Racial trauma is not merely a concept for the mind—it is a lived, breathing, and deeply embodied reality. It stirs in the nervous system, rests heavy in the bones, shapes the breath, and weaves itself into the fabric of relationships, community, and soul.

For many people of colour, this trauma is not a singular event, but a lifetime of cumulative wounds. Tiny paper cuts and large gashes. Personal hurts and collective betrayals. Historical grief and everyday exhaustion. And yet, amidst this weight, there is something else.

There is survival.
There is creativity.
There is joy.
There is the possibility of healing.

This piece you are about to read is both an offering and an invitation. It is a gathering place of knowledge, reflection, compassion, and truth. Here you will find:

A clear understanding of what racial trauma is, who it affects, who causes it, and how it manifests—physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially.
An exploration of racial grief—the often-unspoken losses that accompany racial trauma: the loss of safety, ease, belonging, dignity, and joy.
Gentle, empowering pathways towards recovery and healing—both short-term and lifelong practices drawn from culturally rooted, decolonising, and liberatory approaches.
Reflection prompts to help you pause, breathe, and gently inquire into your own lived experience. These 24 prompts are designed to support your self-awareness, growth, and inner healing.

A Note on How to Move Through This Resource

This is not meant to be rushed.
It is not meant to be "consumed" in one sitting or skimmed for quick tips.

This is slow work. Sacred work. Soul work.

You may wish to read one part at a time, allowing space to journal, rest, or breathe between sections.
You may wish to read the reflection prompts aloud. Or share them with a trusted friend, therapist, coach, or community space.
You may even find parts of this piece uncomfortable or stirring—that is okay. That is the sign of the body remembering what the world has asked it to forget.

You are invited to meet yourself here gently. Kindly. There is no rush. There is only breath and space.

For white readers who may also find themselves here, this piece may offer insight into a lived experience not of your own. It is shared not to evoke guilt or shame—but to invite awareness, humility, and the practice of becoming a witness and unlearner.

For all readers—this is a beginning, not an ending. An opening, not a closing.

May this guide meet you where you are—with care, truth, and tenderness.

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Part One: Understanding Racial Trauma

1. What is Racial Trauma?

Racial trauma—sometimes called race-based traumatic stress—is the emotional, psychological, and physiological harm caused by experiences of racism—whether overt, covert, systemic, or interpersonal. It is not only about one act of harm, one insult, or one moment of discrimination. It is cumulative. Ongoing. Layered.

For many people of colour, racial trauma is woven into daily life in ways both visible and hidden. It arises not only from overt acts of racism—slurs, violence, exclusion—but also from the persistent, quiet erosion of dignity that comes with microaggressions, structural inequalities (in health, housing, education, employment), cultural misrepresentation, erasure and stereotyping; and historical injustice (the generational impact of colonisation, enslavement, apartheid, and imperialism).

What distinguishes racial trauma from other forms of trauma is this:
It is not accidental or random. It is systemic. Expected. Repeated. Historically rooted. Socially maintained.

Psychologist, Dr. Robert T. Carter (2007) describes racial trauma as a response to real or perceived threats related to racial discrimination that can overwhelm a person’s sense of safety, control, and wellbeing. It is important to note that these experiences are not isolated—they are situated within generations of historical oppression, such as colonisation, enslavement, apartheid, and displacement.

Carter describes racial trauma as distinct from other forms of trauma because the source of harm is often ongoing, socially sanctioned, and systemically reinforced—not a one-time event but a relentless condition of living in racialised bodies in racialised societies.

For Black, Indigenous, and other racially minoritised people, this trauma is more than an individual wound.
It is ancestral.
It is collective.
It is relational.

In her ground-breaking book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Dr. Joy DeGruy (2005) argues that the traumatic impact of slavery has left enduring scars on Black communities in the form of internalised oppression, mistrust, and survival behaviours shaped by historical brutality. This perspective reminds us that racial trauma is not "in the past"—it is alive in the present moment, embedded in family systems, cultural memory, and even the body’s stress responses.

Racial trauma is also perpetuated by the silences and denials of the dominant culture. When harm is minimised or denied—"It wasn’t about race," "You’re being too sensitive"—this compounds the trauma, creating what Dr. Aileen Alleyne (2021) calls the "haunting" of generational pain.

Key Characteristics of Racial Trauma:

Cumulative: The result of repeated exposure over time, not only single events.
Systemic: Maintained by societal structures such as laws, education, media, and healthcare systems.
Relational: Influencing not only individuals but families, communities, and entire cultures.
Embodied: Felt in the body and nervous system, shaping stress responses, health, and wellbeing.
Historical and Intergenerational: Passed down through cultural memory, family systems, and epigenetic inheritance.

A Note on Validity

It is important to affirm:
Racial trauma is real.
It is not imagined, exaggerated, or a result of personal weakness.

Many people of colour are gaslit—by individuals, institutions, or society itself—into believing their pain is invalid or "all in their head." This false narrative only deepens the wound.

To name racial trauma is to reclaim truth. To speak it is to begin healing.

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2. Who Does Racial Trauma Affect?

