RACIAL TRAUMA IS PERVASIVE, PERSISTENT, IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT AND HAS MULTIPLE TRIGGERS.
WHAT DOES TRAUMA FEEL LIKE IN YOUR BODY?
What are the deeply pervasive impacts of discrimination based on your ethno-cultural, religious identity?
Learning about the vast and expansive manifestations of racial and oppression-based trauma is essential in the journey of healing for Black, Indigenous and racialized people. Being able to connect mental, emotional, physical and spiritual agitation/dis-ease/dis-regulation to oppression that we have experienced in our lifetime (or oppression that our ancestors have experienced) moves our thinking from, “something’s wrong with me” ... to “something happened to me.”
If you are an educator or a wellness professional, do you know how to recognize these symptoms in your students and clients? When social workers, therapists, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists are not educated on the manifestations of oppression-based trauma, racialized clients get mis-labeled, mis-judged, and mis-diagnosed.
Race-Based Traumatic Stress Responses Are:
PERVASIVE
Racial and oppression-based trauma can impact everything, including your the way your body functions, your hormone levels, your emotions and your behaviour.
PERSISTENT
Events are not usually single occurrences. Verbal, emotional + physical assaults can happen hourly. Daily. Monthly. AND, the impact on your nervous system can be prolonged + enduring.
IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT
Never knowing when racial attacks or bullying may arise, can lead to “hyper-vigilance”: Always being on-guard, persistent anxiety, having a nervous system on high-alert .... or can feel like the opposite: exhaustion, depression and disconnect.
CAN HAVE MULTIPLE TRIGGERS
Trauma doesn’t always look like surviving a war. Sometimes it looks like being bullied on the street. Sometimes it looks like never being chosen, being excluded, being called derogatory names, racial slurs. Sometimes triggers include absorbing violent racism on the media, watching the Derek Chauvin trial, witnessing racism or continuously having to prove your experiences of systemic and personal racism.
Racial and oppression-based trauma is CHRONIC, COMPOUNDED, CONSISTENT AND COMPLEX.
Mental health and healing practitioners, educators and teachers: It is ethically and morally essential that you educate yourself on the intricate ways in which system oppression can impact mental, emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing.
Structural and systemic oppression can lead to bodies and nervous systems that are perpetually in a state of hyper-arousal or “fight/flight” or oppositely to bodies and nervous systems stuck in “freeze” or paralysis. Read more about symptoms of racial and oppression-based trauma, HERE.