Healing Hands

In a perfect world, my services would no longer be necessary. My passion is empowerment and encouragement, counseling, and healing; for EVERYONE. I have found that too many people are suffering in the ways I have, and not enough platforms are truly for everyone who suffers- and likewise, not enough platforms are accessible to everyone. Many platforms, for example, are aimed at just women empowerment and healing, or minorities. Others are aimed specifically at those considered to be higher in power in today’s world, such as straight white cis men. Many counselors are way too expensive to be accessible, and many people feel ashamed at needing services from a therapist and counselor. However, you do not often see a platform that is aimed at the most important things; healing and empowerment for everyone as a community, encouraging everyone to work together and build a community of health, that does not pit everyone against each other, and that is not insanely expensive. Oftentimes, even if someone can get professional counseling, the counselors do not fully understand the issues we all face, and that lack of understanding leads the clients to feeling more discouraged and crazy. When you focus on one target group, you fail to recognize the importance of every part of the community, in my opinion. When there are three weak legs on a stool, what is most beneficial for the stool? Fix one leg, and leave the other two weak? Fix two? What if everyone worked to fix all three legs to the stool, to make a stool that is completely stable, so that pressure can be placed on all three sides equally without the risk of crashing down? To me, that is the number one solution. When you are counseling someone, you need more than just professional knowledge on the subject- you need real world experience, to understand and connect with those that need help.

When you look at a community in pieces, you fail to recognize the big picture! For instance, when we ignore the mental health needs of straight white cis men, we ignore the foundation for inequality. While empowering women and minorities is great, it also ignores why we need that in the first place. Empowered women can scream their power to others until they are blue in the face, however, if the audience is unresponsive, what good is it really ultimately doing? To create a more responsive audience in those seen to have the power, wouldn’t it make more sense to also target them in the healing? People who bully or oppress others have a lot of healing, growth, and learning to do, but when we target something solely at them, the typical response is to feel attacked and defensive. A defensive audience is not a good audience. Many things targeted at that demographic focus on forceful teaching, that oftentimes focuses on how they are the problem, and how everyone else automatically has it worse for not being in their demographic. But are they really the problem? Or are they also a victim of society’s brainwashing?

For generation after generation, men have been taught these toxic ideas that they are entitled to whatever they want, that they are- and must be- stronger than anyone else, that anger is a male trait that needs to be punished rather than understood and healed, and many other ill-formed ideas. Many people often forget that while these ideas certainly harm everyone else, they also harm the men that these ideas are targeted at. Many people think that if we focus on healing everyone, we are minimizing the struggles and hardships of certain groups who have, arguably, been more obviously targeted by society and the government long term. But to me, in order to create true equality and diminish the toxicity in society, we need to focus on every leg of the stool. If you have one weak leg, you risk the entire stool falling, even if you can’t tell outwardly that the leg is weak- and acknowledging that the third leg may be weak in no way diminishes the visible weakness in the other two legs. Diminishing the plights of men is equally wrong. While their plights might seem inane and insane to others, it is important to remember that we are not in a competition of who has it worse. You wouldn’t tell a woman who has been abused that she has no right to complain because another woman was killed by her abuser, would you? Does surviving make someone less abused? Similarly, we should make sure that everyone in society feels they can share what they feel is a hardship in their own lives, without fear of being ridiculed or told that they don’t have it that hard, regardless of their demographic or their issue.

That is why I want to have a platform that focuses on healing everyone. People send in their hardships, and get advice, encouragement, explanations for why something might be happening, ideas on how to handle it better or discourage it from continuing to happen, encouragement, love, and compassion. Each question will be sent to me, and I will provide my response and post the entire thing into the public format. Once it is in the public format for my members, other members can join in on the discussion after reading the question or complaint, and my response. Any members that are negative or toxic, will be given two warnings. After a third offense, they will be given a temporary ban from replying to the public format, but will still be able to send in their own questions and complaints to me for me to post. If there is a fourth offense, they will be banned longer, with a more in depth reason for why, which includes healing and encouragement and an attempt to gently educate. Upon a fifth offense, I will share a post about them in the public format, where people can chime in with gentle education on why they should not do that but also why they might be doing it, encouragement, love, advice, et cetera. If there is a sixth offense, the member will be permanently banned. I know six strikes may seem like a lot, but the format is for healing and education and encouragement, not punishment and exile. If we can reach even one person feeling this way, it is a success. On a specific day each week, I will also post my own blog posts onto the format, to provide some further education, thoughts, advice to the general public or myself, my own struggles, et cetera, for everyone to reply to as well. The membership fee will allow members to access a loving, healing environment for everyone, at an affordable price. Like I said, in an ideal world, this service would no longer be needed, but the only way to get there is to offer things like this. This is what I am passionate about; making lives better, providing connections, and healing alongside my peers, whomever they may be, so that we may all be as free-spirited and happy as my little girl when she is laughing.