Unresolved harms
A couple of weeks ago I found myself walking down the street in tears about something that happened to my family almost two years ago.
The anger, the rage, the hurt - it was so present, it surprised me.
Why was it coming up now?
It was because another family was experiencing something similar within the same community, even though for completely different reasons, and even though the community was now under different leadership.
I pulled myself together for a meeting I had with a client ten minutes later to review the findings of some of our recent interviews with staff to measure progress since our original discovery interviews at the start of our work with this organization two years ago.
But the experience of feeling those emotions rise so close to the surface stayed with me. And when we started talking about “past harms”, a term I have struggled with because they are really not actually “past” when we carry them with us and impact how we experience the world, it came to me - I suggested we call them “unresolved harms” instead.
This resonated with everyone on the call - my own team as well as the client’s DEI team.
Organizations often struggle with how to address unresolved harms, in part because they think of them as “past” and that therefore there is nothing they can do about them. It’s not like they can go back and change the past right? What if the people involved, past leaders, are not even around any more?
No you can’t change the past. Yes, some of the leaders may not be with the organization any more.
But if you don’t change the culture that created those harms, they remain unresolved, and when they reoccur, whether to the same people or different people, those harms get exacerbated.
It’s not just the pain of the unresolved harm that gets reactivated but it some ways a new harm occurs - the harm of the message that gets sent: we didn’t care enough about you to change our culture so what happened to you wouldn’t happen again. You didn’t matter enough. You didn’t have value to us and you still don’t.
Restorative justice is about putting right the harm not just at the interpersonal level but at the community level so the likelihood of the harm reoccurring is reduced. Acknowledgement is an important component, but it can’t be the only one if there isn’t also a shift in culture, practices or policies. Addressing only the specific situation and not the culture isn’t enough either.
Harms point to unmet needs. Focusing on self-identified needs and taking community responsibility for meeting those needs creates shifts towards equity and inclusion.
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Banner photo by Issy Bailey on Unsplash