020: Tiffany & Adia

Written By Tiffany Yu

Tiffany & Adia | Healing and Support During Times of Racial and Intergenerational Trauma ft. Dr. Adia Gooden

In this episode, we're joined by Adia Gooden, Ph. D., a licensed clinical psychologist and mental health expert, to talk about healing and support through times of racial and intergenerational trauma.

We discussed:

  • Adia’s May 27th Instagram post that sparked this conversation

  • Racial trauma and intergenerational trauma

  • What is trauma and triggers?

  • Why it is important to name trauma

  • Healthy coping strategies

  • What is giving Adia hope amid continued racial injustice and uncertainty

Show notes:

About Dr. Adia Gooden

Adia Gooden, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist; she received her BA in Psychology from Stanford University and her PhD in Clinical Community Psychology from DePaul University. Dr. Adia is the Director of Community Programs and Outcome Measurement at The Family Institute and is an active clinician who specializes in treating people of color in the context of individual, group, and couple therapy. Dr. Adia is a sought-after, dynamic speaker who gives talks on unconditional self-worth, imposter syndrome, and Black women and mental health and conducts trainings on cultural competence and working with Black women in psychotherapy. Dr. Adia gave a TEDxDePaul talk on “Cultivating Unconditional Self-Worth” which has over 450k views on YouTube.

Follow Dr. Adia Gooden

Transcript

Tiffany Yu: You’re listening to Tiffany & Yu. This is your host, Tiffany Yu. On this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Adia Gooden, who is a clinical psychologist and mental health expert, to talk about all things mental health, trauma, and coping strategies. In light of continued racial injustice and uncertainty, it was great to have Adia on the show to really dig into racial trauma, intergenerational trauma, and ways that all of us can heal collectively. Hope you enjoy this conversation.

Tiffany Yu: Hi everyone it's Tiffany Yu here and you're listening to this episode of Tiffany & Yu. On today's episode, I have with me, Dr. Adia Gooden, she's a licensed clinical psychologist. Hi Adia! 

Adia Gooden: Hi, good to be here with you. 

Tiffany Yu: Adia also has this incredible TEDx talk called “Cultivating Unconditional Self-Worth,” which has 450,000 views on YouTube. And we're not going to talk about that today, but we should hopefully have her on another time to talk about that. But Adia and I actually know each other through a community called the Global Shapers. How long have you been part of the Global Shapers for? 

Adia Gooden: I think I was part of the Global Shapers for about four years total before I aged out. So now I'm a proud alum of the Global Shapers.

Tiffany Yu: Got it. And for those listening, we've had a couple of Global Shapers on the podcast so far. It's a community of people in their 20s and early 30s who are passionate about social impact and want to make change within their local communities. And “aged out” is a term we use within the Global Shapers Community when you turn 33. 

Adia Gooden: Yep. 

Tiffany Yu: But it does not mean that it, it does not mean you have aged out of life or anything. Life still goes on. You and I have known each other since the 2016 SHAPE North American conference in Minneapolis. So I brought her on the show today because I wanted to talk about trauma. But I wanted to talk about trauma in the context of the civil rights revolution is what I'm calling it, that we're living in right now. But it seems like our world is kind of changing every single week, almost every single day. So Adia, I'd love to bring you in to chat about just how are you doing right now and talk about this May 27th Instagram post that you posted that kind of sparked a lot of the conversations that we're having now. 

Adia Gooden: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for having me to talk about this. Yeah, I mean, I'm doing pretty well right now. I think it's interesting for me to observe—and I think a lot of people go through this initial upset, emotional intensity that I experienced, that I think many people experienced, following—after learning about George Floyd's murder and Breonna Taylor's murder and seeing the protests and participating in them to now, when I feel like I'm getting back to normal a bit, and I think there's a tension for me between the need to get back to a normal, the need to get back to feeling okay and feeling safe and feeling healthy, and the concern that I might forget some of the urgency, and the importance and lose some of the energy and the anger that drove a lot of action in the beginning. And so I'm doing pretty well right now and also wanting to keep myself engaged and thoughtful about what needs to happen to continue to shift things and how I can participate in that. 

Tiffany Yu: And so about a month ago, you posted on Instagram. I think that the general sentiment of the post was just this whole idea of feeling exhausted in the body that you were in. And of course the police brutality that we're seeing is nothing new, but for some reason, and maybe it could be in the context of this pandemic and people stuck in their homes for months, it just seemed to wake the world up to the fact that we need to be active anti-racists. 

