WRITER + ARTIST + ACTIVIST
ABOUT CRISTIEN
I am a writer, artist, activist, and therapist whose work explores the relationships between
trauma, embodiment, culture and collective liberation. My writing and healing are rooted in the
understanding that individual suffering cannot be separated from social, political, economic, and
historical systems that shape our bodies, relationships, and ways of being.
What becomes possible when we understand suffering as relational—and healing as a collective practice?
Drawing from over three decades of cultural organizing, politicized healing, and movement
building, I strive to weave nervous systems with political analysis, somatic awareness with
historical inquiry, poetry and research, with curiosity and imagination. My belief is that healing
is not an escape from the world, it is a way of becoming more fully present within it, which
requires facing and attending to structural inequities and power-over systems.
During the early 90’s I co-founded a Seattle-based arts and anti-violence organization, Home
Alive. At Home Alive, I helped develop community self-defense, boundary-setting, and anti-
violence programs rooted in the understanding that violence is not only interpersonal but also
structural and cultural. As a researcher and cultural organizer with The Northwest Coalition for
Human Dignity, part of my work was to monitor the white nationalist movement, support
community responses to organized hate, and develop cultural organizing strategies grounded in
art and music.
Today, in addition to writing and working as a therapist, I facilitate Global Social Witnessing and
Societal Resilience gatherings with the Pocket Project. GSW supports individuals and groups in
cultivating embodied presence while engaging with the challenges of our time. Facilitation
invites participants to witness personal and collective experience without turning away, while
developing embodied and relational capacity to metabolize unresolved individual,
intergenerational, and systemic trauma.
Healing is not isolated and only individual. Our bodies carry family histories, collective
inheritances, and ancestral stories. White supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and
other systems of domination do not exist only "out there"; they become embodied, shaping
perception, relationship, and the limits of what we imagine is possible. Healing, therefore, is not
simply about feeling better. It is about restoring our capacity to be in relationship—with
ourselves, with one another, with the living world, and with histories that have not yet been fully
grieved.
Through writing, therapy, facilitation, and community practice, my hope is to create spaces
where people can engage with personal and collective experiences with curiosity, courage, and
compassion.
healed people heal people
–Cristien Storm
–Cristien Storm
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Kindness eases change. Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession
blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest.
–Octavia Bulter