"Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture."
- Resmaa Menakam
Lately I’ve been sitting with this quote from Resmaa Menakem, licensed social worker, trauma specialist, somatic abolitionist, and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. The first time I heard him say these words, they felt both as familiar as anything I’ve always known and like a riddle to puzzle my way through. In my puzzling, I did what any word nerd would do: I looked up some words in the dictionary. Here’s what I found. To decontextualize something is to consider it in isolation from the set of circumstances or facts that surround it. When we isolate something from its context, it necessarily loses some of the meaning it originally held. It’s also vulnerable to new, perhaps unrelated, meanings being added.
As I sat with this concept of decontextualization, I realized that I spend a lot of my time as a therapist helping clients contextualize their trauma. Behaviors that have been separated from the set of circumstances or facts that created them can now be understood as trauma responses or survival strategies, born of missing developmental experiences in childhood or in response to other overwhelming factors. It’s easy to mistake these survival strategies for “personality,” especially when they started really early in life. Similarly, it’s easy to think, “that’s just the way my family’s always been,” without the context for how those traits might have served a different function at their inception. As we expand out our frame to include culture, we see that the way we do things isn’t just “how it is.” As Americans, our cultural norms emerge out of a set of circumstances that have been largely covered over, hidden, forgotten, or denied by those with what Resmaa calls “white body supremacy.”
One thing that’s been more and more clear to me in recent weeks as I’ve been sitting with white clients, observing white people’s behavior on social media and paying attention to my own responses to this historic moment is that there is incredible overlap between the personal and collective healing work we have to do. I’ve been repeating often that old adage, “how you do anything is how you do everything.” If you show up in your personal relationships with certain patterns of relating, then it is very likely that you will show up in any work you do to participate in collective healing/anti-oppression work in similar ways. If, in your personal life, you get really quickly activated/mobilized in response to stress, then just as quickly then burn out or get frustrated and confused about what to do next, that is likely to be your default response when you become aware of injustice. This is why it’s so important to understand our personal patterns and begin (or continue) to heal them.
A few things I know for sure: personal and collective healing are possible. Healing is a worthwhile endeavor whether we start for ourselves or for others. Healing is relational and the best outcomes are found when we find others to share our healing journey with.