Good afternoon, my name is Rory Reese. I'm a faculty member at Morehouse School of Medicine and I'll be your moderator today. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Healing from Trauma presentation that will be done by Dr. Denise Cheverington. But before we get to the heart of the matter, there is some housekeeping that we need to do. You could go to the next slide, please, or the first slide. This presentation and this work is sponsored by SAMHSA, which makes it a grant-funded initiative supporting the African American Behavioral Health Center of Excellence at Morehouse School of Medicine. We want to extend our gratitude to SAMHSA for their support. In addition, this activity is accredited for AME, PRA, for one credit. There'll be instructions at the end of the presentation about how to claim that credit. Here are instructions about how to download your handouts. We'll sit here for a minute. If you want to take a second to kind of digest this so that you can follow along the presentation with Dr. Cheverington's slides. Okay. These are instructions about how to participate in the question and answer period that will follow the presentation today. Again, we'll just take a second here so that you know how to put your questions in the question box. Then finally, the disclosures. There were no financial relationships that Dr. Cheverington had to report. With that, we are good to go. It's my pleasure today to introduce our presenter, Dr. Denise Cheverington. Dr. Cheverington has curated a career that sits at the intersection of public health and academic psychiatry. Currently, she is the chair and professor of psychiatry at Charles R. Drew University. Previously, Dr. Cheverington held professorships in psychiatry at Tulane and Columbia University. A graduate of NYU School of Medicine, she also earned an MPH at Tulane University. Dr. Cheverington completed her residency at University of California, San Francisco, and is board certified in psychiatry and neurology. She's a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of the APA's Award for Excellence in Service and Advocacy. Previously, she was awarded the Jean Spurlock Minority Award. She is a member of the following entities, the American Board of Psychiatrists. She serves on the Residence and Training Commission. She co-chairs the New Orleans City Council Task Force on Childhood Trauma. She's a member of the Scientific Board of the Center for Society and Mental Health at King's College in London. She has testified before the US Congress on the impacts of childhood trauma. Dr. Cheverington is the author of Healing is the Revolution, a guide to healing from historical, intergenerational, interpersonal, and community trauma. She also hosts a podcast by the same name, Healing is the Revolution. And as important as anything that I've shared with you today, Dr. Cheverington is the proud parent of two amazing children, see your smiles, two proud children, and three grandchildren. That was a quote, that was, make sure you emphasize this. So please join me in welcoming our presenter, Dr. Denise Cheverington. Dr. Cheverington. Thank you, Dr. Reese. It's really an honor to be here. I would like to feel that we're sitting in dialogue. This is a very difficult subject for all of us. And so I'm going to invoke my ancestors to help me through. Basically what my objectives are to talk, describe some of the historical and current day racial atrocities that as African Americans, we have been subject to for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years. Sometimes when I say for four centuries, it doesn't feel the way as much as just the time and the time and the time and the time that we've been suffering. I want to try to apply Lacanian psychoanalytic theory about lack and jouissance to the maintenance of racism and the fantasy of racial superiority. Lacan himself did not do that, but several Black scholars have looked to his theories because it's not just about the individual, but it's about the individual as a social being interacting with others. I want to talk a little bit about the intergenerational biologic transmission of historical trauma. And I want to end on an upbeat talking about some population level and individual approaches we can take for the healing of all of us. Next slide, please. My outline very much follows what I said as the objective, so I'll just keep going. Thank you. And I want to start with this Israeli, a quote from the Israeli psychologist, Gilad Hershberger. And he says that collective trauma is a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Aside from the horrific loss of life, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning. For victims, the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but also elevates existential threat, which then prompts a search for meaning and the construction of a transgeneration known as collective self. For perpetrators, the trauma of, the memory, I'm sorry, of trauma poses a threat to collective identity that may be addressed by denying history, as we're seeing now, minimizing culpability for wrongdoing, transforming the memory of the event, closing the door on history, or what we hope, accepting responsibility. And he pointed out that the collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory, because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events and is remembered by group members that may be for, that may be removed, I'm sorry, from the traumatic event in time and space. Those of us who are now living