T-MAPs and my own story

Sometimes, I miss what is most obvious. I’ve been writing (a lot) about T-MAPs (https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/t-maps/)

Yesterday (T-MAPs and YOUR own story) I said ‘I sense that I’ve written enough about Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs).’

This morning, I was feeling chaotic, I guess I might say. I won’t present the long list of my concerns. I’m sure we share many of them, especially related to the potential for global war. You might see where this is going. I realized I needed to revisit MY OWN Transformative Mutual Aid Practice document, which I had created less than a year ago. (That’s the obvious thing I realized this morning).

I can see what I did previously because when you use the online tool, you can choose to have your answers emailed to you. The alternative is to download the sections, print them, and write your answers on the forms.

I moved the conclusion to this beginning because it summarizes why T-MAPs can be a tool for Mutual Aid.

Conclusion – T-MAPs as a Tool for Mutual Aid

We hope the process of completing your T-MAP has given you new insights into your own story and inspiration to engage in this process with others. It’s a living document – you can keep revising it and adding to it as you gain more ideas and visions. While T-MAPs can help you map your individual transformation and growth, we think it’s more powerful as a collective practice. T-MAPs is a tool that is designed to be developed in groups, shared with groups, and practiced in groups. Our vision is that T-MAPs and tools like it will play an important role in evolving the ability of creative activist movements and mental health support networks to communicate with each other and build the kinds of stronger, more effective communities and forms of resistance that our current historical moment requires.
By reflecting deeply on our own experiences and developing a stronger connection with ourselves and what’s important to us, we can become more comfortable sharing that knowledge; we can learn from each other and more easily collaborate with one another. By having a better awareness of each other’s personal struggles, it’s easier to understand our similarities and differences and navigate them with respect, love, and understanding. T-MAPs is really our attempt to help operationalize mutual aid.

Crisis = Opportunity

Taking the time to articulate basic needs and desires about wellness and support when someone is in a clear head space can make an enormous difference when any kind of crisis emerges. Having others who already know what your needs and desires are can turn crisis into an opportunity for growth and transformation, for building solidarity and grounded friendship. Understood and articulated, our weaknesses can actually become our strengths.
At the same time, by opening up space to talk about life lessons and personal stories it can become easier to talk about collective dynamics, and things that are often challenging to talk about in groups, like power and larger structures that affect all of us in different ways depending on our social location, like race and class and gender and ability. While there are many ways that our differences can end up separating us, if we can learn to talk about the difference our stories can actually bring us together and raise levels of awareness. T-MAPs is an invitation to a collective practice of transformation and growth. Skillfully facilitated, a group using these questions can evolve to trust and support each other in the hard times on the horizon.

T-MAPs Section 1: Connection and Vision

The purpose of this first section is to help ground us in our strength and resilience before we undertake the T-MAPs process. To reframe the conversation so that it’s not starting from the premise that we are sick and need fixing; instead, we are reminded of what we are like when we’re well — how it feels and how we relate to the world around us. Taking the time to think about these things is generative: this is less like a form to fill out where we already know the answers and more a starting point to prompt our imaginations.

This is the format of the tool. To introduce each topic and provide checkboxes to help you answer the question, in this case, How do I feel when I’m most alive? And then a free-form box to describe your own experiences.

These were my answers at that time:

There are more pages in this section, but I think you get the idea.

Section 2: Wellness Practices

This section is designed to guide us in building our wellness toolkit – to identify what practices and supports help us manage stress, avoid crisis, and stay grounded and healthy. Once we’ve developed these lists, it is good to return to them on a daily basis and potentially share them with others in our lives. If we notice we’re slipping off track, we can return to this toolbox to help us remember how to get back on course.

My answers

And, again, there are multiple questions in this section.

Section 3: Life Lessons and Personal Stories

Where we come from and how we tell stories about ourselves is so important. In this section we have a series of questions to help you think about your own personal story and find good language for it. Society has so many expectations and frameworks for understanding your life that might not fit at all, or might fit in some ways but not others. There is an incredible power in creating a personal narrative of your life that fits well for you.

