Healers

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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July 15, 2026

Healers help individuals and societies come to terms with profound wrongs in ways that make a more constructive future possible. Violence, oppression, and humiliation do not end when the immediate conflict stops. Survivors may continue to experience fear, grief, anger, and distrust, while communities remain divided by incompatible memories of what happened and who was responsible. Healers create opportunities for suffering to be acknowledged and for damaged relationships to be repaired. Their goal is not to erase the past or pressure victims to forgive. It is to prevent unaddressed trauma and grievance from continuing to shape identities, relationships, and future conflicts.

Truth and reconciliation commissions are among the most visible examples of this work. They investigate patterns of past abuse, preserve testimony, and give victims public recognition after their experiences have been denied or ignored. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, for example, documented the experiences of Indigenous children, families, and communities affected by the residential-school system. Such commissions can establish a more credible public record and recommend reparations or institutional reforms. They also face difficult trade-offs. Truth-telling may reopen painful wounds, and reconciliation language can become hollow when it is not accompanied by accountability or meaningful change. Healing therefore requires more than discovering what happened; it also requires demonstrating that the harms are taken seriously and will not simply be repeated.

Other healers work more directly with trauma. Agnieszka Alboszta’s account of trauma-informed peacebuilding at Mediators Beyond Borders International describes efforts to help peacebuilders recognize how trauma affects perception, behavior, and relationships. Trauma-informed approaches emphasize safety and avoid practices that may unintentionally recreate feelings of powerlessness. They may help people understand their reactions, rebuild supportive relationships, and regain a sense of control over their lives. Beyond Intractability’s overview of trauma healing similarly explains how carefully supported storytelling can help survivors incorporate painful memories into a larger life narrative. Healing is not a uniform process, however, and people should not be forced to recount experiences before they are ready.

Narratives and storytelling can also help communities reconsider the meaning of a painful past. Conflict narratives often present one side as wholly innocent and the other as permanently evil. Such stories may preserve important truths about injustice, but they can also transmit fear and hatred to later generations. Projects such as “Re-Storying Canada’s Past” and the Ododo Wa storytelling project show how people can tell stories of suffering while also recovering agency and imagining different relationships. The Canadian Friends Service Committee’s Indigenous Voices on Reconciliation project similarly gives Indigenous participants the opportunity to explain reconciliation in their own words, rather than leaving dominant institutions to define what healing should mean.

Healers disagree about how societies should interpret historical injustice. Coleman Hughes and the organization now known as Fair For All argue that racial injustice should be addressed without making racial identity the defining feature of social life. From a different direction, network-building and racial-justice practitioners encourage people and organizations to confront continuing inequities and change relationships of power. Nigel Biggar advocates a historical reckoning that recognizes occasions for both shame and pride, rather than reducing complex histories to a simple account of either national innocence or unrelieved evil. These approaches are controversial because communities disagree about what acknowledgment, justice, and reconciliation require. The healer’s essential task is not to impose a comforting story. It is to help people face painful truths without becoming imprisoned by them, so that memory can support accountability, dignity, and renewed relationships rather than endless retaliation.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.