Adia Gooden: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting because what I posted about on May 27th was just really how I was feeling emotionally. I woke up feeling exhausted, feeling angry, feeling frustrated, feeling disappointed, and I felt it physically. So I felt a weight in my chest. I felt fatigued physically. I felt like I had more— like the anger was, felt like it was moving through my body and needed to get out. And it just landed so physically for me. And I think that that relates to how racial trauma impacts us. And when I refer to racial trauma, I'm really referring to the stress that physical, mental, emotional stress that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color experience when they experience racial violence, discrimination, microaggressions, any of these forms of oppression. And the thing about racial trauma is that it can be intergenerational. So it's passed down both in the gene expression and what happens related to stress and how that affects our genes. It's passed down in utero in terms of what a fetus, a baby before it's born is it exposed to. And so all of this was triggered, not to mention all of the experiences that I have had related to racism and sexism, that just felt like they came right to the surface. And so that was a lot. And in the post, I was just trying to share that. And it's interesting because I have a blog, which I don't write in very much anymore, but I think it was about four years ago in 2016 when there was another wave of Black Lives Matter protests, and that was becoming more widespread, but there weren't as many non-Black people involved. I wrote a post that was very similar and it was interesting to go back to that and see the similarities in terms of what I experienced and what I was thinking and feeling. And so the thing that feels really different right now is that the broader public—people who are not black are waking up, as you said, are listening, are interested, are believing these stories right now. And so that really feels very different, right? I think in the past, I might've had similar emotional experience, but the wider society, community response was very different.

Tiffany Yu: And I had Corey Ponder on our show a couple of weeks ago, and he's a Black man and an empathy practitioner. And he had written a post about how he felt like he was stuck in a loop. He wanted to be Black and proud, but he was also just really exhausted of being in this loop. So I know you mentioned racial trauma. I know you mentioned intergenerational trauma. I wanted to take a step back. For those of us who don't sit in trauma spaces, I was wondering if you could just provide a definition of what trauma actually is? And what trigger, like what that actually means?

Adia Gooden: Yeah. Trauma sort of traditionally—So I'm a clinical psychologist so I have that training and background. And so in the field of psychology, and mental health field more generally, a trauma is generally thought of as an incident or experience that someone has, where they felt like they were seriously in danger or they were harmed or they thought they were going to be harmed. So in that traditional sense, a trauma could be a car accident. It could be being raped. It could be witnessing somebody else being harmed or killed. And in the last, I would say five to 10 years, we started to expand our understanding of trauma beyond this one singular event that was really big to thinking about traumas that may not lead to post-traumatic stress disorder but challenge a person's sense of safety, sense of connection, sense of agency. And so a trauma could be feeling betrayed by someone that you previously trusted, so that would be—I don't know if this is the best way to refer to it—but we sometimes call them “small T traumas.” So that could be traumatic in terms of relationship or we're also more understanding that there's this complex trauma that might not be one incident, but it might be experiencing microaggressions week after week after week at your job. It might be applying to jobs over and over again and never getting a call back. Or getting an interview and people like you, but never getting hired and feeling thwarted, feeling like because you're part of a particular identity group that you're not being acknowledged. Or, I know that you focus Tiffany a lot on people who have disabilities. And so it could also be feeling really unacknowledged. So maybe you're in a wheelchair and people never acknowledge you, never say hello, never greet you, and that could be traumatic in its own way. I think about traumas, when I'm working with clients, I'm thinking, “Okay. So did this really alter or shift the way you saw yourself, the way you saw the world in a fundamental way that made you less trusting of yourself, less trusting of other people that gets brought up for you when you're in similar situations?” And so that leads us to this word “trigger,” which people talk about often. You might hear the term “trigger warning” and basically a trigger is anything that brings that trauma up into the present. So one of the things that happens with traumas is that people can have flashbacks and can have very, physical, bodily responses to their memories, to their vivid memories of the traumas that have happened in the past for them. And so a trigger is something that brings that back to the present. So a couple of years ago when the Me Too movement was really strong and going you'd see people write “trigger warning” before they talked about their experience sexual assault. And the point was, the idea is that if somebody who has been assaulted reads that description of somebody else's assault or hears about it, that that might be triggering, it might remind them of their own trauma. And so we want to give people a heads up about that.

Tiffany Yu: Thank you for those explanations. The reason why I wanted to ask you about those definitions is that we have a tendency to want to disassociate ourselves from trauma when I believe that it is a very human experience. And at the beginning of this pandemic, people were talking about what we're experiencing right now, social distancing or seeing our loved ones contract the virus or frontline workers. There was an element of that that was trauma. Would you say that or would you agree with that? 

