Healing Justice and Black History Month: Honoring Resilience Beyond the Therapy Room
By Jen Bennethum
Understanding Racial Trauma Through a Healing Justice Lens
When we talk about racial trauma during Black History Month, we're not just discussing historical events—we're naming the ongoing, embodied experience of navigating systems designed to harm Black bodies and spirits. Healing justice offers us a different framework than traditional therapy models. Instead of pathologizing the brilliant ways Black communities have learned to survive, it honors the collective wisdom developed through generations of resistance and care.
This isn't about adding diversity training to existing therapeutic models. It's about fundamentally reimagining what healing looks like when we center those most impacted by systemic violence. It means recognizing that hypervigilance in unsafe spaces isn't paranoia—it's wisdom. That code-switching isn't fragmentation—it's adaptive brilliance. That rage in response to injustice isn't a symptom to manage—it's a healthy response to an unhealthy system.
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde
The Body Remembers: Somatic Responses to Systemic Violence
Our bodies hold the truth of intergenerational trauma—the cellular memory of enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, and daily microaggressions. But they also hold intergenerational wisdom. Black bodies have developed sophisticated strategies for sensing danger, creating pockets of safety, and finding joy as resistance.
Traditional therapy often treats these embodied responses as problems to fix. But what if we understood them as teachers? The tension Black folks carry in predominantly white spaces isn't just stress—it's the body's intelligent preparation for navigating environments where safety isn't guaranteed. The exhaustion after code-switching all day isn't weakness—it's the natural result of the enormous cognitive and emotional labor required to translate oneself across worlds.
Community as Medicine: Beyond Individual Healing
Healing justice reminds us that trauma is collective, and so is healing. Long before therapy was professionalized, Black communities created sophisticated healing practices: call and response that moves grief through the collective body, drumming circles that regulate nervous systems together, storytelling traditions that make meaning from suffering, and church communities that hold both lament and celebration.
These aren't quaint cultural practices to appreciate from a distance—they're evidence-based interventions that Western psychology is only beginning to understand. When we reduce healing to individual therapy sessions, we miss how mutual aid is mental health care. How Black joy in the face of oppression is a radical healing practice. How the Black Lives Matter movement itself is a massive, collective therapy session for racial trauma.
Therapy Resources That Honor This Framework
For therapists committed to culturally responsive care, several approaches align with healing justice principles:
The Black Lives Matter Healing Justice Committee offers frameworks for understanding healing as inseparable from liberation work. Their resources help therapists understand how activism itself can be healing when it transforms helplessness into agency.
Resmaa Menakem's somatic approach to racialized trauma, detailed in "My Grandmother's Hands," offers body-based practices that honor how trauma lives in our tissues. His work helps both therapists and clients understand the difference between dirty pain (which perpetuates harm) and clean pain (which metabolizes it).
Dr. Jennifer Mullan's Decolonizing Therapy framework challenges therapists to examine how our practices might perpetuate colonial harm. Her work insists that healing happens when we address not just individual symptoms but the systems creating them.
The Fireweed Collective demonstrates what peer support looks like through a healing justice lens—recognizing that those with lived experience of trauma and resilience are the experts in their own healing.
EMDR and Processing Racialized Trauma
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) has shown powerful results in helping people process racial trauma—but through a healing justice lens, we must examine both its gifts and limitations. EMDR can help metabolize specific incidents of racial violence or discrimination, allowing the nervous system to complete interrupted defensive responses. For many Black clients, it offers relief from intrusive memories of police encounters, workplace discrimination, or childhood experiences of racism. However, EMDR was designed to treat discrete traumatic events, not the ongoing, ambient trauma of existing while Black in anti-Black systems. This is why combining EMDR with a healing justice framework is crucial—using bilateral stimulation to process specific wounds while acknowledging that true healing requires addressing the systems still creating those wounds. Some practitioners are adapting EMDR protocols to include collective healing sessions, recognizing that racial trauma isn't just personal but communal, and healing happens best when we process both our individual pain and our shared history.
Creating Safety in Therapeutic Spaces
For Black clients entering therapy—especially with white therapists—the question isn't just "Is this therapist culturally competent?" but "Will this space replicate the harm I experience everywhere else?" Creating safety means more than hanging diverse artwork or completing a training. It means:
Understanding that trust is earned through consistent action, not assumed through credentials. Being willing to acknowledge when we don't understand, rather than pretending expertise. Recognizing that sometimes the most therapeutic intervention is validating that a client's environment really is unsafe, their anger really is justified, and their hypervigilance really does make sense.
It means creating space for righteous rage without rushing to breathing exercises. Honoring when clients need to process collective grief before personal healing. Understanding that healing might look like joining a protest, creating art, or building community—not just talking in a therapy room.
Moving Forward: Integration and Liberation
As we honor Black History Month, we're called to move beyond performative acknowledgment toward material change in how we approach mental health. This means therapists examining our complicity in systems of harm. It means funding community-based healing initiatives led by those most impacted. It means recognizing that liberation is the ultimate therapy—that we can't heal from racial trauma while the trauma is ongoing.
For therapists, this is an invitation to humility. To recognize that our training might have taught us to pathologize the very strategies that have kept Black communities alive. For clients navigating racial trauma, it's an affirmation: your responses make sense, your healing happens in community, and your liberation is bound up with collective liberation.
The path forward isn't about perfecting individual therapeutic techniques. It's about joining the larger movement for healing justice—understanding that personal healing and social transformation are inseparable. It's about creating mental health approaches that don't just help people cope with oppression but actively work to dismantle it. Because true healing comes not from adjusting to injustice, but from creating a world where such adjustment is no longer necessary. If you have any questions or would like us to walk beside you on your journey to wholeness, please reach out to us at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective.
