Speaker 1: Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. I learned things
Speaker 1: about how to navigate in the world from what my
Speaker 1: caregivers lean into and recoiled from. So much of the
Speaker 1: way we moved through the world is influenced by those
Speaker 1: who raised us, from how we hold a fork to
Speaker 1: how we carry our bodies when we walk and talk,
Speaker 1: and hard stuff has passed through generations too. Families who
Speaker 1: have survived famine might be more likely to teach their
Speaker 1: children to stockpile food. Those who survive violent wars or enslavement.
Speaker 1: They may pass on lessons consciously or subconsciously to their kids.
Speaker 1: Trauma in a person over time can look like personality.
Speaker 1: Trauma in a family over time can look like family traits,
Speaker 1: and trauma any people over time can look like culture.
Speaker 1: Resume Menicum is a trauma therapist based in Minneapolis. The
Speaker 1: killings of George Floyd and many other black Americans at
Speaker 1: the hands of police have intensified the focused and urgency
Speaker 1: of Menicum's work. When a black body is murdered on
Speaker 1: TV or we see that type of stuff, the impact
Speaker 1: of it is not just personal. We're dealing with the
Speaker 1: historical energy that has gone unresolved, the intergenerational energy that
Speaker 1: has gone unresolved. Menicum expects that racialized trauma will continue,
Speaker 1: but he believes that hard work by people of all
Speaker 1: races can bring meaningful change. My name is Resume Menicum,
Speaker 1: and I believe that racialized trauma is solvd. My cost
Speaker 1: An apple Bomb spoke with Menachem. Here's their conversation. So Resma,
Speaker 1: to begin with, could you define trauma for us? What
Speaker 1: do you mean when you use that word? Basically, anything
Speaker 1: that happens that's too much, too fast, happens too soon,
Speaker 1: or happens too long without any reprieve or limited reprieve
Speaker 1: is trauma? And how is that different from other types
Speaker 1: of pain or depression or is it the same thing?
Speaker 1: Are these things all related? They're related. But the most
Speaker 1: important piece for me with regard to trauma itself is
Speaker 1: the stuck quality in the ideas or the stuckness in behavior.
Speaker 1: There's a stuck quality that over time begins to look
Speaker 1: like standard and begins to look like normality, Like you
Speaker 1: can have bad things happen to you and not get
Speaker 1: stuck right. Trauma is about the stuckness of it. Tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about yourself and how this became
Speaker 1: your area of focus. Two things. So I was in
Speaker 1: I did two years in Afghanistan doing a trauma work
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan, and during that time, all of the trauma
Speaker 1: that I experienced and saw I had to override in
Speaker 1: order to give service to those people, to those military
Speaker 1: contractors and all of those people that was on those
Speaker 1: fifty three military basis, I had to give service. So
Speaker 1: when they were dealing with suicide, when they were dealing
Speaker 1: with thinking about suicide, when the Taliban would come, would
Speaker 1: would breach the compound, all of that different type of
Speaker 1: stuff I had to work with. I in order to
Speaker 1: survive that, I had to override my own pieces. And
Speaker 1: so when I came back here in twenty thirteen, it
Speaker 1: wasn't until then that I noticed that my own trauma
Speaker 1: pieces started to unthought and started to come about. And
Speaker 1: so that's when the story of my grandmother came back.
Speaker 1: So when I was young, my grandmother, Grandma Addie, she
Speaker 1: would lay on the couch and when she would lay
Speaker 1: on the couch, she would then put her feet across
Speaker 1: our thighs and she would watch TV or put her
Speaker 1: legs across our thighs and her hand would be on
Speaker 1: her hips, and I would always rub her hands and
Speaker 1: just be rubbing her hands and rub her hands while
Speaker 1: she was watching TV. And at one point I was
Speaker 1: comparing her hands to my hands, and what I noticed,
Speaker 1: and my grandmother was a thin woman. She was a
Speaker 1: thin woman, but she had these big, thick hands, like
Speaker 1: the thumbs had all of this patting on it on
Speaker 1: the front, in the palm there was just patting on
Speaker 1: the back of her hands. And she had these thick
Speaker 1: digit fingers that looked different than the way her body
Speaker 1: was constructed. And so at one point I was looking
Speaker 1: at her and I said to her, I said, Grandma,
Speaker 1: why are your hands like that? White the hands while
Speaker 1: your hands so fat like that? And my grandmother, without
Speaker 1: missing a beat, goes, oh, boy, that's from picking cotton.
