Human after all

Content note: This episode discusses sexual violence, disclosure of abuse, breaches of trust in therapeutic and educational spaces, and institutional betrayal.

When someone tells you they’ve been harmed, what do you actually say?

In the Season 2 opener of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW responds to recent reporting about sexual violence and breaches of trust in therapeutic and educational spaces. Without speaking to any specific case, she turns toward a moment many of us will face: when someone we love chooses to tell us.

Most people don’t tell a professional first. They tell a friend, sibling, family member, or coworker. Drawing on Tarana Burke’s reminder that empathy interrupts shame, Tanisha offers a grounded way to show up: thank them for telling you, let them know it wasn’t their fault, ask what they need, and stay. You don’t have to decide what’s true to offer empathy.

She also names what can harm even when it comes from love: “why” questions that land as blame, defending the person being named, and taking over. Because harm like this takes control away, our role is to help people get it back by letting them lead, keeping their story theirs, and checking in long after the first conversation.

Tanisha speaks to trial-by-comment-section culture and the survivors watching to decide whether it’s safe to tell. She closes with psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s concept of institutional betrayal: what happens when the systems people depend on fail to protect them or close ranks when someone speaks up.

To anyone affected by sexual harm, we hope you find care, dignity, healing, and justice in whatever form those take for you.

Support resources:

• RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673, available 24 hours a day
• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Music Credit: “Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Tiktok | Youtube | Substack

The world feels heavy right now. Every day seems to bring more reasons to feel afraid, angry, or powerless, and it can seem like the institutions we once trusted are faltering while basic needs like housing, healthcare, and safety slip further out of reach. In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW starts from an honest place: it’s vital to acknowledge that reality, because pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

But naming the darkness isn’t the whole story. Tanisha turns to history to ask what people have always done when the systems around them failed, and what she finds is a throughline of adaptation, imagination, and relationship. Across cultures and generations, communities have survived and thrived not by facing hardship alone, but by forming networks of care and responsibility.

She traces that thread through the collective memory of Indigenous communities, the resourcefulness of immigrant families building new lives, the cultural transformation of the Great Migration, the preserved traditions of Jewish communities through centuries of displacement, the rebuilding of Japanese American families after incarceration, the organizing of Latino labor and farmworker movements, and the mutual aid that queer and disability communities created in the face of the AIDS crisis and systemic exclusion.

This isn't romanticizing hardship. Suffering is not noble, and our ancestors deserved rest, safety, and joy just as we do. But their lives show that power doesn’t only live in governments or institutions; it lives in what we share, protect, and refuse to give up. Tanisha invites listeners to reconsider what makes a life meaningful, not accumulation, but what we make possible for one another, because we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams, carrying their languages, recipes, rituals, and ways of loving forward into choices they fought to give us.

For anyone holding grief and hope at the same time right now, this episode is an invitation: stay informed, feel what you feel, and protect yourself, but also look for the people building something new, and join them. The light we need may not come from above or outside us. It may be something we create together.

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Music Credit: “Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Tiktok | Youtube | Substack

What does it mean to become more familiar with yourself?

In this episode of Human After All, host Tanisha Christie, LCSW is joined by Tatille Jackson, MFT-LP for a thoughtful conversation on self-familiarity, self-attunement, and the quiet work of learning how we move through the world.

Tatille explores self-familiarity as more than simply knowing facts about who we are. It is a practice of paying attention to our emotions, our patterns, our needs, and the parts of ourselves we may have learned to avoid, judge, or hide.

When we understand our reactions, emotions, and needs with more curiosity, they may feel less overwhelming and more like information guiding us toward care, clarity, and connection.

This episode invites listeners to consider how becoming known to ourselves can shape the way we show up in relationship, community, and care.

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Guest: Tatille Jackson, MFT-LP

Music Credit:

“Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack

What actually holds you up when resilience runs out?

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW, talks through her mother's recent hospitalization and what it means to sit on the other end of a phone, two thousand miles away, while a complicated relationship meets an uncertain ending.

There's history here that doesn't resolve neatly. Distance she needed to survive. And grief but not the kind most people picture. Complicated grief happens when love and harm come from the same person, so the loss doesn't just bring sadness. It also brings relief, anger, guilt, and things that don't cancel each other out no matter how long you sit with them. Tanisha picked up the phone anyway. Her sister held it to their mother's ear. What she said into it, and whether her mother understood it, isn't something this episode resolves for you either.