This section has two parts – the first is on understanding your journey with mental health and emotional distress, and the second on social and cultural context as it informs mental health. If you don’t identify as someone who’s been through intense mental health struggles and and/or the diagnosis process, some of the questions in the first half might not feel like they apply – it’s fine to skip them. In the second half of this section, some of these questions might be new to you – you might not have thought a lot about your cultural or class background, for example – and that’s ok. Consider these questions a starting point for your explorations.

How I understand the story of my journey with mental health:

My answers

I think of myself as creatively maladjusted
I think of myself being a very spiritual person
I think of myself as someone struggling to be whole while living under a colonized system that doesn’t work for me

What language do you use?
I think of myself being a very spiritual person. My spirituality is a very important part of my mental health. And language is important because in my culture we don’t have good ways to express spirituality.
I have been learning a lot about settler colonialism from my Indigenous friends. While I continue to learn of all the ways I benefit from white superiority, life as a Quaker has meant many struggles against white dominance. At 18 years of age, I became a draft resister. I was led to live my life without a car for environmental reasons. I’ve spent the past decade working to protect the water, working against pipelines.
I’ve found a home in my Mutual Aid community that works against systems of dominance and hierarchy.

If I’ve been through serious crisis, what were some of the early indications that I was struggling? How did it all happen?
There has always been something different about me
The truth is I never really felt like I fit in

Add your own:
Quakers used to be referred to as a peculiar people, often refusing to accept the norms of the culture we live in. Living without a car was one of the most visible expressions of that. That periodically created real crisis for me, because it was not only a struggle to live without a car, but this caused conflict with my fellow Quakers, the people I looked to for support, and to be examples of faith in the wider community.
And as I learned more about racism during the years I spent in a Black youth mentoring community, it became a real conflict to find so many Quakers had no idea of their white privileges, and the ways racism was part of their lives.
Over the past five years of making and developing friendships with Indigenous people, I’m learning much more about the multigeneration traumas they, and their ancestors have from the genocide of their people as their land was stolen and millions were killed as White people moved across the country.
Again, white Quakers were involved in some of this when they were involved in the forced assimilation of native children. Native children were kidnapped from their homes and taken to institutions where horrendous things were done to try to erase their Indigenous culture and become more like white people.
Over 100,000 children were forced to go to these institutions where there was widespread physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Thousands died. It is a struggle to be with my Indigenous friends, knowing of this history, as it must be for them to have me in their presence. And it has been another source of significant trauma to me to not only know that, but once again for so many White friends to work so hard to refuse to think about this history, let alone do anything they can to begin any process of healing.
And over the past three years as part of my Mutual Aid community, I see more clearly the systems of white dominance at every level. Learn more about these things in myself. And struggle again to get other white Quakers to understand this and do something about it.
In fairness I must say there are white Quakers who do acknowledge these things and are working to improve them

Section 4: Slipping off the tracks

The point of this section is to map out what is hard for us, what we struggle with, and help us develop the self-knowledge to be able to figure out what to do about it. This section is often the hardest one to fill out because it asks us to think about hard times, but the information we gather is really useful in our journey. Often unresolved things from our past can make us feel unsafe or upset in the present – this is called getting triggered. Sometimes our triggers contain useful information about what needs to heal in us, and what we need to express. If you find yourself getting triggered or overwhelmed as you complete your map, take a break and do one of the practices in your wellness toolkit. It can also help to do the T-MAPs process with other people and realize you are not alone.

My answers

Add your own:
My stressors relate to conflicts that arise from my spiritual guidance and trying to get Quakers and/or others to understand that guidance and follow it with me. Or for certain guidance, finding out how to implement it, and then do it myself.
I realize this isn’t much compared to the awful things many people have gone, are going through.

Section 5: Support

One of the main benefits of making an T-MAPs document is being able to get clarity on the things that are important to us and being able to share it with other people. In this section, we identify the people, services, and resources that are the most important sources of support for us. This helps us remember where we can turn when things get hard, and who to stay in touch with along the way

My answers

In this section, we are asked questions about who our support people and networks are.

T-MAPs and your own story

I sense that I’ve written enough about Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs). This is a link to all that I’ve written about T-MAPs: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/t-maps/

You can create your own T-MAP. This can be helpful either for you personally, or as a tool to share with a group you belong to.

