This text is an archive
This text, and the texts linked to it, have been archived from the official T-MAPs Website.
Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) are a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources. Creating a T-MAP will inspire you to connect your struggle to collective struggles. When we make and share our T-MAPs with others they become potent tools for healing and liberation.
What is a T-MAP?
A T-MAP (Transformative Mutual Aid Practice) is a personal guide for navigating challenging times, clarifying what matters most to you, and strengthening communication with the people in your life.
It’s more than a crisis plan—it’s a living document that helps you reflect on your values, recognize patterns, and build a deeper connection to yourself and your community.
T-MAPs can be created on your own or with others, using simple tools that support self-awareness, resilience, and mutual care. Whether you’re filling out a digital version or handwriting your answers in a printed workbook, the process is designed to meet you where you’re at—and help you stay grounded, connected, and resilient in these wild and uncertain times.
Make Your Own T-MAP
This is a set of three simple, fillable Google Docs designed to help you reflect on your mental health, relationships, and sense of purpose—without jargon, diagnosis, or judgment. You can fill them out on your own, with a friend, or in a group. They’re based on Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs): a set of tools for navigating struggle, building resilience, and reconnecting with what matters most.
Each map is downloadable or can be copied as a Google Doc so you can personalize and reuse it. To make your own editable copy: click the link to open the document, go to “File” in the upper left corner, then select “Make a copy.” Use them to start a practice, prepare for challenges, or build deeper relationships—all in the context of a world that often makes that hard.
Google Docs have been replaced by simple pages
To protect privacy and avoid Google services, the links available below are simple copies of the Google Docs document on this archive website. You can find the actual Google Docs on the appropriate page on the T-MAPs website
- T-MAPs Introduction - Getting to Know Your Self & Parts, to help you begin a personal practice of noticing your internal parts, accessing Self-energy, and understanding what helps you feel alive, grounded, and connected. This map is inspired by Internal Family Systems (IFS) and systemic thinking. It introduces the idea that we each have multiple “parts” inside us—different voices, needs, and roles we play to survive and stay safe. And we also have a core Self—calm, curious, compassionate—that can gently lead us through chaos and confusion.
- T-MAP: Stress & System Check-In, a personal guide for noticing patterns, responding to stress, and finding your way back to connection. This document is a living tool designed to help you—and your trusted support network—stay grounded, connected, and resourced through difficult times. It’s divided into key sections that help you reflect on your own wellbeing, recognize when you’re struggling, and make clear plans for getting support. This plan is rooted in relationship. It’s not meant to be a solo exercise—it’s a way to invite your people into your care, and to keep yourself in alignment with what matters most. This template was inspired by years of peer practice and collective wisdom. Use what works, change what doesn’t, and make it yours.
- T-MAP: Community & Communication Map, strengthening relationships for the fight ahead. This map is designed to help you reflect on the people in your life, how you communicate, and what you need to feel grounded and connected in this moment of uncertainty and global change. Building resilient relationships is part of how we survive—and how we thrive.
Each of these T-MAPs can be used on your own or with a group. Print them, fill them out, share them—or keep them just for yourself.
Here is a PDF copy of the original 5 section T-MAPs document, developed by Jacks McNamara and Sascha Altman DuBrul in 2018. This version has been used in First Episode Psychosis (FEP) programs around the U.S. as a training tool for peer support workers to explore values, crisis planning, and mutual aid practices.
Why Make a T-MAP?
T-MAPs offer the opportunity to connect with yourself and others in tangible ways that contribute to personal and community healing.
T-MAPs can help us:
- Practice communicating needs and desires.
- Develop language for thinking and articulating personal experiences.
- Create an empowering narrative for our personal journey.
- Identify stressors and what it looks like when we struggle.
- Articulate wellness strategies that support us.
- Write down our resilience practices.
- Assemble a collection of community resources
- Connects us to movements for justice that are fighting for a better world.