This episode doesn't try to tie it together. It sits in the contradiction of caring for someone you don't particularly like, in the question of what you owe someone at the end of their life — someone who survived things of her own, who loved in the only way she knew how, even when that way caused harm — and in what's actually left standing once the conventional advice stops working.

Content note: This episode discusses family trauma, estrangement, dementia, hospitalization, narcissistic behavior, and end-of-life experiences.

Credits

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Music Credit:

“Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack

Exercise is often framed as something we do for our bodies, but movement can also be one of the ways we care for our mental health, regulate our nervous systems, and reconnect with ourselves.

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW is joined by Dagem Lemma, LCSW therapist, educator, runner, and clinical supervisor at Liberation-Based Therapy, for a deeply reflective audio note on running, embodiment, and healing beyond the therapy room.

Dagem reflects on running not as escape, but as a practice of return. Through his relationship with endurance running, the mountains, his mother’s walking practice, and the realities of moving through the world in a Black body, he explores what it means to show up honestly to the body, to grief, to belonging, and to the world as it is.

This episode invites listeners to consider movement as more than performance or discipline. It can be a practice of presence. A way of listening. A way of taking up space. A way of remembering that we are human beings, not human doings or human fixings.

At its center, this conversation reminds us that healing does not only happen in therapy rooms or perfectly curated routines. Sometimes, it happens when we move, breathe, listen, and return to ourselves with honesty.

Credits

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Podcast Guest: Dagem Lemma, LCSW

Music Credit:

“Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack

Music has a way of shaping the emotional atmosphere around us. It attaches itself to memory, grief, identity, relationships, and the parts of our lives that words cannot always reach.

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW takes a closer look at the theme music heard at the beginning of the podcast: “Better Angels,” written, produced, performed, and sung by Alexis Hightower. Tanisha reflects on the often unseen labor behind music-making: the vulnerability, experimentation, discipline, technology, frustration, and imagination required to translate feeling into sound.

Alexis then shares the story behind “Better Angels,” from the drum and bass groove that first gave the song its sense of forward movement, to the way the song shifted from something bold and self-assured into something more honest, introspective, and human. She speaks about writing, producing, recording, and mixing the song, and how the music came to hold a message about fear, surrender, support, and allowing our “better angels” to do some of the fighting.

This episode is a meditation on creativity, healing, and the humanity behind the art we consume. It reminds us that sometimes healing enters through conversation, and sometimes it enters through sound first.

Credits

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Podcast Guest: Alexis Hightower

Music Credit:

“Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack

Liberation is a word we hear often — in therapy, activism, healing work, and everyday conversation. But what does it actually mean?

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW reflects on liberation as more than a concept, buzzword, or destination. She explores liberation as an ongoing process of becoming, rooted in history, community, care, resistance, and the everyday choices that help us become more connected, honest, and human.

Drawing from liberation theology, Black liberation traditions, Latinx and Chicanx movements, feminist, womanist, queer, and trans liberation frameworks, this episode traces how liberation has always been tied to lived conditions — poverty, state violence, racism, displacement, patriarchy, survival, and collective struggle.

At its center, this episode asks us to hold a more grounded truth: liberation has never been about utopia. It has always been the work. The work of caring for each other, repairing harm, telling the truth, refusing dehumanization, and building lives, families, relationships, and communities that move us toward something better.

For those feeling tired, overwhelmed, or uncertain, this episode offers a reminder that transformation is possible — not because the work is easy, but because we are still becoming, still moving, and still capable of moving toward liberation together.

Credits

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Music Credit:

“Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW invites listeners into the purpose behind the podcast and the questions that shaped its beginning.

This episode opens the door to a space for thoughtful conversations on being, relating, healing, identity, work, rest, grief, joy, conflict, repair, art, culture, and everything in between. Rooted in the values of Liberation-Based Therapy, this episode reminds us that healing is not only internal. It is relational, contextual, cultural, and collective.

Rather than offering perfect answers or generic advice, Human After All creates room to pause, listen, reflect, and ask deeper questions about how we stay connected to ourselves and one another in times that can feel deeply disconnected.

Podcast: Human After All

Presented By: Liberation-Based Therapy

Host: Tanisha Christie, LCSW

Music Credit: “Better Angels” written, performed and produced by Alexis Hightower

Liberation-Based Therapy Website: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com

Podcast Page: www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/human-after-all-pod

Make an Appointment https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/make-an-appointment

Follow us on Social Media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Substack