My Grandmother's Hands. Resmaa Menakem
dozens of generations.
White bodies traumatized each other in Europe for centuries before they encountered Black and red bodies. This carnage and trauma profoundly affected white bodies and the expressions of their DNA. As we’ll see, this historical trauma is closely linked to the development of white-body supremacy in America.
If you’re a white American, this book will offer you a wealth of practices for mending this trauma in your own body, growing beyond it, and creating more room in your own nervous system. I urge you to take this responsibility seriously. As you’ll discover, it will help create greater freedom and serenity for all of us.
Courtesy of white-body supremacy, a deep and persistent condition of chronic stress also lives in the bodies of many members of the law enforcement profession, regardless of their skin color. If you’re a policeman or policewoman, you’ve almost certainly either suffered or observed this third type of trauma. This book offers you a vital path of healing as well.
While I hope everyone who reads this book will fully heal his or her trauma, I know this hope isn’t realistic. Many readers will learn something from this book, and perhaps practice some of the activities in it, but eventually will stop reading or turn away. If that’s ultimately what you do, it doesn’t mean you haven’t benefited. You may still have created a little extra room in your nervous system for flow, for resilience, for coherence, for growth, and, above all, for possibility. That extra room may then get passed on to your children or to other people you encounter.
In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health. If this book moves you even a step or two in the direction of healing, it will make an important difference.
In fact, in this book you’ll meet some people who have not fully healed their trauma, but who have nevertheless made strides in that direction and who have deepened their lives and the lives of others as a result.
Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.
Over the past decade or so, therapists have become increasingly aware of the importance of the body in this mending. Until recently, psychotherapy (commonly shortened to therapy) was what we now call talk therapy or cognitive therapy or behavioral therapy.6 The basic strategy behind these therapies is simple: you, a lone individual, come to my office; you and I talk; you have insights, most of which are cognitive and/or behavioral; and those cognitive and/or behavioral insights help you heal. The problem is that this turns out not to be the only way healing works. Recent studies and discoveries increasingly point out that we heal primarily in and through the body, not just through the rational brain. We can all create more room, and more opportunities for growth, in our nervous systems. But we do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do—not through what we think or realize or cognitively figure out.
In addition, trauma and healing aren’t just private experiences. Sometimes trauma is a collective experience, in which case our approaches for mending must be collective and communal as well.
People in therapy can have insights galore, but may stay stuck in habitual pain, harmful trauma patterns, and automatic reactions to real or perceived threats. This is because trauma is embedded in their bodies, not their cognitive brains. That trauma then becomes the unconscious lens through which they view all of their current experiences.
Often this trauma blocks attempts to heal it. Whenever the body senses the opportunity—and the challenge—to mend, it responds by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. (In therapy, this might involve a client getting angry, going numb and silent, or saying, “I don’t want to talk about that.”)
As a therapist, I’ve learned that when trauma is present, the first step in healing almost always involves educating people on what trauma is. Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity—which is why, in addressing trauma, each of us needs to work through it slowly, over time. We need to understand our body’s process of connection and settling. We need to slow ourselves down and learn to lean into uncertainty, rather than away from it. We need to ground ourselves, touch the pain or discomfort inside our trauma, and explore it—gently. This requires building a tolerance for bodily and emotional discomfort, and learning to stay present with—rather than trying to flee—that discomfort. (Note that it does not necessarily mean exploring, reliving, or cognitively understanding the events that created the trauma.) With practice, over time, this enables us to be more curious, more mindful, and less reflexive. Only then can growth and change occur.
There’s some genuine value to talk therapy that focuses just on cognition and behavior. But on its own, especially when trauma is in the way, it won’t be enough to enable you to mend the wounds in your heart and body.
In America, nearly all of us, regardless of our background or skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race. We typically think of trauma as the result of a specific and deeply painful event, such as a serious accident, an attack, or the news of someone’s death. That may be the case sometimes, but trauma can also be the body’s response to a long sequence of smaller wounds. It can be a response to anything that it experiences as too much, too soon, or too fast.
Trauma can also be the body’s response to anything unfamiliar or anything it doesn’t understand, even if it isn’t cognitively dangerous. The body doesn’t reason; it’s hardwired to protect itself and react to sensation and movement. When a truck rushes by at sixty miles an hour and misses your body by an inch, your body may respond with trauma as deep and as serious as if it had actually been sideswiped. When watching a horror film, you may jump out of your seat even though you know it’s just a movie. Your body acts as if the danger is real, regardless of what your cognitive brain knows. The body’s imperative is to protect itself. Period.
Trauma responses are unpredictable. Two bodies may respond very differently to the same experience. If you and a friend are at a Fourth of July celebration and a firecracker explodes at your feet, your body may forget about the incident within minutes, while your friend may go on to be terrified by loud, sudden noises for years afterward. When two siblings suffer the same childhood abuse, one may heal fully during adolescence, while the other may get stuck and live with painful trauma for decades. Some Black bodies demonstratively suffer deep traumatic wounds from white-body supremacy, while other bodies appear to be less affected.
Trauma or no trauma, many Black bodies don’t feel settled around white ones, for reasons that are all too obvious: the long, brutal history of enslavement and subjugation; racial profiling (and occasionally murder) by police; stand-your-ground laws; the exoneration of folks such as George Zimmerman (who shot Trayvon Martin), Tim Loehmann (who shot Tamir Rice), and Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (who murdered Emmett Till); outright targeted aggression; and the habitual grind of everyday disregard, discrimination, institutional disrespect, over-policing, over-sentencing, and micro-aggressions.7
As a result, the traumas that live in many Black bodies are deep and persistent. They contribute to a long list of common stress disorders in Black bodies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder8 (PTSD), learning disabilities, depression and anxiety, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other physical and emotional ailments.
These conditions are not inevitable. Many Black bodies have proven very resilient, in part because, over generations, African Americans have developed a variety of body-centered responses to help settle their bodies and blunt the effects of racialized trauma. These include individual and collective humming, rocking, rhythmic clapping, drumming, singing,