Adia Gooden: Yeah, I would agree with that. So witnessing people pass away, people you love passing away, especially if it feels like it's unjust and unexpected can certainly be traumatic. And feeling like your trust in medical systems, in the government is being eroded very rapidly, which I think has happened for us, that can certainly be traumatic. It really challenges our sense of safety and our sense of wellbeing. And I liked what you said, I feel like you started to reference this idea of, we want to disconnect from the feelings, we want to pull away from them and what we know from trauma research is that, people are more likely to experience PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder if they dissociate or pull away from their body, from their experience and try to shut down the feelings. Now, we don't want to stay in feelings that are overwhelming for days and days and days. And what we know is that feeling the feelings, feeling the sadness, feeling the anger, feeling the fear is actually a really healthy thing to do, even though it's uncomfortable, because we process the emotions through and then we're able to move forward and make choices about how we want to act and what we want to do and how we want to address issues. 

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. When you were talking about trying to disassociate from the trauma, I mean, I definitely get it. But I want to take a quick break and then when we come back, I want to talk about pathways to healing. I know you touched on it just briefly , but really thinking through naming it and where we go from here. 

Adia Gooden: Sounds good.

[break]

Tiffany Yu: And we're back from the break. You're listening to this episode of Tiffany & Yu. We have with me Dr. Adia Gooden. She is a clinical psychologist. And before the break, we were talking about trauma in all its forms, defining it. We talked about race-based trauma, intergenerational trauma. Adia, the reason why I wanted to talk, talk to you about race-based trauma, it was actually the first time that I had heard that term, race-based trauma. Is this new or it's becoming popularized because of what's happening? 

Adia Gooden: Yeah. You know, I would say it's more becoming popularized right now. I'm not totally steeped in the research on it. I did a quick search and found there was a special issue of the American Psychologist, which is a journal put out by the American Psychological Association on racial trauma. And that came out in 2019. So I would say it's fairly recent, but I think it's something that Black people have been talking about for a while, even if that name racial trauma wasn't necessarily added to the discussions about how slavery continues to impact us today and how segregation and discrimination continue to impact Black people today. If we about intergenerational trauma, we can think about it as being related to racial trauma. It could be related to some other harm or injustice that happened to one generation that then influenced subsequent generations. And then I think, another aspect of racial trauma is that it also includes what's happening today. So the trauma, the racial trauma that I experienced is related to what my grandmother experienced that my mother experienced. And it's also related to kind of what I experienced present day, because racial discrimination and oppression are unfortunately continuing and so it has both this past and present dynamic in terms of understanding how has that play for people. 

Tiffany Yu: Yeah, and so before the break, you touched on this briefly. There's a phrase I really liked that my therapist told me, he said, “The only way out is through.” And you and I chatted a little bit about when to disconnect from, from that feeling. I was wondering if you could chat more around how to recognize if what you're experiencing is trauma related. Is it helpful to name it?

Adia Gooden: Hmm, this is a good question. And I love your therapist's phrase, “The only way out is through.” I so agree with that. I think naming things can be so helpful because often when we feel something, we start looking around for, Why do I feel this? Is it something I did? Is it something I said? Did I make a mistake? Or am I just—did I eat something wrong? Or did I not get—like we sort of start going through what is going on. And I know I go through that myself. When I wake up and I'm sad, or I'm anxious or angry. It's like, where is this coming from? Or you have an interaction with someone and you feel upset or something comes up, you are questioning, Where is this coming from? And so naming racial trauma, naming intergenerational trauma, can be so helpful because it at least starts to help us understand, Okay, it's not something I did wrong. This is here. Feelings are here, but it's not my fault. And I can choose how I want to respond to these feelings, but I don't need to blame myself for them. I don't need to look and see, Well, what could I have done differently to not experience that? I also think another reason that naming things as racial trauma can be helpful is because it explains—it helps us to understand the bigness of the reaction. So it helps us understand why is it that witnessing someone being killed—that's traumatic in and of itself. But thinking about, Okay, George Floyd it is not someone that I know. I don't know him. I don't know his family. What is it about this situation that is impacting me so deeply? And part of it is, Wow, that could have been a relative or a friend, or this keeps happening. This is a representation of the trauma I've experienced or the harms that Black people have experienced in the U.S. So we’re putting it in context, which then helps us to meet sense of the feelings. You asked about whether we need to name it as racial trauma or trauma in general. I think getting specific can be helpful. And if you just start with, I think I'm having a traumatic reaction, or I think this is a response to trauma. I think that's a really great start. I think this is one of the places where therapy can be really helpful because often when we're in the feelings, it's really hard to make sense of them. And so having someone who can sit with us and see them and help us process them through can be a useful way to name what's happening and move towards healing. 

