Effective action — one year of research on ‘relational activism’
At the beginning of this year, I started a research group with Bettina Rollow and Anjet Sekkat on the topic of ‘relational activism’. Previously, I had written a longer article of the same name that dealt with current debates around activism and social transformation. The research lab took place under the name Relational Activism. From Entanglement to Presencing and Beyond, as part of a Collective Trauma Facilitator training programme. This is offered by the Pocket Project, an organisation founded by Thomas Hübl and Yehudith Sasportas, which has set itself the task of increasing awareness of the existence, impact and healing of collective trauma fields. Trauma, so the theory goes, hinders the ability to change and is largely responsible for the fact that the world is so stuck and in a deep crisis.
The one-year research group, which met once a month for two hours on Zoom, focussed on the question: How can activists work effectively and sustainably for change? What stands in the way and how can we overcome obstacles?
After receiving 90 applications from around the world, we selected 38 based on their professional experience, diverse perspectives and familiarity with Inner Work.
In this blog post, I want to reflect on our work process and initial findings. Over the past few months, we have been approached time and again by some of you who were unable to take part in the lab, but who felt that the topic appealed to you and wanted to know more about it. The question of effective activism also seems increasingly relevant to us, so we will build on the experiences described here in 2025. Among other things, Anjet, Bettina and I will be writing a more comprehensive report on the Lab as part of our work with the Pocket Project, which will focus more on the process of emergent facilitation. Events such as the Hearth Summit Berlin from 27–28 February 2025 will also revolve around the topic of social change capacity.
Building a sufficiently safe group basis for self-critical reflection
In the first lab sessions, the main aim was to build a sufficiently safe psychological group container that would enable us all to have the deepest possible experiences and to show ourselves authentically and vulnerably in the group. Our intention was to guide the participants through a deeper, self-critical process of realisation. Together we wanted to better understand the relationship between activists and the world they are trying to change and — if possible — reveal new possibilities for activism through a next step of realisation. We are convinced that such a next step is necessary, thereby echoing Bayo Akomolafe’s hypothesis: What if the way we face the crisis is itself part of the crisis?
It was clear from the applications that many activists have reached a limit: They have been campaigning for social change, often for many years or decades. Many had very successfully climbed career ladders in the social sector. At the same time, many felt frustrated, sad and unmotivated. They asked themselves very fundamental questions: What am I actually achieving? Why am I running into so many obstacles? Why, despite all our work, is the world more crisis-ridden than ever? Is the price I pay for my commitment — enormous work pressure, poor pay, little recognition — not too high? How can I balance my quality of life, my well-being, my wellbeing and my stressful work?
Motivation as a resource. What motivates me and how are early life experiences interwoven in my career choice?
When choosing the research design and questions, we endeavoured to strike a balance: we needed a clear focus, but at the same time had to make the process as open as possible. We didn’t want to create a program for the participants, but rather give us all the chance to experience something new. Emergence cannot be planned, it is a gift and our contribution was to shape the process as closely as possible to the group dynamics without forcing it into a predetermined mould so that new insights could potentially end up there.
As a starting point, it seemed sensible to first take a closer look at the motivation of the participants. After all, the motivation of people who dedicate their life energy to social issues is an enormously valuable resource that we wanted to raise awareness of before we turned our attention to difficult, darker topics.
In one of our supervision sessions with Thomas Hübl, which we attended as Lab leaders, Thomas described the motivation of activists as ‘the amazing power of life to heal itself’. In a world full of grievances, pain and suffering, some individuals are explicitly addressing these wounds. Instead of becoming accountants or footballers, they feel called to put issues such as violence, torture, inequality, species extinction or climate catastrophe at the centre of their lives. This is, I think, a very beautiful perspective: to see the activist interest in and focus on social and ecological crises as a valuable self-healing mechanism of creation.
In the lab, we assumed that most socially committed people have a life story that is linked to their respective field of work. We know this from the biographies of countless civil rights activists and social entrepreneurs. Famous examples include Angela Davis, who was subjected to systemic racism in the racially segregated South before becoming a leader in the civil rights, prison reform and women’s movements. Similarly, Malala Yousafzai, the world-renowned advocate for female education, experienced what it meant to be a young girl denied access to education under the Taliban in Pakistan and was even subjected to a direct attempt on her life. Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement took her motivation from her personal experiences of sexual violence and her desire to support others who have experienced similar trauma. The series can go on and on.
