To raise awareness about these things, however, is not enough. My focus in my speaking, workshops, and seminars is on bearing witness to violence in the service of healing the wounds violence repeats, and on bringing trauma-informed practices to every aspect of our lives, work, social, and political engagement.

After building and directing a Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgia Southern University, I went to Albania as a Fulbright Scholar.  That tenure led to my work with former political prisoners from Albania’s cold-war totalitarian dictatorship, and then to co-founding and serving as the Academic Director and Human Rights Coordinator for the nongovernmental Organization OTTOnomy.  OTTOnomy’s mission was to use the arts, culture, and public education to heal wounds of war and dictatorship in the Western Balkans.

The vision to bring education to the people and to use the arts, culture, and public education in the service of healing wounds from collective and transgenerational trauma still drives me.  I returned to a United States with more mass shootings than there are days in the year; in the wake of insurrection; with a people so radically divided that it is hard to find a thread of the social fabric that is not frayed and tattered.  And it is here – precisely here, where the social fabric seems torn beyond repair - that we are called to work.  To work across divides, across the lines separating “us” from “them” and creating enemies where we need to forge alliances.  Our work now is to follow the violence erupting all around us back to its historical roots; to bear witness, finally, to what has remained unconscious in our collective psyche; and in this way to begin the work of healing in ourselves and in our society.

My most recent book, Time Travels through Albania: A Love Letter from the Future, provides a model of this work.  My vision and method for this work come from my training in healing collective trauma with the Pocket Project and study of deep systems transformation with the Presencing Institute.

For more on how to tell the truth of violence in a healing way, see my TEDx talk Restoring the Social Fabric: Bearing Witness.

To book Lori for a speaking engagement or to schedule a discovery call, get in touch here.