Reparations: Ancestral Trauma Healing for Non-Black Collaborators
By: Evvie Ormon
Tags: Coaching And Consulting, Trauma, Healing, BlackLivesMatter, Ancestral Healing

Often American folks are constricted by trauma in their Soma so that they are not in choice about the overflow or transmission of their emotions from their Soma to their environment. This means for people with power-over in the social hierarchy, their trauma is causing harm to those they have power over, and frequent, regular repair practices are required to maintain right relationship. This is not an indication of a character flaw, but of embodied trauma that has not healed and continues to perpetuate.

There are many ways to do right relationship repair.

The most simple and least effortful way to begin repair is to apologize. This is often inadequate by itself because an apology does not actually repair the harm caused, and does not automatically come with changed behavior. Another way is to change the harmful behaviors as well, yet, this is challenging to do in an authentic way without healing automatically the trauma responses within the Soma.

Transmitting Versus Transmuting

One of the best ways to complete, release or transform a trauma response that has caused harm or is in response to harm is to transmute it by turning it into something else. This is what a survivor of racism might be doing by taking their anger or pain from racialized suffering and then singing, rapping or writing or dancing about it: transmuting destructive energy of oppression trauma into creative, generative energy. Black bodied people in the US created entire cultures of resilience by transmuting trauma of oppression in creative and healing ways, instinctually. Non-black people must also transmute their oppressor trauma to heal, instead of continually transmitting it to those they have power-over in their orbits, causing repetitive intergenerational harm. Given that the people who are most frequently harmed by interactions with oppressor trauma are Black people in the closer orbit of non-black people, it makes sense for non-Black people to begin practicing reparations with Black people you know personally, live near, exchange with and are energetically attached to already.

Reparations as spiritual and Somatic practice is yet another, deeper more impactful way to transmute intergenerational and ongoing oppressor trauma and harm.

The core of repair-ation (action to repair) is to restore right, equitable & reciprocal relationship from traumatic damage done, both by conscious choice and by being a beneficiary of oppressive systems. Often, white people and people assigned male at birth (and other people socialized into power-over in various ways) are not required or are discouraged from observing the full impact of the unchoiceful overflowing and transmitting of their trauma to others, including feeling all their own accompanying emotions. Transmitting is easier than transmuting trauma because in American culture we are socialized to transmit trauma automatically whether by birth or by societal rules, laws and cultural expectations.

However, Somatic practices (embodied practice) and occasionally certain substances (like psychedelics, antidepressants and certain strains of cannabis) expand our nervous systems’ capacity to be in choice about our traumatic responses.

Edible Groundcover, Photo by Evvie Ormon

Trauma is a protective reaction from the automatic brain to overwhelm of the faculties of the Soma (the physiological organism of our human bodies) to an actual or perceived threat of harm or danger to the self, OR to witnessed or perceived harm to another Soma.

Trauma can become “stuck” in our Somas on a loop, repeating through our lives and passed intergenerationally through DNA if any trauma reaction is not allowed to complete its cycle and release for any reason. In our modern context, this trauma is a daily occurrence for most Americans due to the racial and gender castes of “oppressed” or “oppressor” we are forced into at birth, and socialized to perpetuate for the rest of our lives.

Sometimes because of inherited and ongoing trauma of living in a Black body in the United States, the amount of space I have to hold and separate and observe my emotions is extremely constricted. Some days I have only a small thimble to hold a deluge of emotion, and that thimble of emotions overflows into places I did not chose for them to go consciously.

Trauma sometimes constricts my nervous system to the point where my overwhelming emotions cause my Soma to lose control.

This is a trauma response: I am no longer in choice about where the energies of my emotions land, it is an automatic response, like a reflex. My experiences and research with Somatics, some psychedelics or particular herbal allies (each by a different means) expands the capacity inside my nervous system to hold and process — sense, observe, transmute — my emotions and automatic trauma responses. It is as if the tiny constricted thimble releases into an expansive investigational space complete with instruments, organized containers and creative tools to separate, study and observe emotional reactions in my and others’ Somas in an intentional way. With continued practice, I feel more in choice about which emotions to observe, or when and where I want to pour the contents of an emotional container to transmute it. This way, regardless of the type of emotion, I am more able to be an observer and an investigator. I do not as often get lost, unmoored, or overcome by emotions in a way that takes away my choice in the process, especially choice over the response by my Soma.

White bodies overflowing and flailing emotions and trauma about, are impacting Black and other people like me, in their orbit viscerally, and literally.

People in their orbit — including me, are being impacted — hit, essentially — with projectile energies of white trauma. Most white-bodied folks are not in choicefulness about the flailing and outsourcing of their intergenerational, structural and personal level trauma. And because of the identities they hold and are socialized into, the trauma that white folks are flailing is particularly toxic and harmful and deadly to non-men and Black bodied people.

White bodies have inherited and socialized oppressor trauma from upholding exploitation and power-over: patriarchy and white body supremacy. That is why some BIPOC describe the connection with white-bodied people as feeling “dangerous”, “unsafe”, and “exhausting”. This is why caucusing (e.g., black only, bipoc only, qtpoc spaces) provides necessary temporary relief from the impact of white-body trauma for groups of people who do not hold white, cis and assigned male body supremacy and privileges.

In my body and its associated identities, I carry the trauma of centuries, millenniums of harm from patriarchy and white supremacy.

In my black non-man body, and I am also a Healer. People in pain are drawn to me and I to them, instinctually. To do healing work it became clear to me that I needed to heal my own Soma from inherited and ongoing trauma.

Even though these political designations of Black, White, man, non-man are constructs and not based in biological facts, the impact of these labels on the trauma our bodies receive — primarily oppressor or oppressed trauma in the United States —is VERY real, visceral and tangible.

When we are not in choicefulness around the traumatic emotions getting in and out of our bodies, we often cast painful trauma into the bodies of others. This is not a theoretical process, it is the direct or indirect transfer of energy from one body to another body.

Following the laws of conservation of energy, this traumatic energy transmission causes pain (as in striking or cutting a body), and harm (as in not allowing that body to feel, or constricting because the impact of a trauma is too overwhelming), and exploitation (extracting or inputting energy from or to a body in a non-consensual, non-reciprocal way as in rape culture, exploitation and all forms of enslavement).

This is not an intellectual exercise, it is literally happening.

One. way to give our bodies more choicefulness in this process is to regularly clear trauma from the body with somatic practices or use of plant & fungal allies, as well as engage in practices such as Reparations if we carry the trauma of having exploited and oppressed people in different bodies than ours. Much the harm we witness happening today in Covid-19 times, or in times past, is related to compiled trauma, dehumanizing systems that encourage us to dehumanize others to survive, and the feeling that getting out from under these systems is impossible because the systems punish anyone who begins to extricate themselves from the systems or is rejected by the system as an impediment to making profit. Some examples include:

Why is it so hard to direct our eyes towards people visibly living on the streets (see my essay On Being dropped from the social contract).

Why families and communities see members in distress and ignore it, pathologize or blame that person, instead of finding out what is possible.

Hitting, beating, or causing pain to children or pets or anyone who has less agency and power in these systems.

Ghosting people we have been close to but have experienced some unspoken dissonance with without addressing the underlying cause.

These patterns are learned. To work through them is hard work. It requires communities of trust and growth and commitment. And it is possible.

That is the very work Emergent Phoenix is doing, among many others. Come and see. You are invited. We don’t claim to know all the answers, but we do commit to the adventure and experiment of uncovering the answers together.