At its core, racial trauma impacts all racially minoritised people—those who are placed on the margins by structures of power and privilege. Yet this is not a uniform experience. Racial trauma is shaped by context, geography, history, and identity. It touches individuals, families, communities, and entire cultures in distinct and layered ways.

Racial Trauma Affects:

1. Individuals of Colour

People of colour—especially those who are visibly marked as racially ‘other’ in predominantly white or dominant-culture societies—carry the daily burden of racialised stress. This includes:

Black communities, who contend with the legacies of enslavement, colonisation, police violence, systemic exclusion, and cultural stereotyping.
Indigenous peoples, whose lands, languages, and spiritual practices have been stolen or erased, resulting in profound historical and cultural grief.
Asian communities, who face the impacts of model minority myths, cultural invisibility, xenophobia, and racialised scapegoating (particularly evident during events such as the COVID-19 pandemic).
Mixed-heritage people, who may struggle with identity, belonging, and being perceived as ‘not enough’ of any category—a liminal space that can create its own form of racial grief.
Latinx, Arab, and other racially coded communities, who face stereotyping, Islamophobia, cultural exoticisation, and exclusion from dominant narratives of belonging.

2. Families and Communities

Racial trauma is not just personal—it is also interpersonal and collective.

Families pass down survival strategies, cautionary tales, warnings, and fears that shape how children navigate the world.
Communities may form protective cultures—but these can also carry unspoken griefs, silences, and internalised oppression.
There are ‘family loyalties’ to ways of coping with racial trauma—sometimes functional, sometimes limiting—that flow through generations.

3. Whole Generations (Intergenerational Trauma)

Racial trauma is transmitted across time.
Children may carry the emotional and psychological residue of harm their parents or grandparents endured—even if the original wound is never spoken of.

This can manifest as:

Chronic anxiety or hypervigilance
Deep distrust of systems or authority
Unexplained grief or restlessness
A haunting sense of loss or disconnection from culture, language, or homeland

Joy DeGruy (2005) powerfully argues that Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome continues to shape the identity, self-worth, and relational patterns of African-descended people in the Americas and beyond.

4. Society as a Whole

While racial trauma primarily wounds people of colour, its shadow touches the entire society.

Those with racial privilege (particularly white populations) are affected too—though differently—through inherited narratives of superiority, disconnection, guilt, denial, or fragility.
Institutions, workplaces, and systems carry the mark of racial trauma in policies, practices, and unspoken norms.
Until racial trauma is named and tended to, no community is truly whole, safe, or free.

As psychologist Derald Wing Sue reminds us, racism is a societal illness. Healing must also be collective.

A Note on Intersectionality

It is essential to recognise that race does not exist in isolation. Racial trauma is shaped by gender, class, sexuality, disability, migration status, and more.

For example:

A Black woman may experience racial trauma in ways that are inseparable from sexism (misogynoir).
A queer Indigenous person may carry the burden of cultural erasure alongside homophobia or transphobia.
A disabled person of colour may navigate both racial discrimination and ableism.

These intersections do not simply ‘add up’—they multiply and compound the effects of trauma in complex ways.

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3. The Role of Ancestral and Collective Memory in Racial Trauma

Racial trauma does not begin with you. It did not start the moment you were insulted on the street, excluded at work, profiled by police, or erased in the classroom.

For many Black, Indigenous, and racially minoritised people, racial trauma is inherited grief—carried forward through generations, encoded not only in family stories but also in the body, the nervous system, the silences, and the dreams.

This is what Dr. Joy DeGruy (2005) names as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS)—the enduring, unhealed wounding passed down from ancestors who survived the brutality of slavery. These wounds are not metaphorical. They shape beliefs, behaviours, fears, and hopes, passed like invisible heirlooms from parent to child, grandparent to grandchild.

Similarly, Dr. Aileen Alleyne (2021) describes the "haunting of heritage"—the way unresolved racial trauma is transmitted through family dynamics, survival strategies, and unconscious loyalties to ancestors who suffered and survived. She speaks of intergenerational transmissions of racial injury that live quietly in the background of family life, influencing everything from how we parent to how we grieve to how we love.

Ancestral Memory as Survival and Wounding

Our ancestors were not only harmed—they also survived.
And in their survival, they developed strategies that kept their descendants (us) alive.

Silence became safety. Speaking of racial violence was dangerous—so it was not spoken of.
Hypervigilance became protection. Expecting betrayal was realistic—so trust became rare.
Overachievement became armour. Proving oneself meant survival—so rest became unfamiliar.

But what once protected can now imprison. What once served life can now cost joy, connection, and wholeness.

To heal racial trauma, we must also gently tend to these inherited patterns—with compassion, not judgement.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets

Modern trauma research—including the work of Resmaa Menakem (2017)—shows that trauma is not only stored in memory but also in the body itself.

Tight shoulders, shallow breath, a racing heart at authority figures—these are not simply personal quirks.
They may be the echoes of ancestral survival responses to slave masters, police, overseers, colonial soldiers.

Even without conscious awareness, the body prepares for dangers the ancestors once faced.
This is not weakness. It is ancestral intelligence—an old wisdom trying to keep you safe in a world that has not yet fully changed.

