Warm Greetings from Introspective Family Therapy,
If you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen our post responding to the recent back-to-back mass shootings. In just 10 days, these crimes took over 30 lives, the lives of children, teachers, and our Black brothers and sisters. The total number of lives lost to mass shootings, so far in 2022, is beyond 200. Gun related deaths, including suicide and homicide, are nearing 18,000.
Government inaction has led to an American society in which people have greater access to firearms than mental healthcare. Every time we experience these senseless tragedies, politicians urge us not to “make it political.” How could the safety and well-being of a nation’s people not be political? It is their job to make the concerns of their citizens political issues, so they can be dealt with by the politicians we elected to protect us.
We need to demand greater accountability from those in power. We need to demand the change and reform that our children, families, and neighbors deserve.
As mental health professionals, we not only have an obligation to our clients, their families and to the personal injustices they face, but to standing up against injustice everywhere. We have a responsibility to broadly speak our clients’ truths to those in power, to advocate for a dire societal need for universally accessible mental healthcare and common-sense legislation that respects our rights, as well as our lives.
Introspective Family Therapy is committed to the change we wish to see in the world. We are committed to learning from each of you, from both the lightness and darkness of your experiences. We are committed to your well-being. We are committed to YOU.
Our practice is growing to meet our community’s growing need for health and healing. We are here to offer support, guidance, and resources, and to be shaped by your needs.
We leave you with a poem by Amanda Gorman, words that we have carried with us over the past week, that we hold in our hearts as we advocate for a better future for ALL of us.
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.
Amanda Gorman is a poet and author of “The Hill We Climb,” “Call Us What We Carry” and “Change Sings.”
(Courtesy of The New York Times)