CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Jenée Johnson: Minaa, it is a pleasure to be with you tonight. As I have had the privilege of reading and listening to you on Audible, which was such a treat, I was taken by your stories and the wealth and depth of information you provide your readers. And tonight, I would really like our audience to get to know you through your stories as we explore the topics in your book. And at the end of our conversation, engage our audience with a gratitude journaling prompt from your book. But first, by way of some fun connections, some things I learned we have in common. I am a tall woman also. I am also from New York. And my family is also from the Caribbean from St. Martin. And my mom is the one who attended NYU, class of 1954 girl. She was there when there was like a handful of black people. And she is a social worker. So we have all these all these beautiful connections. And another fun fact, if you will, I am a Girlfriends and Sex in the City fan. These are all delicious things. You got to get from her book, y'all. And I watched all I think there's all 95 episodes of Sex in the City during the pandemic, just like her. So just some wonderful fun connections that we have behind the curtain. I love that I discovered your book on Audible and could hear your beautiful voice with your gentle New York accent. It was music to my ears, and we will definitely have others experience you. Now I was so intrigued by the title of your book, Owning Our Struggles, A Path to Healing and Finding Community in a Broken World. What is it to own struggle? And why did you frame this work around struggle? 

Minaa B.: Well, one, thank you, Jenée. I'm happy to hear all the different things that we have in common. That makes this conversation even more exciting. But to answer your question, as a therapist, and I worked treating clients who struggle with depression, anxiety, and trauma. And the number one thing that came up in every session was a particular struggle that each client was trying to navigate. But one of the things that my clients realized, and what I even realized in my work is that we can't navigate these struggles by ourselves. And so why they were coming to me to see a therapist, because they needed support. Even outside of the therapy room, maybe they were trying to get support from a friend, a partner, even their parents, right? Someone that was in their community or realizing that they didn't really have a community. And so when I decided to name the book Owning Our Struggles, this was really all about reflective work, learning to look inward, learning to build resilience versus learned helplessness, right? Feeling as if we are powerless people because we are not. How can we really be reflective of the things that happened to us and find healing in that, but also realizing that that healing cannot be found alone. It has to happen in a community. 

Jenée Johnson: That's beautiful. And I just want to say to the audience that there are so many practices and opportunities for reflection in Minaa’s book, where she encourages us to go slow, to stop, to pause, to answer questions, to journal. So what she's talking about, the reflection not only happened in her office with her clients, but she brought that same quality to the book. Let's unpack trauma. Some people really don't know what it is. So I'm going to ask you from your perspective, what is trauma? 

Minaa B.: So trauma, a lot of us are used to hearing certain circumstances that we have defined as traumatic. Going to war can be traumatic. Living in poverty can be traumatic, experiencing some form of natural disaster can be traumatic. However, the core thing to understand about trauma is that it's less about the event and it's more about how the event itself impacts your nervous system and also shapes and rewires your brain. So the reason why we hear those common conversations around how war can be traumatic is because there's enough evidence and data to show that when you go to war and return home, how war can impact your mood, it can impact your nervous system. It can literally impact the way you think, the way you navigate the world. When we think about early childhood development, because the brain is developing rapidly during the ages of zero to five, if a child is exposed to acute trauma, which is one single event that could literally alter the way the brain is developing. But more importantly, if that child is exposed to chronic or complex trauma, which is ongoing trauma and experiencing multiple forms of trauma, that is also now impacting the way that child is developing. Even in our adult relationships, if a woman is pregnant and is experiencing trauma that could literally alter the child's DNA, thinking about epigenetics. And so trauma really is all about how a particular event impacts your body, impacts your nervous system, impacts the way you think, because you and I could literally experience the same event and you could walk away unscathed and saying, I'm fine. And I might walk away having nightmares. I might walk away experiencing hypervigilance where I'm looking over my shoulder chronically or always scanning the environment because I think a threat is coming. I might walk away with memory loss. I might walk away having ebbs and flows of feeling depressed or even feeling anxious. And you're not experiencing any of those things. And so that is what it means to experience a traumatic event. 

