Race and trauma can often be intertwined, particularly for BIPOC clients. And these experiences can leave them feeling disempowered and hopeless.
What’s more, for clients with a history of racial trauma, this sense of hopelessness can deepen into depression, especially in a society that often fails to recognize the impact of racism.
So how might we help when a client’s depression stems from experiences of racial stress?
In the video below, Ray Rodriguez, LCSW-R, shares his approach.
And what happened to her was that there was a lot of micro and macro-aggressions that she was experiencing there. This is a client that had experienced racial based trauma in her life, and here was something in her present that that was happening. And so we name the depression in the context of racialized trauma; that it was not just something that was happening with her as a deficit and that she had to fix as in take medications, but rather that was intrinsic to the contextual factors that were happening at work that had happened in her larger life, in her past. And guess what? This was a client that I saw recently and that was also very by the rise of white supremacy that we have seen in this country. And that was very significant to her because she began to see her depression as part of something larger. Not a deficit, but actually as an effect, as an impact of things that were happening around her.
And so then the next step that we began to do with her was ways that she could take care of herself. And this all goes with the three phases of treatment, right? Resourcing, stabilization. And she began to take very, very small steps. She decided not to take the medication. And she worked on very, very small steps that she could do to empower herself, not only in the world, but also in her family, because there were a lot of things happening in her family and most certainly at work.
Then we began to identify: what are the touchstone events? What are the things that happened to her in her past that created the conditions for her to experience what she’s experiencing now, this re-traumatization? And some of them would just trace from her present to the past what an EMDR you would call a float back. But then also we began to work with those events through a more trauma processing lens. And what happened eventually, which was quite fascinating, was that this client decided to leave her job and to create her own organization because she was no longer identified as a victim of her circumstances but rather she began to identify with a sense of empowerment and her own capacity and her own strength to make her own choices in life.
For more strategies that can help you work with clients who’ve experienced racial trauma, please join us for the Trauma of Racism. Each session is free to watch at the time of broadcast – just sign up here.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How do you work with clients with a history of racialized trauma? Please share in the comments below.
As a White person and a therapist, I usually start by clearly acknowledging that I can’t possibly “know” a person of colors experience of racism. But, I will validate that person’s experience and invite them to help me understand (as best I can) their experience and how this has defined them. Using a Constructivist approach, I invite the person to deconstruct their lived experience with a view of empowering them to create a new narrative for themselves that is based on their terms rather than on the terms of what they have experienced. I place much emphasis on not (inadvertently) minimizing their lived experience but rather to better understand its impact and how to create a more empowered reality that they define themselves. My partner is a Black therapist and she helps me to better understand and appreciate non-white experiences. I have been able to adapt my therapeutic approach so that I can be more helpful to others.
Really refreshing to hear an example of shifting from victim identification to one of empowerment. Many Thanks
I work with a woman, who hadn’t the feeling of being equal with the other person at her work. She” permitted.” her boss to put press on her and just bend her back to it.. She hadn’t realised that it had something to do with both her colour as well as her socials origin. When we came to it and stayed there for a while just to be able to feel and share it with someone, When we named it and named the fact that it wasn’t appropriate, neither right, it’s started to change everything for her. Her references kept changing as she began to empower. we kept on a reflecting what it was like for her to understand that., to feel that, To be living that… She got centred to what she felt in body and felt the way it changed along the sessions. To come with consciousness is one of the power of full of changing as I understand.