Speaker 1: She looked at me and she said, boy, you've ever
Speaker 1: seen cotton a cotton plant? I said, no, ma'am. She said,
Speaker 1: cotton plant has got these birds in it. And she said,
Speaker 1: my daddy was a sharecropper. So, and this is the
Speaker 1: tone that she's using now, right, she's going my daddy
Speaker 1: had My daddy was a sharecropper, and so at four
Speaker 1: years old, we had to walk up and down the
Speaker 1: rows and pick that cotton. When you reach your hands
Speaker 1: into cotton, it rips up your hands. Those birds rip
Speaker 1: your hands up until callous's begin to develop. And so
Speaker 1: my hands blared for a long time until Callous's started
Speaker 1: to develop. And so I was just looking at her
Speaker 1: and she said, yeah, that's why, and then she stopped
Speaker 1: right there and she turned and started watching TV. I
Speaker 1: did not remember that story. It totally left me. And
Speaker 1: the reason why it came back is that the connections
Speaker 1: between trauma, my own trauma, her what she was going through,
Speaker 1: my own issues with suicide, and in overwhelming all of
Speaker 1: that different type of stuff, all of that came together
Speaker 1: to help me begin to kind of think about this
Speaker 1: idea around racialized trauma, how it shows up in a body,
Speaker 1: what it does in terms of embodiment, what are the
Speaker 1: protective mechanisms. So that's how I came to this piece,
Speaker 1: and that's why I'm so passionate about it, because people
Speaker 1: can move through it, they can metabolize that energy. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't come from just education, It doesn't come from
Speaker 1: just doing nice thing. It comes from going through it.
Speaker 1: So that so that energy can be used as fuel
Speaker 1: for your freedom as opposed to feel that incinerates you.
Speaker 1: And does trauma always manifest itself through physical symptoms? Most
Speaker 1: often trauma has an embodied physical component that we don't
Speaker 1: many times relate to the trauma that we've been exposed to.
Speaker 1: And I believe through interrogation and through excavation, I believe
Speaker 1: you begin to see how the physical pieces show up.
Speaker 1: But at the beginning most of us don't equate physicalness
Speaker 1: with trauma. But in terms of my work, I do. So,
Speaker 1: what are some examples of physical reactions to pass trauma
Speaker 1: that you found? A classic one is not sleeping, having
Speaker 1: a bracing quality and energy that in which you have
Speaker 1: a sense that the next shoe is getting ready to drop,
Speaker 1: especially when we're talking like when I'm talking about in
Speaker 1: terms of racialized trauma, many people have neck pains or
Speaker 1: back pains, things that show up in their hips or
Speaker 1: things that show up in there so as in the body.
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of work on the post Soviet world,
Speaker 1: including in Ukraine and in Russia. I worked on a
Speaker 1: book about the Gulag. I worked about a book on
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian famine. And these are also places where people
Speaker 1: have long legacies of memories of physical violence or parents
Speaker 1: who've experienced physical violence. Is the kind of racialized trauma
Speaker 1: you're talking about different from that? Or is it? Or
Speaker 1: are we talking about the same phenomenon just you know,
Speaker 1: playing itself out and differently in different cultures. So yes,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about the Second World War, when we're
Speaker 1: talking about googlas, when we're talking about those things, that
Speaker 1: is a trauma manifestation that is absolutely traumatizing, and with
Speaker 1: particular to America, with particular to colonial trauma that I'm
Speaker 1: talking about my underlying pieces that we live in a
Speaker 1: structure by which the white body is the supreme standard
Speaker 1: by which all bodies humanity shall be measured and both
Speaker 1: structurally and philosophically, And what happens is because of that
Speaker 1: organizing structure, what happens is that any body that isn't
Speaker 1: housed in a white body is structurally deviant from that standard.