Jenée Johnson: So the whole notion of what we often hear of fight, flight, freeze, fawning or appease or dissociate that these are things that the body is, the person, literally the body is experiencing and it impacts the nervous system and can dysregulate us, are causing things in the body, in the brain that should be working together well to not work together at all. And as you say, have these experiences of hypervigilance or nervousness, lack of sleep, insomnia or all of these things. So what are the sources of this emotional injury? Because you talk a lot about that in your book and you also mentioned childhood a lot, ACEs. So I want to come back to that. And for the people who don't know ACEs is Adverse Childhood Experiences. And Minaa talks about that zero to five window with the brain is developing and it's very fragile, extremely malleable. What's happening all, what's happening there? 

Minaa B.: Yeah. I mean, so as you shared what the ACEs are, we use the ACEs in our clinical treatment to really measure the different forms of trauma people experience. But what I will say is you can experience one thing off that list of 10 questions. And that one thing could be a big thing. You don't have to have a 10 out of 10 to say, I have trauma. You could say, you know what, someone in my family was imprisoned and that was traumatic because that question is on the ACE questionnaire. Another thing that I bring up in my book, however, is something called the Philadelphia ACE study. And that is a different version of the ACEs that kind of is a little more extensive. And it's one that I really like the reason why is because it includes the questions within the ACEs, but it also expands a little more to societal and environmental trauma. So in the Philadelphia ACEs, it'll ask you where you bullied in school. It will ask you how to experience the racism. So the reason why I shared those studies in the book is because again, I think a lot of us may have had a limited version of trauma. I know I grew up having a very limited version of what trauma is. And I think a big part of this work is education. I'm not sure why these things are not taught in the public school system because it should be. And so as adults, we have to literally lean into the resources that are available to us to say, well, I never thought that dealing with racism could actually impact my nervous system. I didn't realize that being bullied could impact my nervous system. And some adults can engage in bullying too. So it's not just things that's happening on the playground. I never really realized that community violence is something that I should be paying attention to. Community violence isn't just having high crime in your area. It could look like, well, I am consistently hearing gunshots when I go to sleep. Maybe I've witnessed shootings. There's a high gang. There are high levels of gangs in my community as well. That can look like community violence. And that also impacts the way you maneuver in your own neighborhood. Experiencing redlining. Right now there's branching off into systems and institutions. So it was really important for me to dive into those concepts because trauma is not just what happens to us when we are children. But when it happens to us in childhood, if it is not treated, it will definitely impact the way we maneuver as adults in our society. And so it was really important for me to talk about the different things that we experience in childhood. In my book, you see, I wrote a lot of people think that during the ages of zero to five, children are thinking of their ABCs and their one, two, threes and learning shapes and learning what animals make which sound. But what they're also learning is what love looks like, what love feels like, what care feels like, what emotional support looks like. So that means they also are going to be impacted by abandonment, emotional neglect, physical abuse, mental abuse. And I think it's really important that we reframe the way we see children in our society and how we care for our mental health on an individual level, but reflecting on our childhood, but also thinking about the children that we're raising in our society as well. 

Jenée Johnson: I would ask you to talk a little bit about the nervous system because I grew up in New York too, and I feel that I'm from Shaolin, home of the Wu-Tang Clan. But there were certain things that I experienced with my family. My dad was an alcoholic, and so that there was violence in the home, not with the children, but with he and my mom. And I always felt for many, many years that my nervous system was just a little hypersensitive to, fast forward into adulthood, I felt that I took that anxiety into my motherhood actually. So can you say something about the nervous system and what we can do or how do we begin to address that thing that gets dysregulated because of, well, in my case, it was early trauma, but the trauma that happened was somebody stole my car from right in front of my house. That was a sense of violation, like right here, where I live currently. And it seemed to just touch that, it's just that little quiet nerve in my system. What is that about? 

