Trauma Training Tip
In honor of Black History Month, I would like to lift up the work and vibration of Joy DeGruy, MSW, PhD, author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Dr. DeGruy is a nationally and internationally renowned researcher and educator.
Her research focuses on the intersection of racism, trauma, violence, and American chattel slavery. She has over thirty years of practical experience as a professional in the field of social work. She conducts workshops and trainings in the areas of intergenerational/historical trauma, mental health, social justice, improvement strategies, and evidence-based model development.
From her website:
Dr. Joy DeGruy authored the book entitled Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, which addresses the residual impacts of trauma on African Descendants in the Americas. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can eliminate non-productive attitudes, beliefs and behaviors developed to cope and survive the traumatic periods of capture, transport, enslavement, Jim Crow and current day racial terrorism. The focus of the book is to learn and build upon the strengths we have gained from the past in order to heal from injuries both past and present.
She has a 10-week on-line course that starts April 2, 2024: Dr. Joy DeGruy’s African American Multigenerational Trauma and Implementing Models of Change. Read about it here.
I also want to lift up Black Love, a term I first heard from Dr. Cornel West.
In response to the Adverse Childhood Experiences research, Mark Rains and Kate McClinn in the Healthy Start Program in August, ME, developed this Resilience Score questionnaire. It speaks to me of the power of Black Love and the Black family that undergirds the beauty of so many African American contributions to American life and vitality.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Cornel West, Catastrophic Love
Dr. Cornel West looks at racism through the lens of what he calls “a Blues sensibility” in this YouTube Video. He refers to it as Compassion’s response to catastrophy.
Here are some of the comments on this video:
Justice is what love looks like in public,
Unconditional love is attached to justice – BINGO! Love this man!
Cornel West delivers harsh truth with love so that you cry but also laugh.
Dr. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary and the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
Dr. West has written 20 books. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Dr. West has partnered with MasterClass.com to provide teachings on several influential courses including a class with Pharrell Williams on Empathy, MasterClass’s first-ever multi-instructor class on Black History, Black Freedom & Black Love, as well as Dr. West’s standalone class on Philosophy. You can learn more by going to www.cornelwest.com and clicking on the MasterClass banner.
Check This Out!
Tobi Ayé is a Tao of Trauma graduate in Lisbon, Portugal.
She hosts beautiful monthly grief circles where participants “intertwine gentle breathing exercises with somatic practices, chants, and shared reflections. Together let’s build a container for our sorrow and loss and forge connections amidst global distress and fragmentation.” You can register here.
She is also hosting this 10-week on-line course:
It Takes A Village to Raise A Child, But What if the Village is Traumatized? Honest Parenting and How to Create a Safe Nest for our Children
It takes a village, so everyone with or without child, from any race, ethnicity, gender, age and social background could join this course, because we are always consciously or unconsciously participating in raising a human around us.
As for many things, there is no one-size fits all in parenting as well. There are no bad parents, and no perfect parents either. There are social systems that impose ways of doing, and bombard us with parenting advice, perspectives, philosophies, judgmental looks and voices, etc.. too often without taking into account our children’s real needs.
We want our child to be quiet in the supermarket, to sit and eat perfectly at a table…we just want them to BEHAVE because we, parents and caregivers are feeling pressured and judged by others. So yes, it takes a village and want it or not, the village is raising our children for us.
More info and to registe here.
Clinical Curiosity
Where is your clinical curiosity carrying you?
Send me a question or two and I will explore them with readers in this corner next month.
Q: My patient just had a liver transplant. His kidneys have shut down and his lungs are so compromised that he has to be on a ventilator. He’s being well cared for in the ICU, but is there something I can do? I’m a massage therapist, doing a lot of work with trauma survivors and pain.
A: Such a critical time for your patient! He received anesthesia that essentially creates a very necessary bio-chemical freeze response. It immobilized him, took away any sensations of pain and is helping him to never remember what happened. He gave written consent – but his more primal body felt an alarm when they made the first incision. It wanted to fight or flee – but he was both immobilized by the anesthesia and was held down by straps to prevent him moving while people were working with sharp, precise knives.
While we are glad he had the surgery, and glad that anesthesia was available – there is a “cost to doing business.”
When you are able to be with him – he will want help to stabilize his autonomic nervous system. The Kidney/Adrenal hold will help him through the overwhelming sense of threat that such a massive surgery will create. There’s an important relationship between the kidney and the lungs – and is probably influencing why his lungs are struggling to “grasp the qi” on their own.
Once he is more stable, you may want to work more directly with his liver blood. The Liver plays such an important role in restoring regulation to the blood after a big and alarming message of life threat comes from the Heart. When the kidney feels fear or terror – it sends a message to the heart, which in turn commands all the organs of the body to go into high gear to save our life. His liver blood may need some support to find regulation, so it can assure the heart that “it’s over” and “I survived.” Gentle presence with your hand over his liver will help restore regulation to the message of alarm in his blood.