Trauma Resilience Healing the Wounds of Sexual Violence With the Holistic Healing Arts
Healing the Wounds of Racial Trauma
Thema Bryant-Davis & Egypt Leithman
Pepperdine University
In a racist society, information technology is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. ~Angela Davis
Historical and contemporary racial trauma, including ancestral wounds and the current-solar day range of microaggressions and large scale terroristic hate crimes, require healing intervention psychologically, spiritually, and socio-politically (Brave Heart et al., 2020). While trauma psychologists recognize single incident events of violence against an individual as potentially traumatizing, the resistance to acknowledgement of the trauma of violence, invalidation, and dehumanization of racially marginalized peoples for hundreds of years is rooted in the fake ideology of White Supremacy (Helms et al., 2012). To heal the wounds of racism requires a readiness from psychologists to encounter racial trauma and to acknowledge it beyond individual bias merely also structural, systemic, and institutional oppression that is both straight and vicarious (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019).
Blackness, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) have been bombarded with private and institutional racism, which includes pervasive racially motivated state sanctioned violence (Bryant-Davis, Adams, Alejandre, & Gray, 2017). The lack of protection from racially motivated violence and the lack of justice in the face up of documented racially motivated brutality intentionally maintain a organization that devalues the lives of BIPOC. BIPOC take seen the continuation of detest and hostility and the simultaneous escalation of racial trauma amid a global pandemic. To attempt fighting a medical trauma that disproportionately affects your community while concurrently trying to go along yourself and your community safe in a political climate of overt racism has left many depleted physically, emotionally, and spiritually (Watson et al., 2020). The potential furnishings of historical and contemporary racial trauma includes depression, anxiety, anger, distrust, somatic complaints, hopelessness, substance dependence, dissociation, sexual bug, and slumber disturbance (Carter et al., 2020).
Decolonizing psychology requires that psychologists terminate ahistorical, decontextualized approaches to healing interventions (Goodman, 2015). Psychologists need to move beyond awareness of the existence of oppression, to include racism, and also a commitment to anti-racism and liberation in our professional and personal lives. There are multiple pathways to healing the wounds of racism. Bryant-Davis and Ocampo (2006) provide one model that is a process oriented individual or grouping psychotherapy model based on the themes:
- Acknowledging the racism that one has experienced
- Sharing one's narrative
- Rebuilding trust in 1's self as one builds connection with trustworthy others
- Healing internalized racism oft manifesting as shame and cocky-blame or community arraign
- Mourning the losses of racism
- Expressions of constructive versus destructive anger
- Adopting good for you coping strategies
- Exploration and activation of resistance strategies
Healthy coping strategies in the midst of ongoing racism can take the grade of talking with supportive community members, journaling, the expressive arts, exercise, eating nourishing food, reducing fourth dimension watching the news, embodied healing practices (such equally praise dance and yoga for racial trauma), reducing time on social media, aromatherapy, and engaging in spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation. BIPOC need to become beyond the Western model of trauma recovery which ends with coping and adjusting one'due south self to the realities of trauma and recognize the need for active resistance to oppression, both internalized oppression and systemic oppression that is encountered at various levels. The Bryant-Davis and Ocampo model does not re-enact the colonial psychology perspective that healing merely requires individuals to change their thinking. It acknowledges that the internal healing process needs to be coupled with resistance and activism to dismantle racism. Liberation psychologists, womanist and mujerista psychologists, Blackness psychologists, and social justice oriented psychologists, amongst other ethnic psychologies, accept recognized and called for a psychology that attends to the inner and outer earth recognizing that our worlds are inextricably linked (Burton & Guzzo, 2020; Comas-Díaz & Bryant-Davis, 2016).
Resistance is past necessity interdisciplinary every bit racism occurs beyond disciplines and domains.
Resistance is by necessity interdisciplinary as racism occurs beyond disciplines and domains. Resistance as activism may accept the form of many activities including: protests, boycotts, policy advocacy, policy monitoring, petitions, cultivating anti-racism inside organizations, creating independent anti-racism organizations, providing anti-racism, liberation oriented psychotherapy, creating courses that middle anti-racism, anti-oppression, and liberation, raising anti-racist children, running for political office, and creative arts which have likewise been called artivism.
Activists and social justice oriented mental health professionals have argued for the recognition that living fully and authentically in a society that seeks your devastation is also resistance. To that end, in the face up of anti-Black racism, Black joy is resistance, Black rest is resistance, Black mental wellness is resistance, and even Black beloved is resistance. While it is good for you to exist outraged about the outrageous realities of racism, our rage alone will non sustain usa. Healing racism requires resisting dehumanization and creating space for our humanity to exist revealed, expressed, welcomed, and best-selling (King, 2013). BIPOC do not have to be one dimensional, super heroes, goddesses, unaffected, wise, and or spiritual gurus. Healing requires infinite for our pain, grief, fear, uncertainty besides as our strengths, resilience, and cultural resources. While liberation psychology, which emerged from Latin America, and Blackness psychology which emerged from African psychology integrate spirituality, they practice not promote spiritual bypassing (Burton & Guzzo, 2020; Comas-Diaz, 2006; Nobles, 2013). In other words, BIPOC exercise non have to engage in erasure of the difficulties resulting from oppression to solely express gratitude, optimism, or organized religion. Instead spirituality and religiosity can fuel a radical promise that empowers BIPOC to sustain the marathon toward racial justice. Practitioners must create space for the full expression of our humanity as we attend to the psychological wounds of racism and colonization in the larger globe and inside the field of psychology.
Healing racial trauma requires practitioners to acknowledge the many intersectional identities that contribute to the ongoing and evolving trauma faced by BIPOC. BIPOC belong to every gender identity group, sexual minority group, disability group, and socioeconomic class. Racial trauma cannot be separated from these identities and to exercise so further complicates trauma healing work. Monolithic approaches to trauma therapy are damaging to those experiencing circuitous oppression.
Practitioners need to routinely assess history of racial stress and trauma, while integrating an anti-oppression, anti-racism stance in their approach to formulation, handling planning, and evaluation of intervention effectiveness (Helms et al., 2012). Psychologists likewise demand to exist very clear about not but what they oppose but what they support, envision, and value. A life or practice spent reacting to the actions of others reduces vox, agency, and possibility. Psychologists need to non but stand confronting racism but also be intentional virtually cultivating justice, liberation, and empowerment. Additional pathways for the healing of racial wounds include Emotional Emancipation Circles, RECAST, Critical Consciousness Raising, Optimal Conceptual Theory, and Radical Healing (Anderson & Stevenson, 2020; Customs Healing Network, 2016; French et al., 2020; Mosley et al., 2020; Myers et al., 2018).
BIPOC who are practitioners are currently operation equally both trauma survivors and care providers of trauma survivors. Those who are educators are having to tend to their ain wounds while being attuned to the wounds of their students. BIPOC who are researchers are existence affected both personally and professionally as attacks are beingness made against the scientific report of Critical Race Theory and White Privilege. As psychologists, we need to be aware of our mental health and the ancestral and contemporary wounds that take for many been deepened. Psychologists need space to acknowledge, grieve, accept outrage, and share our wounds. We need to actively cope and resist the false ideology of White Supremacy while we piece of work for liberation and justice in our areas of study and exercise, but besides within the corridors of our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits.
Focus Fall 2020
Source: http://division45.org/healing-the-wounds-of-racial-trauma/
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