By Sara Thorsen, LMFT and Krista Gaston, LMFT

Recorded by Sara Thorsen

“Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground.”
    ~ Francis Weller,  The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Introduction

It’s hard to describe the experience of providing mental health services in the last few years. This has always been heartfelt work, but unprecedented levels of grief, loss, sadness, panic, confusion, rage, and despair amongst the backdrop of a global pandemic and our ever unfolding climate crisis was harrowing to hold. Whether working in schools, jails, tech startups, community agencies, or in private practice– we all felt how hard this experience was and continues to be. Truthfully, it seemed that everywhere we turned, not only were our clients struggling, but our colleagues were struggling as well: inaccessible education, exams that gate-keep our profession, increased licensing fees, wide spread dysfunctional systems of care with ever higher demand for services, poor pay and benefits, unethical supervisors with little recourse, labor theft with minimal opportunities to collectively organize, the loss of hard-earned hours for those unable to complete their training in the specified 6 years, and widespread burn out. There is no infrastructure for our care– a truth that became painstakingly felt throughout the pandemic.

The path to becoming a licensed mental health provider and sustaining oneself in this field is challenging and we have reached our tipping point. We can no longer maintain this wholly dysfunctional and traumatizing system of care– for ourselves, our clients, nor for the greater benefit of our society. We know that our experience as part of this system is a mirror of our client’s experience in getting care. Once we take this perspective, we can only then begin to ask in earnest: what can mental healthcare look like at this phase of the Great Turning? 

The Bloom + Grow Collective

Dreamt on a windy hilltop patio in Ramaytush territory (aka San Francisco, CA) in 2021, The Bloom + Grow Collective is a collaborative of mental health professionals passionate about advocating for and supporting the well-being of providers. 

Members are enlivened about systemic changes in licensing, a reorientation to healing-centered practices, and improving working conditions for those serving their communities as mental health workers. We need and deserve care and investment to sustain us in our work, particularly at this phase of the Great Turning. Bloom + Grow is cross-pollinating with other community collaborators to orient to a more regenerative system of care and put it into practice. Turning towards this wounding is essential as we move forward given the collective psychological distress accumulating in our experience. Our immediate priorities are to continue showing up. We are gathering thought partners and kindred spirits, facilitating spaces where people can feel supported and plug into our work, gathering information and stories to inform others of our experiences, and getting ready for direct action.

Metabolizing Grief and The Great Turning

Inspired by Joanna Macy’s work, several members have found solace in the Work That Reconnects framework and community. We value the honoring of our emotions and the sacred relationship between humans and our ecological world.

  The distress we experience is in direct and reciprocal relationship with the distress of the Earth. We look to living systems theories to understand our unique placement as mental health professionals within the context of healing. 

With this in mind, Bloom + Grow has integrated the spiral to move us through metabolizing our grief. We are rooted in gratitude for each other, our skills, and our knowledge base as intuitive social-emotional guides within our collective’s mycelial network and beyond. We have held intimate space for each other’s bottomless grief through community care opportunities and compassion. This grief cannot be truly understood alone, it demands witness and time to see its full terrain. Honoring our pain is a foundational piece of the spiral and many folks engage with the collective for an opportunity to share their pain in community.

The Spiral framework provides a container to move beyond our grief by sharing diverse perspectives that are seen with new eyes. Witnessing our collective pain supports us in moving into imaginative possibilities for engaging in change that might ameliorate our situation. When the fog of our disillusionment clears, even momentarily, we can see a few steps forward. The Bloom + Grow Collective is our offering in going forth– our metabolized grief in form and action– the spirit of the wild alchemy that Weller describes as our outdated values and beliefs decompose to give life to something tender and new.

Orienting to Active Hope and Calls to Action

We are currently cultivating a diverse network of support to build sustainability, catalyze our work, access active pathways and conversations for change, and imagine new pathways for change. This project can only grow in alliance with others and we honor that support comes in many forms. To stay updated about our work follow us on Instagram or join our newsletter. To learn more details about what motivates our work, check out Fractals, a Bloom + Grow Collective podcast series featuring interviews with mental health providers utilizing the Spiral framework to metabolize disillusionment into active hope. To plug into our work more directly, check our website for community process groups, clinical consultation, town halls, and workgroups. 

One of the alliances that Bloom + Grow has been cultivating involves increasing access to unionization in mental health and breaking down barriers for collective organizing. The ability to organize collectively is limited due to existing antitrust laws and our fragmented system of care. However, as we can see from the efforts of Northern California and Hawaii’s Kaiser mental health providers in the historic 2022 strike, having more organizing power can be one pathway toward systemic change. 

 Bloom + Grow is exploring this avenue further and excited to highlight a new opportunity to join the conversation via the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW)’s Behavioral Health Associate Membership. Through this new membership, mental health professionals from different licensure paths and workplaces can gain knowledge on how to catalyze our public health expertise into political power to impact change while advocating for mental health parity in our healthcare system. 

Orienting towards living systems theory, and in particular leaning on the concept of open systems, we look to and are influenced by those having similar conversations. If you or someone you know has already begun or would like to join the conversation on creating sustainable pathways for change, healing the healers, and metabolizing the collective grief we carry for our neighbors and the environment around us, reach out to say hello. If you are a mental health professional who is experiencing compassion fatigue or other barriers to feeling successful in the mental health field, we want to connect with you! The longevity and health of a community is informed by how it cares for its members and its responsiveness to collective needs to catalyze action. 

Reimagine mental health care by joining us in community!

 

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Sara Thorsen (she/they) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Eco-therapist with nearly a decade of experience supporting youth, families, and emerging adults in the Bay Area, CA. Her areas of focus include: nature connection, liberation, trauma, and ethics/philosophy. Sara is passionate about fostering the Labor Movement in mental health and is a founder of the Bloom + Grow Collective. Outside of clinical work, Sara nourishes herself through writing, plant medicine, and community organizing. She has a long-standing dream to be a steward of land and is forming a group of collaborators to make this dream a reality.

Krista Gaston (they/she) is a Licensed Marriage Family Therapist in CA and TX, a certified Eco-Therapist and Trauma Informed Systems Specialist. Krista has worked with youth and families for over 20 years, in community mental health for 8 years, and in private practice with young adults 18-25.  As a therapist activist, Krista is passionate about reconnecting to sustainable life practices rooted in collective care and emergent strategy. Bloom + Grow Collective is a loving offering for other mental health providers to orient to their own healing as well as marking a trail head for action.