Minaa B.: Well, that speaks to the fact that healing is an ongoing journey because some of the wounds that you experience and so what you're speaking to, witnessing domestic violence, generally when domestic violence is happening, especially within the household, it is not a one-off event. It generally is chronic. So it's not just the situation that you just named. Someone stole my car from in front of my house and this was, out of 30 something years, this was the first time it happened. Your nervous system is still going to have a reaction to it, but when you witness something ongoing and it is repeated and it is also happening during a time where you need safety, where you need to know you can trust your caregivers, where you need to know that you can trust that they will nourish you, respect you, love you, that can be deeply wounding. And so it's really important to start there because when the nervous system is chronically, and this is why a complex PTSD can be really difficult to navigate because it's ongoing and it's chronic, and especially because it also develops different forms of trauma. And so when you're witnessing domestic violence, that's not just the single event you're experiencing. You're also experiencing what might feel like abandonment. You're also experiencing what might feel like neglect. And so when it comes to repairing the nervous system, it's really all about being intentional about what it looks like to treat that wound. If someone shows up to a hospital with an open stab wound, the doctor isn't just going to say, all right, let's put some alcohol on it and then put a bandaid on it. Then you can go home. No. So you most likely are going to need to treat that with some antibiotics and then also be stitched up. And depending on how severe that wound is, you might need expensive treatment. And so it's important to pay attention to the different forms of traumas we've been exposed to and how that impacts our nervous system. Because again, going back to what trauma is and the event that took place and how it impacts us, what I might need for my emotional care and my treatment plan might look different from you, despite the fact that we both have a dysregulated nervous system. So when it comes to those practices, which is why I was very intentional about outlining practices all throughout my book, is because this work is daily. This is daily work that we have to commit to. And this is work that we have to be intentional about. Because repairing our nervous system looks like engaging in healthy co-regulation. So what you're also speaking to, going back to domestic violence, that's already a sign of unhealthy co-regulation, right. You have already been exposed to the fact that this person is not safe for my  nervous system. Their nervous system is so dysregulated that it's manifesting an abuse. So there's no way that they can calm me down when they are the threat in my environment. So how can we heal from trauma if I'm consistently exposed to it? So one of the things we might want to work on is co-regulating, which is why a lot of people go to therapy. Because  sometimes we need to co-regulate with someone who is literally a complete stranger, who has the ability to sit with those uncomfortable emotions and can also walk us through those difficult feelings without judgment, without minimizing, without belittling, and also doing things like maybe casting blame, where you bring something up to a family member or a friend and they're like, well, you don't understand what it was like when you were a kid, and this is why these things happened, right? This is why it's really important to co-regulate with a therapist who can really utilize their own professional background and expertise to provide you with comfort, support, and most importantly, safety. Teach you that safety in a relationship is possible. And other practices people can be engaging in, in my book, you see that I give a lot of reflective journaling prompts, right? You see, I offer a lot of deep breathing prompts. You see, I offer a lot of mindfulness prompts, right? Waves that we can be grounded because also going back to the concept of hypervigilance, sometimes when you are experiencing trauma, sometimes you kind of leave your body. So when you feel dysregulated, you're literally in your living room, but in your mind, you're back in your childhood home witnessing the abuse all again. And so that grounding exercise can bring you back to the present and say, no, I'm safe here. I'm safe here. My body is safe here. My mind is safe here. I am not where my trauma is trying to take me. I'm not where my anxiety is trying to take me. I'm safe in this moment. And so that's why it was really important for me to offer those practical tools that people can utilize anywhere at any time, because that's a part of the trauma healing work. 

Jenée Johnson: I love it. I thank you for that. I want it to be really vulnerable and offer an example that folks could perhaps relate to when it comes to childhood trauma and that the need for the lifelong healing and tending to and the gentleness and the depths of holding that with kindness and understanding. Now what is the significance of trauma on Black and BIPOC bodies? 

Minaa B.: So what you're speaking to is chronic and complex trauma as what I shared. People who are BIPOC and Black people are very prone to complex PTSD because of the discrimination and the racism that we experience in this country, both interpersonally as well as institutionally. We see it all the time when we turn on the news. How can you ever feel safe or regulated with every time I turn on the news, there's a hate crime and it's explicit. This is not something that's subtle. This is not something that we can try to say, oh, it wasn't about race, it was. Imagine what it feels like knowing that I could go grocery shopping. I could be in a doctor's office. I could be at a playground. I could be in an adventure park and I could literally be the target of a hate crime. I named those places because they have happened. I'm not just throwing out scenarios. These things have happened. I could be in a dollar store and it could happen. It was very important for me to be intentional about writing a specific chapter to Black wellness as well as BIPOC wellness because that complex PTSD that comes up when you are a person of color in this country is complex in itself. It is a form of trauma that you have to already navigate on top of, let's say you do have childhood trauma. Let's say you do have intimate partner violence happening. Let's say you do have all of these other traumatic scenarios happening and you still exist in a Black body. It was really pivotal for me to create a body of work that really shed light on this topic because as a therapist, I know I got tired of reading books that did not name my experiences. I said I have to be the one to write it because when we're talking about trauma, we can't have a whole list of things and not include racism and not include those institutional and systemic practices that are also rooted in racism. We can't talk about trauma and not acknowledge our country's history when it comes to enslavement. I don't want to hear Minaa slavery ended—no because it just manifests in our systems and our laws. It's just very important for people of color to be very, very intentional about utilizing those practices that I shared, but also being very intentional about cultivating joy. You hear it in the Black community all the time, Black joy, Black joy, Black girl magic, all of these things that we have claimed for ourselves because we know that if we don't proclaim these things over our lives, we can succumb to these systems, right? Because it's not just again interpersonal. I could walk into a doctor's office and be treated one way because I'm Black. I can walk into a doctor's office and we see the rates of women who died during childbirth. We see the way the system is set up where doctors under prescribe Black patients because they believe we have a high tolerance of pain. These are all things that one, I wrote that chapter for Black people to know how to heal, but I also wrote that chapter for all for White people because you see in the introduction of my book, I said, I don't want you to shy away from things because they're uncomfortable. I think discomfort is why as a society, we still see these systems enacted and we still see this interpersonal trauma that consistently is ongoing because we have White fragility and we also have these other fragile systems that are happening where people don't want to hear the truth. There are people who will still say, oh man, things, I don't, this country has come a long way. Are we not paying attention to what's happening in Florida where they're trying to say people who were enslaved benefited from slavery? Are we listening to that? 

