Reframe:

Balms for Languishing

Explore this page to learn more about the emotional responses that feed into Languishing and what we can do with them!

What are the “Balms”?

The goal of this project is to provide support to others in the social justice community who are struggling with Languishing. We can’t promise answers, or concrete solutions, but we can provide resources, tools, and new ways of thinking about our work that might help us find more ease and connection to our justice work; these comprise the Balms provided as part of the Languishing Project.

But, like really…what are they?

Within each Balm, we narrow in on the aspects of languishing that we can control, namely our emotional responses to engaging in activism and social justice movement. I hypothesize that not processing these emotional responses closes us off from accessing the wells of hope and motivation that drive our activism and block us from reaching that “flow” state of engaged and hopeful activism. And when hope is such an integral part of activist work, the inability to access those reserves make it difficult for an individual to find meaning in the activism; we get stuck in the feedback loop of languishing that “dulls” our motivation to work for change, “disrupts” our ability to focus on movement goals, and “triples the odds” that we’ll cut back on time spent in the movement - or leave the movement altogether.

With this in mind, each Balm attempts to:
1. Contextualize our emotional responses to a given context/consideration
2. Provide tools and thinking to help process those emotional responses
3. Provide new ways of thinking to help find ease in praxis

Tip: Click each Emotional Response below to explore the available Balms!

Don’t See Your “Emotional Response” Listed?

Not to worry! You can use the form on the left-hand side of this page to request a “New Balm” to be incorporated as part of The Languishing Project.

Guidelines for Submitting a Request:

  1. Please complete all fields with as much detail as possible - this will help us address your “blocker” as extensively as possible!

  2. Please ensure all submissions align with The Languishing Project - Community Covenant!

    Note: Requests that conflict with the Community Covenant cannot be considered.

What Happens Next?

  1. Please allow time for your Balm to appear on The Languishing Project!

    We are a small team and can only tackle so many responses simultaneously, so we thank you for your grace!

  2. Once you’ve submitted a request and the team is working on a response, any information submitted to this form (including personal anecdotes, stories, and references) will be anonymized for the sake of presentation; your personal reflections will never be publicly shared.

    If you have any questions or concerns about how your data is stored and shared, please visit our Evaluation Methods space or contact our team at admin@thelanguishingproject.com