Last week, I listened and reflected on discussions at the “Compassion in Therapy Summit,” a five-day online event about mindfulness and compassion-based therapies, neuroscience, and compassion training.
I’m not a therapist, but I work in a mental health counseling office, and I hoped to gain some insight that could help me when I talk with people who call us for help. So after work and on the weekend, I watched one or two of the recorded webinars.
There were some empowering, difficult, and emotional conversations about racial trauma, legacy burdens, and indigenous wisdom. At times, I found it hard to listen, because what they were saying, and the anger they expressed, made me feel uncomfortable.
It should make me feel comfortable.
A little bit of context. I grew up in Hawai’i and was fortunate to attend Kamehameha Schools. In school, pride in our Hawaiian heritage was starting to flourish again, but the focus was on academic and career success. We learned Hawaiian history and a little Hawaiian language, and sang Hawaiian songs, with an emphasis on the positive aspects of Hawaiian culture. I didn’t feel a strong sense of anger or outrage over the legacy of colonialism and Hawai’i’s loss of sovereignty.
So I’d like to share just a small part of the rich conversations that talk about healing on a societal level. Note: Any mistakes or misunderstandings are my own and not the responsibility of the speakers.
Feralness toward the black/indigenous body
“There is an energy connected to race,” said Resmaa Menakem, LSW, LCSW, SEP, “and as we get closer to race, there is a lot of shaking.” When we feel that shaking, we know that is it a time to pause, to slow down and attend to race, he says during “The Quaking of America: An Embodied Approach to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning.” For most of the U.S.’s history, there has been a feral reaction to the black/indigenous body, because the white body is seen as the standard of humanism. This is racism, he declares. Racism is historical, intergenerational, persistent institutional, and personal lived experiences (HIPP). And it is structural. Most white bodies have had bad things happen to them, but not racism – and racism informs everything else.
Protecting ourselves from racial trauma
During “Healing the ‘Legacy Burdens’ of Racism with IFS,” Richard Schwartz, PhD and Deran Young, LCSW explained that “legacy burdens” are extreme beliefs and emotions that come into our system from a generational trauma and attached to us, such as racism and the loss of pride in our culture. Schwartz and Young talked about a therapeutic practice called Internal Family Systems (IFS), which is based on the belief that that our minds are made of parts: Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters. Exiles are the memories and feeling of trauma that have the power to pull us back into those memories and make us feel as bad as we did back then. To protect ourselves, we create Managers to keep those Exiles contained, such as avoiding difficult situations and controlling the outside world; and Firefighters to douse the flames of exiled emotion, such as addiction, anger, and working hard. For healing, we need to address the protective parts of us that are carrying “legacy burdens.”
Indigenous wisdom and interconnectedness
“Everything we do affects seven generations,” said Eduardo Duran, PhD, “and in dream time, time can move forwards and backwards, so we are sitting at the center of fourteen generations.” This is the “soul wound,” the effects of trauma we inherit from past generations and also the effects of trauma that we pass to our descendants. During “Bringing Indigenous Wisdom into Psychotherapy,” Duran reminds us that past and present, self and community, community and nature all connected. In Western psychology, a diagnosis objectifies a person without addressing the continuous movement and interconnectedness of the person in need of healing.
These are difficult thoughts to struggle with. I hope that you can practice compassion for others who may have harmed you and self-compassion on your journey of healing.
How can we have self-compassion as people who have lost rights and freedoms? How can we offer and accept forgiveness for harms done to past generations?