There’s No Justice, Just Us: Elizabeth Mikotowicz on Healing, Empathy & Agency

Some conversations take us into difficult places. The second ride with Elizabeth Mikotowicz takes us there—but it also keeps asking what happens when we find our way back.

Elizabeth is the author of No Justice, Just Us, a book rooted in her experiences with the criminal justice system, addiction, incarceration, trauma, and recovery. In this conversation, she talks openly about what she saw and experienced behind bars, the people she met there, and the ways systems can shape—and sometimes distort—the lives of the people moving through them.

But the deeper movement of this conversation is personal. Elizabeth talks about learning to recognize the survival behaviors she had developed, confronting the ways trauma had affected her relationships, and discovering how much changes when we begin to set boundaries and take responsibility for our own healing.

She and Marc and Greg also explore empathy—what it means to extend it toward people society has labeled and dehumanized, and what happens when we begin extending some of that same understanding toward ourselves. Elizabeth describes how she and her partner have learned to recognize each other’s triggers and work around them rather than allowing those old wounds to run the relationship.

The conversation doesn’t pretend that personal agency erases the larger systems Elizabeth is concerned about. Instead, it asks a more difficult question: how do we hold both truths at once? We may not be responsible for the trauma that happened to us, but we still have a responsibility to decide what we do with the life that comes afterward.

That may be the quiet heart of this second ride with Elizabeth Mikotowicz: recovery is not a destination. It is work. It is learning, unlearning, setting boundaries, asking for help, extending empathy, and refusing to give away the power that remains in our own hands.

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