma. We can hold space for people and connect them to mental health services and first aid services if needed so they can process some of the impact the issues or activism has on them.

Activism and Mental Health

Activism is a powerful tool for mental health and for survivors, enabling us to tap into our motivation to effect change and address injustices in our world. This proactive engagement contributes to healing from trauma and presents many opportunities for pursuing it in diverse and impactful ways.

Activism has the power to not only ignite social change but also to deeply heal and empower trauma survivors on their journey toward recovery and resilience.

By embracing the intersection of activism and trauma-informed mental health, survivors can navigate triggering symptoms with compassion and strength, making meaningful contributions to causes they are passionate about while safeguarding their own well-being.

Remember, self-care and self-compassion are not just optional luxuries but essential practices for sustainable activism.

As we continue to advocate for a better world, let us also prioritize our own healing journey, honoring our past while actively creating a brighter, more just future for all.

You can listen to this episode on my podcast, “Initiated Survivor.” The episode is titled “Activism as a Healing Path for Trauma Survivors” and is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

Want to learn more about YOUR specific trauma recovery style? Take the QUIZ and get unique skills specific to you!

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