In The Community

The joy of it all is affordable, but at what cost? Underlying problems led to what we were healing from “trauma”. In the Black community, joy is a fight-or-flight response. We laugh loud, dance through pain, turn struggle into art, and make beauty from pressure. But sometimes the joy we cling to is a cover for a need for relief that helps us get through the day without fully addressing what’s underneath. The cost shows up later: in our bodies, our relationships, our selves, and the ways we cope. Healing asks us to pause and look beneath the surface, even when it feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar. If you’ve ever been in a discomforting situation and had to question your ethics, self-existence, or undergo emotional stress, you may have had a traumatic experience. Trauma doesn’t always announce itself with one defining moment. Often, it arrives quietly and stays longer than expected, shaped by personal experiences or passed down through generations. Trauma is a layer of individual pain compounded by systemic injustice, racial violence, economic strain, and the constant need to be resilient. “Be strong, “be safe, or how to rest, or how to feel without guilt. Now, if dissecting all the ways we can experience trauma, there would be no end, but we need to acknowledge and embrace it Acknowledgement is powerful because it interrupts denial. When we name trauma, we give ourselves power and permission to stop minimizing our pain. Embracing it doesn’t mean living in it forever; it means understanding how it shaped us so we can decide what we want to carry forward and what we’re ready to release. Trauma left unaddressed doesn’t disappear; it finds new ways to express itself through anxiety, anger, numbness, avoidance, or even physical illness. In the Black community, trauma acknowledgement can feel complicated. There’s often a fear that focusing on pain will weaken us or distract us from progress. But the truth is the opposite. Healing strengthens us. When we make room for honest conversations about grief, loss, fear, and emotional wounds, we reclaim parts of ourselves that survival forced us to suppress. Healing allows joy to be more than a coping mechanism; it becomes something in our everyday lives. Embracing trauma also means redefining what healing looks like. Healing isn’t always therapy sessions and clinical language, though those can be valuable. Healing can be community, storytelling, music, movement, faith, boundaries, rest, and learning to say no. It's to check in with yourself, be gentle, and push through everything, allowing ourselves to feel without rushing to fix or explain it away. There is joy in healing, but it’s not always loud. Sometimes it’s a quiet relief. Sometimes it’s clarity. Sometimes it’s the freedom of not repeating patterns we inherited. When we acknowledge trauma, we stop blaming ourselves for responses that were once survival tools. We gain compassion for who we were and power over who we’re becoming. The cost of ignoring trauma is too high. Generational curses we can’t break and pain we can’t name. But when we choose acknowledgement and embrace the work of healing at our own pace, in our space, we invest in a future where joy doesn’t require confusion. Healing is not about forgetting where we’ve been. It’s about honoring it, learning from it, and choosing ourselves anyway.