Jenée Johnson: It's so ignorant. It's ridiculous. 

Minaa B.: Right. You know, and so for me, this is what I mean when I say community. If you want community, you have to pay attention to the type of community member you are. You have to pay attention to the belief and the ideologies you bring to community because you bring your full self to community. So if you have bigoted beliefs, how are you and I going to be in relationship? If you have oppressive beliefs, how are you and I going to be in relationship and you have these beliefs, but the problem is you don't want to work on them. It's one thing because the unconscious bias is real. We all have unconscious bias, which is why learning and unlearning is going to be a part of our journey for a lifetime, until the day we die. We need to be committed to learning and unlearning. I as a black woman have had to work on my own internalized oppression, which I talk about in the book. And so we have to be committed to saying there are ideologies I was raised with. Okay. Well, what you were raised with is harmful because guess what? Your parents were raised with that. Their grandparents, it's a system of intergenerational trauma. And so we really have to do the work of being committed to saying what kind of community member do I want to be? How do I want to show up in this role? Not just for myself, because this is why this book is about community care. There are a plethora of books out there that are self-help that are I focused. My work is we focused. My work is I want to be loved. I want to be cared for. I want to be in safe relationships, but guess what? So does Jenée. So does person B. So does person C. So what are you contributing to that? Everything sometimes can be I centric, ego driven. I, I, I, and sometimes trauma can keep us in this bubble, right? Because we feel so dysregulated because people, cause the pain. People cause the rupture. So therefore we're doing all of this work on healing ourselves. And we're doing all this work on understanding the way people hurt us. But we don't also realize that traumatized bodies also traumatize other bodies. So in the midst of you doing this work of being reflective to say, this is how someone hurt me. I also want you to be reflective and say, but who have you hurt along the way? And that is what the whole book is about. But when we really get to the concept of race, because even in 2023, this is still such a hard concept for people to grasp. I wanted to write something that people who were not BIPOC could, I could understand and clearly write something for people who were BIPOC who could identify with and feel seen and heard in this industry.

Jenée Johnson: That's great. It was a lot about, um, I did get the sense of being seen. Um, early on in the book, you speak about your own childhood. And so I wanted you to tell us about your family. Who did you blossom from? And tell us about what happened to you that shaped you in childhood, because you're very, um, you, you say a lot about that in the book. So I know folks haven't read it yet, but let's just give them a glimpse. 

Minaa B.: Yeah. So in the book, I share a little bit about my experiences dealing with pretty much depression as a child, and that stems from coming from a very dysfunctional home environment. I share in the book that I am, I come from a blended family. I am my mother's second child, but I am my father's 12th child. I am also 20 to 30 years younger than my father's children. So some of my siblings are old enough to literally be my parent. And because I was, I grew up in a blended family and I grew up being the youngest of so many kids, there was a lot of dysfunction. There was a lot of intergenerational trauma. Um, there was a lot of hate. There was a lot of anger. There was a lot of animosity and I was kind of just like clearly born into it, born into this preexisting system that wasn't already getting along. It was a preexisting system that was already chaotic, already dysfunctional. And then here I came into it and I had to witness, um, the arguments. I had to witness pretty much the dysfunction and grow up in it for a certain amount of time. Now, within this family system, one of the things I talk about in the book, however, is now also experiencing something called sibling abuse. And it was really important for me to talk about that because it's not talked about enough. We have a lot of books on parent child relationships and growing up in a home where your parents are engaging in dysfunctional behaviors, growing up in a dysfunctional family and focusing on the family as a unit, but specifically the parent, um, role. But sibling abuse is a hidden epidemic because it's also tied to that family dysfunction. And the reason why it's a hidden epidemic is because sibling abuse is often underreported because who has to report it? The parents. Right? And so often parents allow things to slide because in their eyes, these are my children. And my expectation is that my children love each other unconditionally the way I love them. And so we say, Oh, you know, that was horseplay. Your sibling didn't mean to do that. Or there are even times where a parent might say, you know, they're just exploring themselves and they didn't mean to do what they did. Right? And so I started to experience what started off as sibling rivalry that turned into sibling abuse and that deeply impacted my self-esteem, especially because I was already dealing with bullying outside of the home. So when you go to school as a child and you're experiencing bullying, you expect to go home to a safe environment, but I didn't get the opportunity to do that because I had to share the space with a sibling who was abusive to me, who was bullying me in the home and just was dealing with their own emotional stuff and taking it out on me. So that just deeply impacted me to the point where I grew with a lot of anger. When I think of my trauma response as a child, I'll be honest, y'all my trauma response was fight. My trauma response was fight because when you're dealing with someone from a very young age who can be very abusive, very manipulative, just very, very unsafe. I used to have a very people pleasing personality and then I don't know what happened. But one day I said, listen, I can't take this anymore. And so it grew into me having a lot of anger, a lot of rage. And by the time I turned 16, I was just filled with so much anger, so much hate, so many negative feelings that it impacted my desire to be here. And so I started to engage in cutting as a form of self-harm, but it actually started off as a suicide attempt. What helped me heal was realizing that the people around me, my friends, my community outside of my home, I remember one time going to my friends and saying, do you feel these things? Do you think these things? And they said, no, Minaa, I don't relate. I don't understand. And I know in our current society, there's this movement around like not being alone, right? And vulnerability is important and commonalities can really shape how we move through the world and our healing process. But for 16 year old me to just give my own story, I needed to hear that I was alone. And the reason why I needed to hear that was because I needed to know what the other side of my hurt and depression looked like. So when my friend said, I don't relate, these are the emotions I have, I've never experienced them. I said, okay, so that's the goalpost. So if you are telling me that you haven't experienced this thing, that I have something I can work toward. And so that was my mindset. And that is what made me eager to heal. That is what made me eager to say, you know what, if you can have a satisfied life, if you can have a happy life, why can't I? You know, I believe we are all worthy beings, but my mindset has always been, you're not that much more special than I am. We're all human. We all exist in this human body. We're all going to die at one point. We all have just been given this gift to be on earth for a certain amount of time. So you're not more special than me. So if you could have this wonderful life, why can't I? And that is what helped me do the work that I do. That is what helped me really focus on self-efficacy, focus on building resilience, understanding that I had my own struggles. I had my own traumas, but I said, what is on the other side to this? And that is what led me down the path of being able to find hope and healing for myself. And I'm happy to say that I feel like I did. 

Jenée Johnson: Me too. I'm happy that you did too. You know, my next question was going to be about, so what was your healing path and how did you liberate yourself to be a therapist? And I do want you to answer that, but I just want to say what a beautiful soul, what beautiful little girl. What the intuition, the love actually that was really coming through you and how, when we talk about how important it is about how important the people around us are. That's such a great example that you had people around you who were doing well. And as you say, you could look and see, well, I can have that too. And that is so gorgeous. That is so beautiful and so hopeful for our young women and our young girls. So thank you for that. Thank you for your courage and listening, listening to that little voice. Say, I want that. So how did you liberate yourself and become a therapist? 

