117. Finding the Language to Talk About Mental Health and Trauma as Members of the Black Community
Summary
Everyone’s mental health journey is unique to their history, personality, and access to support. But as divergent as our paths might seem, no one ever truly walks alone. Erica and India combine full transparency with softness in this intimate look at their personal relationships with trauma and healing. They share the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of their experiences with anyone struggling to express complex feelings.
CONTENT DISCLOSURE: This conversation covers physical, mental, and sexual trauma, including sexual violence and its aftermath. Please take care of yourself with this material. Neither Erica Courdae nor India Jackson is a mental health professional. Their insights are provided for conversational purposes only and not meant to diagnose or treat physical and/or mental health issues.
In this discussion:
Language to support individual narratives around mental health, especially for Black and Brown folks
Examples of physical and emotional responses to “big T” traumas
Effects of generational trauma
Honoring rest and recovery as part of the healing process
Self-directed education on topics related to mental wellbeing
Numbing and what happens in the absence of access to such activities
Experimenting with healing modalities and personal practices
The right vs the privilege to seek support and pay that forward
Keep The Dialogue Going
Cause and effect take on a whole new meaning within Pause On The Play The Community. Here, Erica and India guide members through the process of picking a cause to support. Members can positively impact their chosen cause - say, mental health - via activities that support its purpose and visibility. Spark honest, transparent, and vulnerable conversations about healing with fellow community members at https://www.pauseontheplay.com/community.
Article
For those unfamiliar with Pause On The Play The Community, one of the main activities Erica and India invite members to participate in is choosing a cause to amplify. Mental health is a popular choice for support. Its challenges show up in ways that people don't always consider, and its effects rarely look the same from person to person.
“I think there is this place kind of being the facilitators in the room,” says Erica, “and we don't really always talk about what some of these causes can mean for us. And I feel like mental health is a big one.” For that reason, she says, people tend to shy away from the topic in conversation. “There are these bags that we carry. There's a truth that we have, and we don't always feel like we can be transparent with it. We don't always feel like we can talk about it.”
One of the most significant barriers to honest discussions about mental health is a lack of language to support personal feelings. The purpose of picking a cause within The Community is to move beyond just donating money or time to starting those necessary, often challenging, conversations.
Erica and India aren’t simply founders of the space; they’re active members. In that spirit of fellowship, India picked sexual violence as her cause. “I think in selecting that cause, it also gave me the courage to actually start doing something about it,” she confirms, adding that while she’d wanted to have those conversations before, “part of the reason I hadn't yet was because I still had healing to do. I still had trauma to process.”
Survivors of ‘big T’ trauma might recognize themselves in India’s experiences. She describes one of the involuntary post-traumatic responses as a takeover of her entire nervous system, saying that she often felt like she’d just outrun a bear whenever the topic of sexual violence or advocating for survivors, or creating change came up. “So, that made me have to take a very solid look at the fact that one of the biggest side effects of the cause that I had chosen is mental health and trauma, and that requires for many people who have been a survivor of sexual violence of some sort of assault or rape or you name it is being able to get that mental health support so that they can feel like they are in a body that is theirs again.”
“I've gone through gaslighting, I've experienced extreme types of narcissism that’s kind of dumped on me from other people. I have had emotionally abusive partners. I've experienced abuse growing up. And I have experienced sexual abuse,” Erica says. With regard to the nervous system, she points out that once it’s agitated, “you don't really always know how to get it down, and you just live in that space.”
“I wish that someone had laid out what that feels like for me many years ago and, maybe I would have more quickly and easily recognized that my body was in a trauma response at least 50% of the time at some points in my life.” India shares that she’s experienced sexual violence, abusive relationships, and a highly traumatic ectopic, near-death miscarriage.“I'll say that some of the most traumatic events for me...were followed by living my day-to-day and not really being able to, or recall what happened yesterday clearly and vividly. It felt like, in my body, as if I had a cloud over my head.”
While India’s experiences featured many of the same characteristics as the depression often portrayed in pharmaceutical commercials, “it wasn't that kind of cloud over my head,” she says. “Instead, how it showed up is feeling like I didn't have access to feelings of joy, to feelings of connection, to being inspired, consistent. And, while that can sound like sadness, it didn't feel sad either. It just felt kind of like this weird place in the middle where I wasn't feeling much of anything. I felt kind of numb. And, maybe in some ways, you know, that was worse for me as an individual because I couldn't access my feelings, which then meant I couldn't access words for my feelings, which then meant I couldn't unpack why I was feeling that way as easily.”
The gray clouds became India’s constant companion, a feeling with which Erica has also had experience. “For me, I think there's multiple ways that I could describe it, but one of the big things was just the fact that I was so used to things not being good that when they were, that was worse. My norm was ‘this is off,’ and this has me ready to run at all times, and it is more familiar to feel like my heart wants to beat out of my chest than to feel warm and fuzzy and safe and protected. That was scary.”
Feelings of safety and relaxation eluded Erica both mentally and physically. “I feel like it's so important to have this conversation because so often, there is a lack of conversation around mental health for people of color, especially when you're a Black woman that is trying to not continue to allow the unhealed trauma that you received from others that was passed down to you to continue to perpetuate itself generationally.”
India recommends anyone interested in or coping with the effects of complex trauma do some research around polyvagal theory and the ladder concept associated with it. “At the bottom of the ladder, you are in nervous system shut-down; you've got nothing. As Erica says, you are shot to shingles. I had never felt that way.” Now, India realizes that she hovered in the middle of the ladder, “it felt like anxiety. I didn't know that I had the bodily symptoms of anxiety, not so much the mental symptoms of the ruminating and things like that that can come with that. But my body was in a state of anxiety all the time, and it showed up in so many ways.”
Tense muscles, increased heart rate, and fast breathing were all part of her nervous system response to trauma. But with her advanced level of athletic training and bodybuilding competition, India didn’t immediately correlate those symptoms with complex trauma response. “It’s great for your body to work out and to get your heart rate up, but part of being a high-performing athlete or high-performing business owner, which I'm both, is we have to have moments where our body can actually rest and recover,” she says. “We don't build muscle, we don't create the business we desire to have by constantly being in nervous system overwhelm, or being stimulated all the time. We need to be able to bring ourselves back down and rest.”
India’s body never had the chance to slow down and repair itself. “I knew that I had the feeling in my body of stage fright,” she says, “but my nervous system was so much in a state of stress and anxiety and overwhelm and trauma that when it came time to do anything that required any little bit of risk, where a little jolt of adrenaline is actually good because it keeps you on your toes and alert about what's going on and quick to respond, for me, that put me into complete overload.” In some of the worst instances, India says she’d feel as though she’d left her body, even during interviews - an activity that was generally fun for her - just to get through the exchange.
“I want to acknowledge that what you felt, it's not something that usually, in the moment, you know that it's happening,” Erica says. “It just is. And you've gone through some things recently, and I've literally watched you say, ‘Yeah, I'm fine,’ and then somebody can just be like, ‘Hey!’ and it's like, ‘Nope!’ The flood gates open and, ‘I'm not fine; I can't do this.’”
The loss of her 62-year-old birth mother is a new source of trauma for India. “I'm still processing that ‘cause it was recent. “When you're in that moment, it's like, ‘Oh, I've got this,’ you know, I've cried all my tears, or I've done what I needed to do,” she says. “That does not mean that you processed trauma; it does not.”
“When you are the person that holds it and will push through, and all of a sudden it's like, Wait! No! No! You're not gonna push through it, you know?” says Erica, adding, “There's no warning for when that'll happen...if it wasn't for me knowing as much as I do, I don't know if I would be as whole as I am––and a lot of people walk in not knowing that. But, I almost think that the more you know, the more likely it is you can't hold it like you used to because now you know that that's bullshit.”
India agrees. “If you are the person in it, you don't always see that clearly. And I will say firsthand that the more that I learned about polyvagal theory and read The Body Keeps The Score, in some ways educating myself on these things dramatically changed my life and allowed me to feel more prepared to leave an abusive marriage, feel more prepared to seek out support, and actually find support in a way that was going to feel good for me.”
“Watching you in that moment of just like, ‘No, it's okay to stop’ and still seeing that resistance to still being able to feel your feelings,” says Erica, “and just knowing that it kind of felt like, you know, ‘Enough! Like, can I not have something for a little bit, please?’”
“My mind was like, I've got this, and my body was like, Nope!” India confirms.
“So there is this place of knowing that you want to do things differently, but yet also understanding that part of doing things differently when it comes to mental health, particularly when you weren't given it, is it can feel very painful because you can't hide from it; you can't work it away. You can't utilize these fake coping mechanisms,” Erica says, referring to activities people engage in––shopping, drinking, relying on drugs––to hide from the pain rather than process it.
“And, let you be somebody who doesn't drink and doesn't spend all their money away and hates shopping, you have less places to hide,” acknowledges India.
“So there's this place of trying to figure it out what do you do when you're trying to process things, and you want to do things differently?” asks Erica. “And, yet, at the same time, you're afraid of truly being visible and vulnerable because you know that there are people that could benefit from it. And, yet, at the same time, it's scary to wear your wounds on the outside for the world.”
Speaking only for herself, India offers the same advice that she gives to clients. “If your wounds are gaping and bleeding, you need to, like, bandage yourself up and put some alcohol on ‘em. It's going to sting, but we need to make sure we don't get infected or bleed out before we decide to share anything.” She checks herself for opting to push through in the past. “I need to lead by example for my people,” she says. “But the reality is, if my wound is still gaping and bleeding, I haven't processed what I needed to do for that.” India recalls one such instance during the recording of an episode of POTP with guest Brittany Dunn of Safe House Project. The episode features a frank discussion centered on human trafficking and survivor support, especially children involved in sex trafficking. “We were still recording, and I had to mute myself and get it together ‘cause I started crying.”
“You can't push your way through these things,” Erica reiterates. “And, also know that it's okay to ask for support and do your research about what kind of support you want.” Her ongoing mental health journey includes experimenting with different modalities, reading the latest research-based books, and engaging in talk therapy. “I realized that, while that was helpful, and it served its purposes, it didn't fix how I felt in my body. And it's not that I felt like I needed to be fixed, but I didn't want to walk around every day feeling like my body never really allowed me to fully be in relaxation unless I was actively doing some kind of meditation or something. I wanted to feel like I had my body back.” Erica encourages anyone coping with symptoms related to complex trauma to try multiple supports, as she has done. “Try different things and see what actually works for you.”
Biofeedback, for example, gave India insight into how her body responds to various degrees of stress and how quickly it could return to a calm disposition. “Once you know that,” she says, “for me, it was like, okay, I have something tangible; I can run with this, and I can look at what practices do I need to make be a part of my life so that when I have stress, I can pull these tools out of the tool bag and get my heart rate back down to something more normal.”
“One of the things that I feel like is so important in this moment is for people to understand that––I'm going to be blunt about this––for some reason, there's this misconception, and we've talked about this a lot, people perceive you in a very specific way, and it tends to be very poised, very polished, very perfect and elegant and graceful,” Erica says, referring to India. “I think that even if this is the picture that people process as who and how you are, that it is important to normalize the fact that nobody is exempt from being, you know, everybody can have mental health become a theme in their life or their existence, whether it was there before, whether it's always been there, whether you thought ‘Oh, I was good.’ Whether you just didn't realize it.”
India agrees. “You never truly know what somebody experiences, you know? And that's their right, to choose what they want to share with you. And I don't think that we need to put all of our experiences out there for the world to see, especially when we're in the middle of them.” She reminds audiences that there might be more to the story than what a person is willing to disclose. Respect their choice. “It's never safe to assume what someone is going through what you see. There's always many layers to someone's truth.”
What appears poised and calm on the surface is not the whole story; no one's perfect. “If you have experienced any type of trauma in your life, or you have experienced periods of your life where you've dealt with some mental health concerns or things that you need to process or want to process for that matter, that doesn't have to determine your identity. You are not your trauma,” she says. “I wish someone had told me that sooner because I think for many years of my life, given that a lot of my trauma started very young. I mean, before the age of six, I walked around with the subconscious idea, the seed planted in my subconscious, that I was the trauma that I experienced.”
“I think that often when you’re in it and, sometimes even after you're not in it, it is challenging to extract yourself from what you experienced and to not quantify yourself as what you went through or, somehow, the problem in that situation or the damage after being in that situation,” Erica says. “And it is a constant journey and evolution to reframe the way that you think about that situation for yourself to be able to calm your nervous system to move forward, but also how you process yourself and how you want to navigate the way that you present to the world because, how other people process you is on them. But before you can even be, you know, concerned in any way, shape, or form with how you want to be perceived by others, there has to be that space of working on how you want to be perceived by you.”
“I experienced trauma, but trauma is not who I am,” India says. “I have experienced sexual violence, and being a sexual violence survivor is a part of my identity, but is not who I am. And that's so important to let that sink in because I know that many in our audience have also experienced some things in their life, and that doesn't have to determine who you are going forward. You get to decide who you wanna be.” One of India’s most memorable turning points on her journey was when she realized that engaging in healing work with licensed professionals is one thing. “It's another to begin to share your findings or share the experiences of that healing work with others.” Especially those that are closest to you.
India recalls having an emotional response with a romantic partner after she’d had a session of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (also known as EMDR). “Sometimes, these things can come back up when we are in situations that we actually feel the safest and because it is safe to now reconcile that this activity or this conversation or the smell or whatever it is, is incredibly safe and build new neural pathways for experiencing these things,” she says, adding that moving from the healing practices she was engaged in through therapy to actually seeing the results manifest in her life, giving her the language to engage in conversations with those closest to her, was a significant turning point.
The ongoing journey has since prompted India to change her own chosen cause within Pause On The Play The Community to mental health. “I definitely realized for me, the biggest side effect that I experienced through my own sexual violence is the mental health piece of seeing myself as the violence, seeing myself as what happened to me and not completely as who I am and having what Erica you lovingly gave words to many years ago and our friendship, which is the funhouse mirror, seeing myself in a completely different way than other people see me.”
“This is never easy, to dig into your past and to try to uncover and to work through your traumas and to decide that mental health is a priority for you. We have chosen to prioritize that,” Erica says of this conversation, reminding folks that they are not their trauma and that they are never alone. “If there's even one person that can hear themselves in it and feel some type of softness toward themselves, then it had a purpose.”
“Absolutely,” says India. “I wish that I had seen more people reach a certain level of status or fame or whatever that were more willing to share the truth of their experiences and normalize that. I think that there is an immense power in that, which is why I'm willing to be transparent because I would never want someone who is looking to get to a certain point in their life or their business or whatever to feel like because something happened to them in their life or because they had this experience or because, you know, they're dealing with mental health or disability or whatever, that they can't get there, that they can't do something. It's not true.”
“As much as I can, I want to be the voice to support changing that and to create more access and to encourage more people to get the support that they need,” India continues. “I'm going to be transparent and say that I want more people in general to do it, but, specifically, I'm talking to you Black people, because it is something that has so much stigma and so much negative connotation in our community about being able to get mental health support. And yet, honestly, if I had to look back at most of my lived experiences that were very traumatic for me, they all stem from Black and Brown people who had already experienced trauma, including some of my own ancestors that never got the mental health support that they needed to process their own trauma. And, so, they continued to create more trauma going forward.”
“I think that there's such a necessity for us to model to people that do look like us that having access to mental health is a right, not a privilege,” Erica says. “And, you know, trying to really break layers and layers and layers of generational trauma is not an easy thing. And yet, it is so necessary. If nothing else, it is so incredibly necessary to have this moment to hopefully feel witnessed and to know that you're not alone; you are not broken. You are not beyond redemption, and that you are deserving of everything good that you want and seek in this life. If you can just get that from this moment, I would feel good about that.”
There's no finish line on this healing journey; we’re never “done.” Nor is it a race. “If you can relate to anything that we've shared here, give yourself permission to reach out for support,” India says.
“Start by putting your oxygen mask on first, and then go do that. I agree. 100%,” says Erica. “It is so important to have people around you that remind you that it's possible to be whole, no matter where you are in that journey.” Honest and transparent discussions like these remind us that it's safe to show up as our authentic, imperfect selves, “even in those moments that it feels anything but safe to do.”
Quoted
Erica Courdae
“It is challenging to extract yourself from what you experienced and to not quantify yourself as what you went through.”
“It is so incredibly necessary to know that you're not alone, you are not broken, you are not beyond redemption, and that you are deserving of everything good that you want and seek in this life.”
“It is so important to have people around you that remind you that it's possible to be whole, no matter where you are in that journey.”
India Jackson
“If your wounds are gaping and bleeding, you need to, like, bandage yourself up and put some alcohol on ‘em. It's going to sting, but we need to make sure we don't get infected or bleed out before we decide to share anything.”
“I wish that I had seen more people reach a certain level of status or fame or whatever that were more willing to share the truth of their experiences and normalize that.”
“Give yourself permission to reach out for support.”