Microaggressive Trauma: Let's Talk About It

As a coach, yoga teacher and psychologist with a clinical background, I have studied and worked with individuals suffering from trauma. With time I have found myself gravitating more and more towards a trauma-informed approach. I suppose it is obvious that this should be important, but I see that it is also vastly overlooked.

I started going deeper into the neurobiology of trauma on a course I embarked on a little while ago. It has been fascinating, enriching and affirmative of my belief that if we are working with others to help them grow and change - then an understanding of trauma and how it affects individuals is vital.

But what has been missing in my own exploration and teaching is an understanding of the trauma that is experienced by black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) in response to ‘everyday’ existence. And it is this which I have been consciously turning towards and learning about. I want to share these learnings and their importance with you today. 

First up, what is trauma? 

Before we can talk about ‘microaggressive trauma’ it is important that we make sure we understand what ‘trauma’ is. Many of us have been thought to think of Trauma with a big ‘T’; those catastrophic, one-off life events that cause life-threatening danger’. Indeed the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines a event that meets the criteria for trauma as:

“actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation”. 

It is easy to see how explicit and intentional acts of racial discrimination and violence fit this criteria and would therefore be classified as such by therapists and clinicians. 

However, not all trauma is big T Trauma. Much of it is ‘little t’ trauma; this is the kind of persistent, repeated exposure to events that may not threaten our physical survival, but that threaten our sense of psychological and emotional safety. This is the kind of trauma that pervades in many people of colour in response to the everyday discrimination they encounter.

Not understanding microaggressive trauma in BIPOC a big problem that further perpetuates the experience of individual and collective trauma. 

Not only because a lack of understanding means that we are far more likely to partake in an act of microaggression (and therefore fuel trauma). But also because if clinicians (and coaches...and anyone in the wellness space) have only a very limited and ‘big T’ understanding of trauma, then they are unable to diagnose/recognise it in those who they work with. If they cannot identify it, then people of colour who are experiencing the symptoms of trauma do not get the help, support and interventions that they need. Instead - they are often (mis)diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ or ‘depression’, when a diagnosis of PTSD would be more fitting (and personally validating) and give them access to the appropriate help. 

I will add - I don’t think it is enough to just understand ‘little t trauma’, either. We need to specifically understand more about the experiences and discrimination that black, indigenous and people of colour live through. This is where understanding about microaggression is important. It's also where white peoples’ work on becoming anti-fragile is key. 

Let’s talk microaggressions:

Microaggressions are manifestations of unconscious bias and implicit prejudice targeted towards socially marginalised groups. They are: 

“The everyday verbal, nonverbal and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership”

Diversity in the Classroom, UCLA Diversity & Faculty Development, 2014.

It is important to highlight the ‘intentional or unintentional’ aspect. Is it possible to hurt and threaten someone's feeling of safety without meaning to? Absolutely. Is it possible to repeatedly do so? Absolutely. Is it possible to communicate something racist without the intention or conscious awareness that you have done so? Yes. Intention does not equal consequence. This is why it is not enough to say ‘I’m not a racist’. Because it is an ignorant disownership of that fact that we are intrinsic to, and exist within, a system that is built upon prejudice. If you are white, then you have unconscious prejudice. Not wanting to believe this about yourself doesn't make it untrue.

The fact is; most microaggressions are communicated unintentionally by people with good hearts (and often - good jobs; teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, solicitors etc). And the first step to addressing them is to acknowledge that a microaggression has happened - and crucially - what message is being sent (often unintentionally) to the receiver. This is why educating ourselves is so important. 

For instance, if you say to a black, brown or person of colour person that ‘I don’t believe in race/I don’t see colour’ the message you may be intending to convey is one of union and anti-racism, but the message you unintentionally send is one that denies the receiver their individuality and ignores the significance of their personal experience and history. 

Another example of non-verbal microaggression is a store keeper following a coloured customer around the shop. They may think they are just ‘doing their job/the right thing’ (or they may be acting intentionally on explicit racism), either way - the message that gets received is that the customer can’t be trusted, is dangerous or is going to steal. It is a message of ‘you don’t belong here’.

