Collective Care
“Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in community.” — Dr. Jennifer Mullan
Some months feel loud with celebration; others feel like a long exhale. Black History Month can hold both at once. It can bring pride and visibility, and it can also bring memory—grief, tenderness, anger, joy, and fatigue braided together, especially for people living with racial stress, cultural expectations, and the pressure to keep going no matter what.
Much mental health messaging focuses on the individual: your habits, your mindset, your coping skills. Those tools matter. Routines can stabilize your day. Breathwork can help your body soften. Therapy helps you untangle what’s been knotted for years. Still, many people can’t heal through inner work alone. Relationships and culture shape healing. Community sustains it.
Dr. Mullan challenges a myth that many people sell as strength: you should be able to handle it alone. If you just try harder, think differently, or push through, you’ll arrive at peace. But isolation rarely creates safety. More often, it deepens shame. It tells people they’re “too much,” that their needs burden others, or that they should manage pain privately where no one can see it.
Healing in community offers a different message: your pain deserves witness, not secrecy. Support is not something you earn by suffering quietly. Your nervous system can learn safety not only through personal effort, but through relationships that are consistent, respectful, and real.
This month is an invitation to rethink what healing means and where it happens. We can honor Black history not only by remembering milestones, but by protecting Black wellbeing in everyday life—by naming burnout, racial stress, grief, and generational pain, and by practicing collective care as a legitimate mental health practice.
Why Black History Month Belongs in Mental Health Spaces
Black History Month began to recognize Black contributions that society ignored, minimized, or erased.It is a celebration, a corrective, and a call to tell the truth. Over time, it has also become an invitation to honor the full human experience of Black life: the systems that shaped it, the communities that resisted, the creativity that flourished anyway, and the everyday costs of survival.
That truth includes mental health.
Mental health isn’t separate from history. History lives in bodies. It shows up in family patterns, workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, policies, and daily interactions that either affirm dignity or chip away at it. Many people carry stress that didn’t start with them. They’ve learned vigilance—anticipating harm, minimizing needs, staying productive through exhaustion, holding emotions tightly because vulnerability didn’t feel safe.
These strategies aren’t flaws; they’re adaptations—intelligent survival responses to environments that demanded them. And what helps you endure can also make rest and softness feel unfamiliar. When others have required “strength” for a long time, your system can read letting go as danger—even as life shifts.
Including mental health in Black History Month moves us away from the idea that distress is a personal weakness. It helps us stop pretending wellbeing exists outside of culture and context. It also challenges the notion that “coping” should happen quietly while the world stays unchanged. Instead, we name a more honest truth: context matters. Community matters. Safety matters. And healing often needs more than private effort—it needs public care.
When we make room for this conversation, we don’t diminish resilience. We protect it—by making wellbeing part of the story, not an afterthought.
Culture Shapes What Healing Even Means
Healing is not one universal definition. What counts as “healthy” can look different depending on what you inherited, what you’ve had to navigate, and who has held you along the way. Some people were taught strength means silence. Others learned emotions are private because the world can weaponize vulnerability. Many learned to keep moving because stopping wasn’t an option. In some families, the rule was simple: do what you have to do, and don’t give anyone a reason to doubt you.
At the same time, Black cultures hold deep wisdom about restoration—long before modern mental health language existed. Spiritual practices, prayer circles, music, call-and-response, storytelling, humor that makes pain survivable, intergenerational caregiving, mutual aid, chosen family, and community gatherings that create joy in the middle of struggle are not side notes. They are protective factors. They are nervous system medicine: belonging, regulation, identity affirmation, and meaning in action.
Modern psychology increasingly echoes what communities have long known: mental health is relational. The body isn’t designed to endure everything alone, and people regulate through connection. Safety, consistency, and care help us co-regulate. Feeling seen and supported allows the nervous system to settle. Isolation—or constant misunderstanding—keeps the body on alert.
This is why culturally grounded healing matters. It doesn’t “add culture” as decoration; it recognizes that cultural practices already hold pathways to resilience and restoration. It also names a hard truth: forcing people to leave parts of themselves at the door makes healing harder.
So the question isn’t only, “What can I do to cope?” It becomes, “Where can I be fully human?” And that’s a community question as much as an individual one.
“Healing Doesn’t Happen in Isolation”: What It Means in Real Life
When Dr. Jennifer Mullan says healing doesn’t happen in isolation, many people feel an immediate sense of relief. It names something they’ve been living: the exhaustion of carrying everything alone, the pressure to appear fine, the emotional labor of translating pain into language others will accept. It also challenges a belief many learned early—if I need help, I’m failing.