Minaa B.: Yeah. I mean that, that played a big role in it. I remember thinking to myself, I want to be able to help people. And I think of a big part of that was because during this time, mental health was still highly stigmatized. And I know in our current climate, it still can be, but I think we've made a lot of progress where I think people are more open to mental health and more open to going to therapy. And more open to even talking about it, the fact that we're even having this conversation and there's a platform to host it. Right. Where, and I was going to grad school, I still didn't see people talking about mental health despite pursuing social work. And that played a role in why I knew I wanted to engage in this work. One, I remember my first experience in therapy, it was with a white therapist and I loved her. And I also knew that there were a lot of people who wanted to only work with a black therapist for particular reasons, especially around race and identity and thinking about the intersections of who we are as people. And I think the other part to it is culturally growing up. In my family, we always looked at mental health as like either substance abuse or homelessness. Like that's the concept my parents drilled into me. So the term depression, I didn't hear that word until I was 16. Anxiety, I didn't hear that word until I was 16. Even the concept of mental health and understanding our social, emotional, psychological makeup didn't understand that. I didn't learn about the nervous system until I was in school. And so I think a big part of that was realizing that the more there is a lack of education, the more people suffer. And as a black woman, I also felt that it was important for me to engage in this work because even though I heard about mental health to some degree, one of the things I will say is I always thought, well, mental health is a white person's issue. Mental illness is a white person's issue. What is even mental health, right? Not even realizing that we all have mental health and a mental illness is a diagnosis. But whenever I heard about that, I instantly hurt, saw a white face and just thought, these are things that white people deal with. Because culturally, that's also what I was told. Culturally, I was told we don't do those things. We don't see therapists. Like that's not something we need because we can just, we're strong black women. We're strong black people. We can just get through anything. And so that played a role in also why I chose to do this work because I wanted to be a culture shifter. I wanted to be somebody who did something, not just for myself, but it also goes back to community. I wanted to play a role in shaping my community and getting my community with resources that we need. And as I shared earlier, it's not talked about in public school. It's not taught to us. And the less we know, the less we're also capable of finding ways to heal ourselves because we really have no idea, one, what are we healing? I don't even realize I'm struggling with depression, right? Because nobody's telling me what these symptoms are. So the more you learn about it, the more you know, the more you gain insight, the more you gain knowledge, you can also find your life change for the better. And I wanted to play a role in being an educator. So that is why I chose to be a therapist.  

Jenée Johnson: That's beautiful. One of my favorite sections in the book is being black isn't exhausting. White supremacy is. I was like, bam. You've shared such a poignant example of what happened to you and your uncle in Home Depot. Can you tell that story?

Minaa B.: Yes. So this is chapter four in my book for those who are listening in. I was 10 years old and I was on vacation in Florida, Fort Myers to be exact. And in the book, I share that I was in an aisle with my uncle and these two white male officers started approaching us and they had like these glares, the way they were just glaring at me. And I looked around and I realized, well, I'm the only person in the aisle, just me and my uncle. I started to feel my nervous system react. Right. But of course, at 10, I don't know what's happening. To try to make this story concise, because I want you all to be able to read it, to really feel what happened. I remember sending my uncle to get my parents when the officers came up to me because they were like, ma'am, we need to see identification. And this is why in that chapter, I talk about adultification bias, because I was only 10 years old. And I know that I always looked mature for my age. I'm tall, y'all. I'm 5'10". And by 10 years old, I was already about 5'6", 5'7". However, 10 year old me knew when they started calling me ma'am, and asked for identification, I'm like, okay, I know I do not look that grown. Like, come on. And so I knew that, okay, this is going to be an issue. My uncle is deaf. And so I sent him to find my parents. And when my parents came, they're like, what's the issue? And they said that a woman reported me and said that I had stole her purse and then stole her wallet out of her purse. And basically, in the book, what I share is that my parents were immediately filled with this sense of righteous indignation where they were outraged. And this woman was nowhere to be found. It was very clear they were protecting her identity. They never asked to see store footage. They never asked if they were witnesses. They never called the manager. And so it was literally me against this woman who was being protected. And I was not being protected. So my parents had to clearly step in and do the protecting. And I share in the book that I remember them saying, this is because we're black, isn't it? And mind you, I don't even know the race of the woman. But what I do know is I had two white males in front of me. And that was enough information. And I remember thinking in the car ride, why did my parents say this is because we're black? And so when we went home, they had to explain to me what they meant by that. And they had to explain to me that there are going to be things that I experience and there are going to be people who make judgments about me simply because of the color of my skin. And that really opened my eyes to what it meant to be black, what it meant to exist in a black body. You know, I grew up in a predominantly black and brown neighborhood. I went to predominantly black and brown schools. So even when I was around white people, because I always felt welcomed in my community, I always just assumed white people are welcoming me too. They're not pushing me out. They're not ostracizing me. So despite growing up in this community where everyone looked like me, I was always moving through the world, feeling accepted and feeling as if I belonged. And that was a moment that really shaped how I saw myself. Because when my parents said that to me, I started to instantly think about the interaction again and the way the officers were treating me, the things that they were saying and the whole time were like, who is this mystery woman? And the fact that you're not even asking for additional evidence, right? You're just really drilling it in that I stole something that I know I did not do. And that it was very unfortunate because even in our current climate, you will see that I outlined in the book that adultification bias is still the thing. And what that means is when a teachers, law enforcement, sometimes parents also do this. It's when they perceive children as adult-like basically. And what I knew in that moment, when I think of 10 year old me was, I could have faced adult-like consequences because to them, they did not see me as a 10 year old child. And they made that explicitly clear when they came up to me and said, ma’am, we need to see your identification. And they ignored my adult uncle who was standing right next to me. They did not say a word to him. So they would have never known that he was deaf. They explicitly came to me and said, ma'am, we need to see your identification. And that, unfortunately was my first encounter with understanding what is racism, what is discrimination. But I also share insights into the book about what it means to liberate yourself and find black joy. Because even 20 something years later, there are still people who look at me and say, probably think to themselves, ma'am, you don't belong here. And I think it's just really important to continuously choose yourself and choose joy because being in my black body is not exhausting. Those encounters are exhausting. People who choose to continuously commit to oppressive beliefs and white supremacy and marginalizing other folks, that is what's exhausting. My existence will never be exhausting. And that is what that chapter really focuses on as well.