I recommend downloading this PDF ‘Recognising Microaggressions and The Messages They Send’ adapted from the work of Professor Derald Wing Sue , a leading expert in microaggressions - to educate yourself so you can learn to identify them in yourself, and in others - and unlearn these biases. He is also the author of Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation.

Traumatic Discrimination & Microaggressive Trauma 

“When people face discrimination in their lives that is (a) intense, (b) extensive and enduring, (c) threatening to one’s sense of safety, and (d) causal of symptoms that are aligned with PTSD (e.g., avoidance, dissociation), their experiences might be labeled as traumatic discrimination.”

Kevin L Nadal, Microaggressions & Traumatic Stress

Taken as one-off situations, an isolated microaggression is not enough to cause a trauma response. But the repeated and consistent exposure to subtle discrimination across the lifespan - at both the individual level (verbal/nonverbal), and the systemic level (practices and policies in governments or institutions that marginalise groups of people) produce an intensity of experience that is enough to cause symptoms of trauma. 

Some of the emotional & psychological symptoms of trauma include: 

i) Shock, denial, or disbelief, ii) Guilt, shame, self-blame, iii) Confusion, difficulty concentrating, iv) Anger, irritability, mood swings, v) Feeling disconnected or numb.

“Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then, It's the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.” 

Bessel Van De Kolk

Dr Bessel Van De Kolk, the world’s expert of trauma and author of The Body Keeps The Score talks about the single most powerful aspect of what creates trauma as being ‘inescapability’. The inability to change things, the sense that ‘there's nothing I can do’: a feeling of helplessness. This is the experience of so many people BIPOC; the repetition of intense and subtle discrimination that is inescapable leaves many feeling overwhelmed and helpless. 

This feeling of helplessness and inescapability, I believe, is compounded when microaggressions are never called out for what they are; the lack of recognition is a further invalidation of the lived experience of people of colour that can send their nervous systems into greater states of dysregulation and cause the numbing or shutdown that we see in trauma.

On her Instagram page, the anti-racism activist and writer Nova Reid (who runs a course on ‘Anti-Racism + White Privilege) wrote in a post from 2019: 

“We haven’t gotten over centuries of oppression ‘yet’ because we continue to experience it every day & white folk continue to benefit from it”.

Nova Ried, Instagram Post 18/10/2019

The unravelling and dismantling of overt racism, inherent-racism and anti-blackness is a complex issue that requires deep systemic change and a conscious reconfiguration of our whole society and the values it leads with. This is big work. But what it less complex - and what is absolutely necessary for systemic change to occur - is that the people who make up society (that's you and me) do the work to identify and unlearn our covert biases so that we can begin to put an end to the subtle and deliberate everyday racism that fuels the individual and collective trauma of black people, indigenous people and all people of colour. 

Our allyship isn’t reflected in our outrage and shock. Inherent racism doesn’t simply go away the more times we tell ourselves ‘but i’m not a racist’. We can’t pull that card to get us off the hook from having to do some actual work. Believing that we have no work to do because we consciously align ourselves with a feeling of outrage at the mistreatment of BIPOC is 1) white fragility in action, and 2). entirely missing the point of inherent prejudice; that it is unconscious.

The good news is that it is possible to shine the light of our consciousness into our unconsciousness so that we can change our automatic and implicit ways of thinking, behaving and feeling.

But what I have learned more in the last week than I have every learned in my whole 33 years of life is this; that it requires an intentional commitment to do the work and educate ourselves. We actually have to do something different.

I am learning. I will continue to learn. Let’s all keep learning together.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

C.G. Jung

References:

Derald Wing Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation, Wiley & Sons, 2010.

LaVonna B. Lewis, PhD, MPH, Killing Me Softly-Implicit Bias/Cognition And Microaggressions, USC Price School of Public Policy

Kevin L Nadal, Microaggressions & Traumatic Stress, American Psychological Association

Tori DeAngelis, Unmasking Racial Micro Aggressions, American Psychological Association

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5

Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score: Mind Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, Penguin Psychology

Diversity in the Classroom, UCLA Diversity & Faculty Development, 2014