But needing help is not failure. It’s human.
Healing in community doesn’t mean you never spend time alone or that reflection doesn’t matter. It means you don’t have to process everything in a vacuum, or turn every struggle into a private project you manage with perfection. Community offers places where people can witness you without judgment—where you can name what happened without being told you’re exaggerating, and where support doesn’t require you to perform “strength” first.
In community, shame often loses oxygen. A simple “Me too” can help the body relax. Hearing “That makes sense” sends a steady message to your nervous system: you’re not crazy. When people offer practical support instead of quick advice, you can feel held in ways words alone can’t do. And when relationships include repair—apologies, accountability, changed behavior—the body learns a new story: connection can be safe.
Community healing can look like a friend who checks in without expecting you to entertain them. A faith space that offers comfort without demanding perfection. A group where laughter and grief can coexist. Elders who remind you you come from people who endured and still created beauty. A therapist who honors your culture and doesn’t ask you to translate your pain into someone else’s worldview.
It doesn’t have to be big. It does have to be intentional—and safe enough for your nervous system to soften.
The Hidden Weight of Racial Stress
Some stressors show up clearly: a breakup, a deadline, a health scare, conflict at home. Racial stress often lives in the in-between—moments that people who don’t experience them may not recognize as stressful. It can take the form of overt discrimination, and it also shows up through microaggressions, code-switching for safety, heightened scrutiny, underestimation, tokenization, and the exhaustion of anticipating bias before it even happens.
Over time, this stress shows up in the body in quiet, persistent ways. You might notice a tight chest in certain spaces, or a racing mind after a “small” comment that your body registers as not small at all. It can also surface as irritability, emotional numbness, or a strong drive to stay hyper-productive so no one can question your worth. Sleep may shift, mood may flatten, and concentration may wobble. Even relaxation can start to feel out of reach.
These reactions don’t mean you’re broken. They often mean your body did what bodies do: it adapted to protect you.
When society minimizes racial stress, people can internalize the experience and turn it inward. They may wonder why they feel “too sensitive,” why emotions linger, or why they can’t “just let it go.” A more compassionate question is: What have I been carrying that no one named?
Naming the weight matters. It turns private suffering into shared reality. It also makes room for support that doesn’t gaslight you into silence. This is one reason community healing can be so powerful for Black mental health: community can validate reality without forcing you to justify it. It can hold anger without policing it. It can make space for grief without rushing you into positivity.
Your responses are not character flaws. They are signals—responses to lived experience. And they deserve care, not dismissal.
Unlearning Harmful Narratives About Strength
Many Black communities have survived by mastering strength. That strength deserves respect. It has protected families, preserved dignity, and held people together under tremendous pressure. And still, strength can become heavy when it turns into a requirement instead of a choice.
You can hear that weight in phrases that sound like wisdom, even when they cost tenderness: Don’t let them see you sweat. Handle it yourself. You can’t fall apart. Keep it moving. Talking about it makes it worse. Therapy is for other people. These beliefs didn’t come from nowhere. They formed under real threat. They were strategies for staying safe in unsafe conditions.
But survival strategies are meant to evolve. What protected someone in one season can restrict them in another. When self-silencing becomes automatic, people can lose touch with their needs. They can forget what it feels like to be supported without having to “deserve” it. They can feel guilty for wanting rest, for setting boundaries, for saying no, for needing softness.
Unlearning doesn’t mean rejecting resilience or blaming the past. It means gently updating those strategies with compassion—honoring your history while choosing what you want now. You can respect the strength that got you here and still decide, I want more than survival. I want care and ease. I want a community that holds me, not only one that celebrates me when I’m performing “okay.”
That shift often becomes possible with witnesses—people who can say, “You don’t have to prove anything here.” When others are also putting down the armor, it’s easier to believe you’re allowed to, too.
Strength can include openness. It can include tears. It can include asking for help before you’re at the edge. And it can include choosing relationships where your humanity doesn’t have to be hidden to be respected.
Collective Care Isn’t a Trend. It’s a Lifeline.
“Collective care” gets repeated online so often it can sound like aesthetic language instead of real practice. But collective care has deep roots. Long before it had a name, it was survival: mutual aid, community organizing, neighbor-to-neighbor caregiving, faith-based support, shared meals, resource-sharing during hard times, and the everyday choice to show up for one another.
Collective care says: if the system won’t protect us, we will protect each other. It also tells the truth about burnout. Burnout isn’t only personal. People burn out when they face ongoing stress without adequate support, safety, rest, and resources. So community care doesn’t just offer comfort—it offers structure. It can provide tangible help that makes life more survivable.
