Until Freedom: A Liberatory Exploration Of The Radical Healing Framework In Mitigating Burnout Among BIPOC U.S. Racial Justice Activists

Activism burnout among U.S. Black, Indigenous, and people of Color (BIPOC) racial justice activists remained underexplored in research literature. Guided by liberation psychology (Freire, 1970; Martín-Baró, 1996) and the radical healing framework (French et al., 2020), this qualitative study employs a constructivist grounded theory within a critical ideological paradigm (Charmaz, 2017) to examine activism burnout among U.S. based BIPOC racial justice activists. Eleven participants engaged in in-depth interviews exploring the following research questions: (1a) What is the role of BIPOC identity for U.S racial justice activist who are reporting burnout? (1b) What parts of the self are embraced or excluded in these movements, and how are they connected to activism burnout? (2) How does the radical healing framework serve as a buffer against activism burnout in U.S. BIPOC racial justice activists? (3) How does collective care help to serve sustainability and longevity within a racial justice movement, individually and collectively? Data analysis generated six major themes and 21 subthemes. The six core analytic themes are as follows: (1) Activism as Identity Formation and Moral Calling, (2) Burnout as Cumulative Moral Injury and Complex Trauma, (3) Critical Consciousness as a Double-Edged Process and Dichotomies, (4) Intragroup Harm, Whiteness, and Movement Fracture, (5) Collective Care as a Buffer and Sustainability Infrastructure, and (6) Radical Healing as Embodied, Spiritual, and Ancestral Praxis. Findings reconceptualize activism burnout as cumulative moral injury and complex trauma shaped by sustained exposure to structural and institutional racism and retaliation, intragroup harm, racialized labor extraction, and moral conflict. Burnout was experienced as an embodied, psychological, physiological, relational, and soul injury. Radical healing functioned as an embodied, decolonial praxis and its five dimensions: critical consciousness, collectivism, strength and resistance, cultural authenticity, and radical hope, operated as buffers when supported by relational and structural conditions. Collective care emerged as a necessary structure for sustainability. This study advances burnout and trauma scholarship by situating activism burnout within ongoing systems of racism, colonialism, and structural violence while maintaining a depathologizing stance. Implications are offered for theory, supervision, and clinician practice, emphasizing the need to integrate structural analysis, collective care frameworks, and liberation-centered frameworks within counseling psychology.