A visual of embodied experience. 

 

In My Grandmother’s Hands:  Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017), Resmaa Menakem outlines how racialized historical trauma in America is an embodied experience. Embodiment is a way of representing that the mind, the body, the spirit, and the world around us is a single system. Our bodies, as the houses of our collective being, decide whether an environment, an event, a person is safe or not safe based on prior experience. A traumatized body does not reason, and while the mind can construct stories to bury embodied responses, it is the body that ultimately keeps score (van der Kolk, 2014).

 

In Western systems, dominated by rationalism, we are taught to view the mind as some executive power directing the body’s function (Menakem, 2017). What trauma research suggests is that many of our embodied responses happen at lightning speed, before cognition, and in reaction to stressors in our environment. Emotions, not thinking, guide our behavior and the first place we feel things is in our bodies. In direct opposition to what we’ve been taught in Western systems, embodied responses create the emotional states from which our thoughts, perceptions, and behavior arise. The body, not the mind, keeps the score. This doesn’t mean we can’t exercise influence over our embodied responses. We absolutely can, but not without internal awareness of how our bodies are responding to the world around us, and ignoring or suppressing those responses is bad for your wellbeing.

 

Language revitalization, like wellbeing, isn’t a potted plant that you set on the window separate from the rest of your existence. Language revitalization happens, or does not happen, within a larger social and historical context, in a specific web of relationships, and for each of us, in a unique embodied experience. Like a tree, our wellbeing is rooted in the soil of our existence. That soil isn’t just what we put into our bodies, or think with our minds, or even experience with our whole being in the present moment. The soil of our existence is a complex mix of the past, present, and future. It isn’t just what happens to each of us as individuals.  It’s what happened to our ancestors, to our families and to our communities. It’s what might happen to our future generations. To understand the health of our trees, we must understand the soil in which they are planted. We are all trees planted in the soil of colonization. What that means, is that every one of us carries trauma in our bodies, because we live in colonial nation states that are built on violence.

 

Acknowledging trauma, and its power, can feel heavy and hopeless. Yet it can also help give us back agency over our embodied responses. It can help us decide for ourselves how we respond to the world around us, and not let trauma do it for us. In understanding our embodied responses, we create space for ourselves to change them, and to develop new ones that better support our wellbeing. Right now, I’m still usually stuffing cookies in my face when I feel the anxiety of somebody asking for my help, and me not being able to give it, but sometimes instead I go for a walk. Eventually I hope to feel less anxious about simply saying “no”. Every single time I choose the walk, and a reminder to myself that I’m still a good person, I strengthen a different embodied response, and a new neural pathway, that comes from my own intentions about how I want to be in the world.

 

It sounds simple but it really works. I suffer from what I’ve self-diagnosed as PTGSS (Post Tribal Government Stress Syndrome). After two decades of exposure to a system that constantly tried to control me and impede my language revitalization efforts, I developed an embodied response where any kind of bureaucratic nonsense became a trauma trigger. Dealing with my phone bill would activate the fight response of my nervous system. I didn’t know why I was yelling at customer service representatives when my order got screwed up, or when somebody put me on hold for 10 minutes. I didn’t figure that out until therapy, but slowly over time I changed my embodied response. I still have moments where I blow up at bureaucratic nonsense, but most days I follow my new embodied response, and I wade through the red tape without getting worked up. I still have the moral outrage, but I don’t let bureaucratic systems harm me. I know this is true because I can feel my nervous system remaining in a relaxed state, and I only know that because I’ve worked on strengthening my internal awareness.

 

Reflective Questions:

  • What embodied responses do you observe in yourself?
  • What are some things (people, places, specific words, interactions, etc.) that activate your nervous system?
  • What is an embodied response that you’d like to change to bring greater wellbeing to yourself and those around you?