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Therapist and social worker, Resmaa Menakem, is the author of the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and originator of the Somatic Abolitionist movement. I met Resmaa many years ago, when he was one of the few voices in this space—Resmaa calls himself a communal provocateur and this is true, as his work challenges all of us to recognize and acknowledge that we’re scared. And that much of this fear is ancient. We were supposed to talk today about trauma in relationships, but our time together took a different turn—Resmaa jumped at the opportunity to put me in my familial and familiar fear. It’s hard, or at least it was for me, but hopefully you’ll stick with us to see how this works. This is the third part of a series on trauma, and it won’t surprise you to hear that Resmaa also trained with Peter Levine, who we heard from last week.

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies

Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy—And What You Can Do About It

The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

Resmaa’s Website

Follow Resmaa on Instagram

PART 1: James Gordon, M.D., “A Toolkit for Working with Trauma”

PART 2: Peter Levine, Ph.D, “Where Trauma Lives in the Body”

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”

Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNAN: I want to talk to you about sort of everything, but maybe we start with My Grandmother's Hands and then we move to monsters in law and relationship and how so many of these things intersect. I feel like the last time we spoke was I don't even know if we were staring at each other on zoom, but it was years ago when, your book My Grandmother's Hands was establishing an entire space that's now been joined by many others. It's great to be first, right? But it was a different time and yet it's still the same time, right? What's changed for you?