You're invited to build resilience together this evening

Join me for a Resilience Toolkit introductory workshop Tues. Jan 27, at 7 pm ET.

Portland Head Light bearing witness on a wintery day in Maine. (Photo Credit: Dear one who opted for anonymity.)

Hi there,

I’m receiving DM’s, emails, texts, and calls from many people saying they feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do in this global moment of terror and ache.

If this sounds like you, please know you are not alone. Small solace, I know. But, actually, it’s a good sign that so many people are naming the overwhelm.

Awareness is the first step to breaking the cycles of harm and reactivity that got us here. Stabilization is the next step.

We can’t keep doing the same things expecting different results. Elections alone will not heal democracy or the people in it.

Journalists and content creators, political and civic leaders, social change workers, members of this administration, and even you and I can unintentionally hurt ourselves and others, adding to the distrust and division when we are not aware of our stress states and don’t know how to come back to balance.

We need the awareness and resilience tools to stabilize a nation in crisis.

That’s why I’m being brought in to do resilience trainings for journalists here in DC, small rural communities in Virginia, colleges across the country. And it’s why I’m making this Substack an active community that can learn and practice them, too.

I spent my career as a journalist and have learned that with this power comes great responsibility. Journalists can operate in chronic states of stress and trauma — circling between fight, flight, freeze and appeasement — which inevitably creeps into our work and relationships. This affects the questions we ask, the stories we tell, the headlines we write — for better or worse.

We can’t keep doing the same things expecting different results. Elections alone will not heal democracy or the people in it. We need the awareness and resilience tools to stabilize a nation in crisis.

Without support to metabolize stress and trauma, we can unwittingly contribute to polarization without knowing the roots of it or the pathways to repair it. Without knowing the science of what’s happening to us or the skills to stabilize, we can unintentionally create harm.

You don’t have to be a journalist to be caught in these stress and trauma patterns. Just look around. Just look inward.

If this sounds like something you'd like to better understand, please consider joining the introductory workshop to the Resilience Toolkit I teach. It’s tonight, Tues. Jan 27, at 7 pm ET.

The 75 minutes will teach you the science of stress, tools to build awareness of your own stress state, and the ability to stabilize so you can stay engaged without burning out, lashing out, or shutting down. The goal is to reduce overwhelm and increase your ability to choose how to respond to this moment.

Awareness and agency can, over time, melt the paralysis and burnout you may be feeling so you can take action to build a free society where we all can thrive.

The workshop is for paid subscribers, a fee that enables me to do the hard work of raising awareness about the ties between mental health and democracy and teaching the skills to navigate adversity with compassion. This is what democratic renewal and collective care looks like. Subscriptions are $60 a year or $7.50 a month.

Paid subscribers will see the Zoom link below. Others will find it below the paywall. Please RSVP by messaging me to join. I’m making this a small group to encourage space for questions and practice. I’ll put more on the books in February and March.

Step by step together,
Kate

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If you’re new here, welcome.
Back again? I’m so glad you are.

I’m Kate Woodsome, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of the Invisible Threads Impact Lab. I help leaders, journalists, and changemakers transform stress into strategies for civic resilience—strengthening the ties between mental health and democracy.

For more than 20 years, I reported and led global news teams through political unrest and social transformation—from Cambodia to Cuba, Hong Kong to Washington, D.C. I worked for Voice of America, Al Jazeera English, and The Washington Post, where my colleagues and I won the Pulitzer for our coverage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. I also walked away with something more: a reckoning with trauma, burnout, and moral injury.

Two years ago, I left The Post to pioneer a field connecting journalism, nervous system literacy, and systems change. An economy of wellbeing. Learn more about the work my lab is doing here. Georgetown University’s Psychology Department is evaluating the impact of the Regenerative Journalism I’m producing on readers’ sense of hope and empowerment to make positive change.

In a world where old ways of thinking no longer serve us, I believe we must know better to do better to feel better. Together we can.