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

Whenever the body senses the opportunity—and the challenge—to mend, it responds by fighting, fleeing, or freezing.

Cultural Somatics, an area of study and practice that applies our knowledge of trauma and resilience to history, intergenerational relationships, institutions, and the communal body.

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.

adapt everything you read in this book as your body instructs you to.

Experiencing clean pain enables us to engage our integrity and tap into our body’s inherent resilience and coherence, in a way that dirty pain does not.

to a traumatized body there is only now. That now is the home of intense survival energy.

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.

From the body’s viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical, visceral sensations.

Whenever someone freaks out suddenly or reacts to a small problem as if it were a catastrophe, it’s often a trauma response.