37th Annual Boston International Trauma Conference

Something is shifting in the trauma field.

For years, the work of healing has largely lived in a familiar place: the therapist’s office, the individual nervous system, the private interior of one person’s experience. That work is vital. It will always matter.

But more and more, trauma practitioners are naming something that can no longer be ignored: we cannot fully heal people while the systems that harm them remain unchanged. And we cannot sustain the work of healing if we ourselves have no framework for living and working through collective crisis.

This year, the 37th Annual Boston International Trauma Conference meets that conversation head-on. Three sessions in particular ask the question that is on many of our minds: what does it mean to do healing work in a world that is actively causing harm?

Prentis Hemphill and Linda Thai deliver a session on what happens to our bodies – and our movements – when we engage with social and political realities. Not just the burnout and compassion fatigue we talk about in supervision, but the deeper question of how trauma shapes the way individuals and entire communities respond to threat, power, and change. Their framework doesn’t ask us to choose between personal healing and political engagement. It asks what it looks like when the two inform each other.

The Outer Work Project – featuring Nkem Ndefo, Staci K. Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, and Licia Sky – goes further still. Their session is a direct challenge to the boundaries of traditional therapeutic practice. They argue that healing and social transformation are not parallel tracks but deeply intertwined ones, and that trauma healers are uniquely positioned to support change not only in the people they serve, but in the systems those people must navigate. This is about what therapy looks like when it takes its social context seriously.

Mariah Rooney, joined by poet Junauda Petrus, bring the weekend to a close with perhaps the most direct statement of all. In a session on the somatics of liberation, they hold space for what many practitioners are quietly carrying: grief, rage, fear, and the bone-deep question of how to keep showing up when the scale of harm feels overwhelming. Their answer isn’t resignation or revolution for its own sake – it’s a love-centered, body-grounded practice of resistance and imagination. The kind that sustains.

These sessions will offer a way of thinking about the body, healing, and social change that is rooted in decades of clinical and community practice – and that takes the present moment seriously.

Register today to experience these sessions and many others – our conference offers four days of keynotes, workshops and community building.

The 37th Annual Boston International Trauma Conference runs May 27–30 at the Sheraton Boston Hotel & online. Up to 30 CE credits are available.