It Is Political Now + We Need You!
Dear friends,
In case you haven’t received the same texts and roughly one thousand mailers, let us remind you that it is indeed almost election season. As we creep closer, our minds have been turning to the ways we see the election and its aftermath impacting our clients and their families. We’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge how stressful this season can be for so many of you. It can be painful to hear politicians, family, friends, and strangers speak cavalierly about issues that may have directly impacted your life in catastrophic ways.
This year, much of what is on candidates’ platforms deals directly with bodily autonomy or the right to have agency over choices about one’s own body—the right to contraception, reproductive healthcare access, queer rights, and civil rights are all front and center for our local candidates.
We’ve personally been struck by the ways in which historical oppression so often comes down to issues of controlling the bodily autonomy of others. Throughout history and through today, racism has revealed itself in attempts to police the bodies of Black and brown people. The LGBTQ community is no stranger to efforts to control how people present and who they love. And women and birthing people have seen how other states are restricting women’s access to necessary medication, miscarriage care, and of course reproductive decision-making.
Some people might think that these fall outside our scope of practice because much of our work in mental health often deals in the invisible. True, we deal in emotions, thought patterns, and the web of what lies deep within us. But our work also deals with our embodiment—the interplay of our thoughts, actions, emotions, physical experiences, and all that it means to be both physical and spiritual beings.
Specializing in the reproductive journey and maternal mental health, we have a front row seat to the ways that our emotional experience connects with our physical experiences. What are conception, pregnancy, birth, loss, and parenthood if not deeply physical experiences tied to ineffable emotional transformations. And in our work supporting people through trauma, we see the devastation that results from robbing people of their own agency.
When politics invades medical care, women and families suffer the most. They are subjected to delayed care, lack of care, and the trauma that results from being denied agency over their own medical needs. Patients and their doctors are the only ones qualified to make choices about their medical care. Only suffering and complications result from politicians in treatment rooms.
Where we do need local leaders is at work in our communities. Parenthood forces all of us to take a second look at our village. Some of our community we can build for ourselves by seeking out friends and family to rely on, but so much of our support is determined by where we live. Access to drinkable water, quality healthcare, good schools, safe neighborhoods—all of these contribute to family life, and our votes protect all of them.
Elections are a time to strengthen our support for each other. We ask you, our community, to use your votes to elect representatives on every level who will keep our whole community emotionally and physically safe. When you go into the voting booth, we hope you are thinking not just about what your family needs, but also about the needs of all the families in our community.
Warmly,
Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
Owner + Clinical Director
Christina Moran
Executive Director
