Ethan Freedman
SOCWT7102: Social Work Practice II
Prof. Kelsey Reeder
January 22, 2025
While I don’t remember it explicitly, I was born a minute after my twin brother Aidan because I was taking nutrients from him in the womb–and we were co-conspirators in the dissolution of what could have been our triplet brother in our Mother’s IVF process. While Aidan went to the NICU first because he was struggling with oxygen, I was fine until a nurse accidentally gave me blood with a known virus in it capable of killing any newborn. Luckily, there was not enough blood in my system with the virus and my Grandmother and Uncle stepped in and filtered it out of my system. Healing at this moment in time was dependent on those around me in the familial and medial system, and I was fortunate to have accountable doctors and support from family in bloodletting cases especially.
This medical model for treatment continued through my childhood with circumstances of broken noses, surgeries, concussions, but new medical approaches to mental health were introduced at a young age when my parents divorced. With a strong mother raising three boys alone and a working father legally still barely in the picture–my mother insisted her sons be speaking consistently to outside resources. She knew that healing emotionally needed to be removed from my parents because they were both responsible for the dissolution of their marriage. Healing in this case stepped outside of the familial system and highlighted that family can compound negative affect without the space to decompress.
I received social emotional counseling and educational disability services from the point of divorce til I graduated from College. To write these words out portray the money necessary to assist in these services, and the effort my parents gave in de-stigmatizing these experiences of therapy and mental health assistance. Depending on somebody's identities, there are many barriers to healing that I was lucky to tear down because of the effort of my parents. At this moment in time, I thought that I was ready to quit counseling until my therapist introduced me to a social model of therapy that held myself accountable for healing constantly. As a child of divorce and trauma, there was a feeling of things happening to me that shifted into a responsibility for ensuring I did not perpetuate the same behaviors. Dropping out of the pre-medical track and D1 rowing team in my undergrad program, I pivoted to Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies where social models of healing and disability were consistently in tension with epistemology I was learning on scientific inquiry and diagnostic criteria.
Riddled into this knowledge acquisition was praxis of what I was learning in circumstances of health and sex education topics. Whether it was counseling survivors of intimacy violence, preventing it, teaching sex education curriculums, I was interested in helping people on an collective, affective, and visceral level compared to the individual medical approach. I hold these values closely as a one of the many bodies and minds who went through COVID-19 and understand that healing must take place on a collective level.
As I look to the future, healing for me can be defined as making it all just a little bit better. Healing is not constant, but often two steps forward and one step backwards. It manifests at the level of the individual in medical industrial forms, but can also take social models of spirituality, embodiment, or anything else. There are natural ways of healing and man-made, placebo’s or straight up bogus, but who am I to knock what someone might argue makes them feel a little bit better.
At Columbia, I am focused on taking all that I have learned and unlearned and challenging it further by continuing to stay critical about my role in pushing the medical industrial complex or social models of healing as a social justice worker. Healing is a daily practice I learned to embrace in movements like skateboarding, surfing, and stretching in tandem with exercises of breathing and consistency in vocalizing my emotions. It can be as simple as something that makes you happy, writing in safe spaces, completely separate from a cure, or rooted in medical assistance. There are many ways to heal and the healing methods that build me up presently don’t work for everyone–and might need to be changed later in life. Healing is a constant and unique journey that I join so many other agents in trekking.