Episode 5: We Can Be Whole Again - Pathways to Healing

In this episode of The Whole Again Pod, hosts Leslie Briner and Teddy McGlynn-Wright explore the fifth and final statement of the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework: “We can be whole again. Pathways to healing occur anytime we do anything that rebuilds safety, agency, dignity, or belonging.” Drawing on both story and practice, we look at how healing can happen in our bodies individually, in relationships, and across systems.

This episode begins with a discussion of the pathways (or doorways) that over time become practices, all together striving to re-build our safety, agency, dignity, and belonging. Teddy and Leslie offer tangible examples of restoring safety, agency, dignity, and belonging through individual practices like bearing witness, offering choice, and co-regulation as well as collective and systemic strategies including campaign finance reform, taxation, and truth and reconciliation committees.

Referenced in this episode

Whole Again Pod, Episodes 1-4

My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD 

“Neurons that fire together wire together.” In 1949, psychologist Donald Hebb introduced the assembly theory of how the brain’s neurons respond to the same stimulus connecting preferentially to form neuronal ensembles.

How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 

Firearms data and self harm

Movement for Campaign Finance Reform

Structural Racism and State Tax Policy: A Walk Through History

Reconnecting Communities Pilot 

Collective Effervescence

• Émile Durkheim – The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). The original source of the term collective effervescence. Durkheim used it to describe the shared energy and sense of unity people experience during communal rituals and gatherings.
• Barbara Ehrenreich – Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006). A cultural history exploring how humans have long sought experiences of collective joy and effervescence through dance, festivals, and public celebrations.
• Brené Brown – Atlas of the Heart (2021)

Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Orange Shirt Society

Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley 

Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagaski