Our Bodies are Speaking to Us Right Now. Believe them. All of them.

The body is offering something. Will you attend to it? Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

I. Listening to the Body

I’ve heard a lot of speaking out of woundedness lately. Having persistent public violence in the streets of a city will do that. Everyone responds through the lens of their own past experiences, their own family stories. This type of collective trauma even pulls up ancestral harms from so far back that no one remembers the stories anymore, just the pain and fear. This is true regardless of political affiliation, race, age, education, or social consciousness — no matter how aware you are or how much time you’ve had in therapy, your body is speaking to you right now.

Listen to it.

This phenomenon is called resonance, because human bodies catch each other’s vibrations like tuning forks. Imagine you’re a tuning fork tuned to the musical note E. You’re in a busy music store filled with instruments. Someone starts playing the piano, or a guitar or flute, and when they hit an E you find yourself resonating and singing that same note. Or if the microwave in the break room or the hum of the vacuum cleaner is at that frequency, you can’t help but pick it up and vibrate along with it. All of this happens before the thinking brain can get involved.

Stop what you’re doing and listen to it.

Your body can’t help but resonate. Photo by Myfanwy Owen on Unsplash

So many histories are alive now, producing so much resonance. Some seem counterintuitive because they are far outside of our own experience, but we must believe them first to understand later. Believe it when a Native neighbor resonates with their ancestral dispossession and forced relocation. Believe it when a Black neighbor flashes back to the state sponsored terror that was the norm in this country for over 70% of our existence as a nation. Believe it when a Jewish neighbor reexperiences the holocaust of their grandparents. Believe it when an immigrant neighbor has a panic attack after buying groceries for housebound people, a body memory of going hungry during civil war in her birth country.

Listen, and notice what it’s connected to.

Then there are the people — often White or newer immigrants to this country — who are just waking up to the idea that state sponsored violence could happen right here in their community: in their neighborhood cafe or in front of their Saturday hangout donut store or at their child’s school. In the big picture this is not unprecedented. But it is so in their personal experience. To be occupied at scale by a force over which even local elected officials have no control is new for them. To have pervasive cruel and unusual punishment documented in detention centers here is an anomaly for them. Their bodies are vibrating wildly with the shock of a worldview being upended.

Listen, and allow grace and space for them and yourself.

A worldview, upended. Photo by Ethan Ball on Unsplash

We Still Need a Welcome Committee

Back in December of 2023, Ijeoma Oluo posted a piece called There’s No Welcome Committee Here. She made many important points, three of which I’ll focus on here. First, as her title says, when people suddenly become aware of what she names the “massive indoctrination project” of systemic oppression, they need guidance - a welcoming committee that can answer their questions no matter how basic, help catch them up on the history they were never taught, and coach them through their grief, shame and other emotions that inevitably arise.

Second, that kind of guidance is emotionally exhausting for communities whose people have been on the receiving end of that oppression for generations. As Oluo put it, “I don’t want to hang out with people while they process their newfound knowledge of the lived reality of populations of color. I really don’t. It’s annoying and I’m kinda busy trying to survive this all, you know?”

It’s emotionally exhausting. . . Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

Her third major point is that the far right has a welcoming machine that frictionlessly guides people deeper and deeper into white nationalist ideology. They excel at reassuring people who are frustrated, confused, or feel shunned by progressive family and friends. They meet them more than halfway, while social justice groups often expect them to stumble right up to the front door before we invite them in.

Her points all still hold. We especially need a welcome committee now. In the social field formed by all of our bodies together, strong emotion from one body is sensed by the rest. Resonance spreads. There’s plenty of it now, free-floating trauma resonance in the air that complicates everything. At the same time as it aggravates old wounds for some, it makes fresh realizations even more confusing and overwhelming for others. I liken it to trauma ping-pong where a profusion of balls are simultaneously dropped and bouncing chaotically throughout the space. It feels impossible to navigate. We’re all figuring out the complex social field together, all while dealing with our personal experience. Everyone’s capacity to offer grace and space - let alone to be a welcome committee - is diminished.

So what can we do?

First, we can all take a breath and know that we don’t need to react to one another in this exact moment. We can remember that we are or can be on the same team, even though we are having different experiences right now, and save our energy for the long haul. We don’t need to defend ourselves, or school each other.

We can be on the same team, even though we are having different experiences. Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

We can listen to and believe the body: Believe our own bodies as well as those in our social field. Believe people whose exhaustion is coming out in exasperation at the idea that this is all new. Their bodies are exhausted precisely because they feel an echo of it happening before and they deeply know how much energy it takes to resist. Their frustration isn’t only about others not knowing the history. It’s the pain of realizing, again, that those who didn’t have to pay attention, weren’t. Listen, believe, and welcome that, too. We need their yearning for deep and lasting change in the social soil.

We can also believe people who are sensing all this for the first time. Their bodies are experiencing this trauma freshly, even if their minds understand that this is not new in human history, or even US history. They feel the immediacy of what’s being taken away. We need their entitled outrage and their sense that human dignity is not a privilege but a right.

And, especially for those who, like me, were once the people experiencing a fresh hell of old injustices, we can start showing up as that welcome committee. We can remind novices not to place additional burdens on those who are resonating with old oppressions, and let both groups know that we’re available.

And, if you’re coping with some new realizations and find yourself in need of a welcoming guide, I’m available.