What it can look like in real life
Collective care might look like food dropped off when grief makes cooking impossible. A friend taking the kids for a few hours so you can rest without interruption. A workplace ally who speaks up when bias shows up and you’re too tired to fight alone. A check-in text that doesn’t demand a cheerful response. A community fund that helps someone access therapy, medication, or time off.
The emotional side of collective care
It also includes practices that aren’t always visible: making room for pain without rushing to fix it, choosing accountability over defensiveness, offering repair after rupture, and listening as an act of love.
As care becomes normal, healing feels more possible. Without the need to pretend, bodies soften. With steady support available, the nervous system has somewhere to land.
Collective care is not weakness. It’s wisdom—shared. And for many people, it’s the difference between enduring and actually living.
What Culturally Responsive Therapy Can Offer
Therapy can be a powerful part of community healing, especially when it’s culturally responsive. At its best, therapy isn’t a place where someone tries to “fix” you. It’s a place where you’re understood with compassion—and where your reality is acknowledged rather than minimized.
Culturally responsive therapy doesn’t pretend the world is neutral. It recognizes how racism, discrimination, cultural expectations, and identity-based stress shape mental health, and it makes room for the truth that distress can be a rational response to chronic stressors. It also takes seriously that many people have been harmed in healthcare or mental health spaces—stereotyped, dismissed, or asked to explain basic realities just to be believed.
In an affirming therapeutic relationship, clients often gain language for experiences that were previously minimized. Over time, that clarity can be paired with tools for regulating stress responses in the body—not just “thinking positively.” Boundaries become something to explore without shame, and long-overlooked losses have space to be grieved, including the grief of being unseen or carrying responsibility too early. Many also begin redefining success in ways that include rest, connection, and joy—not only achievement.
Therapy doesn’t have to compete with community; it can deepen your capacity to receive support. As you learn what safe connection feels like, it becomes easier to choose relationships rooted in respect rather than repetition of old wounds. Self-advocacy can also become more practiced—without drowning in guilt.
If you’ve ever felt like you had to translate yourself in a mental health setting, you’re not alone. A truly supportive therapy space should feel like relief. It should feel like you can exhale. It should make room for your culture, your story, your emotions, and your pace.
Healing isn’t about erasing who you are. It’s about being met—fully—and learning you don’t have to carry everything alone.
Community Healing Practices That Feel Gentle, Not Performative
Community healing doesn’t require a perfect plan, a big social calendar, or high energy. It can start small—at the pace your nervous system can actually hold. The goal isn’t to do community “correctly.” The goal is to create enough connection that your body has support.
Build a small care circle
Start by identifying a few trusted people and creating a simple rhythm of connection. It can be one check-in a week or every other week: “How are you really?” The power isn’t in intensity—it’s in consistency. When someone knows they will be remembered, the body relaxes in ways it may not notice right away.
Make room for joy on purpose
Joy doesn’t erase pain, but it can soften chronic stress. Joy reminds the nervous system that life contains safety, play, creativity, and pleasure. This can be music that moves the body, cooking familiar food, laughing with a cousin, dancing at home, being in nature, community events, art, or rest without guilt. The practice isn’t forcing happiness—it’s allowing life force.
Let story be medicine
Many people inherit family narratives centered on struggle, because struggle was real. But inside those stories are strengths: humor, resourcefulness, faith, love, protection. Talking with elders, writing down family stories, or naming what helped people survive can restore identity and grounding.
Choose nervous-system-friendly connection
If groups feel overwhelming, start smaller: a walk with one friend, quiet coffee, a voice note that doesn’t require immediate reply, a supportive thread where silence is allowed. Healing can be gentle. Your pace matters.
Community care becomes real when it respects capacity—and when it helps you feel more human, not more responsible.
Honoring Resilience Without Romanticizing Suffering
Resilience deserves celebration. But we don’t have to celebrate the conditions that demanded it. Sometimes Black resilience is praised in ways that unintentionally dismiss pain. “You’re so strong” can land like a compliment, but it can also sound like a requirement: keep enduring, keep carrying, keep proving you can survive.
A more healing approach holds both truths: you survived what you should not have had to survive, and you deserve safety, softness, and support now.
Resilience can include rest—asking for help before you collapse, setting boundaries that protect your body and spirit, and refusing to normalize chronic stress. It can also look like choosing ease when you’ve been taught ease is undeserved.
