In-Forming Communities of Healing Initiative at Vanderbilt Divinity School

I am just finishing up the first academic year of a three year collaboration with Vanderbilt Divinity School on bodies and healing.  The blog post below, that is posted on the VDS Voices blog, shares some of what is emerging in our work together.

Surviving sexualized violence resonates with surviving violence of many kinds—especially violence that is personalized, violence that penetrates our flesh, our self-understanding, and our ability to connect with the world around us.

Survival skills are idiosyncratic, and they are often wise in ways we can only understand fleetingly. These survival skills can deaden and disconnect us. They can leave our nerve endings raw and exposed. And these survival skills permeate and help shape a world—a world that sometimes re-harms, sometimes supports, and oftentimes wants to move along as if everything is as it should be.

The ubiquity and idiosyncrasy of these survival skills means that anyone can be triggered by anything at any time. This statement may be jarring. (click here for the full post)