Speaker 1: That in and of itself is traumatizing. That's why I'm
Speaker 1: talking about the racialized trauma, so we can get at
Speaker 1: the racial pieces and the underpinnings of those racial pieces
Speaker 1: as a way to trauma. So, yes, there are some
Speaker 1: of the same effects, some of the same effects in
Speaker 1: terms of intergenerational passtowns, some of the same effects in
Speaker 1: terms of historical passtown in terms of persistent institutional pass downs,
Speaker 1: and then our own personal traumas. So yes, all of
Speaker 1: those things get organized around it. But I'm talking about
Speaker 1: it in a particular way as it relates to race.
Speaker 1: But are you suggesting this is something that has particularly
Speaker 1: to do with the American experience. So black Americans descended
Speaker 1: from enslaved Americans or is this the ord or is
Speaker 1: it more prevalent. I think it's more prevalent because if
Speaker 1: you look at if you look at the islands in
Speaker 1: Jamaica and South America, is that that's just where the
Speaker 1: boat stopped, where some of the enslaved people got off.
Speaker 1: Some of those white body supremacy pieces, the organizing structures
Speaker 1: of those also took place in those places, right England, Portugal, Spain,
Speaker 1: Belgium and France. Those five superpowers created a sense of
Speaker 1: who was human and who was not, and used pigmentation
Speaker 1: as a shorthand for who was human and who was not.
Speaker 1: So all you had to do is look at somebody
Speaker 1: and you could tell whether or not they were savages,
Speaker 1: or whether or not they were fully human and that
Speaker 1: ethos has been woven through every place that the colonization went.
Speaker 1: What worries me about what you're describing is if it's
Speaker 1: something that affects everybody, and if it's inescapable in a
Speaker 1: certain sense, how can it be solved? Are we talking
Speaker 1: about group therapy? What advice are you offering to overcome
Speaker 1: this long legacy? It's not inescapable. So the solvable pieces
Speaker 1: of this, for me, really is about beginning to have
Speaker 1: us begin to pay attention to what's to what's showing up,
Speaker 1: and not just overrided or act like it's not a
Speaker 1: big deal. Actually beginning to say this is something that
Speaker 1: is an issue in terms of racialized trauma, that the
Speaker 1: ways that we have been organized show up as it
Speaker 1: means to protect us, and we must begin to develop
Speaker 1: communal ways, cultural ways of getting at those pieces, beginning
Speaker 1: at the vibratory aspects of it, the behavior and the
Speaker 1: urges of it. We have to begin to do that.
Speaker 1: That's what makes it solvable, and so communities of people
Speaker 1: have to begin to do this work. Could you maybe
Speaker 1: walk us through some of the things that you're suggesting
Speaker 1: people could begin with, I mean, what are the exercises,
Speaker 1: whether individual or communal, that could be carried out. One
Speaker 1: of the things that happens when I'm working with bodies
Speaker 1: who who are experience in racialized trauma. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I do is I begin to talk to
Speaker 1: them about moving their neck in a way that allows
Speaker 1: them to look behind them and find windows and find doors.
Speaker 1: Because the pass down has been what I call a
Speaker 1: traumatic retention, and the traumatic retention is that I learned
Speaker 1: things about how to navigate in the world from what
Speaker 1: my caregivers lean into and recoiled from. And so when
Speaker 1: I notice the bracing, the kind of vibratory bracing in
Speaker 1: their bodies, my nervous system also picks up on that
Speaker 1: and it becomes decontextualized. In each successive generation. Time decontextualizes trauma.