In preparation for each lab session, Bettina, Anjet and I sat down together to test out the content and choreography on ourselves. As we explored our respective motivations for our future careers, I could see how I had been preoccupied since my youth with the question of why I was surrounded by so many social structures that curtailed or even destroyed human growth. How could we accept so many obvious injustices as normality? Why did my parents’ world feel (to me) so narrow, numb, confrontational and violent? This discrepancy between what was considered ‘normal’ around me and my own desire for inner freedom and coherence has significantly shaped my career, first as a cultural anthropologist, then as a social entrepreneur. I wanted and want to create alternatives: to create structures, processes and spaces in which people can move more freely from collective constraints and have more choices to shape their lives in ways that suit them.
In the first lab sessions, we looked with the participants at what motivated them to get involved in a specific social issue. Was it positive experiences or often more conflict- and tension-laden areas of life that had left such a lasting impression on them that it became a professional calling?
For such reflections, we repeatedly brought the participants together on Zoom in breakout sessions, in which they had between 5–10 minutes in turn to explore themselves out loud. We then came together in plenary and collected individual voices. We found that our hypothesis that motivation and biographical imprinting were closely interwoven was confirmed by many comments. Often it was painful, but sometimes also positive early life experiences that had motivated our participants to deal with issues such as domestic violence, racism, mental health or human rights violations.
What surprised us was that many activists had never before recognised the connection between motivation and imprinting. In some cases, they had worked in one area for decades without making an explicit connection to their own biographical socialisation, which they often experienced as difficult, and only saw the connection between the two through our exercises.
Motivation meets trauma
By focussing on their own motivation, the participants were able to establish deeper contact with themselves. At the same time, the first sessions of the lab also indicated that the connection between motivation and injury was not easy to maintain. Because exactly where my motivation starts, I also touch the scar tissue of life and instinctively tend to turn away from it.
This is where we first hit the core of our lab. On the one hand, activists feel called to improve living conditions and alleviate suffering. Many of them know exactly what they are talking about in their commitment because they have experienced the injuries first hand. But it is precisely when motivation and wounding are so close to each other that activists find it difficult to have a clear, comprehensive view of the issue, which is necessary for adequate responses and strategies. This is because in order to survive the distortions, abuse, violence, discrimination etc. reasonably intact, they have had to develop trauma responses in the form of compensation and protection mechanisms. These mechanisms mean that they are very likely unable to perceive the wider context of the injury, including the ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ involved, in an unbiased, open and differentiated way. Entangled, their perspectives and ability to perceive are probably reduced.
An activist who was herself a victim of domestic abuse and is now campaigning against domestic violence has most likely developed protective mechanisms that were necessary for survival at the time of the abuse, but which now obscure her view of the wholeness of life. Trauma distorts our perception; it reduces a three-dimensional reality to a two-dimensional experience.
We speak of trauma when an experience that is overwhelming for the human nervous system and cannot be processed (i.e. fully experienced and lived through) becomes ‘stuck’ in the body. The nervous system freezes at this point, becomes numb and can no longer participate dynamically in life. In traumatised areas, it is not possible for me as a person to fully grasp the reality around me. Instead, I compartmentalise certain experiences as ‘not me’ and project them into the outside world.
If I now encounter the aspect of life that overwhelmed me as a younger person in my daily activist work, I tend to look at it in a two-dimensional way, for example, to marginalise the excluded parts as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘evil’ and to see the people associated with them as ‘opponents’ or ‘enemies’.
To illustrate this with my own experience: In my parental home, I perceived a great narrowness, muteness and numbness, which also went hand in hand with psychological violence. Even as a teenager, I drew a connection between this atmosphere and the completely unprocessed Nazi past of my ancestors. For many years, I strongly distanced myself from my parents, devaluing them and their lifestyle as morally ‘bad’ and valorising myself as ‘good’. In my own life, I developed political attitudes and values that were diametrically opposed to theirs. I couldn’t engage with them more deeply because their world views triggered me so strongly that I automatically had to represent the exact opposite of them. I had to reduce them to their unreflected relationship to German history and ignore the many factors that had made them the people they were.
How do you feel about your activism?
At this early stage in the lab, we did not explicitly introduce psychological injuries and trauma as a concept. Instead, we asked the participants to describe how they were currently feeling about their activism. How did they experience their activities? What was difficult for them? Where did they see major barriers and obstacles?
The responses revealed that many (but not all) participants were perplexed, angry and frustrated. Others felt lonely, misunderstood, overwhelmed, exhausted and increasingly ineffective. They described the constraints in which they operated, the entrenched institutional structures, the lack of financial support for their work, the superiority of large systems such as the economy, patriarchy, party politics and the like. They often reached the limits of their understanding: How could these people act like this? What kind of image of humanity was behind these statements? At the same time, it also became clear that many had good recipes for how the world could be different: if only we changed this and that, then we would all be so much better off.
