Safety in Treating Anger What is healthy anger? It’s something that can get very politicized, very tangled into other agendas. I’m wanting to make it clear that being right and being healthy are two different things. You can be totally right, and having a stroke. You can be totally right, and acting out in ways…
A Happy New Year’s Resolution For a few years now, I’ve had an Economic Redress policy at Perennial Medicine. I do this in part because it feels good to stand behind what I believe in, but also because I want to introduce the Economic Redress concept to my community—especially to other anti-racist white people who often…
What is healthy anger? That’s an easily politicized question—and I‘d like to disrupt the binary of healthy/unhealthy anger by instead suggesting that we consider anger along the polarity of healthier anger and less healthy anger. This is important for many reasons, chief among which is that anger is a dynamic process, and health is a…
What is healthy trauma? Healthy trauma is a state of complete or incomplete dissociation from an injury that we do not have the resources to heal. This is why injuries that took place years ago—or centuries ago—can still remain unhealed. That is the nature of trauma—to remain unhealed, until we have the resources to heal.
I read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass Jr. when I was in fourth grade. The part of the story that struck me the hardest was the description of little Frederick being sold up north to Maryland, to be a happy little white family’s very own first slave.
Why a Healer Needs to Consider Race Too often, “I don’t see color” is translated as, “I don’t want to hear about racism.” The white person who said these words might not have meant it that way at all—but it is important to be aware of how we are coming across in a context where…
Love is Necessary for Healing Have you ever said or done something that, in hindsight, might have been significantly hurtful to someone? Maybe you realized it yourself, or maybe someone pointed it out to you. That’s a difficult moment. How did you feel, and how did you support yourself through those feelings? There are many…
I’m white. Racism doesn’t affect me, does it? I’m going to take a moment to write about a fairly new venture of mine, which I’ve been calling Whole Heart Whiteness. It has arisen in the context of the work I’ve been doing in Baltimore (and soon also in NYC) around healing interracial injury and pain….