Speaker 1: Time itself decontextualizes trauma, and so trauma and a person
Speaker 1: over time can look like personality. Trauma and a family
Speaker 1: over time can look like family traits, and trauma and
Speaker 1: a people over time can look like culture. So having
Speaker 1: people begin to look around, or if they come from
Speaker 1: a people that have been traumatized, begin to have them
Speaker 1: look behind them, look for exits, look for safe places
Speaker 1: where they can leave, because for many of our bodies
Speaker 1: we have not had that, and so orienting is one
Speaker 1: of the first things I begin to do. Second thing
Speaker 1: I begin to do a self incommunal grounding, beginning to
Speaker 1: have people have some sense, no matter how small, develop
Speaker 1: some sense discernment in the body that they are present,
Speaker 1: now that they are in this space and in this time,
Speaker 1: so very small little things like noticing their butt on
Speaker 1: a hard surface, noticing their feet inside their shoes, and
Speaker 1: communities can begin to do this with each other. The
Speaker 1: third one is self in communal movement, beginning to move
Speaker 1: congruently and incongruently together to have some sense of communal alignment.
Speaker 1: And then the fourth thing is self in communal touch
Speaker 1: and verbalizing and wailing. Those are the things that I
Speaker 1: used to begin to help people move through these pieces.
Speaker 1: In my work with people who've either experienced traumatic famine
Speaker 1: or incarceration unfair incarceration in Soviet camps, as well as
Speaker 1: their children. One of the things that they often have
Speaker 1: said or have simply practiced in their lives is to
Speaker 1: join something positive. In other words, not to deny that
Speaker 1: it happened, but to throw themselves into a positive project,
Speaker 1: whether it's you know, after the war we all got
Speaker 1: together and we rebuilt Kiev, or we constructed the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: independence movement in the nineteen nineties, and the experience of
Speaker 1: doing something positive for their fellow sufferers sometimes or for
Speaker 1: their for their compatriots, that was all. Often the way
Speaker 1: to get over the trauma is that something that interests you,
Speaker 1: that kind of as I said, a positive political or
Speaker 1: social or communal project. Well, two pieces to them. The
Speaker 1: examples that you used are all examples of the trauma
Speaker 1: actually stopping. There was a there was a stop point, something,
Speaker 1: there was some type of intervention, and the trauma stopped.
Speaker 1: When I'm talking about indigenous people here in America and
Speaker 1: I'm talking about Black Americans, the trauma is persistent. It
Speaker 1: hasn't stopped. And so that's one key difference. The other
Speaker 1: key difference is that the idea of getting over the
Speaker 1: trauma is not the same as metabolizing the trauma. And
Speaker 1: let me say this, in the movement of doing something,
Speaker 1: you can begin to metabolize it. But I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting that there is a getting over this. I
Speaker 1: am suggesting that the energy that exists with regard to
Speaker 1: trauma when it shows up, is designed to protect us,
Speaker 1: to help us to survive. The problem is is that
Speaker 1: when we've gone through a prolonged period of time with trauma,
Speaker 1: that thing that we've been using in order to survive
Speaker 1: it doesn't just dissipate. You have to begin to metabolize
Speaker 1: that energy. Otherwise the protective mechanisms that you've developed as
Speaker 1: survival now become decontextualized and you begin to use that
Speaker 1: as a standard. And so that's the difference. Let me
Speaker 1: shift the focus for a moment to COVID nineteen because
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if there are things that we should all
Speaker 1: be thinking about and paying attention to, you know, in
Speaker 1: our bodies and our minds, using some of your the
Speaker 1: work that you've done to address the trauma of this time,
Speaker 1: so that we're less likely to pass it along or
Speaker 1: less likely to suffer it in the future. I realize
Speaker 1: that this isn't as profound or as widespread, as multigenerational
Speaker 1: as racialized trauma, but it is something that you know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people suffering out there. Is
Speaker 1: there is there something we should be aware of now? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: there's a lot like like, even though this isn't intergenerational.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we know that mass amounts
Speaker 1: of death can cause a global stress on human beings,
Speaker 1: and we've all we all know it. Like being locked
Speaker 1: in a house and not being able to move like
Speaker 1: you're like you're used to, can create a weightedness to us.