this memory were removed, but we carry in our collective unconscious. Next slide. I just want you to see where we started. Next. And I want to just focus in on some of the notable historical moments that I think it's important for us to keep alive so that we know from where we came and what healing will look like. So right after slavery had the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and then with that brief period of reconstruction, it was dismantled as Southern whites wanted state control, as we're seeing now. There was the post-Civil War convict leasing, leasing of prisoners to private runways, railways, mines, large plantations, which was a result of the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which said we could resort to slavery as punishment for crime. Then there are the Black Codes, which allowed whites to arrest and find Blacks guilty of anything. There was no need to prove guilt for incarceration. Lynching, which began during reconstruction, where you would have mob killing of Blacks, usually in the form of hanging for alleged offenses for which there was no trial. Next slide. Just some visual reminders of what we've come from and what is still amongst us. Next slide. And then we had Jim Crow, which some people might say is still alive in the South. And this came with the famous case, the Plessy versus Ferguson at the Supreme Court, where it was upheld that as African-Americans in our societies that we would live, it would be separate and unequal. We assume that it ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But still, in the South where I live, we see much segregation and unequal law. Then there's the destruction of our communities. I referenced Tulsa and Rosewood. There's redlining, which continues to haunt us. Those unfair housing policies that denies housing to folks based on their race. In the current form, we are seeing gentrification and displacement. When I highlight the war on drugs, especially now when there is a different approach, when white people are substance using. No need to remind us of police brutality. We all saw what happened in May 2020. And then something we sometimes don't think much about, but which just continues subtly to traumatize us are very unequitable tax codes that often are based on unfair housing and employment factors. Next slide. I just want to show you convict leasing, what it looked like. And this was not just in adults. There was also convict leasing with juveniles. Next slide. And lynching. And I remind us of Billie Holiday's song. It was written by Abel Mirapol. That southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree. These were our people. And note the joyful people who watched and would picnic at these events. Again, the joy of your spaces. Then there was Sam Holt. I have the quote that was written about him. Another picture for a lynching. Keep going. And then just some photographs of some of the destruction of our communities. This happened in Tulsa in the 1920s for about three months, recorded as over 300 killed and 35 city blocks burned. Next. And then Rosewood, Florida. This happened after a lynching, and they continued to terrorize the community in Tulsa. This happened after a lynching, and they continued to terrorize the community in Florida. Next slide. And just a reminder that we've had several U.S. presidents who have advanced this construct of biologic inferiority in Black people. Thomas Jefferson, while he was saying that, we know of his fear and birthing children with one of his slaves. Next slide. Then there was also Abraham Lincoln, and the history on him is quite challenging, because as much as he gets credit for the Emancipation Proclamation, he also had feelings and expressed feelings about white supremacy. Next slide. And Andrew Johnson. Some of you will associate him with the extinction of Native people, and he also was responsible for supporting the Southern states' rights. Next slide. And so I want to focus in now, those are some of the general factors that, of course, impact our health, but going in a little more deeply on what came out of the medical community historically about us, and remind us of Martin Luther King's quote, that of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman, because it often results in physical death. And we've been seeing a lot of that throughout the pandemic. Next slide. Take us back to Benjamin Rush, who was the father, was noted as the father of American psychiatry. I was a fellow in 2015, and his picture was still on the APA cover. And his underlying teachings was that race is biologically rooted, which gave, weirdly, Black people immunity to disease and pain, and that our skin was a result of leprosy. So it should be of no surprise that one of his apprentices, Benjamin Rush, who practiced medicine in Mississippi and Louisiana, invented the mental illness of dreptomania, saying that people who tried to free themselves from enslavement, who desired to run away and seek freedom, that we were mentally ill, and our treatment was to whip the devil out of us. Next slide. The defenders of slavery in the 1800s described our enslavement as a need because of our inability to be full humans. Senator John Calhoun, in 1840, said that there was proof of the necessity for slavery because we Africans could not take care of ourselves, and we would sink into lunacy if we were to be free. And we do know the record showed that during Jim Crow, there was a lot of involuntary commitment of Black people to state mental health