During Black History Month, it can be powerful to celebrate survival while also building conditions for wellbeing. That means recognizing what people overcame—and also advocating for what people need today: accessible mental health support, safe workplaces, respectful healthcare, community resources, and environments where Black people can exist without being policed, doubted, or forced to shrink.
This is part of collective care: shifting the focus from admiration of endurance to protection of humanity. It asks us to stop treating suffering as proof of worth. It invites us to celebrate joy without apology, and to honor grief without minimizing it.
Resilience isn’t only the ability to keep going. Sometimes resilience is the courage to stop, to receive, to be cared for, and to let your nervous system learn a new baseline—one that includes safety.
When we honor resilience without romanticizing suffering, we give people permission to be more than survivors. We give them room to be whole.
The Role of Rest in Liberation and Mental Health
Rest is often mislabeled as laziness in high-pressure environments. For many people, it can also feel risky—because slowing down may bring up emotions that were held back for years. But rest isn’t a luxury when it comes to mental health; it supports emotional regulation, cognitive clarity, physical repair, and spiritual grounding. Rest also creates room for creativity and connection, reminding the nervous system it doesn’t always have to stay on guard.
When someone lives under chronic stress, the body can get stuck in fight-or-flight. Rest helps interrupt that cycle. Even short pauses can tell the body: you can be safe now, even for a moment.
Rest doesn’t only mean sleep (though sleep matters). It can look like a slower morning, a quiet lunch without scrolling, turning off notifications, a short nap, a day off without guilt, saying no to one extra obligation, or letting yourself do something “unproductive” that restores you. Sometimes rest is also emotional: stopping the explanations, the over-functioning, the performance of being okay.
Rest becomes more possible with collective care
Rest is easier when community protects it—when responsibilities are shared, when caregiving is distributed instead of landing on one person, when friends encourage breaks, when workplaces respect boundaries, when people check in without pressure.
Collective care makes rest more accessible. Rest makes healing more possible. And healing supports liberation, because a regulated nervous system has more room for clarity, connection, and choice.
If rest feels unfamiliar, you don’t have to force a dramatic change. Start with a small permission: five minutes of stillness, one boundary, one earlier bedtime, one less obligation. Rest is not something you earn. It is something your body deserves—because you are human, not a machine.
Holding Grief and Celebration at the Same Time
Black History Month can bring pride, grief, anger, joy, exhaustion, gratitude, and numbness—sometimes all in the same day. That complexity isn’t a problem. It’s often a sign you’re paying attention and that you care.
Some people feel deeply nourished by cultural celebrations and community events. Others feel drained by performative recognition that disappears after February. Many feel both. It can be painful to witness corporate acknowledgments that don’t translate into safety, equity, or real support. And it can also be healing to see Black joy, creativity, brilliance, and love centered publicly—especially in a world that often highlights Black pain.
If you notice mixed emotions, a gentle reframe can help: your feelings reflect your values. Pride reflects love and belonging. Anger reflects the need for justice. Grief reflects the reality of loss. Joy reflects life force. Instead of forcing yourself into one “acceptable” emotion, allow the full range.
Healing doesn’t require positivity. Healing requires honesty—with enough support to hold what’s true.
Why community matters here
Some feelings need witness and need space. Some need someone to say, “I get it,” without trying to tidy it up. When emotions are carried alone, the body works harder to contain them. When emotions are held with care, the nervous system can settle.
You don’t have to pick between celebration and grief to be “doing it right.” Both can exist. Both can be valid. And both can be honored in ways that protect your dignity.
This month can be a time to celebrate history while also naming what hurts, resting when needed, and seeking spaces that feel real. The goal isn’t a perfect emotional experience—it’s a supported one.
What Support Can Look Like If You’re Not Black
Meaningful support during Black History Month isn’t about bigger statements—it’s about reducing harm and increasing safety. It respects boundaries and acknowledges that Black people are not obligated to teach, explain, or relive pain for someone else’s growth.
Listen without debate
When someone shares lived experience, resist the urge to minimize, problem-solve, or argue. Simple responses like “I believe you” and “That makes sense” can create safety quickly—especially when they come without defensiveness.
Learn without assigning labor
Do your own learning about racial stress and mental health so a Black colleague or friend doesn’t have to explain the basics. Credit Black educators, therapists, and creators rather than absorbing their work without acknowledgment.
Speak up where it matters
Support includes using your voice in professional spaces where silence has consequences. Name bias when it shows up. Make room when someone is interrupted. Question policies when they cause harm. Advocacy is a form of care—especially when it doesn’t put the burden back on the person already impacted.
