The Nervous System Healing Workbook
What if healing your nervous system could become part of everyday life and help protect your capacity to take on difficult community-focused work?
The Nervous System Healing Workbook offers accessible ways to understand chronic stress and vicarious trauma (CSVT) and 13 nervous system healing methods for use in our daily lives, relationships, careers, and communities.
Drawing from Indigenous Knowledge, scientific research, applied anthropology, and ancient practices from around the globe, this Workbook approaches nervous system healing through the larger priority of being in balance—mentally, biologically, spiritually, and collectively.
Central to this balance is relationality: our ability to bond, connect, and carry mutual responsibility for the well-being of all people in our lives, including human and non-human persons. CSVT can make these capacities more difficult to access.
Dr. Vélez Young has spent two decades facilitating, teaching, researching, and providing services alongside community teams. Her work has shown that people and communities deserve just as much time and attention on healing their nervous systems as given to legal matters, Indigenous sovereignty, education, and community change.
Humans have tremendous capacities for cooperation, empathy, and connection. By repeatedly helping our nervous systems return to more regulated states, we can support and protect these capacities—even while living and working under stressful conditions.
Nonprofit Work is Killin' Me
This book examines a widespread but often overlooked reality in the U.S. nonprofit sector: staff teams experiencing unmitigated chronic stress and vicarious trauma (CSVT) while serving communities facing some of the greatest consequences of inequality.
Centering truth-telling and Indigenous perspectives, the book examines how racist and colonizing forces within the nonprofit sector can contribute to CSVT. Dr. Vélez Young also highlights Indigenous and ancient healing methods and ways individuals and teams can use these methods to mitigate the impacts of chronic stress and vicarious trauma.
Ultimately, the book honors the contributions of nonprofit social services professionals while calling for their capacities to heal, challenge oppressive norms, and transform the systems in which they work.
Published by Toplight/McFarland Press.
Our Punitive Society
This reader-friendly exploration examines how poverty and political powerlessness shape punishment in the United States and why humane alternatives to mass incarceration are needed. Looking across slavery, the death penalty, women, LGBTQ communities, youth, and supervision, the book traces historical patterns of punishment and social control via the U.S. criminal justice system.
The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with the harms of punishment falling disproportionately across race, class, and gender. These consequences extend beyond incarcerated people to families, communities, and society as a whole. Equal justice is not possible in an unequal society.
As the criminal justice system continues to face challenges to policing, rising costs, and demands for change, this book asks whether meaningful transformation is possible—or whether reforms will preserve existing systems and interests. By making the often-hidden workings and consequences of the criminal justice system more visible, the authors invite readers to critically examine punishment, inequality, and possibilities for change.