Towards Healing Racialized Trauma #blacklivesmatter

Hello, friends.

Well, this is a time of transition! We are all asking what we can do to support the shift that wants to happen away from institutionalized racism, towards understanding and healing. 

As a trauma specialist, I can't help but see these issues through that lens: we all have trauma in our lineages, whether that is from perpetration, victimization, benefiting from the degradation of others, or some combination of roles.

How do we heal intergenerational trauma? We must acknowledge the pain and suffering, and begin to work with our nervous system responses (are we angry, wanting to fight? are we scared, wanting to run away? are we overwhelmed, trying to bury our head in the sand [this one might look like, "I don't see race"])? None of these responses is wrong, but they all need to be worked with if we don't want to continue to pass on the legacies of racism and racialized trauma.

Body & Mind

It's worth pausing on why I'm framing this as a body issue and not only a values issue. Most of us were raised to think about racism primarily as a matter of belief: what someone thinks, what someone says, what someone votes for. That framing isn't wrong, but it's incomplete, and it can actually get in the way of change.

Beliefs live in the thinking brain — the part of us that's relatively fast, verbal, and easy to override with a good argument. Trauma doesn't live there. It lives in the nervous system, in patterns of tension, bracing, collapse, and hypervigilance that formed long before any of us could reason our way through them, and that get passed down through parenting, culture, and even biology.

This is part of why conversations about race so often go in circles. Two people can agree, intellectually, on almost everything, and still find the conversation itself unbearable — because underneath the words, one or both nervous systems are in a stress response. Someone's chest is tight. Someone's jaw is clenched. Someone has quietly stopped breathing. No amount of correct language fixes that, because the problem was never purely cognitive to begin with.

Resmaa Menakem's Framework

For a small step in the direction of acknowledging and healing racialized trauma, I recommend this free eCourse from Resmaa Menakem, who works brilliantly at the intersection of nervous system regulation, trauma, and race. The course is broken up into:

• black body trauma

• white body trauma

• police body trauma

• communal body trauma

  
  

Even reading these categories can help our minds warm up to the types and pervasiveness of trauma, how they work and intersect.

The four bodies, unpacked

Resmaa Menakem's framework — black bodies, white bodies, police bodies, and communal bodies — is useful precisely because it doesn't ask anyone to occupy only one category. A person can hold trauma as a Black body and carry communal trauma and, if they're a police officer, carry police-body trauma too. The categories aren't about assigning blame; they're about noticing that different bodies have absorbed different pressures over generations, and that healing work looks different depending on which pressures you're carrying.

For Black bodies, this often means trauma that has been stored from direct threat — generations of real physical danger that the nervous system had no choice but to prepare for, whether or not any single day brought an actual attack.

For white bodies, it can mean something quieter but no less real: numbness, disconnection, or a kind of protective ignorance that developed specifically so a person wouldn't have to feel complicit in a system that benefited them.

For police bodies, it can mean a nervous system trained toward constant threat-detection, which doesn't turn off at the end of a shift.

And communal trauma is the layer underneath all of it — the shared, cultural-level activation that moves through a whole society during moments like this one, whether or not any individual person feels it consciously.

What this can look like in practice

In sessions, this kind of work rarely starts with talking about race directly. It usually starts smaller: noticing what happens in the body when a hard topic comes up. Does the breath get shallow? Does the person's attention drift away from the room? Do their shoulders rise toward their ears? We slow down enough to track those signals, and instead of pushing through them or shutting them down, we let the nervous system complete whatever response it started but never got to finish — a tremor, a deep exhale, an urge to move or push against something solid.

This is slow work, and it can feel almost anticlimactic compared to the urgency of the moment. But nervous systems don't heal on the timeline of a news cycle. They heal through repetition, safety, and small moments of discharge, over and over, until a different pattern becomes available.

The goal isn't to feel calm about racism — calm would be the wrong response to an ongoing injustice. The goal is to have enough regulation that a person can stay present, stay in relationship, and act from clarity rather than from fight, flight, or freeze.

The honest tension

I want to name something directly: nervous system work is not a substitute for structural change, and I'd be doing this topic a disservice if I implied otherwise. Policy, policing practices, housing, education, and economic systems don't heal because individuals regulate their vagal tone. Those require organizing, legislation, and sustained collective pressure, and that work matters on its own terms.

What somatic work offers is something different but complementary: it addresses why so many well-intentioned efforts at dialogue and solidarity stall out, burn out, or turn defensive. A person who is dysregulated — flooded, shut down, or braced — is not in a state where they can think clearly, listen well, or sustain difficult commitments over time. Somatic healing doesn't replace the outer work of justice; it's what makes a person capable of showing up for that outer work consistently, without collapsing into denial or burning out into despair.

An invitation to reflect

If you're reading this and wondering where to start, a simple practice: the next time a conversation about race brings up discomfort, pause before responding. Notice one physical sensation — tightness, heat, a held breath — and just breathe into it for ten seconds before you speak or act. That's not the whole of the work, but it's a real place to begin, and it's available to you regardless of which "body" you recognize yourself in.

Feel free to reach out to me; I would love to hear your thoughts on these topics.

In solidarity, Emma

Learn more about our approach to trauma.

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Emma Sartwell, MDiv, CYT | Emma holds a Master of Divinity from Naropa University and is a registered psychotherapist. She combines Somatic Experiencing, parts work, holistic healing, and mindfulness into her sessions, which focus on nervous system regulation, trauma integration, attachment patterning, inner critics and inner children, and ancestral healing. Her deepest joy is helping people feel more integrated, authentic, and connected.