Articulating these things gives us a resource we can share with the people in our lives to guide our conversations and help us support each other through rough times.
How to make a T-MAP
You can complete a personalized booklet (or “T-MAP”) by yourself or with a group. Your T-MAP becomes a guide for navigating challenging times, figuring out what you care about, and communicating with the important people in your life. We have developed different ways to create this document; these tools can help you generate your T-MAP through an online questionnaire or through a downloadable pdf workbook that you can print and fill out.
The Origins of This Tool
Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) is a tool born out of the radical mental health movement—a way to map what matters, survive crisis, and build collective care in a collapsing world.It’s not a clinical intervention. It’s not a self-help gimmick. T-MAPs is a living tool for people who are navigating complex inner worlds and hostile external systems—and want to do so with intention, connection, and courage.
Where T-MAPs Came From
T-MAPs was originally dreamed up in the early years of The Icarus Project (now the Fireweed Collective), a community that challenged the dominant language of mental illness and made space for people to share stories, strategies, and visions of healing outside the medical model. Early versions of the tool were inspired by Wellness Recovery Action Plans (WRAP), and the concept of Psychiatric Advance Directives—but quickly grew into something more relational and imaginative.
Rooted in Systemic Thinking
The current evolution of T-MAPs is deeply informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS) and systemic family therapy traditions. These frameworks offer ways of understanding ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as systems—of parts, of relationships, of histories.
We’re interested in what happens when:
- People speak for their parts instead of from them
- Families explore the dynamics beneath the diagnosis
- Communities trace the webs of connection and rupture that shape mental health
T-MAPs invites people to locate their struggles within both internal and external systems—personal histories, intergenerational trauma, community care, economic violence, spiritual longing. It’s a map that reflects the complexity of real life.
“We are not puzzles to be solved—we are systems to be witnessed, supported, and transformed.”
From Margins to Practice
T-MAPs was never designed inside the system, but over time it has been adopted into places like First Episode Psychosis programs, peer support trainings, and community-based clinical care. Still, its spirit lives in the margins: activist circles, mutual aid projects, underground peer networks. In this political moment—rising authoritarianism, unraveling social safety nets, fractured public discourse—tools like T-MAPs offer more than just crisis plans. They offer pathways for reflection, communication, and relational repair.
Not Just a Tool, But a Practice
T-MAPs can be:
- A personal wellness map for surviving extreme states
- A group process for building trust and accountability
- A framework for exploring how our inner and outer systems relate
- A cultural practice that holds complexity without collapsing into blame or control
It’s not about finding the “right” answer. It’s about naming what’s true, making meaning, and choosing how we want to show up for ourselves and each other.
Who Created This
The two main architects of T-MAPs have been Jacks McNamara and Sascha DuBrul, the founders of The Icarus Project. Jacks and Sascha wanted to create a practical tool that embodied the peer wisdom found in our greater community. We offer it as a labor of love to people who might find it useful. There are so many different people’s voices captured in the questions and the responses.
About the T-MAPs Name
The acronym T-MAPs stands for Transformative Mutual Aid Practices.
Transformation
We understand that we’re always in a process of transformation and growth; we’re not just in a process of “recovery” or going back to some state of health (that we may have never known). As our lives change, it’s helpful to leave tracks for ourselves about where we’ve been and where we want to be going; T-MAPs helps facilitate this process.
Mutual Aid
We also understand that just working on our own “self-care” isn’t enough; we also need mutual aid. Most simply, mutual aid is when people help each other. Historically, mutual aid has been a way that people have self organized to create interdependent networks of support. People might help each other with things as basic as growing food and building barns or as abstract as education and mental health support.
Practice
When we think about how personal and community change happens, it’s pretty clear to us that the only way to grow and evolve is to intentionally practice what we want to see happen in our lives. Practice might be as simple as not getting on our smart phone as soon as we wake up in the morning or as intentional and deliberate as a daily sitting meditation practice. Practice that happens with groups of people has the potential to change the world.