dr.deanza

The Fall Equinox reminds us of the balance between joy and pain, the harmony of celebrating what we’ve worked for, and preparing for the necessary transitions ahead.

As we reflect on the harvest, both literal and symbolic, this season invites us to honor the fruits of our labor, acknowledge the growth we’ve achieved, and celebrate the communities that have nurtured us. Like the trees shedding their leaves, fall teaches us that letting go is part of the cycle of healing and growing. 🍂

In a world shaped by colonialism and capitalism, we’re often told that productivity defines our worth, that endless work is the path to “success”. Fall shows us that rest, reflection, and release are vital. 🌙 Healing is a series of cycles. We don’t have to rush. There is power in embracing the pace of the land.

Through the wisdom of fall we are reminded that our liberation is interconnected. The support of community and our ability to weave stories together help us to recognize our inherent worth and belovedness, especially in spaces where our very existence is radical. Let’s empower one another to heal, rest, and move through these cycles of life with grace. 🍁💫

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Image description:
Orange and black writing with white and beige background. Each slide has a drawing of animal and one slide has a pickup truck. Text reads:
Slide 1:
“Fall Equinox: A Time of Harvest, Transition, Honoring Cycles, and Letting Go”

Slide 2:
“Celebrate the Harvest: Honor the fruits of your labor, the seeds you’ve planted, and the hard work you’ve put into your healing journey.”
ID to be continued in comments.

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Religious abuse is when a person or persons uses their power and authority, through any means possible, to control, demean and coerce you into submitting or complying with their will or desired outcome. A healthy spiritual leader affirms your process, hopes, safety, boundaries, dreams, gifts, and capacity. A healthy spiritual community also affirms, celebrates, and encourages.

If you are searching for a new spiritual community, it can feel scary and vulnerable, especially if you’ve been harmed. The process of finding new connections in a religious or spiritual community can feel overwhelming because it brings those hurts to the surface. Entering into a new community doesn’t mean we have to give our trust away. Trust is established through healthy connections built over time.

Give yourself space to observe and to listen to your own body and intuition. Exploring your spirituality is a personal, intimate relationship. Your journey is your own. It might be a process of leaving beliefs and rituals that do not align with where you are and finding home in new traditions rooted in your ancestry. Curiosity is the greatest gift and offering you can give yourself.

💗

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Image description:
Slide 1: From a Trauma Therapist. Is Religious Trauma Real? Image of multicolor mosaic heart.
Slide 2: Ever wonder about an experience you’ve had in a religious environment and/or upbringing that has never felt right to you, but you’re afraid to say it was traumatic because you don’t want to be wrong or be perceived as overly dramatic?
ID to be continued in comments below.
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trauma

Rumination may be your bodymind trying to problem solve, get closure, protect you from painful emotions, or establish a sense of safety in chaotic and uncertain situations. Rumination can be an incredibly exhausting and overwhelming experience, but here is hope, and relief is possible. We can welcome, observe, and listen to the parts of us that are scared and just want to protect us. We can explore the core needs rumination has met for us, and find alternative ways to meet those needs.

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5 Tips for how to navigate rumination.
For when we feel like all the thinking will help us feel better, but it just ends up being a road to more overwhelm.

What purpose does rumination serve?
Over the course of our lives, we’ve all adopted different coping mechanisms to help us survive, manage emotions, and protect us from harm. Some coping mechanisms we’ve learned early in life do not serve us in the same way they did when we were young. What purpose does rumination serve? Rumination may be your bodymind trying to problem solve, get closure, protect you from painful emotions, or establish a sense of safety in chaotic and uncertain situations. We can honor rumination and see it as part of our wiring to survive and navigate the world.
Image description continued in comments

As we enter Su***de Awareness Month, it's vital to acknowledge how mental health and suicidality are deeply tied to oppression and state violence. Healing happens when we come together to build relationships rooted in compassion and support. If you're feeling this way, remember that it’s not a sign of personal weakness. These emotions are an extremely valid nervous system response to ongoing experiences of racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of systemic violence, and you are so deserving of care and community support.

Be gentle with yourself and reach out to those who uplift you. ♥️ Does reaching out for support and receiving care feel painful and complicated for you at times? Well it does for most of us! In the spirit of taking action, I want to uplift the offerings of , especially their Radical Mental Health First Aid workshops. offers such a bounty of wisdom and knowledge when it comes to growing the tools to be able to give and receive community care and recognizing our own belovedness. Go give them a follow and support their powerful work! And see the slides for additional resources!

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1: Su***de Awareness Month
Su***de Prevention Is Rooted in Collective Care and Systemic Change
2: As we enter Su***de Awareness Month, it's vital to acknowledge how mental health and suicidality are deeply tied to oppression and state violence. For many BIPOC women, and other marginalized groups, feelings of hopelessness are intertwined with ongoing experiences and histories of racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic violence.
3: A 2023 study by the Boston University School of Medicne found that Black women between 18-65 years face the highest su***de risk among women, regardless of socioeconomic status. Image description to be continued in comments.

***deawarenessmonth

For those of us at the margins, our survival was never intended. Silence doesn’t guarantee safety. Our survival is not guaranteed. Audre Lorde teaches us that we might as well speak anyway, love anyway, and live anyway, and live a life aligned with our most deeply held values. We keep each other safe when we raise our voices for one another. So let’s get to it! ❤️‍🔥

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[Image description: Pink and white text with beige background. Text reads: Excerpt from “A Litany for Survival” By Audre Lorde “...when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” On the second slide, text reads: For those of us at the margins, our survival was never intended. Silence doesn’t guarantee safety. Our survival is not guaranteed. Audre Lorde teaches us that we might as well speak anyway, love anyway, and live anyway, and live a life aligned with our most deeply held values. We keep each other safe when we raise our voices for one another. So let’s get to it!]