Offer practical support, not performative help
Ask, “How can I support you?” and mean it. Offer tangible options: covering a task, sharing resources, checking in, making space for rest, respecting boundaries without punishment.
Be consistent
Support that appears only in February can feel hollow. Consistency builds trust. The goal is not to be perfect—it’s to be accountable and steady.
Ultimately, supportive action changes the environment. It makes it easier for people to breathe. It makes safety more accessible. And it signals that Black wellbeing is not a seasonal topic—it’s a daily priority.
A Community-Based Healing Invitation for This Month and Beyond
If healing doesn’t happen in isolation, community can become a wellness practice—not just a social preference. That doesn’t mean forcing yourself into spaces that don’t feel safe. It means choosing connection that supports your nervous system, your dignity, and your wholeness.
Start small and specific
You might reach out to one trusted person—not to “fix” anything, but to be less alone. You might send a message that’s honest and simple: “I’ve been carrying a lot. Can we talk this week?” Or, “I don’t need advice—just company.”
Choose affirming spaces
Consider attending one community event that feels nourishing—even if you stay only briefly. Follow a Black mental health educator whose words help you exhale. Or join a support group or healing circle where being understood is part of the foundation.
Practice collective care in real time
Consider sharing one resource with someone who’s struggling. Offer practical help instead of motivational words. Check in without demanding a reply. And normalize rest—by taking it, protecting it, and encouraging it in others.
Let small actions change your baseline
Over time, small choices build a new normal. Care becomes more expected. Support becomes more accessible. Isolation becomes less of a default.
Black History Month reminds us that collective survival required collective love. That truth still stands. We can honor history by practicing care now: language that affirms, support that shows up, boundaries that protect dignity, and healing spaces that don’t require you to shrink.
You don’t have to carry everything alone. Community doesn’t erase pain—but it can help your body believe safety is possible again. And that belief is a powerful beginning.
FAQs: Black History Month, Racial Stress, and Healing in Community
How does community support mental health?
Community supports mental health through belonging, emotional safety, practical help, and shared understanding. When people feel seen and supported, stress responses often soften. Supportive relationships can reduce shame, make it easier to process difficult experiences, and offer co-regulation—steady connection that helps the nervous system settle. Community also provides perspective: when someone responds with “that makes sense,” your body receives validation instead of isolation.
What is racial stress?
Racial stress refers to the emotional, cognitive, and physical impact of racism, discrimination, bias, and ongoing racialized pressure. It can show up as hypervigilance, irritability, sleep issues, emotional exhaustion, numbness, or feeling “on” all the time. These reactions often reflect adaptation rather than personal weakness—your body responding to repeated experiences that require alertness, caution, or self-protection.
Can therapy help with racial trauma?
Yes. Many people benefit from therapy that validates lived experience and acknowledges cultural context. Culturally responsive therapy can help reduce stress symptoms, support nervous system regulation, and create space for grief, anger, identity affirmation, and boundaries—without requiring you to minimize reality. Therapy can also help you recognize safe relationships and strengthen your ability to receive support.
What if I want support but don’t trust therapy yet?
That’s valid. Trust is built, not demanded. You can start with community support, psychoeducation, culturally grounded resources, or a low-pressure consultation with a therapist who aligns with your values. You deserve a pace that feels safe, and you’re allowed to prioritize settings where you feel respected and understood.
Closing: This Month and Always
This Black History Month, we can uplift voices that tell the truth about healing. We can honor resilience without demanding more endurance. We can practice collective care in ways that feel real—not performative. And we can keep Dr. Jennifer Mullan’s reminder close: healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in community.
That community can be small and still powerful. Sometimes it’s one person who checks in with steadiness. Sometimes it’s a room where your full story makes sense. Other times, it’s a space where you don’t have to translate your pain, minimize your anger, or rush your grief. It might look like care that shows up in tangible ways—meals, rides, childcare, advocacy, rest protection—and in emotional ways too: listening, believing, accountability, repair.
If you’re carrying racial stress, burnout, grief, or the fatigue of having to be “strong” all the time, you deserve more than survival. You deserve support that lets your body soften. You deserve spaces where you can be fully human—tender, complex, honest, and held.
Collective care is not a trend. It is a lifeline with deep roots—an inheritance of people who protected one another when systems wouldn’t. Honoring history means keeping that practice alive now: in how we treat each other, how we respond to harm, how we make room for rest, and how we build environments where wellbeing is possible.
If you’re looking for support that feels affirming, grounded, and human, Joy Spring Workspace can help you explore a path that fits your needs at a pace that respects your story. You don’t have to carry everything alone.