Writing down stories about our lives helps us understand who we are, how we got here, and how we relate to the world around us.

To create your own T-MAPs you can either

Download PDF Workbooks and write your answers in them.
Or you can use the T-MAPs Online Creator Tool, which is described below. The Tool will save your responses to the questions. You can save what you have done and return to it later. If you enter your email address, you will be mailed a PDF copy of each section you complete.

T-MAPs Online Creator Tool

You can use these questionnaires to create your own T-MAP and have your answers emailed to you in a printable pdf. There are 5 sections. Click one of the images below to try filling out that section, see what you think, and let us know!

Map Making Instructions

Before you start working on creating your T-MAP, take a few minutes to ground yourself – the more centered you are, the better time you’ll have with this process. The T-MAPs workbook is designed to begin with questions that explore who you are and what you care about, and as they go on become more challenging, digging into what it’s like when you’re struggling. Eventually, you’ll want to answer the following questions thoroughly, but you may start out with notes and evolve your answers over time. This is a living document. You don’t need to do it all at once, and it can be really helpful to talk over these questions with other people. If they get too challenging, take a break and come back to it. Remember that you are creating a map for you and other people to be able to follow – it’s worth taking the time to find the right language that will make sense to you, and that you will be able to share with others

T-MAPs are drawn from our collective wisdom. These tools take into account our social, economic, and political context, and create space for thinking through how our histories and backgrounds shape who we are now. As our political climate becomes more heartless and unstable, we feel the need to weave our own safety nets. T-MAPs can be nourishing to everyone from grassroots social justice activists to woke health care practitioners and Peer Specialists working on the front lines of the mental health system.

Writing down stories about our lives helps us understand who we are, how we got here, and how we relate to the world around us. Wellness strategies are things like eating enough food every day and talking to our support people, which help us stay on our path. Resilience practices are things that bring us a feeling of being whole and alive – spending time in nature, singing, hanging out with people we care about – which help us stay grounded. Resources can be things in our local community – like friendly gathering spaces and places where we can watch the stars at night – or our favorite media, like helpful books and podcasts, or international resources like Madness Radio and The Hearing Voices Network. Articulating these things gives us a resource we can share with the people in our lives to guide our conversations and help us support each other through rough times.
https://commedesfous.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/T-MAPs-Transformative-Mutual-Aid-Practices.pdf

T-MAPs is licensed by Jacks McNamara and Sascha DuBrul under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Origins of T-MAPs

As global chaos erupts in so many ways and places, I feel pressure (on myself) to write about that, as I would have in the past.

(There is information below about a Friends Committee on National Legislation event, Calling for a Ceasefire: Israel-Palestine Briefing.)

Instead, I’m led to continue to write about transformative mutual aid practices (T-MAPs) because we need to support each other, especially in perilous times like these.

T-MAPS and Mutual Aid

Some time ago, at our Des Moines Mutual Aid food project, one of my friends asked how I was doing. Which turned into an opportunity to share about T-MAPs. She agreed that no one asks how those of us doing justice work are doing. At least, no one outside our Mutual Aid community, where checking in with each other is an important part of our work together.

The Icarus Project

T-MAPs was originally dreamed up in the early years of The Icarus Project (TIP), a community of people working at the intersection of mental health and social justice. Over the years, TIP has created peer-based mental health support groups, alternative publications and educational resources, and new language outside the conventional “mental illness” paradigm. One tool developed by TIP, which has partly inspired T-MAPs, is called Mad Maps. Mad Maps began as creative and supportive conversations on the Icarus website about strategies for friends and strangers to communicate about how to take better care of each other. Mad Maps has evolved into a set of guides on navigating different topics like intergenerational trauma and madness and oppression.
https://tmapscommunity.net/the-origins-of-this-tool/

The Icarus Project is now the Fireweed Collective.

Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice and Disability Justice lens. We support the emotional wellness of all people and center QTBIPOC folks in our internal leadership, programs, and resources.

Our work seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression, often reproduced by the mental health system. Our model for understanding ‘severe mental illness’ is community and relationship-based and divests from the prison industrial complex and psych wards.

