Healing Is a Currency: The Elephant in the Room, Session Three
Founder & Principal Consultant · NIH CHORUS Co-Author
The in-person room moved that morning — weather closed the venue for the day. The Zoom went ahead as planned, 6:30 that evening. Seven people sat in it, Tye among them.
The room kept expanding anyway. California and Michigan had joined the week before. This week, Texas.
Healing Is a Currency
Session Three opened with a reframe: relationships, self-worth and healing itself operate on an economy. Every interaction either builds internal capital or drains it, and most people are running that account without ever looking at the statement.
“Healing in and of itself creates an economy in and of itself — a ripple effect of healing and growth and health and wealth throughout communities.”
— Tyshaun Perryman
The room named three domains where that capital sits:
Cultural Capital
What connects you to identity and belonging?
Grief Capital
What helps you carry loss while continuing to live?
Time Capital
What are you making room for?
Grief Capital is not new to this series — Session One named it first, the people you trust who will sit with you. Session Three gave it two neighbors and put a name on the whole account: you can audit it, same as any other capital.
The Deficit Contract
Then the antagonist. Deficit-based language is the habit of framing people by what’s broken, missing or wrong with them instead of what’s available in them. The deficit contract is what that habit turns into over time: an invisible agreement, signed without ever noticing, to keep seeing yourself through the lens of lack.
It is not abstract. The room named exactly where it shows up — it shapes which relationships you tolerate, which ones you quietly undervalue yourself in, and which ones you already know you deserve to leave.
“There is a parallel lane. We can use systems to help get us through the tough moments — but at the same time, there is an altitude we want to raise to. We begin to learn independently, outside of systems, how to elevate and move forward within ourselves.”
— Tyshaun Perryman
Systems are a resource, not the destination. The deficit contract is what keeps people mistaking one for the other.
Two Things Can Be True
Grief came back into the room, the way it has every session this series has run relationships. This time the room landed on a single sentence for it: two things can be true. You can be grieving and living forward at the same time. Neither one cancels the other.
That sits alongside a wider shift in how the room talked about recovery itself — less as an identity, more as one optional building block inside a bigger project: human development.
Chair Conversations Are for Everyone
The room drew a line it hadn’t drawn out loud before: Chair Conversations are not only for people in recovery. They are for anyone affected by addiction — which, as Tye put it, is rarely just one person.
“It is said that when a person is in addiction, the family is in addiction as well.”
— Tyshaun Perryman
The room closed on grace and love — not as sentiment, as spiritual principle, sitting underneath everything else that got named that night.
Session Two asked whether you are any good at sitting with somebody else’s grief. Session Three asked what you are investing in, in yourself and in the people around you.
Coming This Week · Session Four
The Elephant in My Potential
Free · date to be announced
Details land here and on the kit as soon as Tye confirms them. Register once — the same link works for whichever Monday it is.
Want to keep rooms like this free? Contribute any amount. Want to stay after the series? Membership is open.
Healing is a currency. Spend it on purpose.