My Grandmother's Hands. Resmaa Menakem
does your body experience that hope? Is it a release or expansion? A tightening born of eagerness or anticipation?
What specific hopes accompany these sensations? The chance to heal? To be free of the burden of racialized trauma? To live a bigger, deeper life?
Do you experience any fear in your body? If so, where? How does it manifest? As tightness? As a painful radiance? As a dead, hard spot?
What worries accompany the fear? Are you afraid your life will be different in ways you can’t predict? Are you afraid of facing clean pain? Are your worried you will choose dirty pain instead? Do you feel the raw, wordless fear—and, perhaps, excitement—that heralds change? What pictures appear in your mind as you experience that fear?
If your body feels both hopeful and afraid, congratulations. You’re just where you need to be for what comes next.
One final note: at the end of each chapter you’ll find a list of Re-memberings, which highlight the key insights from that chapter. Rememberings will help you easily recall these insights and use them for healing in a variety of ways: to re-member your ancestors, your history, and your body; to create more room and opportunities for growth in your nervous system; to build and rebuild community; and to discover or rediscover your full membership in the human community.
RE-MEMBERINGS
• White-body supremacy doesn’t live just in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.
• As a result, we will never outgrow white-body supremacy just through discussion, training, or anything else that’s mostly cognitive. Instead, we need to look to the body—and to the embodied experience of trauma.
• Our deepest emotions involve the activation of a single bodily structure: our soul nerve (or vagus nerve). This nerve is connected to our lizard brain, which is concerned solely with survival and protection. Our lizard brain only has four basic commands: rest, fight, flee, or freeze.
• In the aftermath of a highly stressful event, our lizard brain may embed a reflexive trauma response—a wordless story of danger—in our body. This trauma can cause us to react to present events in ways that seem out of proportion or wildly inappropriate to what’s actually going on.
• Trauma is routinely passed on from person to person—and generation to generation—through genetics, culture, family structures, and the biochemistry of the egg, sperm, and womb. Trauma is literally in our blood.
• Most African Americans know trauma intimately. But different kinds of racialized trauma also live and breathe in the bodies of most white Americans, as well as most law enforcement professionals.
• All of us need to metabolize the trauma, work through it, and grow up out of it with our bodies, not just our thinking brains. Only in this way will we heal at last, both individually and collectively.
• That healing is the purpose of this book.
• This book is about the body. Your body.
• Whether you’re a Black American, a white American, or a police officer, this book offers you profound opportunities for growth and healing.
• Trauma is not destiny. It can be healed.
• Talk therapy can help with this process, but the body is the central focus for healing trauma.
• Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity. This is why people need to work through trauma slowly, over time, and why they need to understand their own bodies’ processes of connecting and settling.
• Sometimes trauma is a collective experience, in which case the healing must be collective and communal as well.
• Trauma can be the body’s response to anything unfamiliar or anything it doesn’t understand.
• Trauma responses are unpredictable. Two bodies may respond very differently to the same stressful or painful event.
• Healing involves discomfort, but so does refusing to heal. And, over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.
• There are two kinds of pain. Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you feel when you know what to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway, responding from the best parts of yourself. Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, or denial—when you respond from your most wounded parts.
3 I and some other therapists also recognize a fifth command: annihilate. The lizard brain issues this command when it senses (accurately or inaccurately) that a threat is extreme and the body’s total destruction is imminent. The annihilate command is a last-ditch effort to survive. It usually looks like sudden, extreme rage or like the attack of a provoked animal. Some therapists see annihilate as just a variant of the fight response, but I classify it separately, because annihilation energy looks and feels quite different from fighting energy. It’s the difference between a punch and a decapitation. Because fight, flee, or freeze has become such a meme, I’ll continue to use that phrase throughout the book. But in a therapy session, there are times when it’s important for the therapist to note and work with the unique energy of an annihilate response. At times, I’ll mention it again in this book as well. More generally, we would also be wise to recognize that much of what we call rage is actually unmetabolized annihilation energy.
4 If you’d like a more detailed understanding of human trauma, read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking Penguin, 2014). If you’re interested in the practice of helping others heal their trauma or in addressing your own as swiftly and safely as possible, an excellent place to start is Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETA), traumahealing.org. I have received training from both Dr. van der Kolk and the SETA.
5 I did not invent the term soul wound. It has been around for some time, and is most often used in relation to the intergenerational and historical trauma of Native Americans. Eduardo Duran’s book on counseling with Native peoples is entitled Healing the Soul Wound (Teachers College Press, 2006). “Soul Wounds” was also the title of a 2015 conference on intergenerational and historical trauma at Stanford University.
6 These terms describe a general approach to psychological and emotional healing. They should not be confused with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is a specific model of therapy that includes six distinct, predictable phases. CBT is widely used and has a generally good track record. However, it has also been widely disparaged, and it has been the subject of some controversy within the field. In my view, CBT’s primary limitation is the same limitation of talk therapy in general: it pays too little attention to the body.
7 Micro-aggressions are the small but relentless things people do to insult or dismiss us or deny our experience or feelings. If you’ve ever been deliberately ignored by a sales clerk, or questioned harshly and at length by a border patrol agent, or told, “I’ve never seen that happen; you must have imagined it,” you experienced a micro-aggression.
8 Although the formal, clinical term is post-traumatic stress disorder, a more accurate term would be pervasive traumatic stress disorder. Post means after, and for many Black Americans, traumatic stress is ongoing, not just something from the past.
9 The terms clean pain and dirty pain were popularized by one of my mentors, Dr. David Schnarch, and by Dr. Steven Hayer. Dr. Hayer defines and uses the terms somewhat differently than Dr. Schnarch and I do.
10 I also own a Corolla, which police follow far less often.