In Dr. Joy DeGruy’s fascinating book “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome”, she highlights how behaviors learned from slavery still impact Black households today negatively.

For instance, whoopings. Slave masters would beat and abuse their slaves to keep them “aligned” and obedient. Then to protect their children from the master and overseers, Black families would whoop their children when they were “misbehaving” bc they didn’t want any reason for the master to do it or have their kids taken away. The stakes were high.

But the issue is that those protective whoppings from Black adults back then, who were abused slaves, was never eradicated.

Fast forward a century and now we have a generation of adults who will beat their children like runaway slaves for not being obedient. Their rationale for it is rooted in generational trauma from seeking control and obedience.

No wonder we have adults who are so disconnected from their bodies. You were abused. See it for what it is.

The most under protected class of our society are children. How confusing is it to have a parent who love bombs you with how much you mean to them and how much they care about you; and for them to be the same person who will mutilate your body leather to skin with full force. If we were talking about domestic abuse, then there is a more obvious reaction amongst sensible adults. But when it comes to children, those same sensible adults can justify it.

It’s no longer the 1800s, as I said in my previous argument, where the abuse is rightly justified as protection training. However, we do now live in a society where police brutality seemingly justifies using the same tactics. If the police are beating our children, we might as well beat them to it … no? Yeah I hope you see how absurd that sounds!

What do we actually gain when our children, who will someday become adults seeking love and affection from others, have received physicial mutilation both at home and in the streets. Who can they run to for full, authentic, and genuine affection that doesn’t view struggle and pain as a means to an end?

bell hooks (y’all better stop capitalizing my girl’s name) wrote:

“In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children's rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse. Unlike women who can organize to protest sexist domination, demanding both equal rights and justice, children can only rely on well-meaning adults to assist them if they are being exploited and oppressed in the home.”

As a former child who was severely abused within the privacy of her home and sworn to secrecy to not speak of the wounds that were inflicted upon and visible on MY body, it can feel so lonely within my body and inside this world.

In September 2022, I had a psychotic break that manifested physically. While laid out on my floor in front of my washer, gripping my body tight between my arms, I was reliving every moment my parent hit or kicked me as if it was happening in that moment. A visceral, physical memory that my brain tried to hide from me for years, but with the right trigger the flood of corporal memories came back.

Children grow into adults who will either mentally or physically remember the pain that was bestowed upon them. Our bodies can hold trauma just as well as our brains can. The book, “The Body Keeps Score” medically spells this out so well.

I am an adult who had to learn how to set boundaries. Who had to learn how to demand consent when touching my body. Who had to learn what is my body.

It seemed as if everyone else knew what to do with my body except for me — for 28 years.

This realization and the book made me tap back into yoga not as an exercise, but as a practice for learning how to breathe again. Learning how to feel myself again.

So if you are an adult who was abused as a child, I challenge you to pay attention to your body when certain memories surface. What tenses up? For some, it’s possible that you’ve neglected that area for so long that the somatic and sensational experience is actually numb to you as you read this.

What do you feel?

Here’s what’s been useful for my own journey of healing from mental and physical childhood abuse:

>Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
>Power Vinyasa Yoga
>Moving my hips to Afrobeats music (our hips store trauma)
>Reading about others experiences and talking about my own with trusted others
>Validating my own emotions and memories
>Journaling daily (more like hourly… more like minutely lol)

Envision me, Michole, as a healed version of your parent that did abuse you. I really want you to hear this from the depths of my heart:

“I am sorry that I hurt and disrespected YOUR body. It is yours and was never mine. I am sorry I didn’t know how to teach you how to love your body. I am sorry I am too scared to go to therapy to heal from the trauma my parents inflicted upon me in which I passed down to you. I am sorry.”

——

There are other pieces of work that I did not mention directly in this article but I want to bring attention to only by name:
>Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish
>Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy & Confronting Adult Supremacy
>Another article I wrote about the commonalities between Police Brutality and Math class (linked below)