What Is Right About You?

How Trauma-Informed, Socially Just Research Supports the Bio# Community Vision

Reframing What We Know

In a world increasingly asking what is wrong with us, the Bio# framework offers a deeply embodied, strengths-based alternative: what is right about you. This guiding question, echoed in Voith et al.’s (2020) call for healing-centered engagement, invites us to view individual physiology, story, and social context not as problems to fix, but as sources of wisdom, resilience, and community transformation.

Their article, “Using a Trauma-Informed, Socially Just Research Framework with Marginalized Populations”, provides vital scaffolding for our Bio# work. It reinforces what we already know: that healing cannot be separated from justice, and research must be lived, relational, and co-created—not extracted or imposed.

The Voith Article Aligns with the Bio# Ethos

1. From Outside Expert to Embodied Collaborator

Voith et al. challenge the top-down dynamics of traditional research by emphasizing shared power, reflexivity, and authenticity. This echoes the Bio# model, which is not something one applies to another, but rather something lived through one’s own physiology, then offered with integrity.

Bio# facilitators must be rooted in their own embodiment before guiding others. This mirrors the article’s ethic that researchers must do their inner work before claiming authority.

2. Intersectionality & Structural Trauma: Why Bio# Context Matters

The article names intersectionality as essential to understanding trauma and healing—honoring how race, gender, class, and history shape one’s experience. In Bio# work, we take this even further into the body: each number holds a physiological and perceptual lens that processes the world in distinct ways.

Intersectionality meets interoception in our community: who you are is shaped by both your story and your structure.

This means that creating safety, trust, and transformation requires more than blanket inclusion—it asks for deep listening to what each Bio# needs in a group, and honoring how each interprets threat, invitation, and connection differently.

3. “What Is Right About You”: A Shared Mantra

One of the article’s most powerful reframes is shifting from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what is right about you?”

This language lives at the heart of Bio#. It names the medicine, the frequency, the capacity we each carry when aligned. Trauma distorts, but it does not erase this core. When we teach or lead from Bio#, we are always scanning for what is intact, not what is broken.

This shared mantra bridges trauma-informed care with physiological truth-seeing.

4. Designing Evaluation from the Inside Out

Voith et al. advocate for qualitative, participatory, and narrative-based methods. These are the only kinds of evaluation that resonate in Bio#-informed settings.

Standardized tools often erase the subtlety of our inner world. But storytelling, body-based reflection, and relationship-centered assessment—those bring us closer to the truth.

We can use this insight to:

·      Create Bio#-sensitive feedback forms

·      Open every workshop or circle with a grounding that meets each number where it lives

·      Structure peer support with an awareness of how trust builds differently across Bio#s

5. Safety, Power, and Co-Regulation in Practice

Voith et al. emphasize safety not as an absence of harm, but as a living condition that must be co-created. For Bio# work, this reminds us that who sets the pace, who speaks, and who stays silent matters. So does who facilitates, and how power circulates.

We must become attentive not only to what is said, but to how it lands in each physiological system.

Creating protocols for rupture repair, group check-ins, and ethical facilitation—all of these are expressions of the article’s trauma-informed guidelines, translated into somatic and community practice.

Putting This Into Practice: Ideas for Bio# Community Design

Inspired by Voith et al., here are a few concrete steps we can take to reinforce our Bio# framework:

·      Adopt healing-centered language: Begin programs by naming “what’s right about you” based on Bio# gifts.

·      Design trauma-informed circle models: Use grounding exercises tailored to the nervous system needs of each Bio#.

·      Integrate reflective feedback: Invite voice, silence, and storytelling as valid forms of feedback—not just surveys.

·      Normalize facilitator vulnerability: Model reflexivity by sharing your own process, including Bio#-specific learning edges.

·      Map intersectional access needs: Ensure community events account for emotional, sensory, and relational inclusion.

Conclusion: Bio# Is Research—Embodied

Trauma-informed, socially just research isn’t just for universities. It’s for all of us who are daring to live in truth, build equitable communities, and restore our nervous systems from centuries of extraction and fragmentation.

Bio# work, when done with depth and care, is a living research project. It investigates how structure meets soul, how difference meets belonging, and how physiology meets liberation.

And now, with allies like Voith et al. helping articulate frameworks that validate what we already know, we’re not alone in this work—we’re building something that lasts.

References:

Voith, L. A., Jachimowicz, A., McCauley, H. L., & Glass, N. E. (2020). Using a trauma-informed, socially just research framework with marginalized populations: Practices and barriers to implementation. Violence Against Women, 26(15–16), 1826–1845. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219888306