Collective Memory: Community Grief and Resilience

Racial trauma also lives in collective memory—the shared grief and defiance of entire peoples.
This is why certain dates, events, or public injustices (such as the murder of George Floyd, the Grenfell fire, Windrush deportations) awaken profound, disproportionate feelings of pain, anger, or despair.

It is not just this event—it is every event like this, ever. It is the grief of the whole community speaking through the individual heart.

But collective memory also holds strength, creativity, and joy:

The sound of the drum, the weaving of hair, the scent of ancestral food, the fire of protest, the poetry of survival.
These are forms of cultural and ancestral nourishment that restore dignity, humanity, and wholeness.

A Note on Healing Ancestral Trauma

To heal racial trauma is also to heal what came before—to break patterns that no longer serve, to honour wounds that were hidden, and to reclaim ancestral wisdom that colonialism tried to erase.

This may involve:

Reconnecting with language, land, or cultural practice.
Naming family silences.
Releasing inherited fear or shame.
Inviting the gifts of ancestors who were more than their suffering—those who were joyful, brave, wise, whole.

As Dr. Renee Linklater (2014) reminds us in her work on Indigenous healing:
Decolonising trauma work is also the work of cultural and spiritual remembrance.

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4. Who Causes Racial Trauma?

Racial trauma does not arise by chance. It is not the result of random misfortune or isolated incidents.

Racial trauma is caused by people, systems, and structures that uphold racial inequality, exclusion, and harm—whether intentionally or unconsciously.

Naming the causes of racial trauma is not about blame for the sake of blame—it is about truth-telling for the sake of healing. What remains hidden or denied cannot be healed.

So we name this gently, but clearly.

1. Interpersonal Causes: Individuals and Groups

Racial trauma often begins at the personal level—through the actions, words, or silences of individuals. This includes:

Overt acts of racism: Hate crimes, racial slurs, physical violence, exclusionary behaviour.
Covert acts of racism: Microaggressions, stereotyping, cultural appropriation, assumptions of inferiority or exoticism.
Complicit silences: Bystander inaction, denial, avoidance when racism occurs in social or workplace settings.
These harms can come from:
Individuals in everyday life (colleagues, neighbours, classmates, health professionals).
Those in positions of authority (police, teachers, employers, therapists).
Even members of one’s own racial or ethnic group (internalised racism, colourism, lateral violence).

2. Institutional Causes: Systems and Structures

Beyond personal actions, racial trauma is embedded within institutions—the systems that shape daily life, such as:

Education: Curricula that erase or distort histories of people of colour.
Healthcare: Racial bias in diagnosis, treatment, and pain assessment.
Employment: Discriminatory hiring, wage gaps, and workplace microaggressions.
Housing: Redlining, gentrification, displacement.
Criminal justice: Over-policing, racial profiling, disproportionate incarceration rates.
Media: Stereotypical portrayals, erasure of positive or complex representation.

These systems do not act on their own—they are designed, maintained, and justified by human beings. When institutions fail to change, they perpetuate the conditions of racial trauma.

3. Historical and Cultural Causes: Legacies of Oppression

Some of the most profound causes of racial trauma are historical and cultural in origin.
These include:

Colonisation and the theft of land, resources, and culture.
Enslavement and its brutal, dehumanising legacy.
Genocide of Indigenous peoples.
Apartheid, segregation, and caste systems that enforced racial hierarchies.
Cultural erasure and assimilation policies that sever people from language, ritual, and belonging.

These historical events have left psychic wounds that ripple through time, shaping the worldviews, fears, and hopes of descendants today.

These past harms create present-day vulnerabilities to stress, mistrust, and survival adaptations that can affect identity, relationships, and self-worth.

4. Societal Causes: Cultural Norms and Ideologies

Racial trauma is also maintained by the stories a society tells itself:

The myth of white superiority or ‘normalcy’.
The devaluation or exoticisation of non-white bodies.
The narrative that racism is ‘over’ or ‘solved’—which denies the ongoing harm.

This cultural context shapes everything: who is trusted, who is feared, who is believed, who is invisible.

Even when no overt insult is spoken, these cultural norms shape opportunity, belonging, and safety—or the lack thereof.

5. Unconscious and Unintentional Causes

It is important to note: Not all causes of racial trauma are conscious or deliberate.

Much harm is caused by implicit bias—automatic, unexamined beliefs absorbed from society.
Or by “well-meaning” ignorance—people who do not realise they are causing harm because they have never questioned their privilege or assumptions.

But whether conscious or unconscious, intentional or accidental—the harm is real. The trauma is real. The impact remains.

A Note on Accountability and Compassion

This truth is not offered to evoke guilt or defensiveness—but to encourage awareness, accountability, and change.

Healing requires space to name and process racial harm—not to shame, but to transform.

Racial trauma was created. And what was created can be dismantled. But only through honest reckoning.

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5. The Intersection of Racial Trauma with Other Forms of Oppression (Intersectionality)

Racial trauma does not exist in isolation.

For many people of colour, the wounds of racism are intertwined with other forms of marginalisation—gender, class, sexuality, disability, migration status, religion.

This complexity is captured by the concept of intersectionality, first introduced by legal scholar and Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Intersectionality shows us that people are not shaped by one identity category at a time—but by the overlapping of many systems of power and exclusion.

