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Our health and well-being is more than just the physical—encompassing our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual parts. This toolkit offers a menu of options to consider of how to nourish our whole selves and buffer against the impact of historic, systemic racial trauma.

“The Four Bodies: A Holistic Toolkit for Coping with Racial Trauma”

Many White/non-Black faculty and staff have reached out to the EAP asking for resources on allyship and how to support their Black colleagues without being intrusive or draining of their emotional energy. While the work of allyship has many entry points, and begins with internal work and reflection, this article highlights relational one-on-one ways to hold space, stand in solidarity and mobilize in constructive ways.

“Dear White Friends here’s what I need and don’t need from you”

Resmaa Menakem, LICSW, SEP is a therapist and trauma specialist who brings the wisdom that our experiences of racial identity and racial trauma are all held in our bodies, and that we cannot just teach our brains to think better about equity, cultural responsiveness and racial justice. Menakem encourages us to turn to the mind-body connection of our nervous systems to consider a pathway forward that is more embodied, more wholistic as we seek collective healing and transformation.

Racial trauma is the experience of race-based stress faced by people of color. This stress and trauma may come from specific events including experiencing violence as the result of one’s race, from seeing repeated images of violence against the bodies of people of color, or from less overt microagressions in a person’s school or workplace. Like all trauma, racial trauma takes a toll on the body and on one’s sense of safety and worth.

Engaging with hope is an active process. To cultivate hope, we need to be able to imagine pathways to the future that we want, and the concept of “nexting” is part of this imagining the future. Nexting is the ability to look at what is next or when something will happen again. For example, we think of the next time we will see friends, when our next dental appointment occurs, when the next Marvel Universe movie is coming out. Kids as young as 3 can do some nexting in that we can say to the child, “Next, we are going to brush your teeth…next, we are going to get in bed and read a story.”

A clinical psychologist from California has written a free book for children to help them cope with the current global pandemic and created both an illustrated book and a coloring book version. The book validates the distress children are experiencing during such an uncertain time and uses mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) strategies to help them manage discomfort.

The two versions of the book can be freely downloaded on their website: https://rightnowiamfine.wordpress.com/

The third video in a series for front line healthcare workers identifies some of the signs of burnout, when the overwhelm and exhaustion of the pandemic may be rising above our current capacity. The video begins the dialogue of where and how one might begin to bring new options for coping and support. https://sho.co/1CLFH

This second video in a series of three, offers ideas for health care workers looking to build their resilience and bring additional supports onboard as they continue to care for patients during the pandemic:https://sho.co/1CLFB

This is the first video in a series of three tailored specifically for front line healthcare workers. It offers normalization and validation for the unique emotions and experiences many workers are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic: https://sho.co/1CLF8