Ability to relate
In the following sessions, we delved deeper into our ability to relate to what we want to change. By ‘relate’ we don’t mean ‘like’ or ‘approve of’. Instead, we are able to relate when we can adequately map/host other people, other perspectives, other behaviours within ourselves. When we allow something that we perceive as ‘outside’ to emerge in our inner experience to such an extent that we can see, feel and understand it more fully. In this case, the ability to relate means tuning into different perspectives in life, witnessing them emphatically in three dimensions.
At this point, a few words about the Theory of Change that we worked with:
We assume that we can only change what we grasp and assess more deeply. After all, how can we effectively influence something if we are unable to understand its inner dynamics and perhaps even shy away from them? How can I improve something if I can’t look things in the eye as they are?
In this understanding, change is not so much something that individual people or groups ‘do’, but rather a process of unfolding. Life has its own inherent movement that can get stuck or unfold. The trauma mentioned above is such a barrier that stands in the way of life’s own movement, including healing injuries or developing further. In this picture, activists are not so much ‘doers’ who realise their own visions in the outside world, but midwives who hold the space for latent movements and manifest them in the world through their actions.
Effective change is therefore based on activists grasping and feeling the problems, crises and grievances as clearly as possible and also seeing where they themselves are involved. Because in today’s world, no one is outside the ‘system’. Our tendency to locate problems, crises and grievances ‘out there’ and to pretend that we ourselves are unaffected by them only contributes to further social fragmentation and division.
But reality is whole and marginalised parts make themselves heard in the form of crises, disruptive factors, symptoms of illness, etc. They form symptoms that supposedly ‘stand in our way’ to a ‘better world’. And so we fight them, exert pressure, use shame and embarrassment strategies to defeat our ‘enemies’ or ‘opponents’.
However, pressure usually creates counter-pressure and so we become part of a huge spiral of pressure that keeps us on the spot.
In order to better understand these patterns, we turned to our ability to relate in the lab and explored what stands in the way of relationships. Firstly, it was important for us not to reject what we identified as a lack of relationship, but to understand it as a healthy natural protective mechanism. When we distance ourselves from something, there is a good reason for it. For many of us, our ability to distance ourselves was essential for survival and helped us, for example as children of abusive parents, to build up a reasonably intact identity. Similarly, strongly dissociative feelings such as anger can be essential for self-assertion and self-esteem for people whose biography is characterised by constant discrimination.
Strategies at the border
In the next lab sessions, we explored our relationship to the issues, people and groups we want to change. We came across a number of popular othering strategies that help humans to stabilise themselves psychologically, but which are often ineffective at the political level and lead to greater polarisation and fragmentation.
To give participants a few pointers, we offered them these popular othering strategies (based on the work of the Held Collective):
Reductionism
belittling or reducing someone by seeing them in terms of only one part of their identity. (e.g. their social identity — origin, class, sexuality, political affiliation, institutional role, etc.)
Punishment
the impulse or desire to meet harm with harm. Punishment(s) or retribution to a person for the harm they have caused or that we believe they have caused
Wrong-sizing
a response that is inappropriate to the situation or dynamic at hand
Superiority
seeing ourselves as better than others or seeing them as less good than ourselves
Fragility
the unbearable discomfort we feel and the evasive behaviours we exhibit when we talk about or are confronted with our privilege
We asked the participants: What do you do with your counterpart, e.g. with those you want to convince of something? Whose behaviour is ‘wrong’, ‘dangerous’, ‘difficult’ and that you want to change?
As the session took place shortly after the 2024 European elections and many participants were emotionally agitated, we gave them the question ‘How do I relate to voters of a party that I reject as dangerous and inhumane?’ in small groups. Specifically: ‘What do I observe on the border between myself and the other?’
In the discussions that followed, it became clear how often we distance ourselves from what we see as ‘wrong’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘different’. For us facilitators as well as for many of the participants, it was enlightening but also embarrassing to see how much we/they tended to valorise ourselves over others or reduce people to their political affiliation, for example.
What enables and what prevents exclusion strategies and relational skills?
Then we wanted to know: What exactly happens at these boundaries and what are the consequences of our ability or inability to relate to others? How does my ability to communicate and create change depending on how holistically I can perceive my counterpart?
