Thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest the brutal killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by police — only to be met with tear gas and rubber bullets, and to be called thugs in a tweet by the President of the United States. This is only the latest instance in a legacy of racism that stretches back hundreds of years. “The endangered Louisiana black bear is occasionally observed on the refuge,” says Brett Moule, the project leader of the Theodore Roosevelt NWR Complex. Under pressure to please the president, Collier and his dogs tracked a 250-pound Louisiana black bear in the dense canebrake forest and told Roosevelt to wait for him to drive it to him. But Roosevelt grew tired of waiting and went back to camp for lunch. While the president was away, Collier found a bear, which attacked and killed one of his beloved dogs.
Three Mile IslandArchived ProjectsTransparencyTrusting News ProjectThe days of journalism’s one-way street of simply producing stories for the public have long been over. Now, it’s time to find better ways to interact with you and ensure we meet your high standards of what a credible media organization should be. The complexity of people’s emotions makes it hard to find a uniform approach to feeling better. A trauma bond is an intense emotional attachment formed between a perpetrator of abuse and the victim. How to examine the impact of your social and cultural identities.
Mental Health Requires Cultural Context
In particular, at one point in the story, a Black protagonist literally experiences her grandfather’s traumatic past. This fantastical, fictional metaphor helps highlight the real emotional pain of historical trauma. People from marginalized groups often internalize racist stereotypes about their own group.
Historical traumas have lasting consequences for individuals and communities.
According to Dr van der Kolk, this is a traumatic memory that her body will remember into adulthood, even though her mind may forget the event entirely. Jules Harrell, a professor of psychology at Howard University, has been involved for years in research showing how stress caused by racism can affect the mental and physical health of Blacks. He said the current public acknowledgement of the issue came because of «the perfect storm. … I don’t know if we could have even imagined this.»
This can be traced back to not only a deep skepticism of Western medicine, but also to pervasive cultural beliefs that admission of mental illness is a sign of weakness. Resilience can be assessed at individual, familial, community, and cultural levels. Resistance acknowledges the continuous efforts made by indigenous peoples to respond to and transcend historical oppression.
Any help we offer or action we take should include a fuller understanding and acknowledgment of this trauma. It is on all of us to refuse to allow this subject to fall back in the shadows, to keep that light shining, and never allow it to go dark again. This trauma is not something any of us who have not had the experience of being black in America can speak to in the same way as someone who has. Yet, acknowledging this trauma and casting it in a broad, unflickering light is all of our responsibility. Whether you’re out protesting or seeing videos from demonstrations across the country, the events of the past week are taking a huge emotional toll—particularly on Black people. George Floyd’s fatal encounter with four Minneapolis police officers is something we’ve now seen over, and over, and over again.
Policy, Wellness, and Native American Survivorship
«It’s about self-protection. Secondary trauma is just as lethal to Black people as secondhand smoke.» Harrell said that even during sleep, the brain may still process acts of racism and that blood pressure, which for many people goes down during rest, may not among Blacks. Burke Harris, the mother of twin sons age 17 and sons 8 and 4, told NBC News that her entire medical training and career have been devoted to reducing health disparity.
This makes it all the more crucial that we find pathways to provide mental health services in the wake of trauma. Racial trauma can involve a “negative, sudden, and uncontrollable experience or crisis.” Alternately, it can involve an “ongoing physical or psychological threat that produces feelings of fear, anxiety, depression, helplessness, and post-traumatic stress disorder » . This book examines the lasting impact of trauma for racial minority immigrants and subsequent generations. Each chapter explores both the stress and resilience of immigrant groups in the United States, as well as clinical or community-based efforts to address the multiple traumas that affect immigrants and their children.
The importance of the body’s wisdom in the treatment of trauma. Enduring and persistent stressors can impact our lives, creating fatigue and a sense of loss of control. The town even has an annual bear festival, the Great Delta Bear Affair, which brings in thousands of visitors and is sponsored by wildlife conservation Charmerly singles groups. “Most days you can find several alligators sunning along the water’s edge,” says Moule, and there are also 200 species of bird, white-tailed deer, rabbits, raccoon, opossum, and wild turkey. After the bear was killed by Collier, the skull was saved, bearing the telltale dent from his rifle’s butt.
When we consider that we are not only walking around with our own lived experiences and traumas but also those of our ancestors, we must slow down and take a hard, honest look at our past. To truly heal, we must address the cultural trauma that has always been there, shaping our perspective from birth. After attending one of Dr. DeGruy’s lectures, I began to contemplate the depth of the impact American chattel slavery had on my family and community at large. The concept that something experienced centuries ago could impact habits, practices, behaviors, perspectives, and fears beyond a person’s lived experience was fascinating. In recent years, talk about cultural trauma and its impact on Black families has made its way to mainstream media. There’s been a desire to understand how we’re affected today by what our ancestors experienced.
These events can be triggering on a level that is both deeply personal and broadly shared. Yet, as we all know, for many African Americans this trauma didn’t start with George Floyd. Trauma, in general, can be defined as any significant negative event or incident that shaped us and can emerge from any impactful instance that made us feel bad, scared, hurt, or ashamed. “Acts of aggression are not only examples of interpersonal trauma but also the trauma of racism, which is examined through the lens of intergenerational trauma, racist incident-based trauma, and complex trauma» (Bryant-Davis, Adams, Alejandre, & Gray, 2017). In the United States, many black people are born into a life of trauma. It is a trauma informed by a long history of brutal inhumanity, repression, violence, and injustice that continues to firmly grip black men and women each and every day.
A historical trauma is an event, or a set of events, that happens to a group of people who share a specific identity and that results in the significant disruption of traditional ways of life, culture and identity. In this case, we are specifically talking about the traumas experienced by Black Americans in the United States. Slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Segregation are all examples of historical traumas. Each individual event was profoundly traumatic and when you look at these events as a whole, they represent a history of sustained community disturbance and devastation.
We must remember that racism does not only express itself through the more commonly talked about police brutality or hate crimes, but also through the other traumas our participants experience, and therefore the health inequities they face. It is therefore crucial for clinicians to seek training on addressing their internal biases about race, and on how to help treat racial trauma. Chronic exposure to life-threatening traumatic events can lead to negative mental and physical health outcomes. Healing from this kind of trauma must occur on a societal and individual level. Part of overcoming trauma is processing what happened to us, feeling the full pain of it, and making sense of the experience. For many black Americans, the experiences they’re trying to process can be ongoing, complex, and utterly senseless.