As people pour into streets across America, rising against racist oppression and the terror of police violence, I find myself unraveling. When I first heard of the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I felt what I always feel when black people like me are killed by the police — a flash of rage so powerful it physically hurts, followed by a numbness that fills me with shame that I didn’t or couldn’t do more.

The more of these images that were inundated with, the more we may experience stress.

Two weeks after George Floyd was killed, protests have now taken place in all 50 states and in other countries. As they spread, I felt energized and ready to hit the streets. But after I decided to join the demonstrations, fear started to kick in.

At first, everything felt relatively fine, given the general horror that 2020 has been. Then the despair and terror snuck up on me gradually, finally making me feel like I was frozen and unable to do anything.

I haven’t been on the ground every day, but as I watch the videos of what the police are doing to the protesters across the country — tear gassing them, throwing smoke grenades, and shooting them with rubber bullets and other harmful projectiles — I hear their screams and feel terrified.

I’m still struggling, but I'm not the only one.

Ihotu Ali, a Minneapolis-based massage therapist and doula, began our interview about protecting the mental health of protesters by asking three questions: Are you safe? What does your heart want to do today? How does it feel in your stomach?

As a member of the Minnesota Healing Justice Network, Ali and her colleagues check in with each other in this manner — which has become daily since protests kicked off in her state.

When she posed the question to me, I paused. “Like a storm,” I finally admitted quietly.

The storm I’m feeling is also raging on for many, so it's easy to see why people are struggling right now. Many of those watching the uprisings unfold from home may feel powerless, overwhelmed, terrified, or full of rage. While protestors on the ground are struggling with the trauma they’re witnessing, the fear of what’s to come, the anger at what has already come to pass, and the looming threat of COVID-19 in the very air they breathe.

It’s a lot to handle, and it’s having a disastrous impact on their mental health. All over social media, people are reporting that they’re crying a lot, having trouble sleeping, feeling terrified, and feeling irritable. And those that are out on the streets are risking arrest, serious injury, and even their lives — whether that’s due to the coronavirus pandemic or police violence. Either way, the streets are covered with trauma right now.

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Dr. Rachel Mitchum Elahee, a psychologist who works with military veterans and civilians experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, says that protestors are at risk of developing PTSD due to this burst of violence.

“PTSD develops from seeing and/or experiencing trauma or even the fear of trauma where it's possible that you will be seriously injured or lose your life, or that somebody else will be seriously injured or lose their lives,” says Mitchell-Elahee. For Ali, who previously worked with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an active conflict zone that trauma came flooding back during the uprising.

“We ran outside the night when everything was burning and the precinct went down. The sky was blood red with smoke. You could smell it,” Ali says. “It brought all those memories [of the Congo] back. Now I am hyper-vigilant and jumpy. I'm anxious.”

But these protests are not just about what’s happening in this moment in history, or even in our lifetimes. They’re fueled by centuries of compounded black pain, and the fact that this generation is experiencing their own crushing wave of stress, thanks to precarious economic conditions and the still-spreading pandemic. And according to Mitchum Elahee, the deep trauma and grief black people carry in our skin and bones, our hair and blood is all coming out on the streets as we face violence from this country yet again, in a cycle that never seems to stop.

“It's the legacy of lynchings. It's the legacy of the painful stories your grandmother and your great-grandmother told,” Mitchum Elahee points out, illustrating the devastation of epigenetic or ancestral trauma.

Still, connecting with our ancestors can also bring healing during this time.

Sterling P. Watson, a licensed psychologist and the Assistant Director of Training for the Counseling Center at the University of South Carolina, has been helping students cope with the pain of the protests, police violence, and COVID-19 with a program called Black Space, where black students can express “the range of emotions that they're experiencing, their desire to want to do something.”

Watson helps students process any shame or guilt they might be feeling because they’re not able to go to the protests. “Everyone [in the group] is helping each other have peace with being where they're at and thinking about how they could fight the fight in very different ways,” he says. “Some of us who are going to be on the front lines fighting and some of us are going to be fighting in the background, continuing to do what's necessary for us to continue to advance.”

Prentis Hemphill, the former Healing Justice Director of Black Lives Matter Global, a movement facilitator, Somatics teacher and practitioner, created a video on Street Somatics, which aims to guide protestors in regulating their body’s stress responses while in the middle of these intense periods of stress, fear, and police violence. “I wanted to do the Street Somatics video, so we can use strategies to regulate ourselves and come back to a state of rest after these traumatic moments on the streets,” Hemphill tells Shondaland.

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But Hemphill feels it’s important to take care of ourselves everyday, not just in moments of stress.

“For black people, there are moments of uprisings, like the one that we're in now. Then there's the ongoing daily work that includes constant and compounded trauma that a lot of Black folks are experiencing. The practice of self-care has to be constant,” Hemphill says. For Watson, that constant self-care looks like planting tomatoes with his daughter, staying active, and writing poetry.

For Ali, part of that constant self-care means disengaging from social media when she needs to and asking her community to help her hold herself accountable to that. Watson also stresses the importance of taking social media breaks during this time, especially when it comes to watching videos of police violence.

“Secondary trauma is real, just like racial trauma and racial fatigue is real. The more of these images that were inundated with, the more we may experience stress.” Watson thinks this enables protesters and organizers to do this work more effectively. “You reconnect with yourself and then you get back in and find out what's going on and how you can contribute to fighting the battle and supporting others,” he says.

The more we take care of our mental, emotional and spiritual well-being the better we will be able to show up for ourselves, each other and the movement.

These protests are not going away anytime soon, nor should they.

Black people should be allowed to live and prosper like all others — and I want us to breathe free air. Not COVID-19 air. Not teargas air. Free air. If the nation forces us to stay in the streets until we get it, then that might be what has to happen.

But we do need to think about how we’re going to take care of ourselves and sustain our mental and physical health in the meantime. What resources to do we need? What structures do we need to build? What strategies do we need to adopt? How do we learn to care for each other? If we don’t figure out the answers to those questions, our rebellion won’t be able to last, because we’ll have made ourselves into emotional and spiritual martyrs.

"Liberation is an everyday practice. Health, wellness and vitality are all forms of resistance, especially for black, brown and indigenous communities," says Ayo Clemons, a Somatic practitioner and healer in Minneapolis. "The more we take care of our mental, emotional and spiritual well-being, the better we will be able to show up for ourselves, each other and the movement."


Nylah Burton is a Washington D.C. based writer. Follow her on Twitter @yumcoconutmilk.

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