Many Lineages of Caring

“Human caring did not begin with our frameworks. It lives in many lineages, carried through relationship, humility, and remembrance.” - Mary Coughlin

Remembering What Healthcare Did Not Invent

As I’ve been reflecting on decolonizing therapy, trauma-informed care, and the moral responsibilities of healthcare, I’ve felt a growing need to pause and name something important.

Much of my own training has been grounded in Caring Science — a framework that has deeply shaped how I understand presence, relationship, dignity, and the ethical dimensions of care. I remain profoundly grateful for that grounding.

And at the same time, it feels essential to say this clearly: Human caring did not begin with us. Nor did it originate within Western healthcare, psychology, or academia.

Caring Is Older Than Our Frameworks

Across cultures, continents, and generations, human beings have always known that healing is relational.

Long before care was measured, credentialed, or institutionalized, people understood that suffering required witnessing; that birth, illness, and death were communal events; and that dignity mattered even and especially when cure was not possible.

Indigenous ways of knowing across many Nations have long held that health is about balance: within the self, within relationships, within community, and within the natural world. Care, in these traditions, is reciprocal rather than transactional, and healing is inseparable from land, story, and ancestry.

African philosophies such as Ubuntu remind us that personhood itself is relational — I am because we are. In this worldview, caring is not something one person does for another, but something a community lives with one another.

Contemplative traditions across Asia have emphasized presence, compassion, and deep listening for centuries — not as techniques, but as ways of being. Suffering is not treated as pathology alone, but as a shared human condition that calls for gentleness and attunement.

Liberation-based healing traditions, particularly in Latin American and Black communities, have taught that care must be tethered to dignity, justice, and accompaniment — that healing cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live.

And countless ancestral caregiving practices — many unnamed, many carried through women’s bodies and hands — have sustained families and communities when formal systems failed or caused harm.

I was reminded, as I wrote this, of a book I read many years ago — Woman as Healer by Jean Achterberg. Long before conversations about decolonizing care entered mainstream discourse, Achterberg documented women’s healing traditions across cultures, illuminating forms of knowing that had been dismissed, silenced, or deemed unscientific. Her work named what many have always known: that healing has lived in women’s bodies, stories, intuition, and practices long before it was 'legitimized' by institutions.

None of these traditions needed validation from healthcare to be true.

Placing Caring Science in Right Relationship

Naming these many lineages does not diminish Caring Science. Rather, it places it in right relationship.

Caring Science offered language, structure, and legitimacy within Western institutions for values that had long been sidelined or dismissed as “soft,” “subjective,” or unscientific. It opened doors. It gave many of us a way to speak about love, presence, and dignity in spaces that once resisted those words.

But it does not — and cannot — claim ownership of human caring. It is one expression of a much larger human wisdom. To acknowledge this is not to abandon our frameworks. It is to hold them with humility.

Why This Matters Now

In a moment when healthcare is grappling with burnout, moral distress, inequity, and loss of trust, it is tempting to search for the next model, the next solution, the next innovation.

But perhaps part of what is being asked of us is not to invent something new — but to remember something old.

Decolonizing care invites us to ask:

• Whose wisdom has been centered?

• Whose knowledge has been erased or appropriated?

• Who has been asked to adapt, and who has been protected from change?

These are not abstract questions. They shape how families are treated, whose voices are believed, and which forms of knowing are welcomed in clinical spaces.

An Invitation to Practice Humility, Not Mastery

We do not need to become experts in every tradition to honor that they exist. What we are called to do is simpler — and harder:

• to resist the urge to universalize our own frameworks

• to listen for what we may not have been taught

• to remain curious rather than certain

• to practice care without claiming ownership of it

In many wisdom traditions, this posture — humility, attentiveness, restraint — is itself considered a form of care.

Carrying This Forward

As we reimagine what trauma-informed, family-centered, and decolonizing care can be, perhaps the question is not: How do we teach caring?

But rather: How do we remember that caring was never ours to invent — only ours to steward?

When we widen the lineage, care becomes less about defending frameworks and more about honoring humanity. And in that widening, something quietly profound happens: We stop centering ourselves — and start centering relationship.

That, across traditions, has always been the heart of healing.

Closing Reflection

Perhaps the most important work before us is not deciding which framework is right, but learning how to hold what we know with humility. When we acknowledge that caring did not begin with our disciplines, our credentials, or our institutions, something softens. We stop needing to defend our language. We stop needing to be the origin story. We become more willing to listen.

Much of what we now call “relational,” “holistic,” or “trauma-informed” care has lived for generations in practices that were dismissed, marginalized, or rendered invisible because they did not fit dominant definitions of science. This remembering does not weaken our practice. It deepens it.

To honor many lineages of caring is to remember that healing has always lived in relationship passed down through ritual, imagery, touch, and attentive presence, often outside formal systems and sometimes in spite of them.

Our task, then, is not to claim ownership of care, but to steward it well with respect for those who came before, attentiveness to those beside us, and responsibility to those who will come after. When we place our frameworks in right relationship, care becomes less about expertise and more about belonging. And that, across cultures, across generations, and across the long arc of human history, has always been the beginning of healing.

With gratitude for the many hands that carry care,
Mary

P.S. If this reflection resonates, you may find the Trauma-Informed Professional (TIP) Certificate Program meaningful as well. TIP is a guided learning experience grounded in Trauma-Informed Developmental Care, the B.U.F.F.E.R. framework, and Caring Science—designed to support clinicians and leaders in practicing care with presence, humility, and courage → Learn more about TIP