A clear picture emerged in the plenary: if we perceive the other person as a template, we are more likely to be stressed. We have to manage our feelings and often even tense up physically. We are easily triggered and experience ourselves as closed off. Instead of listening properly, we formulate our response while the other person is still speaking. We don’t show ourselves to be vulnerable, but strong. We see ourselves as functional and not very creative.
In contrast, we also explored how we feel when we can relate to a dialogue partner or when we are dealing with a topic that fascinates us. Then we feel open and relaxed, experience flow, are grounded and present. We can listen well and speak out of the situation ourselves. We often surprise ourselves with what we say. We are curious and able to respond co-creatively to the other person. We can tap into our intuition and assess the overall situation more easily from a bird’s eye view.
In one situation, the space for jointly developed solutions shrinks to a minimum, in the other it expands and allows for creative impulses and possibly even emergence of something genuinly new.
The impact of trauma
In the following sessions, we went one step further and directly addressed the impact of trauma on us, our institutions and our work. First, we differentiated between three different levels of trauma: individual, intergenerational and collective.
Individual trauma refers to a traumatic experience that is limited to one person, such as the early loss of a parent. Intergenerational trauma refers to injury dynamics that are passed on within families, for example a series of suicides in the family. Collective trauma, on the other hand, refers to phenomena of numbness and exclusion from consciousness as a result of massive violations and crimes committed at the collective level, such as wars, colonialism or racism. These have led to certain conditions and forms of behaviour, such as extreme inequality, violence or discrimination, being regarded as ‘normal’ by a society. In all three forms, which are often interconnected, trauma reduces our ability to see the world realistically and holistically and to shape it effectively as a result.
We asked ourselves and the participants: How has trauma affected the culture and institutions you grew up in? How has trauma become part of the lens, the filter through which you see reality? And — to what extent does all of this influence your activist work?
In our upstream team-internal reflection, I examined my own imprint and its impact on my later career as a social entrepreneur. For a long time, I had accepted the principles of the capitalist meritocracy as the norm and oriented myself towards ideals such as the acquisition of intellectual skills, competition and self-optimisation. Even though I knew from my comparative anthropology studies at the latest that there were many other value systems on this planet, our meritocracy seemed to me to be in need of improvement, but in a way also ‘without alternative’. Accordingly, I was attracted to the idea of social entrepreneurship, which propagated market-based instruments, including innovative business models, number-driven operations, impact measurement and the like, as the optimal way to achieve social change. To this day, I see many positive aspects of this movement. At the same time, I am becoming increasingly aware that in many ways it is reproducing the status quo under a more ‘modern’ guise. I also excluded many other perspectives and looked down on grassroots NGOs and associations as well as bureaucratic international organisations.
More importantly, I did not question the fundamental power dynamics in social entrepreneurship. Today, I share the thesis of Anand Giridharada’s book Winners Take All, according to which elites are double winners. They can successfully reproduce their position of power in social entrepreneurial discourse and at the same time enhance their moral standing.
Our lab participants also found the questions ‘How has trauma influenced the culture and institutions in which you grew up?’ and ‘How does trauma distort your view of reality?’ useful. They reflected on how they are inevitably interwoven in various fields of trauma. One participant described how she and her organisation provide mental health services, but that she has to commercialise them in a certain way in order to have a functioning business model. This inevitably entangled her in the contradictions of capitalism.
In the discussion, it became clear that we all live in different trauma fields — from patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, slavery, sexism, racism, abelism, etc. These inevitably cause us to not see many aspects of the world, to block them out, or to reject them as ‘alien’, ‘different’, ‘wrong’, ‘inferior’. We are born into the separation and reproduce it. Whether we want to or not. We have no other choice, no matter how hard we try to escape the separation.
What is possible?
The deeper and more honestly we explored the topic, the clearer it became how closely trauma and motivation are connected. For many of us, they are two different sides of the same coin. If we engage with this dynamic as openly as possible, we can perceive how our resources — in the form of deep interest, care, time and love — encounter our traumatisation and we reduce the diversity of the world to a few options: then the others are ‘bad’, the ‘problem’, our ‘opponents’. In doing so, we perpetuate the cycle of injury and division and miss out on finding answers to our massive planetary challenges beyond fragmentation and polarisation.
A first step towards an approach that goes beyond division is to recognise our entanglement and to allow it to work more deeply within us. We can slowly build up the capacity within us as a group, develop an awareness that the two movements can be held simultaneously.
But this also means that we engage with our pain and wounds and do not keep them at a distance by projecting them outwards. What is behind our feelings of loneliness and being overwhelmed, disgust and hatred for those who think differently? In the course of this exploration, I will turn to my vulnerable parts, the places where I am needy, sad, angry, and shameful. This usually raises the question of how I can be effective in such a vulnerable state. How can I be both, strong and vulnerable? Who am I without my anger?
