I want to start by saying this is not a political post. I also have no desire to defend morality with anyone who chooses to dehumanize or minimize another, and I will not participate in any such debate.

Recently, I went against my better judgment and engaged in a social media discussion relating to politics. I have found that staying silent in the face of injustice is not something I am comfortable with, and I also know that social media is not an avenue for social change.  I would love to see statistics on how many opinions have been changed on the good old book of faces (and how many families have been torn apart and friendships lost).  Generally, my activism is focused on supporting organizations and nonprofits, contacting my representatives at all levels (often and annoyingly, I am sure), and ensuring people know there are safe spaces and safe people when the world sometimes looks very lonely and very grey.  I work hard to spread love and promote healing, regulation, and connection, even when it doesn’t land with some people.  I do, however, chime in on others’ posts when people unfairly add to the mental health stigma that exists in this country.  For reasons deep in my subconscious, that is an area where I blur my boundaries.  When it occurs, I try to do it as logically and professionally as possible; I always ground myself in a place of love and understanding; I call it what it is; and I always regret it. I am human, and I make mistakes. 

In the post I am referring to, someone who I know, care about, and respect, questioned whether the recent “No Kings” rally was “bad group therapy,” suggesting that people who show up to protest are experiencing some kind of mental health crisis, that their response to the world around them is pathological, a symptom of fixation rather than a legitimate expression of something real. 

I engaged. As a doctor of psychology, I forget how well people deflect and am then quickly reminded.  But I engaged, because two things struck me in my feelers, and they bother me enough, and I see them enough, that I need to say them out loud here, in a space where this isn’t a conversation about which side is right or wrong, or which side is winning or losing, but rather about how this impacts all of us.  This is about the humanity of us all, of what we put into the world, the judgments we place on others, the unfair expectations we project without meeting the same expectations with our own thoughts and behaviors.

The first thing: we have to stop weaponizing mental illness, mental injury, and any type of brain disorder (physical, psychological, or physiological) as an insult.

When we reach for words like “crazy,” “deranged,” or “crisis” to describe people whose behavior we disagree with, we aren’t making a clinical observation. We’re using the lived experience of people who genuinely struggle with mental and physical health conditions, people who deserve care, compassion, and zero stigma, as a rhetorical weapon. That causes real harm. To real people. Even if that wasn’t your “intent” or that “wasn’t how I meant it.”

I have sat with people whose mental health struggles have cost them jobs, relationships, custody of their children, and their own sense of self-worth in large part because of the stigma attached to those words. When we throw “mental illness” around as a descriptor for people we want to dismiss or minimize, we deepen that stigma. We make the world a little more hostile for everyone who is already fighting hard just to be seen as whole.

We can do better. We have to.

The second thing: protest is not pathology. Protest is legacy.

• The 8-hour workday (it used to be 10-16, no overtime, no breaks required, no minimum age, no sick days, no vacation, no holidays)
• Minimum wage
• Child labor laws
• Workplace safety regulations and workman’s compensation
• The Family Medical Leave Act
• Unionization
• Equal pay protections (this is ongoing)
• The end of slavery
• Women’s right to vote
• Desegregation of schools
• The Legality of interracial marriage
• The Civil Rights Act
• The Voting Rights Act
• Marriage equality
• Protections for people with disabilities
• Gender equity in education

Do you know what those are?  Those are all rights we now have, hard-fought through protest.  Through rallies.  Through community gatherings.  Through those so-called “bad group therapies.”

Every right we hold, every protection we take for granted, was at some point someone else’s radical, inconvenient, uncomfortable demand. We don’t get to enjoy the inheritance and then condemn the labor that built it. Dismissing protest as dysfunction asks us to forget our own history.  It doesn’t matter what side you are on, if you are on a side at all, if you wouldn’t personally make that choice, or if you disagree with your entire being about the reason for it.  It is a choice we have, a right.  Not a dysfunction. 

And from a trauma-informed and nervous system perspective? The urge to do something in the face of perceived threat is not a disorder. It is a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems are designed to do: moving toward safety, agency, and connection. Protest, at its core, is a collective regulation strategy. It is people saying, “I will not stay frozen. I will move. I will find others who feel what I feel. I will not be alone in this.”

That is not a crisis. That is resilience.

And if we’re going to talk about what is and isn’t a healthy response to the world we’re living in right now, we also need to talk about who gets to make that call and who doesn’t.

Now, about who gets to define harm.

This section I feel very strongly about, and it is so important in trauma-informed practice.

Oppression is defined by the people who experience it, not the people who perpetuate it, benefit from it, or have never had to navigate the world carrying it.

Not by men, who have never moved through the world in a woman’s body.

Not by straight people, who have never had to hide who they love.

Not by white people, who have never been followed, profiled, or dismissed because of their skin.

Not by those whose faith has never been used as justification for their own exclusion, discrimination, or erasure.

Not by able-bodied or neurotypical people, who have never had to fight just to access the spaces everyone else takes for granted.

Not by cisgender people, who have never had their identity treated as a debate.

Not by wealthy people, who have never had to choose between dignity and survival.

People in positions of privilege do not get to define oppression. Full stop.

Privilege doesn’t mean your life has been easy or that things were handed to you. It means that your skin color, gender, sexuality, ability, or some other factor wasn’t one of the things that made it harder.

When we allow privilege to define oppression, marginalized communities lose their voice. Their lived experience gets reframed as an overreaction. Their grief becomes “drama.” Their fear becomes “sensitivity.” Their protest becomes a “mental health crisis.”

Here’s what happens when we do that: the people who most need to be heard go quiet, or they get loud and then get dismissed as unstable. Either way, nothing changes. The same people stay protected. The same people stay exposed. And we call that “normal.”

In trauma-informed work, one very important concept is this: when someone tells us they have been harmed, we believe them. We don’t adjudicate their pain. We don’t decide whether their experience was actually hard enough to count, whether their fear was really warranted, or whether their grief is proportionate to what happened. We listen. We witness. We trust that they are the authority on their own interior experience.

We don’t get to decide what was hard for someone else. That is not our call to make.

A regulated nervous system doesn’t need to control the narrative.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: a need to control, whether other people’s responses, other people’s emotions, the way people express their pain, or how someone else chooses to live or sin, is almost always a signal of a dysregulated nervous system. It is frequently a trauma response. Control is what we reach for when we don’t feel safe.

Healed people don’t need to tell others how to grieve. Healed people don’t need to decide whose fear counts. Healed people don’t need to reframe another person’s experience to make themselves more comfortable.

And a regulated, progressing society? It listens when the people it has historically silenced finally speak. It doesn’t respond with ridicule or armchair diagnoses. It responds with curiosity. With openness. With the understanding that when someone has been harmed, the person who was harmed gets to say so.

That is not a weakness. That is not “leftist validation,” and for the record, dismissive or dehumanizing language toward anyone on any side causes the same harm.  That is not a mental health crisis, bad group therapy, or a symptom of fixation.

That is how healing happens. For individuals, for communities, and for societies that have the courage to keep growing.

I want to close with this: the opposite of a dysregulated world is not a quiet one. It is not a compliant one. It is not one where the people who are hurting simply learn to hurt more privately so the rest of us are more comfortable.

The opposite of a dysregulated world is a connected one. One where pain gets to be named. Where protests get to exist. Where the people who have been carrying the heaviest packs for the longest time finally get to set them down, not because someone decided their burden was real enough, but because we stopped making them prove it.

That is the world I am working toward. I hope you are too.

If this resonates, you can find me at hopestorm.org or reach out directly. This work matters, and so do you.