What Are Liberation Psychology and Healing Justice?
On May 22nd, former board member and co-founder of the Martín-Baró Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights, M. Brinton Lykes, joined our staff meeting to present on liberation psychology and healing justice. Over the course of an hour, she shared what she’s learned from years of working alongside movements and community organizations practicing healing justice — especially Indigenous women in Guatemala and their work healing from the structural violence they encounter.
Western psychology often focuses on individual healing and individual therapy. While Brinton does appreciate individual therapy’s role, it can miss the collective healing communities can do, and how that healing is as much about individual psyches as it is liberation from oppressive systems.
Because the term « healing » is used in psychology as a way of talking about the fact that peoples are no longer suffering. And in many of these cases… The suffering can be re-storied, but the suffering is ever present in people’s lives.
These women understand violence as multifaceted and as grounded in their material lives. So yes, they suffered from sexual abuse and racialized violence during the armed conflict, and often in their own families. But they saw poverty and the burdens of displacement as deeply constitutive of what violence is and what structural violence is…
So the first project I was ever involved in in Guatemala, in Chajul, was helping women build a corn mill, because they saw the corn mill as a resource that would contribute to their protagonism, or their being able to take actions on their own.
Rather than « empowerment, » communities Brinton has worked with emphasize that we must organize to realize and actualize our power — including through social movements, unions, and other expressions of collectivity.
This work urges psychologists to rethink the use of the term « empowerment ». The term empowerment, oddly enough… is a word that traveled from English into Spanish. It means giving power to somebody. And the communities in which I work say, « nobody gives power to anybody else. » That is, people recognize the power that they have…
Power has been turned by psychology into a transferable commodity, but it’s really a structural relationship.