often deeply toxic type of racialized trauma lives and breathes in the bodies of many of America’s law enforcement officers.
All three types of trauma are routinely passed on from person to person and from generation to generation. This intergenerational transmission—which, more aptly and less clinically, I call a soul wound5—occurs in multiple ways:
• Through families in which one family member abuses or mistreats another.
• Through unsafe or abusive systems, structures, institutions, and/or cultural norms.
• Through our genes. Recent work in human genetics suggests that trauma is passed on in our DNA expression, through the biochemistry of the human egg, sperm, and womb.
This means that no matter what we look like, if we were born and raised in America, white-body supremacy and our adaptations to it are in our blood. Our very bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors.
This is why white-body supremacy continues to persist in America, and why so many African Americans continue to die from it. We will not change this situation through training, traditional education, or other appeals to the cognitive brain. We need to begin with the body and its relation to trauma.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates exposed the longstanding and ongoing destruction of the Black body in America. That destruction will continue until Americans of all cultures and colors learn to acknowledge the inherited trauma of white-body supremacy embedded in all our bodies. We need to metabolize this trauma; work through it with our bodies (not just our thinking brains); and grow up out of it. Only in this way will we at last mend our bodies, our families, and the collective body of our nation. The process differs slightly for Black folks, white folks, and America’s police. But all of us need to heal—and, with the right guidance, all of us can. That healing is the purpose of this book.
This book is about the body. Your body.
If you’re African American, in this book you’ll explore the trauma that is likely internalized and embedded in it. You’ll see how multiple forces—genes, history, culture, laws, and family—have created a long bloodline of trauma in African American bodies.
It doesn’t mean we’re defective. In fact, it means just the opposite: something happened to us, something we can heal from. We survived because of our resilience, which was also passed down from one generation to the next.
This book presents some profound opportunities for healing and growth. Some of these are communal healing practices our African American and African ancestors developed and adapted; others are more recent creations. All of these practices foster resilience in our bodies and plasticity in our brains. We’ll use these practices to recognize the trauma in our own bodies; to touch it, heal it, and grow out of it; and to create more room for growth in our nervous systems.
White-body supremacy also harms people who do not have dark skin. If you’re a white American, your body has probably inherited a different legacy of trauma that affects white bodies—and, at times, may rekindle old flight, flee, or freeze responses. This trauma goes back centuries—at least as far back as the Middle Ages—and has been passed down from one white body to another for 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