Jenée Johnson: I appreciated that chapter so much. And thank you for that story of what happened to you. Because I know that it has happened to others as well. And it's not to normalize it, but it's to help us understand, pull the curtain back to understand what's behind it. The biases and the systems and systems are carried out by people. So how do we unlearn this oppression and push against narratives that are so dehumanizing? 

Minaa B.: Well, one, I want to say that this is lifelong work. Because I think a lot of time people start to engage in anti-racism work or even healing work. And they think it's a quick fix. And I think our American society has tricked us into believing that they are quick fixes when it comes to our wellness. You can't go into CVS and say, let me go to Aisle-6 and just pick up something that's going to make me more anti-racist. That's going to make me a whole healed person. You have to do the work. You have to engage in resources that teach you different things about your beliefs and ideologies that you carry. You need to read more books. You need to listen to more TED talks. You need to also learn to be uncomfortable. And I think that is the number one thing. That is often the number one thing that keeps people in this cycle of harming others. Because we can, one, engage in defensiveness. We can start blaming other people. And what we do is we say, the only way that I can heal is if the people around me do better, is if the people around me learn to make me uncomfortable. And I think this is very common, too, when we're thinking about racism and thinking about white supremacy and when certain white people uphold white supremacy. What's happening is I'm encountering this particular person who's making my body uncomfortable. And instead of me doing the work of regulating my own nervous system as a white person, I expect you, Jenée, I expect you, Minaa, I expect X, Y, Z to do the work for me. So if I am walking through my apartment complex and I see a black person trying to get in the building or I see a black person fishing, again, I'm naming examples that are real. This is not made up. I see these things happening and I feel frozen in my body because, again, you have been trained your whole life, right? And it's intergenerational. You've been trained to fear the black body. So I'm not taken aback by you fearing it. But it's also not my job to make you feel better. It is not my job to do your anti-racism work. So what we need to do is say, oh, man, I'm in a situation right now where I need to pay attention to my body. I feel frozen. I feel nervous. I need to investigate why I feel that. The answer is not to say in order for me to feel relief, I need to go up to you and say, I need to see identification. You're parked in this gated community. I'm going to call the cops because I need to see if you live here. You're fishing in this community. There's no way you own property here. I need you to prove to me. And that is what white supremacy does. And that is also how racism can somewhat manifest, right? Where we feel such extreme dysregulation that we say the person has to do the fixing instead of me saying I have to regulate myself. I have to learn how to manage this discomfort because it's been drilled in me my whole entire life when I turn on the news, the stories my family have told me, these are concepts that I'm literally carrying and stored in my body. And so that is a big part of it because I think fragility plays a big role in why people stay stuck. We feel guilty. And oftentimes that guilt is because you did do something bad. This is the thing I want people to understand about guilt because you can experience healthy guilt and you can also experience unhealthy guilt. When I, for example, talk about setting boundaries, right? I will say things like you don't have to feel guilty for saying no, you don't have to feel guilty to tell someone. You know what? I'm unable to make it to your event, but thank you for inviting me. You don't have to feel guilty for saying my hours are nine to five. So when you asked me to do work at 6 PM, I can't do it for you, right? Because you are allowed to have agency and advocacy over your life. So you don't have to feel guilty for doing what is right. But again, guilt means I did something bad. We have to own that we're capable of doing bad things. We have to own that we're capable of harming people. And when you feel guilty about it, what is the next step? The next step is not to say, well, I feel guilty, but you have to fix it and you have to make me feel wholesome and better. No, the next step now is accountability. And this is why I included accountability framework in my book, because I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. They feel uncomfortable. They want other people to relieve that discomfort. They feel guilty. And again, they want other people to alleviate that guilt instead of owning that I messed up. You know what? I messed up. I feel guilt because it's appropriate right now. I did something that was not okay. And I have to own that as truth. You know, in my line of work, the most common thing I find is helping my clients accept truth, because I realize a lot of people like being lied to because it makes us comfortable. We always choose the thing that makes us comfortable. We say we don't want to be lied to, but lies make us feel good. And we don't even realize when we're abandoning truth for comfort. So sometimes we have to say the truth is hard to hear. The truth is hard to acknowledge. The truth is that I did wrong, but I also need to engage in self-compassion. I need to forgive myself and I need to commit to doing better. That is how we change society. That is how we heal as a community. And that is why it was so important for me to literally in every chapter outline that because we need to learn how to recognize the truth is not always going to feel good and discomfort is not an act of harm. And so when you're feeling uncomfortable, that often doesn't mean someone harmed you. We have to be reflective and saying, you know what, I feel uncomfortable. And it might be because I'm being challenged. It might be because I'm being stretched. It might be because I'm learning new information that goes against my preexisting beliefs. And wow, I'm realizing that I have been engaging in certain behaviors, but I can always do better. We can always do better if we choose to. 