Without this lens, the experience of racial trauma can be misunderstood, flattened, or erased.

Race + Gender: Misogynoir and Gendered Racism

For Black women and other women of colour, racial trauma is often inseparable from gendered harm.

Black women, for example, experience misogynoir—a specific blend of racism and sexism (Bailey, 1998)—which frames them as angry, threatening, or hypersexualised.
Indigenous women globally face higher rates of violence and erasure.
Women of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent may face both Islamophobia and patriarchal stereotypes.

These are not merely parallel oppressions—they interact and multiply, shaping distinct traumas.

Race + Class: Economic Injustice

Poverty, housing precarity, and economic exclusion often compound racial trauma.

Working-class people of colour may face environmental racism (e.g. living in polluted areas), underemployment, and exploitation.
Wealth does not always shield people of colour from racism—but class privilege may offer temporary buffers or access to healing resources unavailable to others.

The intersection of race and class shapes not only exposure to trauma but also access to safety, care, and recovery.

Race + Sexuality: Queer and Trans Experiences

Queer, trans, and non-binary people of colour often experience multiple marginalisations—rejected by both mainstream society and sometimes by their own racial or cultural communities.

Black and brown queer bodies are frequently fetishised, policed, or erased.
Trans women of colour face some of the highest rates of violence globally.

Racial trauma, here, is not a single wound but a network of exclusions—where safety, belonging, and dignity are denied on many fronts.

Race + Disability: Ableism and Invisibility

Disabled people of colour experience compounded trauma at the intersection of racism and ableism.

Medical neglect, misdiagnosis, and disbelief of pain are common.
Disabled bodies of colour may be viewed as ‘burdensome’ or erased entirely from public space and policy.

Their trauma includes not only racial injustice but also the daily struggle for visibility, care, and respect.

Race + Migration Status: The Trauma of Displacement

For migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers of colour, racial trauma is often entwined with the grief of displacement:

Loss of homeland, language, cultural familiarity.
Exposure to xenophobia, anti-immigrant policies, and detention.
The ache of being ‘othered’ both in the new land and sometimes in the land left behind.

This is what Paul Gilroy calls the "diasporic double consciousness"—a split sense of self across geography, culture, and belonging.

The Danger of Erasure Without Intersectionality

Without intersectionality, the unique trauma of (for example) a Black disabled queer woman is flattened into "race" alone—silencing crucial aspects of her lived experience.

Recognising intersectionality is not about adding complexity for its own sake—it is about seeing people in their wholeness, making space for their full humanity (Crenshaw,1989).

A Note on Healing Across Intersections

Healing racial trauma at these crossroads requires:

Culturally competent care that understands layered identities.
Community spaces where the fullness of identity is affirmed—not reduced.
Self-awareness and reflection on how one’s multiple identities shape trauma and resilience.

No one heals in isolation from their social context. The work must honour every part of the self.

We’re at the end of the first section. Now might feel right to download your free reflective journal. If not, let’s keep going.

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Part Two: Experiencing Racial Trauma

6. Symptoms of Racial Trauma: The Whole-Person Impact

Racial trauma does not stay in the mind alone.
It lives in the body.
It weaves itself into emotions, relationships, spirit, and breath.

Like all trauma, racial trauma can affect every dimension of a person’s being—physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, social, and relational. Yet, unlike other traumas, racial trauma is often ongoing, collective, and unrecognised by dominant culture, making its symptoms harder to name, claim, and tend to.
When a wound is unseen, its impact often spreads wider and deeper.

Let’s gently explore how racial trauma may show up in the whole person:

1. Physical Symptoms

The body often holds the first and most enduring signs of racial trauma.
These may include:

Chronic fatigue or exhaustion ("battle fatigue" from constant vigilance)
Headaches, migraines
Muscle tension, jaw clenching
Digestive problems (gut issues, nausea)
Sleep disturbances (insomnia, nightmares)
Increased heart rate, hypertension
Autoimmune or inflammatory responses (as the body stays in a heightened stress state)

Racialised trauma embeds itself in the nervous system, shaping how the body responds to threat, safety, and connection.

2. Psychological Symptoms

Racial trauma can affect thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions, including:

Hypervigilance (always scanning for danger)
Difficulty concentrating or memory problems
Low self-worth, internalised racism
Dissociation or emotional numbing
Sense of foreshortened future ("What’s the point?")
Anxiety, panic attacks
Depression, hopelessness

When racial trauma goes unnamed, individuals may blame themselves for these feelings—deepening shame and isolation.

3. Emotional Symptoms

Emotionally, racial trauma may manifest as:

Anger or rage (often suppressed or pathologised by society)
Grief and sorrow (mourning lost safety, belonging, joy)
Shame or guilt (especially with internalised oppression)
Numbness or apathy ("I can’t care anymore")
Irritability or emotional reactivity

These feelings are not flaws or failures. They are valid, human responses to systemic dehumanisation.

4. Spiritual Symptoms

For many, racial trauma also wounds the soul. Symptoms may include:

Loss of meaning or purpose
Disconnection from cultural or spiritual roots
Questioning of faith or spiritual betrayal (e.g. when religious communities uphold racism)
Longing for ancestral connection or healing
Sacred rage—the deep sense that injustice violates the sacred order of life

For Indigenous and racialised peoples, spiritual disconnection is both a symptom and a goal of colonial trauma—a severing that requires intentional cultural and spiritual repair.

