• 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.
“Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
As we’ve seen, white-body supremacy, and the trauma that causes and perpetuates it, lives primarily in the body, not the thinking brain. Now let’s look at how white-body supremacy causes white, Black, and police bodies to view each other.
The white body sees itself as fragile and vulnerable, and it looks to police bodies for its protection and safety. Its view of the Black body is more complex and deeply paradoxical. It sees Black bodies as dangerously impervious to pain11 and needing to be controlled. Yet it also sees them as potential sources of service and comfort.
For most of our country’s history, the Black body was forced to serve white bodies. It was seen as a tool, to be purchased from slave traders; stacked on shelves in the bellies of slave ships; purchased at auction; made to plant, weed, and harvest crops; pressed into service in support of white families’ comfort; and used to build a massive agricultural economy.
This arrangement was systematically maintained through murder, rape, mutilation, and other forms of trauma, as well as through institutions, laws, regulations, norms, and beliefs.
It is only relatively recently that most Black Americans have had some dominion over their own bodies. The white body often feels uncomfortable with this Black self-management and self-agency.
The Black body sees the white body as privileged, controlling, and dangerous. It is deeply conflicted about the police body, which it sometimes sees as a source of protection, sometimes as a source of danger, and sometimes as both at once. When police bodies congregate in large numbers, however, the Black body is not conflicted: it sees police bodies as an occupying force.
The police body senses that all bodies need its protection. However, it sees Black bodies as often dangerous and disruptive, as well as superhumanly powerful and impervious to pain. It feels charged with controlling and subduing Black bodies by any means necessary—including extreme force.
None of this is rational, and much of it is not even conscious.