Rage is an element of grief, and a sacred expression in response to injustice. When we give rage voice it takes the sting out of the lies systematic oppression tells us & advocates for liberation for all those who suffer injustice.

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Image description:
Text says: Rage is an element of grief. I share this experience not to say my path is the only & right path, but to illustrate that rage is an element of grief. Rage needs a path to effectively burn. When rage is left unattended on a slow, smoldering burn-- it turns into self-harm & self-hate. Rage is a sacred expression to injustice. When we give rage voice it takes the sting out of the lies systematic oppression tells us & advocates for liberation for all those who suffer injustice.

Rage is an element of grief. Rage needs a path to effectively burn. When rage is left unattended on a slow, smoldering burn, it turns into self-harm & self-hate.
Rage is a sacred expression in response to injustice. When we give rage voice it takes the sting out of the lies systematic oppression tells us & advocates for liberation for all those who suffer injustice. Yes, heal yourself and receive the support to stay the course in this holy work of healing your inner wounds. AND don’t let it stop there... find your path and give space to the fire that burns in you. Together we can weave a tapestry that can hold all of us.

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Slide 1:
From a Trauma Therapist
How capitalism glorifies individualism
& entitlement in therapy

Slide 2: Yes, yes, yes your experience in therapy is important. When entering into therapy-- you are entering a sacred, safe space to create a collaborative container to explore and understand yourself better. This is deeply empowering & liberative work. However, in the U.S. therapy has become increasingly self-centered and self-serving due to capitalism which breeds entitlement. The hope is that therapy invites us to human better together. To act in love and respect with one another in community.
Image description to be continued in comments.

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We need to remember that we are not doing this work on our own, we are on a path that our ancestors laid out for us. To keep moving forward, we must lean into the imagination of our ancestors as a blueprint for how we can show up in the world. There is an intentional disconnect from those stories. A disconnect from their bold and genius models for resistance and transformation, like our ancestors during the Stonewall Uprising, the Civil Rights movement, and so much more. We have to root ourselves in the fact that we do not have to invent everything from scratch. Our elders and our ancestors have been fighting for a long time, and we can call on their medicines, tools, and strategies to make a path forward.
Our healing is political.
All of our movements, spanning forward and backward through time, are connected.
We must keep learning, connecting, grieving, growing, and building toward collective liberation ♥️

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Image description:
Slide 1: From A Trauma Therapist
Ancestral Blueprints for Liberation
We’ve been here before and we’ll move forward again.
Image of hands holding seeds, with flowers and maps layered behind them.

Slide 2: The feeling of defeat and hopelessness are strategies of empire.
In reality a different strategy is possible. There IS forward movement, even in moments when we feel like we are not getting anywhere, or going backwards. We need to remember that we are not doing this work on our own, we are on a path that our ancestors laid out for us. To keep moving forward, we must lean into the imagination of our ancestors as a blueprint for how we can show up in the world.
Image of river.
ID continued in comments soon

In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis offers more than just a call to action, but a compass for navigating interconnected struggles against oppression across the world. Angela Davis reminds us that the struggles against apartheid, occupation, and incarceration are deeply interconnected. The trauma imposed by state violence, whether through militarized policing, settler colonialism, or prisons, crosses borders. And so must our healing and our resistance!
Palestinian “sumud” (roughly translated to steadfastness and perseverance) is not only political, it’s ancestral, embodied, and relational. It teaches us that healing is not separate from liberation, but a force that sustains it. As we work to abolish systems that cage, surveil, and silence, we must also create spaces that hold grief, cultivate resilience, and remember that none of us are free until all of us are free, from Palestine to the U.S. and beyond.

Me: ‘Why am I feeling like this?’ My body: ‘Because you haven’t rested in 3 weeks.’ Me: ‘Nah, must be something else 🤨💀…
What if your emotions weren’t obstacles to overcome, but messages waiting to be heard? In a world that teaches us to suppress, ignore, or “fix” our feelings, many of us struggle to see our emotions as anything but burdens. Especially for BIPOC women, capitalism, ableism, and white supremacy culture have taught us that productivity matters more than rest, and that our pain is something to “push through.”
What if healing wasn’t about “getting rid” of difficult emotions, but learning to listen to them? What if every feeling (grief, anger, exhaustion) wasn’t a failure, but a signal from your body asking for care? It can be scary making space for these feelings.
Healing is an ongoing practice of curiosity.
Feeling your emotions feels overwhelming, especially if you have complex trauma. When you’ve spent years in survival mode, slowing down to listen to your feelings can feel unfamiliar, even scary. But healing isn’t about diving in all at once, it’s about taking small, compassionate steps toward yourself. Start with curiosity, go at your own pace, and remind yourself, your emotions are not here to hurt you, they’re here to guide you toward what you need.
We can ask: What is this feeling telling me? What unmet need is calling for my attention? When we listen, we reclaim our relationship with ourselves, and disrupt the systems that tell us we must endure suffering in silence.
What’s one emotion you’ve been struggling with lately? Can you get curious about what it’s asking from you?

Image description: Black text in blue text bubble: “From a Trauma Therapist, Healing is getting used to viewing your emotions differently. Healing is getting curious & asking yourself, what need might this emotion be signaling?”

Free offering. Just bring yourself, glass of water, blanket, candle & something to write on. .deanza