5. Social Symptoms

In social life, racial trauma may show up as:

Withdrawal or isolation (to avoid potential harm)
Distrust of others (especially those with racial privilege)
Code-switching or masking to appear 'safer'
Hyper-performance (overworking to ‘prove’ worth)
Loss of belonging in community or workplace settings

These responses are often survival strategies, not personal failings.

6. Relational Symptoms

In relationships, racial trauma may affect:

Difficulty forming trusting relationships (especially across racial lines)
Attachment wounds (fear of abandonment, rejection, betrayal)
Conflict in interracial friendships or partnerships
Parenting stress (fear for children’s safety in a racist world)
Intergenerational communication struggles (e.g. when elders minimise or silence racial pain)

Unresolved racial trauma in one generation can shape family patterns, loyalties, and taboos in the next.

A Note on Variation and Complexity

Not everyone will experience all of these symptoms.
For some, racial trauma may erupt suddenly (after a publicised hate crime or personal attack).
For others, it may accumulate quietly over years until the body or mind can no longer contain it.

Each person’s response is shaped by:

Personal history
Cultural identity
Spiritual beliefs
Community support (or lack thereof)
Other intersecting identities (gender, class, sexuality, ability)

There is no "right" way to feel or heal. Only your way.

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7. Racial Trauma and Grief: Exploring Secondary Losses in Relation to Human Needs

Grief is not only about death. It is about loss in all its forms—especially the losses that go unnamed. The losses that are repeated. The ones that are dismissed by others but deeply felt in the bones, the breath, the body.

Racial trauma gives rise to what some call ambiguous grief or disenfranchised grief—grief that is ongoing, complex, and socially unacknowledged.

As Breeshia Wade (2020) writes in Grieving While Black, racism doesn’t just cause harm—it takes things from us. Things we may not even realise we’ve lost until we find ourselves grieving in confusion or rage.

These are not always tangible things.
Often, they are needs—essential, human needs that go unmet or are forcibly taken away.

What Are Human Needs?

To live fully, humans require more than survival—we need to feel safe, loved, seen, respected, purposeful, free.

Frameworks like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs, and the Human Givens approach remind us: Grief doesn’t arise only when someone dies. It arises when something essential is missing.

When racial trauma interferes with these core needs, it leads to layers of secondary losses. The pain isn’t only in what happened—but in what was denied.

Secondary Losses in the Wake of Racial Trauma

Let us name some of the most common human needs that racial trauma disrupts—and the griefs they create:

1. Loss of Safety

Maslow: Safety needs
Human Givens: Security, control

Racial trauma erodes the basic sense of safety—both physical and psychological.

The safety to walk down a street without fear.
The safety to send your child to school without hypervigilance.
The safety to express grief, anger, or vulnerability without being labelled dangerous, irrational, or unprofessional.

This loss often births chronic anxiety, over-alertness, and a deep fatigue that is rarely named as grief.

2. Loss of Belonging

Maslow: Love and belonging
Max-Neef: Affection, participation, identity

To be racialised in a society rooted in whiteness is often to feel like a permanent outsider.

In schools where history excludes you.
In workplaces where code-switching becomes survival.
In healthcare systems that misdiagnose or minimise your pain.

This is a grief of disconnection and exile—of knowing you were never quite meant to feel fully at home.

3. Loss of Dignity

Human Givens: Status, respect
Max-Neef: Understanding, freedom

Dignity is the sense that one’s life, body, and voice are inherently valuable. Racial trauma chips away at this, slowly and systemically:

Being spoken over or assumed incompetent.

Having your hair, skin, voice, or name ridiculed.
Carrying the burden of representing an entire race.

These experiences produce a “shameful exposure”—an internalised sense of defectiveness, often inherited and absorbed over generations.

4. Loss of Joy

Maslow: Self-actualisation
Max-Neef: Recreation, creation

There is grief in never being able to let your guard down. In feeling that joy must always be earned, justified, or performed carefully.

The playfulness that vanishes when you’re in a room full of microaggressions.
The laughter that’s muted because someone might say you're “too much.”
The dance that’s shortened because you’re being watched.

This is the grief of joy interrupted. And joy matters—it is a form of resistance and a birthright.

5. Loss of Rest and Ease

Human Givens: Autonomy, privacy, control
Max-Neef: Subsistence + leisure

Racial trauma often births a culture of overwork, hypervigilance, and emotional labour.

Being "on guard" in white spaces.
Managing other people’s fragility or defensiveness.
Suppressing one’s own grief or rage to remain palatable.

This produces a profound grief of depletion—the loss of rest, softness, and self-reclamation.

the compulsion to prove worth and safety can trace back to ancestral survival strategies, now internalised as “perfectionism,” “strong Black womanhood,” or “not wanting to rock the boat.”

6. Loss of Freedom

Maslow: Freedom and self-actualisation
Max-Neef: Autonomy, identity

To live under the gaze of racialisation is to feel watched, regulated, limited.