Healing Justice (HJ) is a framework rooted in racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice. Healing Justice provides us with tools we can use to interrupt the systems of oppression that impact our mental health. Fireweed Collective uses HJ as a guide to help redefine what medicine is, and increase who has access to it.

We are honored to be a part of a larger community of organizations guided by the principles of Healing Justice:

responding to and intervening in generational trauma and violence (Kindred)

collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression (Kindred)

imagining a generative and co-created future (Healing By Choice!)

being in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the land (Healing By Choice)

centering disability justice, people of color, and economic justice (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s history of healing justice)

Fireweed Collective

Calling for a Ceasefire

Yesterday, at our weekly FCNL Witness Wednesday Silent Reflection, we considered the following:

Prompt:
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Query:
How can we best serve as witnesses and holders of humanity in times of great and increasing pain? How can we witness and hold joy and solidarity in moments of humanity’s grief?

You can join this weekly reflection at 4:15 pm Central time here: fcnl.org/ww-stream

Calling for a Ceasefire: Israel-Palestine Briefing

When:

Wednesday, October 25, 6:30 PM Eastern

In war, civilians always pay the highest price. As the crisis in Israel and Palestine deepens following the attack by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory violence, our voices are needed.

As Quakers and advocates for peace, we have an important role to play in advocating for a ceasefire to prevent the tragic loss of more innocent Palestinian and Israeli lives. On Oct. 25, we will gather as a community in grief and action. Join FCNL’s Bridget Moix, Hassan El-Tayyab, and Odeliya Matter, and Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary for the American Friends Service Committee, for insights into what is happening in Israel-Palestine, the response from U.S. lawmakers, and what we can do as advocates to respond.

https://act.fcnl.org/event/quaker-welcome-center-events-watch-home/3221/signup/

Transformative Mutual Aid Practices Part 2

Today, October 18, 2023, the world seems to be falling into chaos on so many levels. Beyond the increasing threats of environmental devastation, there is the complete dysfunction of the US Congress. Economic stresses are increasing as prices for everything are skyrocketing. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East threaten to draw more countries into their conflicts. And killing thousands of people, of children.

I usually write about those things. But now it’s overwhelming to even try to figure out which of these many threats and injustices to write about, let alone what to say about them.

As I often say, I try to discern what the Spirit is leading me to say. Recently, I’ve been led to revisit Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs). The subject is relevant to help us deal with all these stresses in our lives. And a framework to support each other.

[A note to people of faith. From what I’ve been learning about T-MAPs, I don’t think faith is talked about specifically. Rather, you can include that in the parts of T-MAPs related to what gives you support. I think T-MAPs can be helpful for faith groups, such as Quaker meetings, as a better way to do justice work and communal care.]

Mutual Aid

I’m not always successful in explaining why my focus for the past four years has been on Mutual Aid (and Transformative Mutual Aid Practices). One is my lived experiences working in my Mutual Aid community. Not only of the many ways this community serves the survival needs of our community (our neighbors and ourselves) but also how powerful this is in our own lives and care for each other.

This is so because Mutual Aid is about a completely different way of thinking and being. The root of injustices in our society is the hierarchical structure of everything involved in our economic, political, and, usually, social structures. All hierarchies are power relationships and enforce a model of domination. The heart of Mutual Aid is a focus on preventing hierarchical structures. Mutual Aid is not just another approach to living and working in a community. It is about changing the very basis of how communities work.

These quotes are from “Mutual Aid Is Essential to Our Survival Regardless of Who Is in the White House. Mutual aid is inherently anti-authoritarian, demonstrating how we can organize human activity without coercion” by Dean Spade, truthout, Oct 27, 2020. Dean Spade is the author of the essential manual about mutual aid, “Mutual Aid. Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)“.

T-MAPs

Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) are a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources. Creating a T-MAP will inspire you to connect your struggle to collective struggles. When we make and share our T-MAPs with others they become potent tools for healing and liberation.