In the course of this exploration, I encounter, in the best case, a new form of effectiveness. This is not dependent on quick fixes, but understands that all developments take the time they need. With this understanding, I am ready to act in accordance with my values as an activist and to take the next coherent step, without being fixated on a specific goal. When in doubt, I have to accept that the solutions I prefer will not prevail in my lifetime and that the future will be very different from how I imagine it anyway.
One characteristic of this other activist movement is that I am treating myself with kindness. This includes recognising how hard it is to bear witness to the world as it is. My tendency to escape suffering and my inner pressure by distracting myself with visions of the future and more and more actions are deeply human. Of course, I want to escape the pain associated with issues such as human trafficking, species extinction, war, inequality and discrimination as quickly as possible. Only when I have understood more deeply that in this way I am more likely to contribute to reproducing the past in a new guise than to really bring something new into the world will I be able to release the pressure.
In my efforts to include more reality, I am confronted with a great deal of suffering and pain, but also with a great deal of beauty and love. ‘Attention is a moral act,’ writes Iain McGilchrist. It is our responsibility to decide what we focus our attention on and how much we open ourselves to light or shadow. Each of us will find our own balance in this, because for this form of relational activism it is important to maintain one’s own balance: I can only give as much as I myself have available without harming myself. In doing so, I recognise the ‘over-responsibility’ that is widespread in activist circles not as a heroic achievement, but as a trauma reaction.
Thomas Hübl says that things don’t change under pressure. They are the way they are because we as humans are the way we are. It’s not true that the world could be so beautiful if only we opened the prisons, abolished dictators and built sustainable energies. Because these things reflect us as human beings. Of course, it can be said that it is individual rulers who block the path to the solutions that most people really want. But at least in democratic states, we elect these rulers. And even if I vote for pluralistic parties, if I am honest, my lifestyle reproduces many of the grievances that I complain about at the same time.
When we stop and wake up from the anaesthesia of over-responibility, over-activism, hope or numbness, the suffering and distortions suddenly become tangible and thus three-dimensional. This step can easily overwhelm us. That is why we need spaces in which we can discuss and digest our new experiences and feelings with others. Bettina uses the image of interconnected circuits for this: alone, my cable burns out under high voltage; in community, I can connect the powerful charge with other nervous systems and hold it better.
When we see more of what we can realistically change and what we cannot, this leads us to truth. For things to truly transform, they need to have space and be acknowledged. Only then can they change at their own pace and in their own rhythm.
Change requires patience and love. A sense of emergence — what can move here now, but what is not yet ripe for it? What influence do I have right now to change something, or where am I caught up in an over-responsibility that will only make me burn out? What resources do I have at my disposal and what can I achieve with them?
I want the world, or even just this group, to be different than it is.
We also had to look at this dynamic again and again in our Lab leadership team. Because we also wanted the learning process within the group to happen faster than it did. It was difficult for us to recognise where we were right now: within the larger group, but also, of course, in our leadership team, which was going through a parallel learning process that could not be deliberately accelerated. We wanted to be in a different place ourselves, to know more, to have a better overview and to feel more confident in the subject area than we often did. And that was because it felt uncomfortable when we ourselves and our group were not in flow.
But the point of the lab was to recognise that we are tangled up and entangled and therefore cannot clearly orient ourselves in the complexity of our reality and our effectiveness. That is why we had to endure the uncomfortable conditions that accompanied the group process again and again, when there was confusion, the group was very quiet or the process of realisation did not go as fast as we had conceived it. If we put ourselves under even more pressure in such situations, we became even more entangled in the fragmentation and prevented something new from emerging.
Regular supervisions with Thomas Hübl helped here. In one session, Thomas stopped my flow of words by making me aware of the pressure and inner stress with which I asked my questions, simply through his presence. I saw myself as if in a cartoon: a Duracell woman who was constantly running and talking and doing and making. And then, from one moment to the next, I would completely calm down with a brief intervention and look at the whole movement within me, somewhat bewildered and surprised.
I would like to conclude with a quote from Kae Tempest, which I read in her new book On Connection while I was conceptualising this article.
In the past… I wanted to change people… Now I see things differently. I see that every single person is affected by the violence of existence in different ways, and that people carry their burdens however they can. People suffer a great deal, and ideally they must process their traumas in order to reach some kind of peace. … I am no one to judge how someone has come to a conclusion. … I don’t want to change minds anymore. I just want to connect.