Freedom of movement is restricted by fear of surveillance or violence.
Freedom of expression is curbed by fear of stereotype.
Freedom to live expansively is dulled by inherited trauma.

There is grief in the feeling:
"I don’t get to be fully myself—here, in this body, in this skin."

Compound Grief, Layered Grief

These losses are rarely singular.
They often compound over time, creating a layered grief that is hard to name—but felt in the nervous system, the body, the breath, the voice.

Racial trauma causes not just the loss of what was—but the persistent sense that some things may never be fully available: safety, belonging, softness, wholeness.

This is why grief work is racial justice work.
To grieve these losses is not indulgence—it is truth-telling.
And to honour this grief is to reclaim your full humanity.

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8. Barriers to Healing from Racial Trauma

Healing from racial trauma requires more than time. It requires truth, safety, and support.
But for many racially minoritised people, these conditions are not guaranteed. In fact, the very systems that cause harm often also block healing.

This creates a particular kind of grief—a double injury:
First the trauma, then the denial of your right to name it.

There are systemic, interpersonal, and internal barriers that prevent healing from taking root. This section honours some of the most common obstacles.

1. Gaslighting and Denial

“Are you sure it was about race?”
“You’re being too sensitive.”
“It was just a joke.”

Gaslighting is a psychological tactic that causes people to doubt their perception of reality.
Racial gaslighting occurs when the impact of racism is minimised, questioned, or reframed as a personal issue.

In families that "don’t talk about race."
In workplaces that pride themselves on "diversity" but silence complaints.
In institutions that claim neutrality but uphold systemic exclusion.

Over time, this leads to internalised confusion and self-doubt. People begin to mistrust their intuition, invalidate their own suffering, and feel “crazy” for still carrying pain others say doesn’t exist.

2. Lack of Validation and Witnessing

Healing requires witnessing.
But many people of colour grow up and live in environments where there is no one to say:
"Yes. That happened. And it should not have."

Instead, they encounter:

Silence from white friends or colleagues.
Spiritual bypassing from religious communities ("We’re all one in God.")
Cultural dismissal within their own communities ("Just get on with it.")

The result is grief without acknowledgement—pain without language.
This becomes what McKenzie-Mavinga (2023) names as ‘emotional apartheid’: the forced separation from one’s own emotional truth.

3. Inaccessibility of Culturally Competent Care

Even when someone is ready to heal, the path is often blocked by a lack of culturally attuned support.

Mental health services may be unavailable, unaffordable, or understaffed.
Therapists may lack awareness of racial trauma—or unintentionally reinforce it.
Dominant models of therapy often centre whiteness, ignoring spiritual, ancestral, or cultural dimensions of healing.

Black and Brown clients often carry the additional burden of educating their therapist, managing microaggressions during sessions, or having to code-switch their pain. This is not healing. This is more labour.

4. Internalised Oppression and Survival Silence

Another barrier lies within grief suppressed for survival.

Many have learned to silence their pain to avoid being labelled “angry,” “difficult,” or “unstable.”
Others have been raised with the belief that therapy is "not for us" or that showing emotion is weakness.
And some carry intergenerational shame—family secrets, ancestral silence, inherited emotional debts.

These internalised messages are not personal failures. They are survival strategies in a world that often punishes emotional honesty in Black and Brown bodies.

5. Structural Oppression in the Systems Meant to Heal

Racial trauma doesn’t only live in individuals—it lives in systems.

Schools punish Black children disproportionately.
Police and carceral systems criminalise Black distress.
Hospitals and mental health institutions underdiagnose, misdiagnose, or overpathologise racially minoritised people.

When the very systems designed to protect and heal are sources of trauma, the path to recovery becomes steep, and often unsafe.

A Note on Not “Doing the Work” Yet

If you haven’t been able to begin healing, or have stopped and started, or felt stuck—
it’s not because you’re broken. It may be because the conditions for healing have not yet been safe enough. That, too, is grief. And it deserves compassion.

Ready for some reflections? Download your free journal.

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Part Three: Recovery, Reconnection, and Joy

9. What Recovery and Healing from Racial Trauma Might Look Like

Healing from racial trauma is not linear. It is not a checklist or a finish line. It is a rhythm—sometimes slow, sometimes spiralling—a process of remembering, releasing, reclaiming, and returning to oneself.

Many models of trauma recovery have been shaped by Eurocentric, medicalised frameworks. While they have value, they often overlook the collective, cultural, and historical dimensions of racial trauma. They centre the individual, but we do not hurt in isolation. Nor do we heal there.

This section invites us into a more expansive view of recovery—one that honours both short-term practices that soothe the nervous system and long-term pathways that decolonise the soul.

Short-Term Practices: Soothing the Nervous System, Building Safety

In the immediate aftermath of racial trauma—or in its daily microbursts—we need tools that anchor us. These practices don’t erase harm, but they help the body feel safe enough to keep going.

1. Grounding and Regulation

Racial trauma dysregulates the nervous system. Grounding practices help us return to the body and to presence.

Breathwork – slow, conscious breathing to anchor in the present
Sensory grounding – noticing textures, sounds, or tastes around you
Movement – walking, dancing, shaking, stretching

These are not indulgences. They are acts of reinhabiting the body—a body that has been taught it is unsafe or unworthy.

