My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

With practice, over time, this enables us to be more curious, more mindful, and less reflexive. Only then can growth and change occur.

Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.

In many cases, it then develops strategies around this “stuckness,” including extreme reactions, compulsions, strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusual avoidance strategies. Over time, these can become embedded in the body as standard ways of surviving and protecting itself. When these strategies are repeated and passed on

Sometimes trauma is a collective experience, in which case our approaches for mending must be collective and communal as well.

White supremacy does not refer to individual white people per se and their individual intentions, but to a political-economic social system of domination.

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.

the first step in healing almost always involves educating people on what trauma is.

Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth.

When something happens to the body that is too much, too fast, or too soon, it overwhelms the body and can create trauma.