My name is Nour Ghaddar and I’m a Lebanese-Ghanaian mental health and gender-justice researcher and advocate, as well as a trauma therapist-in-training, working to reframe and rephrase mental health and wellbeing, and ways we reinvest in trauma survivors and those who work with them. I work with a range of stakeholders in health, education, media, art, artivism, healthcare, public health, and advocacy to better respond to increasing violence against women and girls across communities, including through safe spaces, film, mindfulness, and art.
I work to design and implement safe spaces in my hometown of Accra, Ghana where women and men join us to cultivate a sense of self-compassion and a capacity for holding space for ourselves, as well as collective well-being. We address limiting beliefs and ways to advocate for and nourish ourselves, to better be able to show up and support our community. We take a look at how we sometimes tie our worth and our inner work to productivity, outputs, titles, roles, and the optics of success. We welcome one another to deepen our sense of self-value in a more internal, innate way that isn’t hinged on whether we gain or become ‘more.’
We explore how “boundaries mean loving you and me simultaneously.”
Running these safe spaces, I’ve found that what is more prevalent than people disrespecting one another is people dishonoring, condemning, and judging themselves. I work within the gender-based violence (GBV) sphere, where people are often prone to ignoring what their bodies, minds, and spirits tell them they need, and normalize heightened burnout and chronic stress, yet need self-care the most in such demanding fields.
“Our most revolutionary act of activism is to take care of ourselves.”
– Audre Lorde
Self-care, particularly for people of colour (POC), can be a foreign concept, one we often attribute to the West in a way to distance ourselves from our need for it. It can’t go unnoticed that one’s ability to self-care is tied to socioeconomic and cultural status, and there are increasing challenges to carving out time to hold space for ourselves, especially when deemed “selfish” in some spaces and cultures. Still, we owe it to ourselves - particularly as women often placed in carer roles in and out of our homes, as well as those in the activist space whose fields valorize overworking – to take time for ourselves, to be able to pour back into our communities and build up our resilience. As the adage goes, we cannot pour from empty cups.
For anyone but especially for POC, we are often born into families that carry decades, if not more, of generational trauma, and that trauma is stored within us, passed down epigenetically from parent to child, as GBV Tabitha Mpamira explains it, the ‘baton we are passed’ from those before us. Culturally, through generations, it can be seen as self-centered to tend to our needs and our mental health, yet our communities have the biggest need to interrupt these patterns and belief systems given the post-traumatic-stress we are predisposed to as a result of hardship some of our families have survived and the unhealthy coping mechanisms formed through them. Compounding this, as women, we are conditioned to think our labour is our worth, and we see high rates of unpaid care labour in our cultures resulting in even less space held for self-care and more value placed on self-sacrifice, leaving us feeling guilty for wanting to hold space for ourselves.
In a consumer-centred world we’re led to believe self-care is tied to luxury experiences that can sometimes feel out of reach. Sexual Violence Research Institute invites us to think of self-care in another way: “it involves being in touch with our wellbeing, responding to our physical, emotional and spiritual needs and encouraging us to pay attention to aspects of ourselves we have been neglecting.” Taking time to ourselves to deepen our self-compassion can change how we show up in the world, for ourselves and others.
I welcome us to challenge the notion that we have to keep others happy and healthy before we do the same for ourselves.
I invite us to start questioning wanting to be busy all the time as a trauma response, and to deepen our sense of wellbeing by simply reveling in being, rather than doing.
My work involves welcoming activists, women, men and queer folk to practice trauma-informed approaches, beginning with the self. According to leading trauma practitioner Dr. Gabor Maté, in order to hold space for the trauma we are born into or experience, we are invited to make the paradigm shift from “what is wrong with her/him?” to “what has she/he survived, been through?” Starting with the self, we can cultivate deeper self-trust and self- compassion by not rushing to assume something is wrong with us or needs fixing, but rather needs attention and care. One way of tending to ourselves is mindfulness, and as leading psychologist Dr. Thema Bryant puts it, “we mistake it as a tool to be more productive, to increase one’s focus, or to improve one’s health. The gift of spiritual awareness in the present moment is much more valuable than a path to gain more things (money, years, reputation, etc.). It is a way of perpetually living with an awareness of all that is.”
We can be more radically kind to ourselves by talking to ourselves the way we would to a best friend, and by extending the same love and affection and forgiveness we would to a friend, a child, a loved one. Interrupting a negative, self-loathing thought with a thought on gratitude or self-forgiveness is one way to cultivate an internal, personal safe space. Scheduling moments of pause through phone alarms also reminds us to take time to pause during hectic days, for just one minute a day.
Eventually our mindfulness practice will deepen.
When we are in tune with ourselves, compassion flows freely. We are no longer trying to perform for others or be several people in one, we are organically ourselves.
Nour Ghaddar is a Ghanaian-Lebanese-American gender-justice activist, gender-based violence survivor advocate and researcher, and mental health counselor-in-training, as well as a communications strategist committed to researching into and writing about the ways our media, health and educational systems dialogue and decision-make around violence against women and girls, men and boys. Her work in behavioral change communications and community mobilization centers the gendered ways we respond to and report on violence in all of its forms, uncovering the value of compassionate-based mental health and psychosocial support. Her purpose-led work covers the intersection between women and girl’s empowerment and inclusion, shifting attitudes and behaviors around gender norms, and the ways in which we respond to increasing gender-based violence (GBV), through improving sustainable, accessible, trauma-informed mental health interventions and services, and driving advocacy for survivor inclusion built upon survivors’ contributions.
Nour is also an artist and a writer.
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