167: Healing and Helping with Mutual Aid with Dean Spade
b'In this conversation with Dean Spade we resolve a long-running challenge in my understanding: when we talked with Dr. john powell on the topic of Othering and Belonging a couple of years ago we discussed how volunteering promotes othering, because it perpetuates the idea that the volunteer is a person with resources to give, and the recipient has little in the way of useful knowledge or resources of their own.\\xa0 Dr. powell agreed, but we didn\\u2019t have time to discuss what to do instead.\\n\\n \\n\\nIn this episode we finally punch out that lingering hanging chad of knowledge and talk with Dean Spade about the concept of mutual aid, which is the topic of his book: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And The Next).\\xa0 In this conversation we discuss:\\n\\n \\n
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- What is mutual aid, and how it\\u2019s more effective than volunteering \\n \\t
- How we heal in community with others from the effects that benign-seeming systems like capitalism have on us \\n \\t
- Ways to find and get involved in mutual aid projects \\n
\\n \\n\\nAs Dean and I talked, I also realized how applicable these ideas are to the work I do with parents in the Taming Your Triggers workshop.\\xa0\\xa0\\n\\n \\n\\nIt\\u2019s not surprising that parents feel triggered by their child\\u2019s behavior when you consider the trauma that we\\u2019ve experienced.\\xa0 Even if you had \\u2018good parents,\\u2019 they still raised you to succeed within a system that told you to hide unacceptable parts of yourself so you could be \\u2018successful\\u2019 - which means getting good grades, going to college, getting a good job, buying a house, and raising a family.\\xa0 And we\\u2019re supposed to do all of this by ourselves, without relying on others - because then we\\u2019ll need to buy more stuff along the journey.\\n\\n \\n\\nOur culture uses shame to enforce these rules and keep us in line - that\\u2019s why we feel a sense of wrong-ness when we do something that isn\\u2019t socially acceptable - like asking for help, for example.\\n\\n \\n\\nBecause these traumas happened in community, they\\u2019re most effectively healed in community as well - just as these two parents did when they built on each other\\u2019s knowledge in the workshop earlier this year (screenshot shared with permission):\\n\\n \\n\\n\\n\\n \\n\\nIf you want to jump-start your ability to actually apply that knowledge in your interactions with your children by learning in community with others, then Taming Your Triggers will help you.\\n\\n \\n\\nJoin the waitlist to be notified when doors reopen.\\n\\n \\n\\n \\n\\n
\\n\\n \\n\\n \\n\\nDr. Dean Spade\'s Book\\n