Episode 5: We Can Be Whole Again - Pathways to Healing

Update: 2025-07-22

Description

In this episode of The Whole Again Pod, hosts Leslie Briner and Teddy McGlynn-Wright explore the fifth and final statement of the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework: “We can be whole again. Pathways to healing occur anytime we do anything that rebuilds safety, agency, dignity, or belonging.” Drawing on both story and practice, we look at how healing can happen in our bodies individually, in relationships, and across systems.

This episode begins with a discussion of the pathways (or doorways) that over time become practices, all together striving to re-build our safety, agency, dignity, and belonging. Teddy and Leslie offer tangible examples of restoring safety, agency, dignity, and belonging through individual practices like bearing witness, offering choice, and co-regulation as well as collective and systemic strategies including campaign finance reform, taxation, and truth and reconciliation committees.

Referenced in this episode

Whole Again Pod, Episodes 1-4

My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

“Neurons that fire together wire together.” In 1949, psychologist Donald Hebb introduced the assembly theory of how the brain’s neurons respond to the same stimulus connecting preferentially to form neuronal ensembles.

How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Firearms data and self harm

Movement for Campaign Finance Reform

Structural Racism and State Tax Policy: A Walk Through History

Reconnecting Communities Pilot

Collective Effervescence

Émile Durkheim – The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). The original source of the term collective effervescence. Durkheim used it to describe the shared energy and sense of unity people experience during communal rituals and gatherings.

Barbara Ehrenreich – Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006). A cultural history exploring how humans have long sought experiences of collective joy and effervescence through dance, festivals, and public celebrations.