We were lucky to catch up with Amy Paulson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Amy, thanks for joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

As a survivor of orphan trafficking and child sexual abuse, I grew up with symptoms of trauma: suicidal depression, anxiety, and bulimia, unrecognized by both me and my adopted family and hidden behind the facade of being a perfectionist overachiever.

I navigated the medical mental health system for decades. But all of my practitioners were elder white folks – no one shared my lived experience, nor even mentioned the word “trauma”. I was medicated, but I never healed.

It makes sense, knowing what I do now about trauma, that I went into accounting and finance. My desire to control every little thing in my life – including numbers on a spreadsheet – was a coping strategy. And I was rewarded for it in my corporate career, despite this aching feeling that there was something missing in my life.

In 2009, I went back to Korea and visited the orphanage I lived at for several months as a baby. And it changed my life forever. It eventually led me to reunite with my biological family in Seoul, where I learned that I come from a lineage of trauma and violence. My ancestors’ wounds never had a chance to heal before they passed to the next generation.

I quit my corporate job and co-founded what is now called Healing Together – a global nonprofit that is working to scale community-led mental health resources around the world.

My work is deeply linked to my story. It’s not a job. It’s my purpose for being on the planet: to break cycles of trauma and violence in my family and help others do the same.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a mental health advocate, writer, speaker, social entrepreneur, and founder of Healing Together, a global nonprofit working to democratize access to trauma informed, healing centered mental health resources in order to break cycles of harm around the world.

“Hurt People Hurt People.” The wounds of unhealed trauma fuel fear, hate, violence, and harm from generation to generation. Yet our medicalized mental health model is an inequitable, inaccessible, outsider-centered institution that is stigmatizing, pathologizing, and ill-equipped to scale the resources needed to tackle a global mental health crisis of epic proportions.

Healing Together is working to democratize mental health care by disrupting the medical mental health system and building a scalable, accessible, survivor-led model for community mental health care.

We train teachers, parents, students, health workers, faith leaders, and community leaders of all kinds in trauma informed care, so they can start healing their own trauma while also serving as local “Healing Advocates” in their communities, break mental health stigma, support survivors through their own lived experiences, and disrupt legacies of generational trauma and violence.

After 10 years, we’ve trained over 7,500 people, from 28 countries, representing over 760 community organizations, who support over 100,000 survivors of trauma and violence around the world. And we’re just getting started.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The impact of “grind culture” that I inherited from the corporate world, and that is built into our capitalist system, still lives in my nervous system – that desire to be productive in order to prove my self worth. When I transitioned from the corporate world to the nonprofit world, I figured it would be my big chance to create more work/life balance. That is definitely not what happened! It was exactly the opposite.

My passion became my obsession. Day and night. Even in my sleep – what little sleep I had during those early years – I would dream about work problems and how to solve them, or I’d have nightmares about other people’s trauma stories. Every 6 to 18 months, I’d experience a spectacular burnout, where I’d promise myself (and my family) that I’d make some changes and build in more self care. And after a few weeks, I’d be back to my old patterns of overwork and sleeplessness, which led to anxiety, depression, and shame, until the next burnout happened.

My health started to suffer a lot. Not to mention my marriage, relationships, and my work too. It all forced me to make some critical life changes – like moving out of the Bay Area to the countryside and prioritizing my physical, mental, emotional and relational health. For the first time since I started my nonprofit 10 years ago, I’m feeling more grounded, spacious, and less “this has to be done today or else the world will fall apart” reactive. It’s true that there are global and local crises happening every day that demand our attention. It’s also true that if I don’t prioritize my health, I won’t be around to play an active role in seeding change in the world.

Mental health work, healing work, and community transformation work is all *slow work*. It’s making conscious micro shifts each moment that can lead to macro shifts over time. I now understand that – not just intellectually – but on a cellular level. I’m trying to practice and model that – for myself and others. To give myself permission to create the pace and space that I need to make those shifts, not reactively, but intentionally. Living on a farm now, nature also teaches me that lesson every day.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Doing my own inner work. The more aware I am of my own triggers, narratives, assumptions, biases, boundary challenges, stress responses, reactions to conflict, and so on – and how these relate to my core trauma wounds – the more I can work to heal them so that when they show up in my work, relationships, and in other areas of my life, I can respond with a sense of agency, humility, honesty, and authenticity. There’s a lot of “saviorism complex” and “martyr complex” in this kind of helping work. A lot of that is rooted in white supremacy culture, toxic gendered norms, and frankly, in our own trauma wounds. What we’re seeing in many activist communities and helping professions is that these dynamics are having a toxic effect on both our own personal health and wellbeing as well as that of our workplaces, relationships, and our social justice movements.

It’s not just rooted in burnout. It’s rooted in trauma – both from the impact of big global issues like systemic oppression and injustice, climate change, institutional violence, and of course, the pandemic, but also from interpersonal and intergenerational trauma in our families and communities. It’s a lot. And without taking the time to start healing our wounds, we risk replicating the same kinds of dynamics that we are working to transform.

I’ve learned this lesson many times over, often the hard way, where I’ve caused or enabled harm because of my own myopic lens, informed by my trauma wounds. I’m learning that healing isn’t just a lifelong journey, it’s a daily practice. A commitment to owning my sh*t, being accountable for when I hurt others or when I don’t act in alignment with my values, and tending to my deepest wounds so that I can show up fully present for others.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wearehealingtogether.org
• Instagram: @WeAreHealingTogether
• Facebook: @WeAreHealingTogether
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/amyepaulson
• Twitter: @WeRHealing
• Other: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/652714508