Meet Vanessa Jackson of Healing Circles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa Jackson.

Vanessa, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Healing Circles was born out of a collapse and a rebirth. After nearly a 2 decades of working in mental health and social services, I had my own “nervous breakthrough” following a divorce which caused me to totally rethink my beliefs and practice regarding mental health and emotional well-being. As part of this process, I spent several years researching African American psychiatric history resulting in two monographs, In Our Own Voices: African American Stories of Oppression, Survival and Recovery in Mental Health Systems and Separate and Unequal. I was able to interview mental health ex-patients and consumers along with the staff of segregated asylums which helped me to understand that very little healing and a lot of abuse and oppression happened within the system.

I thought back to my own experience with clinical depression (which I refer to as a descent) and how I pulled together the best of western medicine, my political activism, a strong circle of family and friends and a grounding in the National Black Women’s Health Project’s self-help groups to get myself well. I remember one key moment driving to work and thinking with a sense of despair “My life is falling apart!” In the next moment, I had the thought” No, your life is cracking open!”

I started to think that it would be pretty revolutionary to have a place where extreme distress could be held without labeling or pathologizing the person. I kept thinking about the importance of having a place where my gifts and talents could be celebrated along with my temporarily wounded self. The same energy that reminded me that I was “cracking open” gave me the name Healing Circles and I knew that my work would be centered in helping people heal within their chosen communities-we need circles of people around us for authentic healing to occur.

I launched my business on my 40th birthday. Over the past 18 years, I have built an intentionally small (scale of life) practice which allows me to be fully present to my clients while leaving me with the time and freedom to pursue writing, training and just hanging out in nature. I have also infused spiritual healing into my practice using reiki, aromatherapy and crystals with clients. I see myself less as a therapist and more of a Soul Doula who helps people give birth to their authentic selves. These days, I am excited about some new possibilities for offering workshops on self-guided healing plans, especially for activists who are constantly juggling their political work with self-care. I love that I can work with clients remotely so I am not limited to Atlanta-based clients.

Otherwise, I see people in my healing cottage tucked in my backyard. It is so satisfying for people to walk into space and feel like they are in a healing sanctuary. I have evolved my practice, to include tools for people to continue their healing beyond my office, I have Power Cards to support power literacy and increase our understanding of how power operates in our lives. I also created Fiscal Trauma and Sacred Elderhood card sets to help clients explore these issues outside of session. I am in the process of launching Dudley’s Apothecary to distribute my aromatherapy sprays and oils.

My goal is to get people in, out and on with their lives with tools that allow them to experience healing and joy. I think the most important factor in my ability to create a thriving business that brings me a lot of joy is that I have lots of supportive people in my life who delight in me doing well and who are willing to open doors for me. I flinch at the word “networking” since it feels so contrived. I just build a relationship with people whom I love and who inspire me and the rest is easy since they believe in me and my work so I am the person that they think of when someone needs a referral. I always do the same for my circle of support.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
In many ways I feel like my path has been smooth but that is because I learned early on that I needed to stay flexible in order to meet my goals, Clearly, my experience with depression was terrifying and exhausting but it also taught me how to ask for help, to listen to my inner voice and not worry about what I “should be doing” or comparing myself to others. I took an experience that nearly broke me and used it as a springboard to the next level of work.

One of my favorite transformative moments was sitting on Waikiki beach and realizing that I was sliding into another depression. I was able to calm myself and check in to see what was really going on for me. I realized that I was not so much depressed as in a panic about whether I would get paid at the end of the presentation that brought me to Hawaii. I had drained my savings accounts to complete my research on African American psychiatric history and I REALLY needed that check!

I began to think about what the impact of tight or non-existent finances would be on someone who had never experienced enough and had no reason to believe that they would have enough financial resources in the future. I felt grateful for my working-class upbringing with enough and the skills and credentials that would allow me to make money in the future. I still needed that check but it was the beginning of my fiscal trauma project which included interviews with people on their relationship with money.

I transformed a moment of powerlessness into a powerful project that resulted in a book chapter, and several international and national training opportunities. I am learning to not give into a panic but to really look for the gift or the lesson in challenging moments because those have tended to be places of great creativity for me.

Healing Circles – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Healing Circles, Inc, is a personal and professional development practice where I co-create opportunities for healing and thriving with my clients. My practice is primarily women but I accept male clients by referral. I offer couples counseling and pre-marital counseling services for all couples. I operate from a social justice framework and it is important that people can bring their whole self into counseling and coaching so I am always thinking about how racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, classism and other forms of oppression impact the emotional well-being of my clients. I also provide consultation and training to non-profit and for-profit business on communication, self-care conflict resolution.

I am proud of the fact that I am trusted and respected within activist communities as a safe place for leaders and front-line folks to come to for support without judgment. I am an activist/therapist and I know how important it is to have a safe space to process our social justice work. What sets me about from others is that I see laughter and delight as key components of my work. In spite of dealing with a lot of people who have dealt with trauma, there is a lot of laughter in sessions as people are reminded of what is good in their lives. Much of my clinical work is focused on explicit discussions of power.

In 2017, I co-edited a book published by the National Association of Social Workers Press titled, Understanding Power: An Imperative for Human Services (https://www.naswpress.org/publications/practice/understanding-power.html ) that includes a chapter on my power-based clinical practice. It is important for me to give something back to the field and to weave together the threads of my political work, spiritual journey and clinical training to create new transformative practices that allow us all to show up as our full selves.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I think my proudest moment was conducting a three-day training on Understanding Power in Guam. It was amazing to be in the room with 60+ fully engage professionals representing behavioral health, criminal justice, social service and other community groups who were willing to address power on individual and institutional levels. There is a certain magic when people are deeply committed to their communities and to each other and were willing to have honest personal conversations about when they felt powerful and when they felt powerless. I cannot think of another training where I felt like all of my professional experience, research and personal processing was able to come together in such a powerful way. I love that my work allows me to travel and give and receive knowledge from so many amazing people.

A very proud (and humbling) experience was to have my work on power be centered in a play, Project Dawn, that was performed at Horizon Theater last year. I confess to cringing a bit when they said my name and spoke about my work but I realized that play would allow my work to reach so many people that I could never access through my day-to-day clinical practice or professional training. It was one of the many lucky moments in my life that came from me making time for an interview with a random caller and then learning that she produced a play that was informed by our conversation. Every opportunity that I have been given is a direct result of me being open and generous without having any agenda. It always pays off in delightful ways.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.healingcircles.org
• Phone: 404/849-3833
• Email: healingcircles@hotmail.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Healing-Circles-Inc-136143613720/

Image Credit:
Ingemar Smith, V. Kottavei Richmond

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