Tiffany Yu: I thought your perspective was really interesting because one of the things my therapist said to me, he said, “Tiffany, Americans, I feel like have this obsession, like this diagnosis obsession. They want to name everything they’re experiencing so that they can blame something else, some way that they're reacting to what's happening in the world.” And the way I'm relaying that is a little bit less empathetic coming out of my mouth, but I was wondering if maybe you had some thoughts around that . I think it's an interesting dynamic of like, do I want a label for what I'm experiencing and part of it is having the therapy there to work through it to then have an action plan of how to move through it afterward.

Adia Gooden: Yeah. You know, you're bringing up some really interesting points. So I would say, I am not into diagnosing people, like I don't really have much interest in it. And as somebody who takes insurance, I have to give my clients a diagnoses like or else the insurance is like, well, what are we paying for? That's kind of how our system is set up. I think that a diagnosis is useful in the sense that it helps us to understand the cluster of symptoms or experiences that somebody is having. It can guide us to specific treatments that have been shown to be effective for that cluster of symptoms. So that's sort of how I think about that. I think what resonates with me about what your therapist was saying is people's tendency to say, well, I'm just depressed. And they create an identity around being depressed around having depression that then sort of gives people permission to say, “This is just how it is. It's never going to change. This is who I am.” And then we can move forward with that in terms of like, “Well, I'm depressed, so I can't do this, or I can't do that.” And now depression can be a real disability. It can be a real challenge for people . And whenever we create an identity around a mental health issue, we sort of get stuck there. And it puts people in this place where they're not seeking to learn and grow and shift things. And so I think there's a balance between naming what is happening, naming, “Wow, this experience you had is leading to these symptoms you're having now.” And I think that naming, this is the context. This is what happened. This is what led you to do this, this, and that. This is what caused you to develop these coping strategies that may not be as healthy right now. When we name the context, it really helps people to develop compassion for themselves. Because there can be a lot of, “Well, what's wrong with me? Why am I over drinking? Or why am I doing this? Or why am I do—?” And if we say, listen, in a context that was harmful and painful. And it makes sense that you developed this way of being, right? So let's offer yourself some compassion and some love. Let's forgive yourself. And then that becomes the foundation for, how do you want to choose to move forward? You're not defined by the trauma. We acknowledge it in that situation. How do I want to respond to my emotions in a more constructive way? How do I want to approach life? And so for me, that is this balance that I try to strike with a lot of my clients, is acknowledging the context and also identifying opportunities for people to be empowered to direct their lives in the way that they want to. So not feeling stuck, not saying well, I'm traumatized racially and the world is racist. So that's it. I can't do anything. But to acknowledge that and acknowledge the toll that takes and to think about, what can you do? 

Tiffany Yu: Yeah That's great. The thing you said that I thought was really powerful is this tendency for some of us to want to create an identity around what that diagnosis is and how that manifests in our life. I want to move forward with our conversation around what's happening with racial trauma. For those of us who are non-Black, I'm getting a sentiment is feelings of helplessness, enormous guilt, discomfort. For my Black friends, it's feelings around anger and frustration and exhaustion and just being tired. And so as we think through pathways to healing, I'd love your tips for some healthy coping strategies. I think everyone is feeling some level of the effects of the trauma.

