“There’s a new, horrific headline every week.”
“I’m feeling overwhelmed because everything happens all at once.”
“What do we do at this point?”
These are regular refrains from the public as weariness grows around us. With amplified and constant exposure to appalling stories—from images of Israel bombing and starving Gaza to reports of ICE roaming through communities and abducting our neighbors—it is no wonder that people either disengage or remain trapped in a cycle of panic and outrage. Our windows of tolerance are narrowing by the day, and it’s becoming more challenging to pace ourselves and refuel our internal resources.
As a psychotherapist, I aim to witness and validate our emotional responses to collective pain while also encouraging us to rest from the prevalence of digitalized and vicarious trauma. But as a grassroots organizer, I am also committed to ushering ourselves back to sustained, community-based movements to interrupt the systemic root causes of our collective pain and distress. Yes, I want us to process and contemplate, but I don’t want us to be inactive or unthoughtful. We need ways to make organizing work more doable in the long term.
I refer to this notion of doability because even in leftist discourse, there is an energy of demand when it comes to “inviting” people into solidarity work—even to the point of weaponizing guilt just to force people to participate in the next community action. Such pressure often overlooks the exhaustion of our psychological and spiritual lives. Taken too far, the weaponization of quick solidarity can disregard the needs and attentions of our inner landscapes. How, then, do we make our participation both doable and sustainable, especially in times when despair and hopelessness feel like familiar companions?
One of the most effective strategies of a hyper-militarized regime is shock and awe, defined as “a strategy of overwhelming the enemy with an impressive show of military might.” This enemy is us. With the state violence rising at a dizzying pace, it’s easy to feel flooded and not know where or how to begin. In a state of shock, we may assume that defeating grand-scale state atrocity would require meeting it with grand-scale social action. Yet such expectations rise so high that they overwhelm us, leaving us debilitated and immobilized.
Growing up in the Philippines, I am grateful to have been in the company of seasoned organizers and human rights defenders who laid the foundations of today’s revolutions in the Global South. They generously taught me political education through both analysis and lived-experience with a paradigm often more collectivist and expansive than that of the West. As I compare those experiences with my experience of solidarity work in the United States, I’ve noticed that the North American worldview tends to seek grandiosity. Theatrics. Spectacle. This impulse to sensationalize “facts” and urgently react to them can negatively influence our commitments to social change. Oppressive forces understand this and leverage it against us. They exploit our underdeveloped capacity to self-soothe in the face of collective alarm, and they weaponize this reactivity by tightly controlling media and social platforms using these same shock-and-awe tactics.
But the organizers of the Global South teach otherwise: we don’t need to meet repression with spectacle. Sustainable grassroots organizing is built over time by everyday people contributing diverse skills, efforts, and capacities. That is to say, the most impactful actions are rarely flashy. They’re steady, cumulative, and deeply relational.
This shift from grandiosity entails a shift of worldview. The American Christian church and the American exceptionalism it often perpetuates may partly explain why the U.S. craves the spectacle. As theologian Soong-Chan Rah notes, American exceptionalism fuels the “Messianic complex of American Christians” who believe they must “go out and save the world,” thus creating expectations for triumphalistic or oversized actions, sacrifices, and results.
But it is the everyday and seemingly mundane bricks that build the whole. And the impasse—the overwhelming force that almost instantaneously destabilizes most Americans—is the internal pressure to undo oppression all at once, in one go, and in the best, most exceptional way possible.
In my work with grassroots organizers and human rights defenders, I’ve learned that a foundation of doability requires paying attention and listening to one’s capacity. Simple as this may seem, listening works. This is why most meetings in labor union and solidarity groups start with check-ins. These collective practices have made it doable to participate in social-change work. In check-ins, we connect more deeply whenever we listen to each other’s human-sized capacities and struggles. This kind of listening may seem small or routine, but it is radical in its simplicity. It reminds us that attentive presence—hearing what is actually here instead of what we expect to hear—is the groundwork of sustainable organizing. Yet beyond these intentional spaces, our collective capacity for such listening has been eroding.
The evolution of the internet has influenced our ability and willingness to listen these days. We have reached a time when there are endless platforms to share thoughts and experiences: the status-update field, the comment section, the curated feed, and so forth. While self-expression deserves protection and celebration—especially for the oppressed whose opinions and stories have long been silenced or outright banned—we are talking more than we are listening.
As a mental health practitioner, I am admittedly more sensitive to this cultural shift. My profession involves a considerable amount of listening at its core, but I have noticed how loud things have become. More concerning, listening has increasingly become relegated to those of us who do it professionally. But active listening is a crucial task of social-change work. We ought to devotionally listen to the needs and demands of the people and to use what is learned as a compass to direct strategy and purpose. This kind of listening extends beyond relationships and communities; it includes listening to our bodies. This invitation to listen to our bodies feels radical and defiant in a world that forces human beings to become like bots and bots more like human beings. When we listen to our bodies, we remember we are not machines who function without limit. We are our flesh, blood, and breath.
And so when we choose to not listen, we lose so much. The cost of not actively listening—of failing to be present—is the erosion of relationships. Communication is a foundation to connection, and when we stop listening, our bonds weaken. Our motivations for our struggle falter. Our shared dream for equity collapses. We owe it to one another to listen and to stay.
Weeks ago, I attended a virtual gathering of somatic counselors and spiritual leaders. One of the facilitators, Ian Goh, led a somatic meditation. Goh invited us to pay attention to different parts of our embodiment, be it our skin, hair, size and shape, facial features, hands. Goh guided us to bear witness to the paradox each part holds: both sociocultural messages and conditioning as well as the potential for liberation. As we surveyed the textures of our hands, Goh compassionately observed, “These hands carry the history of human labor and class systems. Soft hands versus calloused ones tell stories of privilege and work.” By attending to the body, Goh helped us see it as a “cultural artifact that [we] can intentionally engage with, honor, and potentially transform.”
Goh’s contemplative register of the body begins small—with a single part. We would do well to echo this in our lives. In a time when the world demands constant reaction, this practice calls us back to something better. It invites stillness over spectacle and asks us to ground our responses in the immediacy of our lives. It may not be a spectacular display, but it is a sustainable practice. From that sustainability, collective care—and collective power—can grow.
Gabes Torres is a psychotherapist, artist, and organizer who weaves together stories and community-rooted practices of healing and justice.
Image Credit: “Fingers in Water as Seen from Below” by Edward Ringwood Hewitt. Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Biodiversity Heritage Library / Library of Congress.