Can 2021 Be a Year of Healing?
By: Marilyn Flower
Tags: Violence, Wisdom, Trauma, Covid 19, Racism

Happy New Year, Middle-Pausers!

May you all spend the day, the week, the year safely and in the best of health. May the changing of the year bring forth a fresh start not just in our lives but for our country and the planet.

I don’t have to list all the situations that could use healing. But I will, anyway. Off the top of my head, we’ve got an upsurge of the virus that appears to be mutating even as vaccination begins.

Violence appears to be yet another pandemic, often racial. Disagreements escalate into altercations, be they over mask-wearing, the election results, or what happens when the trauma we carry in our bodies gets triggered, and we react instead of responding.

Have the angels of our better natures, as President Lincoln put it, written us off? Flown away with our souls? Some days it sure feels like it.

Yet and still, I have hope.

One of the big reasons I do is a man in Minneapolis named Resmaa Menakem.

Dr.Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP is a black trauma therapist who’s written a bestselling book. It tells about healing the racialized trauma lodged in our bodies, often denying us access to our rational minds where those better angels live.

Finally, an explanation for what’s going on that makes sense to me!

A group of us in my church are reading and studying his book, My Grandmother’s Hands. The book is so named because as a child, Dr. Menakem asked his beloved grandmother why her hands were so different from his.

Her hands were rough, calloused, and misshapen from years and years of painful work picking cotton as a sharecropper. Cotton is a mean, thorny crop, made meaner under a hot southern sun and the vestiges of slavery American style.

Good news?

If you can call it that, the good news is that the way racism and other forms of historical violence have traumatized our bodies — white, black, or blue (police bodies of all colors), can be healed.

Dr. Menakem has worked with families, police departments, schools, and with the U.S. military in Afganistan,

His premise — the kernel that gives me hope — is that racialized violence is not a mind thing. It’s a body thing. It’s a reaction to historical as well as personal trauma, learned and enforced over centuries, if not millennia.

When our trauma gets triggered, fear pushes us into that pumped up flight, flee, or freeze state. We don’t have access to our cerebral cortex, where rational thinking and logic reside.

The adrenaline rush puts our lizard brain in charge.

Our brain stems take over — the oldest part of our brain, the least developed, hence reptilian or lizard. Together with our heart, gut, and other organs, neuroscientists call this system the Vagus Nerve.

Once triggered, we stop at nothing to get rid of the threat, real or perceived. This explains why a police officer can think a toy is a gun and believe he is in danger when, in fact, he is not.

Pardon the pun, but he’s been triggered.

This is not an excuse, mind you. It’s an explanation. One that makes sense to me, and enough folks that his book is a New York Times Bestseller.

Body trauma can be healed with bodywork.

The good news I alluded to is that the trauma lodged in our bodies that triggers these horrific reactions can be released and healed. That is what his book is all about.

A good third of the book is body practices to do just that. So our book group does do them in our study sessions. If trauma is a body thing, bodywork is a huge part of healing.

Together we breathe, rock, and hum, but mostly we notice. Where in our body do we tighten up when we bring a traumatic experience to mind? Can we bring that into our awareness and respond with tender self-care using his techniques?

It appears to work like a vaccine or homeopathic medicine. By introducing a minute amount of the infection, our body learns to respond effectively, instead of reacting in ways that can prove deadly.

Through guided visualization, we put ourselves in imaginary challenges and use the tools to stay calm, connected, and engaged, so we can act with full faculties and integrity. In other words, we practice being the better angels of our nature.

This is deep work, y’all.

In our study group, we do not confront each other. We hold each other in the light as we gentle explore and confront ourselves.

Do I tense when I pass a black man on the street? If so, can I learn to smile and breathe through that experience?

As a white person, I have the privilege of exploring the history of racism in this country or not. People in bodies of color do not. It’s in their face 24/7, as Breonna Taylor’s murder at home in her bed, reminds us.

I can read and learn, talk to folks, and watch films like 13th, Twelve Years a Slave, and Harriet. Or I can keep all that unpleasantry at arm’s length.

The times seem to me to call for a fuller engagement.

Racism and other forms of violent injustice won’t fade away just because we’ve elected a new president.

I think of it as a pandemic we need to come together to eradicate, just like we need to do and are doing in many places, with COVID. The more of us get vaccinated, the more immunity we as a people will have. But it may take 80% of us to make a meaningful difference.

The more we work on healing our trauma — racial and otherwise — the safer this country and our world will be for people of color and all of us.

Like wearing masks and social distancing, we need to do our part. My Grandmother’s Hands is a reassuring and empowering primer on what we each can do that adds up to a significant difference.

So given winter with COVID, how about staying home and curling up with a good book. I know just the one!