Speaker 1: Right A lot of my work now is how to
Speaker 1: is helping people begin to orient online with each other,
Speaker 1: not for you don't have to do it for long
Speaker 1: periods of time, but to see another face and to
Speaker 1: hear another laugh or to share stories, even if it's
Speaker 1: not in person for right now can be helpful. Even
Speaker 1: though it's not the best, it is something to have
Speaker 1: somebody else see your face and smile and say I'm
Speaker 1: glad you're here. That is important and I think that
Speaker 1: can't be short changed as just well it's just zoom. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: it's just zoom, and we need those types of things. Also,
Speaker 1: working with trauma survivors has to be some of the
Speaker 1: that must be one of the hardest things anybody can do.
Speaker 1: Do you have advice for both for practitioners but also
Speaker 1: for all the rest of us about how to be empathetic.
Speaker 1: You know, predicate this moment you know, without taking on
Speaker 1: the pain of somebody else but sympathizing with them, helping
Speaker 1: them through difficult times, what's the best way to do it?
Speaker 1: That really is a great question because one of the
Speaker 1: things that happens is that we don't account for what
Speaker 1: I call vicarious and secondary trauma. Right many times when
Speaker 1: we're trying to help somebody who's been traumatized, we don't
Speaker 1: account for the fact that we can actually be traumatized
Speaker 1: by watching them go through it. One of the most
Speaker 1: important things is to check in with your body. Check
Speaker 1: in with yourself on a regular basis, do I have
Speaker 1: enough resource in room to be of aid to this
Speaker 1: other body? And if the answer is no or not quite,
Speaker 1: listen to that. So it is really a communal beginning
Speaker 1: to develop more of a communal sense of how we
Speaker 1: take care of each other and how we listen to
Speaker 1: what our bodies are telling us, as opposed to more
Speaker 1: of an individual sense, and that is we have to
Speaker 1: override everything that's showing up in order to provide something
Speaker 1: for somebody else. And that usually works for a moment,
Speaker 1: but then over time you start to notice things like
Speaker 1: anxiety and depression and sleeping stuff and eating stuff and
Speaker 1: all of those things that are indicators that you are overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: Do the ways that you think about racialized trauma ever change.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about the awful murder of George Floyd. It
Speaker 1: was so widely experienced across the world. Did that change
Speaker 1: how you think about your practice or does it shift
Speaker 1: how we should be thinking about healing trauma. So the
Speaker 1: first piece is that the George Floyd trauma for me
Speaker 1: in terms of my work, is a law, is an
Speaker 1: extension of a long line of traumas that I've had
Speaker 1: to deal with here in Minnesota, in particular with regard
Speaker 1: to Jamar Clark, atlanda castile, all of these types of
Speaker 1: murders at the hands of the state. When a black
Speaker 1: body is murdered on TV or we see that type
Speaker 1: of stuff, the impact of it is not just personal.
Speaker 1: We're dealing with the historical energy that has gone unresolved,
Speaker 1: the intergenerational energy that has gone unresolved with regard to
Speaker 1: murdering and the slaying of black bodies, the persistent institutional
Speaker 1: energy when these particular things continue to happen. The thing
Speaker 1: is is that the outpouring that you see is many
Speaker 1: times performative. It is not sustainable because it's that there
Speaker 1: is no cultural container to hold a living embodied anti
Speaker 1: racist culture and practice that can get at the structural
Speaker 1: white body supremacy. So what will happen is that people
Speaker 1: will have a response either of shock or a response
Speaker 1: of being mortified, but there is nothing to sustain the
Speaker 1: change of it as it relates to black and indigenous bodies.