The acronym T-MAPs stands for Transformative Mutual Aid Practices

Transformation
We understand that we’re always in a process of transformation and growth; we’re not just in a process of ‘recovery’ or going back to some state of health (that we may have never known). As our lives change, it’s helpful to leave tracks for ourselves about where we’ve been and where we want to be going. T-MAPs help facilitate this process.

Mutual Aid
We also understand that just working on our own “self-care” isn’t enough; we also need mutu aid. Most simply, mutual aid is when people help each other. Historically, mutual aid has been a way that people have self-organized to create interdependent networks of support. People might help each other with things as basic as growing food and building barns or as abstract as education and mental health support.

Practice
When we think about how personal and community change happens, it’s pretty clear to us that the only way to grow and evolve is to intentionally practice what we want to see happen in our lives. Practice might be as simple as not getting on our smart phone as soon as we wake up in the morning, or as intentional and deliberate as a daily sitting meditation practice. Practice that happens with groups of people has the potential to change the world.

T-MAPS. Transformative Mutual Aid Practices

The mental health of all members (of your group) should be supported in an ongoing way. Go around the circle so that comrades can indicate to the group if:

▪ they would like others to reach out to them for a period of time or in an ongoing way, and how
▪ they would be willing to reach out to others who ask for that support
▪ they are currently unable to provide support to others
▪ they would like people to hang out with when they are not feeling well
▪ they are available to hang out with others to decrease their isolation during difficult times
▪ etc
A Call for Prefigurative Mental Health Support and Communal Care Within Radical Groups and Organizations

Additional resources:

T-MAPs

T-MAPs is licensed by Jacks McNamara and Sascha DuBrul under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Prefigurative Mental Health Support

What is the condition of your mental health today? I’ve been thinking about this more recently when I read this quote.

“Everyone is depressed. It’s not just you. It’s everywhere and everyone. It is the state of the world.”
Tracy Collins

Until recently, I had not allowed myself to pay attention to my mental health. I grew up when there was a significant stigma related to mental health.

I recently read that a hallmark of White supremacy is individualism, wanting to fix things on your own. That had been my approach until very recently. I think it’s only fair to say that was because I had so little success getting others to join my work. But, difficult as it is to admit, I can now see that was largely because of my White supremacy approach.

One of the many benefits of being in my Mutual Aid community has been becoming aware of that. And learning ways to deal with my White supremacy.

Prefigurative politics

Prefigurative politics is based on the idea that the means and the ends of social change are interconnected and that the way we organize ourselves in the present should reflect the kind of society we want to create in the future. I’ve experienced prefigurate politics in practice in my Mutual Aid community. So, prefigurative mental health support means applying Mutual Aid principles to mental health care. Which means rejecting hierarchies.

Without changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ‘socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources.’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
Toward an Ecological Society (1980). Murray Bookchin

Prefigurative mental health

The zine below has a lengthy mental health and communal care-related list. Here are a few.

Many of us experienced childhood and adolescent traumas and continue to experience traumas based on our individual intersectionalities
We understand the mechanics of the harms and traumas inflicted by the prevailing social order’s oppressive and exploitative systems
We must recondition ourselves towards caring for each other; communal care is ongoing radical action
Alone we are vulnerable, but together we are strong; therefore, genuine community is paramount
We acknowledge that the architecture of capitalist society is colonizing white supremacy culture; it is an architecture of domination, abuse and exclusion
We focus intensely on the concept and practice of mutual aid
We endeavor to decolonize our thinking, group interactions, and architecture of group processes
We center acting in solidarity across groups in ways that build unity through diversity
We emphasize prefiguration within our organizations as necessary to counteract the abuses of prevailing society and manifest community and liberatory ways of being and living
When we do not prefigure communal care into our group structures and routines, we unconsciously recreate the alienation, racism, homophobia and transphobia, hierarchical ableisms, and neuro-homogeneities of capitalist society, along with their negative effects
If we don’t practice solidarity with our own comrades, we cannot expect to practice solidarity with others
Knowing what we know about how prevailing society operates to oppress, exploit, and traumatize vulnerable people, a group or org that does not actively engage and support the mental and emotional wellbeing of its members is not revolutionary
Many folx who show up to our groups do not stay because they sense the group is non-supportive or unsafe for their being