My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
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.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
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.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
bodies. Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope,
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this historical trauma is closely linked to the development of white-body supremacy in America.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
refusing to heal is always more painful.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
We need to understand our body’s process of connection and settling. We need to slow ourselves down and learn to lean into uncertainty, rather than away from it. We need to ground ourselves, touch the pain or discomfort inside our trauma, and explore it—gently. This requires building a tolerance for bodily and emotional discomfort, and learning to
... See moreLICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
White supremacy does not refer to individual white people per se and their individual intentions, but to a political-economic social system of domination.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
our bodies don’t care about logic, truth, or cognitive experience. They care about safety and survival. They care about responding to a perceived threat, even when that threat is not real. As a result, our bodies scare the hell out of each other.
LICSW MSW Resmaa Menakem • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
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.