2. Community Care and Shared Witnessing

You do not have to carry it alone.

Speaking to a friend who “gets it” without needing context
Sitting in a healing circle or affinity group
Attending a workshop or support space led by people of colour

Healing is not always found in silence and solitude—but in connection, mirroring, and collective presence. Sometimes the most healing words are: “Me too. I know. I’ve felt that.”

3. Somatic Work and Emotional Release

Racial trauma often lives in the body as tension, tightness, suppression.

Somatic therapy helps release stored trauma through body-based practices
Crying, screaming, or laughing in safe spaces helps restore emotional flow
Touch—when consensual and safe—can be reparative

Let the body finish what it never got to complete in the moment of harm. Let it speak. Let it soften.

4. Micro-Rituals of Self-Respect

Wearing your hair how you like it
Speaking your name in full, with pride
Saying no to emotional labour when your spirit says no

These are not minor. These are sacred ruptures from white normativity.
Small moments of re-alignment with your dignity.

Long-Term Pathways: Reclaiming Culture, Land, Spirit, and Self

True healing from racial trauma requires more than symptom relief.
It calls for deep re-rooting—into ancestry, land, language, joy, community, and truth.

Recovery for racialised people must include the reclamation of cultural worldviews. Healing must be more than integration into the dominant system—it must be a return to one’s own medicine.

1. Decolonising Healing

Working with practitioners who use anti-oppressive, culturally rooted models
Integrating ceremony, ancestral practices, and indigenous wisdom
Honouring your spiritual and cosmological worldview, however it manifests

This is about turning towards your own centre—not fitting yourself into systems that were never made for your thriving.

2. Cultural and Ancestral Reconnection

Learning the stories of your ancestors, even if fragmented
Reconnecting with cultural art, music, rituals, or language
Grieving what was lost—and letting what remains become sacred again

It’s about moving beyond survival into cultural reawakening. To know where you come from, even in fragments, is to begin to know where you’re going.

3. Land and Nature as Co-Healer

For people uprooted through colonisation, migration, and slavery, land holds both grief and medicine.

Spending time with trees, rivers, soil
Visiting ancestral homelands or tending to land where you are now
Understanding land not as property—but as relationship, as witness

There is a grief of disconnection—and a healing that comes from restoring our bond with Earth as an ancestor and ally.

4. Storytelling and Creative Expression

Writing your story—even if just for yourself
Making art, music, or dance rooted in your experience
Speaking truth where silence once lived

Healing does not always speak in a clinical voice. Sometimes it hums, weeps, chants, moves.
Expression is exhale. And exhale is healing.

5. Building Systems of Resistance and Care

Healing is also justice—it’s political.

Creating healing spaces for others
Dismantling harmful structures within your reach
Funding, supporting, or joining movements led by those at the margins

To participate in collective liberation is to rewrite the story of what is possible after trauma.

Gentle Reminder

Healing is not a to-do list.
You are not behind.
You are not late.
Some days healing is a march. Some days a whisper. Some days it's just remembering to eat and drink water.

You are already doing the work—by naming, by feeling, by choosing to keep going.

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10. Resistance, Joy, and Creativity as Healing Practices

Because joy is not a luxury. It’s a liberation strategy.

Racial trauma can dull the spirit. It tells you to shrink, to harden, to expect pain. And so healing must not only address the wounds—it must also reclaim the right to joy, rest, art, and imagination.

As Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

In this context, joy is not naive. It is not denial. It is resistance in a world that profits from your exhaustion. It is a way of saying:
"I am still here. I still feel. I still create. I still dance."

Joy as Resistance

Racial trauma can make joy feel dangerous, fleeting, or undeserved.

Joy interrupted by fear.
Joy dimmed by the gaze of others.
Joy buried under generational silence.

To choose joy, then, is not passive. It is a radical act of reclamation.Joy reminds us that we are more than our pain. That our ancestors danced, laughed, and loved—even in the midst of unimaginable suffering. That joy is part of our inheritance.

bell hooks (2000) taught us that “There is no such thing as an apolitical space”—and that includes joy. Joy can be the very thing that keeps the soul intact when the body is under siege.

Creativity as Expression and Exhale

Racial trauma often silences, polices, and constrains expression.
Art disrupts that.
It gives language to what cannot be explained—and gives the soul a place to move.

Visual art to externalise pain
Poetry to rewrite narratives
Music to release tension
Dance to reconnect with the body

Racialised trauma is stored in the body—and it must be metabolised there too. Creativity becomes both release and ritual. It is how we process, protest, and reimagine.

Rest as Resistance

Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy all benefit when we are exhausted, compliant, and productive above all else.
Rest disrupts that.

Rest says: I am worthy even when I am still.
Rest says: I am not a machine.
Rest says: My softness is sacred.

Rest is a portal to healing and liberation—a way to reset the nervous system, honour the ancestors, and reject grind culture.

If trauma is what happens when the body isn’t allowed to rest or feel safe, then rest becomes the medicine. And sleep, silence, softness—they become reparations for the body.

Imagination as Liberation

Healing isn’t just about looking back.
It’s also about looking forward—imagining a life, a world, a self beyond trauma.