facilities. Next slide. Other ways that racism based on biology has been used to harm us is the use of statistics and actuarial science to harness social ideology and put that into mathematical methods. So when Prudential Insurance did not want to provide insurance for Black people, they solicited Frederick Hoffman to give reason and support why we shouldn't be insured. And his basic tenet was that we died because we were inferior. And as he said, to quote, it is not in the condition of life, but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the cause of excessive mortality. This is a discourse that was introduced with COVID. And so I just want to remind you that this didn't just start. Tuskegee, the thing that's important to me here is what the U.S. Public Health Service said when they were at the congressional hearing, that doctors and civil servants did their duty for the glory of science. So we were experimented upon looking at the course of untreated syphilis for the glory of science. Next slide. And of course, the American Medical Association, for those of us who grew up in the NMA, we know why we had to form. And from they were founded, the AMA, they were antagonistic to African-American health. They tried to close our schools, Black medical schools. They would not allow Black physicians to be members. They apologized in 2007. And we know that they recently had the first African-American woman as president. And they spent so much time and money lobbying against insurance for everyone. They call those programs socialists. They talk about keeping politics out of health care. Next slide. Things did not really change until Dr. Montague Cobb gave that passionate testimony around the signing of poor Medicare. And then because there were these huge sums of money that now hospitals could get, they were desegregated, not because of the civil rights act, but because of the money that they resisted, but that Dr. Montague Cobb fought so for. That's when our hospitals became integrated. Next slide. We're now in the midst of the opioid epidemic, but let's go back to when the war on drugs started by Nixon in June, 1971, when he cleared drug abuse, public enemy number one. And what John Ehrlichman said, part of his cabinet was that by getting the public to associate Blacks with heroin and then criminalize them, we could disrupt their community. Next slide. We could arrest their leaders, wear their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. So there's no surprise when we see the difference in sentencing or out of cocaine, which has been associated with the whites and more affluent whites versus crack cocaine for black people. Now contrast that the current opioid epidemic among whites, where the narrative is we should medicalize, do not criminalize, there should be treatment, not punishment. And basically that this substance use lead into all these excess death that we're seeing in white people, it's a result of societal failure. That poor whites have not had access to the American dream. So their substance use disorders is a disease of despair, always was one of criminality. Next slide. No need to say much, the picture paints a thousand words here. It's the stance of the white police, very similar to some of those stances during lynchings. Next slide. A reminder, very recent, the whipping that happened when Haitian escaping a lot of hardship and persecution tried to gain entrance to the United States, the whips that were drawn. Next slide. And I want to share with you a narrative that Frederick Douglass wrote about whipping. And he said in his book Narratives from the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heartrending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers from his gory victim seemed to move his heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped. And where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream and whip her to make her hush. And not until overcome by fatigue would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cow skin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember anything. This is what seeing those Haitians seeking asylum in 2021 brought up for me. Next slide. Remind us of the Khatantat Ines show, where because of our body shape, we were referenced as the missing link between humans and apes. Next slide. No surprise then when we saw the tweet, the freak of nature, in reference to South Sudanese model Nayakim Gatwitch. Next slide. And our former APA president, actually a boss of mine at Columbia, he sort of gave me permission to enter the space about the unconscious and implicit bias. And so I'm going to go there because he said that although in response to what he did, his tweet, he said, prejudices and stereotypical assumptions I didn't know I have held have been exposed to myself and to you and I, and I'm deeply ashamed and very sorry. So tackling unconscious bias is an ongoing part of these efforts. It starts internally. So I'm going to go a little internal, but again, I am choosing the analyst Jacques Lacan, the French analyst, because he tried to explain the construction of the human self, not just in terms of our internal drives, but in relationship to the social. And so basically the two constructs from him I want to bring up into this conversation about racism is him talking about as infants, because we are so dependent and experience that kind of separation from the primordial base of oneness with the mother. That when we, as we begin the journey of separation, we fear lack. It's a kind of primordial vulnerability because we're no longer in the oneness that we experienced with the mother in the womb. And that kind of lack can drive individuals to realize themselves in another imaginary individual, usually starting with the mother or caregiver. And then he talked about jouissance, which is a kind of enjoyment or pleasure that just goes beyond just the mere pleasure principle. And it's been further expanded in feminist theory to say jouissance is that transcendent state that represent freedom, freedom from linearities, and a kind of more metaphysical fulfillment of desire beyond the mere libidinal satisfaction. So jouissance is caught up in the erotic and mystical. Next slide. And so what black analyst Sheldon George, how he's used these concepts is around the construct of jouissance, which is that frustrated, jealous hatred that can spring from one subject to another, convinced that the other has the jouissance, something that drive that enjoyment that they want to access, but that they don't have. And they perceive that the other in this situation, that as black people, we have that jouissance that they don't have. And he gives, for example, the minstrel shows, where at the same time, it allowed those who are racialized in us to enjoy what they think is in us, but they can't have. But then they're connected to us through that experience. Next slide. And so if we think about why white supremacy, with which it's used to terrorize and dehumanize the other, Lacan went further on to say, because he looked, even though he was in particular focused on racism towards black, he was trying to understand what was happening in Europe at the time around capitalism. And he said, what happens is that whiteness is used as a signifying chain. The language, it's signifying an established hierarchy in which whiteness represents the pinnacle of being, or sovereign. But what Lacan said, white Frenchman, was that the master's discourse is that he commands the system of knowledge and thereby has the means to hide the truth. That like all subjects, the master is castrated, the master too has lack. He went further on to say that whiteness takes on the symbolism of the phallus, which gives the master some proof that he possesses the illusory phallic object of whiteness by possessing the slave. Next slide. And so what Sheldon George does is then look at what is that the psychic damage that has happened for black people as we, this racial history, has bound us in this discourse that there is excess in our jouissance, our music, our dance. There have been cases where an African American male was killed in Florida because he was playing that thug music, that jouissance that is envied in us. Next slide. And so I want to stop here a little bit as we think about at the psychic level what might be happening with domination and submission, to know that for those of us who've been subjected to all these years and years and years and centuries of dehumanization, of racial trauma, we're now beginning to see evidence based on studies of other traumatized groups. What happened during the Holocaust and during 9-11 was that there is intergenerational genetic transmission of trauma. We now know through epigenetic studies that ova and sperm can be changed and that the child who's a product of these gametes can carry the effect of the previous generation's trauma. I sometimes, having worked and been in New Orleans during Katrina, I too wonder about children who were born during that period, how they might be more vulnerable to traumatic disorders. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the construct of allostatic loading, where when you've had too much pressure in your system to constantly reestablish homoestasis because of stress, you get to a point where you have excessive release of stress hormones, neurotransmitters. There's now work looking, genetic work, looking at telomere shortening. Study that was done in New Orleans showed that mothers who had a lot of ACEs were transmitting more vulnerability for trauma in their children. And in addition to what might be happening at the individual level, in terms of how trauma gets under our skin and impact our vulnerabilities, we also know that when we, the adverse community experiences that many in our communities are exposed to, the inequitable economic environments, the physical environments, what happens when the social and economic processes that are concentrated in poverty begin to damage social networks and decrease our capacity for advocacy for change, we know that what results is this collective suffering, in addition to at the individual level, symptoms of anxiety and depression and aggression and sleep problems. And what we see often sometimes happening in our children with all that's happening in their brains, low academic achievement. So as a result of others envying or jealous of us, needing to dehumanize us, the suffering happens at the individual and the collective level. So we have to look at healing at multiple levels, not just individual healing, but healing our communities, addressing and dismantling what's happening at the societal level that continue to harm and put the noose around our neck. Next slide. And so as we think about how we're going to get from under the weight of racial trauma, I just want to share with you the W.K. Kellogg's framework for racial healing. That we are going to have to, of course, continue the fight and support those who are trying to dismantle structural racism. Indeed, Black Lives Matter and has nothing to do with taking away from other lives. We're going to have to create a society that begins the journey by adopting racial equity values, affirming that all people, regardless of their racial group identification, whatever their skin color, physical traits, all people deserve an equal opportunity to experience well-being. And because we have harmed people, we're going to have to promote racial healing, restoring individuals and communities to wholeness. Repairing the damage that has been caused by racism. That's okay. And just one thing, just remind us that this is the covenant under which as Americans we live. And just remind us the Declaration of Independence still yet to be realized, but that's the covenant that was made for us, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I want to score the pursuit of happiness because sometimes it appears that our happiness gets connected with excessive jewels zones, which seems to have been a source of jealousy, jealous zones in others. And if we were to use this, then we're going to have to reinvest in disenfranchised communities. We know that poverty is perhaps one of the greatest straws. We have to fight for and support those who are fighting for equity in our communities. As we saw what happened with the colleague or colleague, we're going to have to be able to commit to positive images, seeing all ethnic groups portrayed. And we're going to have to deal with some of our own internalized constructs about beauty. But we're going to have to commit that all humans have their own beauty and should be portrayed as such. And then what I'm recommending for those who need to hold on to their for those who need to hold on to a construct of the hierarchy of human value, that we think about psychoanalysts, Melanie Klein, her theory, we make that a meta-narrative, where she talked about the three positionalities that we have throughout growth, starting out with that very paranoid schizoid position, the good breast, bad breast. And when we're not satisfied by one, we forget the other. And if we were to move from that, if we were to ask those who need to dominate, we might have to suggest that they are in that paranoid schizoid position, and they need to move along developmentally. Because what Melanie Klein talked about was after the infant went through that paranoid schizoid space, they began to realize that that person, that they separated as good when they were being satisfied and bad when they couldn't get their needs met. This was that whole person. And going to the infant then gets a bit depressed, because it realizes that its feelings directed towards the other was not right. And then the infant, in the next couple of years, tried to repair and make reparations. And I'm going to suggest that this becomes a meta-narrative for the healing of white supremacists, begin to move from that paranoid schizoid position. No, when we talk about critical race theory, or the 1619 Project, it's not harming. You don't need to feel guilty and say you can't. You need to work through that you have been that person. You've had these negative thoughts, and some positives, I will add. But you're going to have to move from that split paranoid schizoid position to beginning to feel the weight of what you've done, and then to start to repair and make reparations. Next slide. I'll be finished shortly. At the individual level in our healing, I just want to emphasize that when we work with us, with Black people, we need to factor in how racism impacts us. And in particular for children, because what we're seeing as a result of a lot of structural racism in our communities, where children, Black children who experience traumas, don't have access to the proper psychiatric supports, mental health supports. They're being misdiagnosed as having ADHD and conduct disorders, being given medications that perhaps are unnecessary, being sent into the juvenile justice system. We need to support the mood from these behavioral and so-called neurobiologic conditions, what is being proposed as developmental trauma and mood disorders, to avoid misdiagnosing and harming our children. And we need to be aware that because of the collective and the community trauma that happens for us, that we are showing many more adverse childhood experiences, so we need to jump on the bandwagon to prevent adverse adversities happening, child maltreatment, and then the proper healing if that were to happen. Next slide. We can go to the next slide, I want to get through to the questions. And then at that more social level of healing, remembering that we are not individuals, our mind is interpersonal, our connection, our knowing who we are is connected to everyone else in the world that we live. And so the importance of promoting healthy interpersonal and social relationships. And it really starts with, especially for children, recognizing the importance of the bonding and attachment that needs to happen. So at the societal level, really, really advocating for more just MCH policies that will support equitable healthcare and just wages for mothers or birthing people, as some people say. How important that is in terms of our healing interpersonally to start to allow the development of healthy attachment, secure attachment. And then we also, as we look at our communities, how do we promote healthy adult relationships? How do we allow us as individuals to understand that oftentimes what creates conflicts in relationships are our own projection and splitting, dissociation and denial. We need to begin to speak this language with each other. Next slide. And then we need to, as we see what's been happening in many of our communities, going through COVID and all the disruptions, some of these socio-cultural norms that we have adapted due to our collective trauma creates balance and substance use and disconnection. We need to begin to think about opportunities for us as a collective to rest, to be restored, to be in nature, to play more, to have more joy. And of course, we must, at the community level, continue to fight for more of a social medicine approach to our physical and mental health. For many of us, it's the upstream determinants of health that affect our health, and it's not just our individual behaviors. And I would encourage us to tap back into many of the indigenous-based healing practices that we came from, remembering that when we've had to rely on each other, it kept us closer. We weren't so isolated, and we tried to figure out how collectively we could heal each other and care for each other. We still need those norms in our community. Next. And I'm going to end right now just with a little bit about integrative community therapy, which comes from the favelas in Brazil, brought to us by Dr. Barreto, and now is being imported to the U.S. by psychiatrist Dr. Ken Thompson. And basically, it is that for collective healing, as we heal, as our souls heal collectively, we have the capacity within ourselves to heal if we can maintain ownership of our personal and communal narrative. Next slide. And then I would need, and going back to Lacanian theory, in that space in the unconscious that we don't access with language, I think that part of the healing comes from our cultural arts that we brought with us. And we want to move us from, you know, the conversation about Afro-pessimism. We want to really support, and the young people have taken us there, Afro-optimism and Futurism, transcending collectively using the arts and creativity, taking us to that place where we become, can really connect with and be enchanted with our divine selves. That's the healing we need as African Americans. And I want to end and share that which takes me to that place of transformation and transcendental experiences. I hope we can crew up for just the next two minutes. I've been Ailey Company in Revelations. So we're trying to queue up a video here. So we're trying to queue up a video here. So we're trying to queue up a video here. So we're trying to queue up a video here. So we're trying to queue up a video here. So we're trying to queue up a video here. Okay, I will stop here and just, you know, thinking that we need to deal with the collective harms and individual harms as we heal from all the collective suffering we've endured over the many, many centuries. And I believe that healing is the revolution that we need as black people to release ourselves and hopefully white supremacists will do their own healing work. Thank you very much. And I'm sorry if I went too loud. Dr. Sherrington, we want to thank you for a powerful, powerful presentation. I believe questions might be coming to our colleagues at the APA. But as we think about questions and answers now, I'm wondering what you would say to providers who work with black folks who have experienced trauma and who themselves are not in touch with that trauma because they've been told it doesn't exist. Those categories that you talked about, the historical and intergenerational and interpersonal and community trauma, that there's this, how do we get in touch with that truth that, you know, we've been convinced, we've been brainwashed that it's not a real thing? What would you say to providers around engaging their patients in that space? I think it's really, when I work with us, it's, you know, it's not about forcing, but to look for, when it appears that there is a little bit more than just the individual presentation of what that trauma is. And we know, especially if we're African-American providers, and we are aware of this deep history that from which we've come, that we need to be looking for when we, especially as it would turn up in our own internalized constructs of who we are. Are we always feeling that we're fully human and fully free? Are we, how are we even on the surface? How do we see ourselves? Do we see the beauty in ourselves? A lot when I work with Black women, at some point, we're going to have to deal with some of these issues, how we look, what beauty means. And similarly, you know, I've equally worked with Black men. And sometimes that's a little more evident because Black men have been so much more targeted at the societal level. And it's like, that has to come in. We have to talk about how it's being held in us. And I think it's for us as therapists to open that up and not just stay at the individual level, but not to lead with it. We have to take the cues. And when we know how it turns out, especially in our sense of self or sense of belonging or sense of who we are, then we need to have that conversation. And I'm not sure if there are questions that are coming through on your side, but I have a follow up question to that. And it is, so we do this trauma work, but we know the opening of the trauma in and of itself can be traumatic. And there are so few safe places for Black folks to be around that piece. I wonder how we honor doing that work, but then support our folks going back into the realities of their lives as they do this work. And I'm asking a question both for our audience, but also for me as I think about how much do I unpack here? How do I unpack? What's the timing that I unpack this? Because this person has to be able to function when they leave my office. Yeah, and I think as in trauma therapy, we start before we start unpacking. We kind of really teach folks about this is what trauma does. This is how it impacts you. This is how it turns up in you. You know, the body keeps the score. And so I usually start with mind-body practices. Let's learn a little bit more about presence, mindfulness, borrowing from the Buddhist tradition. Let's know how to come present in the moment, feel what we're feeling, being aware of it, and paying attention to the environment around us and the interaction there. I think breath work. And it's not until I feel that someone has the capacity to really calm and soothe themselves, then we start to getting into the trauma. And then always tying it up depending on what's happening in the session. You know, let's tie this up again. Let's get mindful. Let's get present. Let's know that the past is the past that we explore, but only the lessons we need from the past we're going to take into the present. The pain we've discharged here, and you're going to soothe yourself with your breath and with mindful presence. And I find that has been really helpful. As you can imagine, I'm sure you do, the deep layers of trauma that comes in our community. And I think what happens, people feel it's handled well, the liberation on the other side. So I, you know, I just access to bookend trauma work, which starting with that reminder about what trauma does to the body, teaching some skills about simple two, three minutes. Let's breathe. Let's get present. And then ending our sessions with that. And I find that oftentimes is enough to help someone put it back together. Thank you. I'm mindful of our time. And there's a little bit more housekeeping that we have to do here. But another question is, how do folks who, so this was a powerful presentation. But for those of us at whatever stage in your career you are, what are the steps that you would recommend about how we continue our own personal and professional development as healers in this space? Well, I think we certainly have to make sure we're paying attention to caring for ourselves. And for me, caring for self is, you know, they're the superficial things we do to pamper ourselves. It's beautiful. It makes us feel better. But we have to continue the work, the inner work to know who we are and to understand what our liberation means to us. And that usually comes from being more authentic in our space. I think that, you know, we have to engage more with the beauty or try to create more beauty in the collectives in which we exist. I ended with Alvin Ailey because every time, every season they open, I'm usually right there on opening night because there's something when I sit in the presence of such beautiful Black bodies, I'm transformed. And so whatever brings us that, we really need to seek that out. Whatever in the arts, if it's music, we know how music can help us to transcend all those things that take us into deeper into the mystery of life, but also helps to decrease some of the anxiety that we all have as humans that we're born and we're going to die. So how in the middle of it, we find ways to elevate our spirit. How do we move ourselves into spaces where we feel enchanted? We feel that we're divine. And I think if as healers, we can do that, we can help to transmit that to those that we work with. Because ultimately, they're trying to figure out the most authentic version of who they are. And if we're doing that, the energy happens for those we work with. Ashe, thank you so much. On behalf of me and my colleagues, those in the audience, the American Psychiatric Association, the African American Center of Behavioral Excellence at Morehouse School of Medicine, we just want to thank you for the time that you spent with us today. Words of wisdom and your authentic presentation, because your energy is real and it showed up throughout your presentation today. There's one more housekeeping piece that for those who are claiming credit, here are the steps. We will leave this up for a second or so to make sure that folks know how to get that information or get that credit. As you're taking that down, I want to encourage and invite you all to join us again in our next webinar presentation. There is a calendar of webinars that will be coming up on the APA site. Also, there will be a survey coming directly from the Center of Excellence at Morehouse School of Medicine asking you to evaluate the webinar and to share your ideas and thinking about other topics that we might cover. So again, on behalf of the American Psychiatric Association, Morehouse School of Medicine's Center for Behavioral Excellence, and SAMHSA, who funded and supports this important work, we want to thank you and hope that you have a blessed day. Have a terrific weekend. I want to thank you, Dr. Reese. Thanks for balancing this presentation with your amazing energy. So thank you very much. I'll be in touch with you directly. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

healing from trauma

SAMHSA

African American Behavioral Health Center of Excellence

Morehouse School of Medicine

racial atrocities

racism and mental health

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory

intergenerational biologic transmission

addressing racism

cultural healing practices