Adia Gooden: Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. My first recommendation it is for people to feel their feelings, all of it. We are often very socialized to run away from our feelings. Anything that's uncomfortable, we run away. We have a lot of different strategies for running away. So running away could look like over-exercising, overeating, restricting our eating, over drinking, smoking too much weed. We could look like a lot of different things. It could look like being on your phone for hours and hours and hours, sort of zoning out. So what we want to do is allow ourselves to feel the feelings. And people often worry that if they allow themselves to feel the guilt, the anger, the sadness, the frustration, the hopelessness, they will be overwhelmed by it and they will not come back from it. And the reality is is that that is not true. When I guide people to sit with their feelings in sessions, people often say, yeah, I felt the emotion a little bit more intensely. And then they say, and then I went away where it felt more bearable. And so what I encourage people to do is to when you're feeling something, first of all, notice how it shows up physically for you. I mentioned earlier that when I was feeling angry one morning, it was really a tightness, a heaviness in my chest. Just notice what is showing up physically, where in your body is this emotion showing up? Take a few deep breaths, breathe into that space and allow it to be there. We often constrict and tighten and try to push the feeling away to get rid of it. That just adds another layer of stress on top of the emotion. So see if you can take deep breaths and really just allow the feeling, the physical sensations to be there. Another piece is that what we often do is we amplify our feelings by our thoughts. So you feel some guilt and then your mind starts running, Oh my gosh, you didn't say this then. And why didn't you do this then? And how to do dah, dah, dah. Right. And it just goes and goes and goes. And that just amplifies the feeling. So we want to, just like you might practice with a mindfulness meditation, we want to let go of those thoughts, and we want to focus back on the field physical sensations, and you do that as many times as you need to. And then I would say, say a third core component of this is offering yourself some love and tenderness and compassion. So put your hand over the feeling, put your hand over your heart and just send it some love. The guilt is valuable. Because guilt shows us, Hey, you know, I didn't do something that was aligned with my values and I want to do something different. So we say thank you to the guilt. The anger is valuable because the anger tells us, okay, there is some injustice, there's some injustice that I am not willing to tolerate. And it's not okay. And I'm going to do something about it. So we say thank you to the anger. We're only able to do that when we look at it and we acknowledge it. So that's a brief little practice that people could guide themselves through to really allow themselves to feel the feelings. And then what we find is once we've allowed ourselves to feel the feelings, we're then able to tune back into our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s analytical and can think and then we can decide, okay, what action do I want to take? What steps do I want to follow to change the situation, to remedy it, to apologize, to advocate for justice? When we're trying to do that from an emotional state or a suppressed emotional state, we're not going to be as effective as when we've sort of felt the emotion. moved through it, and then can decide very intentionally about what we want to do. 

Tiffany Yu: I love all of that. I'm still sitting on the point that you mentioned of really valuing whatever emotion you're feeling at the time. And one of the things I'm thinking a lot about is how we place a hierarchy on emotions. We think happy equals good and anger, sadness, guilt, whatever it is equals bad. And I think the same way that we feel the light, the sunshine, when we're happy, shining a light on whatever emotions we're feeling is really important pathway to move through it. As we think through healthy coping mechanisms for racial trauma, I feel like this whole pandemic has kind of been an avalanche of many, many unprecedented things. What is giving you hope right now? And what are you feeling hopeful about?

Adia Gooden: Yeah, those are good questions. I'll just sort of acknowledge, yes, there's a mental health crisis. It's really hard to be alone and to be isolated. And for those people who are in that situation, this pandemic has exacerbated mental health issues, the stress of it, the anxiety of it, the trauma, as we talked about, has really created a spike in mental health issues. Not to mention people losing their jobs and feeling financially unstable. All of that is really cause a lot of mental health issues that we need to address in a systemic way. And I don't think that the government has yet responded in a comprehensive way to address that, but I hope that that will happen. So let's see. What am I hopeful about? I think the things that make me hopeful are one, just seeing how many non-Black people are up in arms about the racial injustice and police violence that has been going on in this country, basically since its inception. So it's really encouraging for me to see people who are not Black get involved in the movement and get out there and want to learn and want to educate themselves and want to make a commitment to doing something different. So seeing the emails from companies and organizations that are committing to diversity, equity and inclusion work in a way that they never have before. That is really encouraging to me. I think the other thing that is giving me hope is that I do feel despite the many, many challenges and tragedies related to the pandemic. I think it is forcing us to get back to a simpler way of connecting, obviously through video calls, it's not necessarily simpler, but as people begin to gather safely outside in parks and having picnics, it feels like there's a simplicity to human connection and just having good conversations and being outside and enjoying the sunshine that I think I may have forgotten about it. And I don't know if I'm alone in that, that I think we sort of forgot about. We don't need a fancy restaurant and a lot of drinks and all of these other things in order to connect, we really just need to be together. And so that has also given me hope that we're rethinking how we want to do life, rethinking the busy-ness, the rushing around, the need to spend money all the time. And so that gives me hope as well. 

Tiffany Yu: Beautiful. one of my greatest learnings from this pandemic has been, what I have is enough. And I visit that often, but loved having you on the show idea. If people want to follow you or follow up with your work, what's the best way to do that? 

Adia Gooden: Yeah, thanks for having me. So you can find me on Instagram at @DrAdiaGooden. Facebook, same name. I also have a website, www.dradiagooden.com. So please reach out, follow me, would love to hear from you. 

Tiffany Yu: Thanks Adia. And that's the end of the show. 

Adia Gooden: Thanks so much.

Tiffany Yu
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