What would it look like to be fully seen and safe?
What would it feel like to walk into a room and not brace?
Who would you be without the weight of proving, performing, protecting?

Imagination is not escapism. As Black feminist futurists have long reminded us: we need the dreamers. The ones who can envision something else. Something freer.

You Are Allowed To Feel Good

There is no virtue in endless struggle.
Your pain is valid—and your joy is too.
You are allowed to feel good. You are allowed to laugh. You are allowed to rest.
That is not forgetting.
That is remembering—your wholeness, your birthright, your humanity.

Joy, creativity, rest, and imagination are not the opposite of healing.
They are the healing.
They are how we recover what was taken.

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11. A Gentle Note to White Readers

This work invites your witness, not your defence.

If you are a white reader journeying through this piece—thank you for being here.
You are welcome. And this invitation is not casual. It comes with care, and with clarity.

This writing centres the lived experiences of people who have carried racial trauma in their bodies, spirits, and lineages. If this is not your experience, then your role here is not to insert yourself into the centre—but to stay present, reflective, and open.

There may be moments you feel discomfort. That is not a sign you are being attacked. It is a sign you are being invited into deeper awareness.

The work of unlearning racial dominance is not about shame—it is about responsibility.
The work of becoming a safe presence is not about perfection—it is about practice.

Here are some gentle reminders to support you in moving through this material:

1. Stay With the Discomfort

If something feels challenging or confronting, pause.
Breathe.
Resist the urge to defend, debate, or distract.
Ask yourself: What is being asked of me here that I haven’t considered before?

2. Don't Rush to Be the Helper

Witnessing racial trauma can stir up a desire to act, to apologise, to help.
While action is important, first, listen deeply.
Allow those most impacted to define what support looks like.
Ask yourself: Am I centring their need—or my need to feel better?

3. Honour the Emotional Labour

Remember: racialised people do not owe you their stories, their trust, or their teachings.
If you have learned something here, let it move you toward sustainable action, not performative guilt.

4. Begin or Continue Your Own Work

Your healing is bound up in this too.
White supremacy dehumanises everyone, albeit differently.
Explore your conditioning. Grieve what you were taught.
And let your unlearning be rooted in love, not shame.

5. Practice Solidarity Beyond This Page

Intervene when racism shows up in your spaces.
Support Black and Brown-led initiatives.
Build accountability into your communities.
Don’t wait for harm to become visible before you act.

This is a shared world.
But we do not all move through it with the same weight.
If you have privilege, may it become a tool for justice.
If you feel unsure, may you stay curious and courageous.

And if you are here—quiet, present, and listening—
Thank you.
Please don’t stop here.

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Conclusion: A Note of Compassion and Hope

Breathe. You have done brave work simply by being here.

If you’ve made it to the end of this piece, please take a moment—right now—to pause.

Feel your breath.
Notice your body.
Let your shoulders soften, even slightly.

You have just walked through tender terrain—grief, history, memory, truth.
Whether it stirred old wounds or gave language to what you’ve long felt but never named, this is work that lives deep in the bones.

Racial trauma is heavy. But your life is not only made of what was taken.
It is also made of what remains. What is remembered. What is reclaimed.

There is strength in you. There is softness, too.
There is wisdom in your grief and power in your joy.

This is not a neat ending.
Healing is not a single path, nor a destination.

But you are not alone in your journey.
There are words, rituals, practices, people—and your own breath—waiting to meet you again and again.

If you would like to keep reflecting, integrating, and tending to what’s arisen here, you are warmly invited to download the free reflective journal here – a soulful companion of 24 prompts and pause to support your healing.

You don’t have to rush.
You don’t have to have it all figured out.
Give it space to breathe.

May this piece hold you gently. May it honour your pain and your power.
May it remind you: you are never invisible to yourself.

As ever,
Rebecca-Monique

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References

Alleyne, A. (2021) The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives. London: Routledge.

Bailey, M. (1998) ‘They aren’t talking about me…: Misogynoir and the invisibility of Black women’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 8(2), pp. 56–77.

Carter, R.T. (2007) ‘Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress’, The Counseling Psychologist, 35(1), pp. 13–105.

Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp. 139–167.

DeGruy, J. (2005) Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, OR: Uptone Press.

Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

hooks, b. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

Human Givens Institute (2023) The Emotional Needs Audit. Available at: www.hgi.org.uk [Accessed June 2025].

Linklater, R. (2014) Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Lorde, A. (1988) A Burst of Light: Essays. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.

Maslow, A.H. (1943) ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370–396.

Max-Neef, M. (1991) Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections. New York: Apex Press.

McKenzie-Mavinga, I., Black, K., Olagunju, A., et al. (2023) Therapy in Colour: Intersectional, Anti-Racist and Intercultural Approaches by Therapists of Colour. London: Pavilion Publishing.

Menakem, R. (2017) My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.

Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C.M., Torino, G.C., Bucceri, J.M., Holder, A.M.B., Nadal, K.L. and Esquilin, M. (2007) ‘Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice’, American Psychologist, 62(4), pp. 271–286.

Wade, B. (2020) Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

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trauma, healing, Journaling, Reflection, loss and grief, RaceRebecca-Monique1 July 2025