Speaker 1: And so what you end up having is people going
Speaker 1: into shock, and particular white bodies going into shock. And
Speaker 1: what happens over time is that you start to see online,
Speaker 1: you start to see the George Floyd pictures and the
Speaker 1: Brianna Taylor pictures shift back to cats and people taking
Speaker 1: pictures of their food. Is because there is no sustained
Speaker 1: culture around living embodying anti racist culture and practices. And
Speaker 1: so for me, and with regard to the white community,
Speaker 1: the white community has to begin to work and deal
Speaker 1: with that stuff and that energy and create culture to
Speaker 1: examine and interrogate whiteness and white body supremacy. So in
Speaker 1: my work, one of the things that I've been doing
Speaker 1: a lot is helping people begin to grapple with that.
Speaker 1: This is about a cultural cultivation and evolution, not a
Speaker 1: performative action plan. That's what's been showing up since with
Speaker 1: regard to George Floyd in a series of other murders.
Speaker 1: That leads me to the final question that we always
Speaker 1: ask on this program, but it seems particularly pertinent here,
Speaker 1: which is what advice do you offer listeners and for
Speaker 1: their family and friends, you know, how can they deep
Speaker 1: in their understanding of long term trauma and how can
Speaker 1: they help to heal it? Right. So, my book is
Speaker 1: one of the first books to kind of try and
Speaker 1: bring all of this stuff together. So one of the
Speaker 1: first things I suggested people do is get my grandmother's
Speaker 1: hands and then began to study and work with some
Speaker 1: of the practices and information in the book, began to
Speaker 1: work with that individually slowly. There's some other books and
Speaker 1: resources that I'd also like to mention to you, Anne.
Speaker 1: One of them is Me and My White Supremacy by
Speaker 1: layla Aside, White Fragility by Robin D'Angelo, Radical Joy by
Speaker 1: doctor Joy Lewis, anything from Adrian Marie Brown or Rachel Cargill.
Speaker 1: And then and then my website, resume dot com has
Speaker 1: a lot of free content on there, as well as
Speaker 1: my Instagram. If they go to resume menicum. I do
Speaker 1: a lot of free videos up there for people to
Speaker 1: begin to work with this. People. Nobody wants to talk
Speaker 1: about race, right, nobody wants to wants to embody what
Speaker 1: race actually is in the concept of our white body supremacy.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to do that. I suggest in the white
Speaker 1: community that has to start happening now, so this stuff
Speaker 1: has not passed on to children in the black embodies
Speaker 1: of culture communities, I think we have to start beginning
Speaker 1: to talk about the impacts of white body supremacy on
Speaker 1: us and how it has created in us things that
Speaker 1: we have not addressed. So like structural issues around our
Speaker 1: sense of fraudulence, imposterate and colorism and all of that
Speaker 1: different type of stuff. Those pieces have to be dealt
Speaker 1: with in community. Start beginning to work with this stuff.
Speaker 1: We can no longer avoid it. If January six, if
Speaker 1: the attack of the American capital taught us nothing, is
Speaker 1: that this stuff is seething and simmering underneath. It has
Speaker 1: not gone anywhere. It is part of the bedrock of America,
Speaker 1: and if we don't pay attention to it, it will
Speaker 1: destroy us. Resumemnicem is an author and psychotherapist working in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: If you or someone you know is suffering from trauma
Speaker 1: and in crisis, please seek help. You can call eight
Speaker 1: hundred two seven three Talk eight hundred two seven three
Speaker 1: Talk any time, day or night. To learn more about
Speaker 1: racialized trauma and for additional trauma support resources, please check
Speaker 1: out the links in our show notes. Solvable Senior producer
Speaker 1: is Jocelyn Frank, Research and booking by Lisa Dunn. Catherine
Speaker 1: Girardo is our managing producer, and our executive producer is
Speaker 1: Mia Lobell. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
Speaker 1: you like the show, please remember to share a rate
Speaker 1: and review it. It really helps us get the word out.
Speaker 1: You can find push and podcasts wherever you listen, including
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app and Apple podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisber