Join Dr. Dee Dawkins-Haigler for a profound Minority Mental Health Month spotlight featuring Dr. Resmaa Menakem, a Minneapolis-based therapist, trauma specialist, and New York Times bestselling author. With decades of experience in somatic therapy and violence prevention, Dr. Menakem is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute, where he pioneers Somatic Abolitionism, an embodied anti-racist practice aimed at healing racialized trauma. His groundbreaking book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, explores how racism embeds trauma in the bodies of Black, White, and law enforcement communities, drawing from his personal experiences, including his grandmother’s stories of picking cotton as a sharecropper’s daughter, which left lasting physical and emotional scars.
Dr. Menakem’s work focuses on the collective and generational nature of racialized trauma, emphasizing that trauma is not just a mental or emotional experience but one stored in the body. He explains that racialized trauma, rooted in centuries of white-body supremacy, is passed down through generations via epigenetics, affecting brain architecture, endocrine systems, and even cultural behaviors. For example, he notes that the stress of systemic racism, like cortisol spikes in a Black mother’s body during pregnancy, can shape a child’s nervous system before birth. His approach, grounded in neuroscience and somatic practices, offers body-centered healing techniques to address this “decontextualized” trauma, which can manifest as personality traits or cultural norms when unaddressed. By fostering communal healing and resilience, Dr. Menakem’s Somatic Abolitionism seeks to dismantle the internalized effects of racism across all bodies, urging us to “notice the rage, notice the silence” to begin healing.
Connect with his work at www.resmaa.com, follow him on Instagram (@resmaamenakem), Twitter (@ResmaaMenakem), and explore his online courses at blackoctopussociety.com. Engage with his hashtags #SomaticAbolitionism, #RacializedTrauma, and #MyGrandmothersHands to join the conversation on embodied healing.