Jenée Johnson: Oh, Minaa, I could talk to you all night girl. Girl, come on over here. I'll make dinner. Because what I'm hearing, and this is in my lane and we don't have time to go down this lane, but I'm hearing how mindfulness is so important on the healing path. This ability to be with what is and what may be uncomfortable and be in mind, body and surroundings and to hold that with an attitude of that compassion, that kindness and curiosity, that willingness to continue to investigate it such that we will become up with what is accurate and what is, if you will, the righteous path. And so I just could see how mindfulness is so important on this journey. I love what you say at the beginning of your book. It's a wonderful quote. I want to read it. Self-care is the bridge to community care, and community care is the bridge to community healing. And essentially that healing happens in relationships. The same way that the trauma happens inside of relationships, healing happens in relationships. And I love that we can keep in mind that this healing balm, as you're saying here, is a path to healing and finding community. That it's inside of this community. It's inside of building relationships. The intimacy that you speak of in the book, there's so many things that go into us building community and then having that community grow and grow and then we'd be able to impact our institutions, our policies, our practices, our procedures. And we're able to do that because we've done the work. So it does start with the self. I'm going to have you look at page 252 in your book. Here you read moving forward with self-trust. 

Minaa B.: Yes. Okay. So this is from chapter seven in the book. And I'm reading the last page, moving forward with self-trust. “One of the ultimate gifts we can give ourselves is trusting that we know what we need. This journey of healing will be long and will come with challenges. And when you face obstacles, it's okay to lean into your own wisdom and trust that you know what you need to feel safe, secure, and move forward. We live in a loud world, one where we hear opinions daily from the people we know personally, as well as on social media. Where you turn, there is a voice that will try to tell you how to live. But one of the best ways to know you are healing is when you finally learn to trust yourself and your ability to make choices for your betterment, instead of second guessing yourself and constantly requiring approval and validation from others on whether your needs matter or how you should live your life. In order to put everything you've learned into practice, you must trust that you can harness the ability to discern what you need and find ways to provide it to yourself, either alone or through community and connection. Give yourself permission to be and do what feels right for you. Owning your struggles is the bridge to owning your healing.” 

Jenée Johnson: That is so beautiful. 

Minaa B.: Thank you.

Jenée Johnson: And wishing you so well on your journey to spread this good medicine. Thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight. Please move forward with a lot of hope and possibility and these wonderful practices and reflections to do this work that's the work of a lifetime. Have a good night, y’all. Be well.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities. 

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