If you are feeling dysregulated right now
We are not even two months into the current administration in the US and there is a lot going on.
If you are feeling angry, frustrated, scared and dysregulated, that makes sense.
I’ve been feeling strangely calm. And yes, this is partly a trauma response where chaos, danger and the unknown feel familiar.
I also don’t feel like I can really afford to let my nervous system get too dysregulated.
I’m determined that no one gets to steal my healing or my joy.
Honestly, I suspect that feeling calm makes a lot less sense but it is what it is.
And I do think it is helpful to be able to feel all the emotions and regulate yourself through them. “Crashing out,” as the kids say, may make sense but doesn’t feel great, nor is it a helpful place to get stuck in. Numbing your feelings and white knuckling it forward is not the greatest either.
My “crashing out” happened in the run up to and aftermath of the 2016 election. Although by the time it happened, I wasn’t as surprised as some, I was still thrown off guard in a way that made me realize that I had some major blind spots.
My biggest question was - why were my white liberal progressive friends so shocked about the outcome of the election? Why was I discovering they thought racism was over? Why did I think they knew it wasn’t? Had they actually felt safe up until then? Why was this news to me? And why was it news to them that I hadn’t?
I felt betrayed. And to be honest I felt and still feel a little embarrassed and horrified that I was caught so off guard. I discovered that Black folks in particular had mostly known all along, and had never had the privilege of not needing to know.
I swore I would not be caught off guard again. That meant learning about the history of systemic racism, learning about the experiences of Black folks and how the similarities and differences to mine, and also learning about the experiences of white folks and the similarities and differences to mine as a British Born Chinese American.
Context is very grounding I have found
People often ask us, why do we have to spend time on history?
Well, that’s what history is - context. Understanding how we got here helps us to understand what is happening and why, which helps us understand how to move forward.
Which helps us ground in reality and not be so dysregulated.
I was recently asked - do I think what is happening now was inevitable? The answer is no, absolutely not, there are always multiple possibilities, but what we’re seeing now was set in motion hundreds of years ago.
To gain context, and I mean visceral, embodied context, not just intellectual context, it can help to engage in content that takes us on a factual and evidence based yet still emotional journey, especially if up until now your lived experiences have been somewhat removed from the experience of systemic oppression.
Here are some (personal and therefore admittedly skewed) recommendations - especially for folks who are feeling dysregulated and thrown off guard and are looking to gain some context (I suggest the first two and the last and then pick what you like from the rest):
A Pimple Is Most Painful Just Before it Bursts, by Jackie Summers on Substack
If you do nothing else, read this article! Jackie Summers brilliantly describes, and graphs, the trajectory of how we got here.
The problem isn’t new. The problem is the Constitution. If the founders had just had the temerity to say, “We don’t actually believe this ‘all men are created equal’ crap; we enslave humans. We mean white male landowners, full stop.” They could’ve had the plutocracy they wanted… Instead, they tried to have it both ways. They gave oppression the language of freedom. And now, the system is running a command it was never meant to execute.
Scene on Radio’s Seeing White podcast
14 episodes in total, with each episode generally falling between 30-50 minutes long, this podcast provides a powerful and critical understanding of exactly how the concept of race has been constructed and embedded into every aspect of our culture and systems here in the US. This understanding is the foundation upon which meaningful conversations about race and the history of this country that lead to action and change can be built, plus it’s incredible and highly listenable audio documentary storytelling, NPR style. Transcripts are also available for those who prefer to read rather than listen.
Kindred, by Octavia Butler
A fictional story based on the realities of the pre-Civil War South, you experience the culture that is at the foundation of this country and from which everything stems - plantation culture - first person through the time-traveling experiences of the modern-day (well, 1970s but close enough) protagonist.
Jubilee, by Margaret Walker
This is another fictionalized but historically grounded account based on the life of Margaret Walker’s great grandmother, born enslaved to an enslaved mother and slave-owning father, spanning from the antebellum period, through the Civil War and into Reconstruction.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
A lot of people are making comparisons to Nazi Germany before World War I… but the Nazis looked to Jim Crow America for inspiration. In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells history in the form of dramatized accounts based on actual research into the experiences of Black Americans as they fled the South for the North and West in the hopes of escaping oppression.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
No this is not about American History, but it’s important history covering the twentieth century in China, which was not that long ago, and not that many generations ago for those of Chinese descent. I read this in 2017 and it was and continues to be grounding to me to know some of what my people have survived.
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
This covers a similar time period, following several generations of a Korean family in Japan.
Fellow Travelers - TV series on Paramount+
This may seem like an odd choice to include on this list but it is also “historical fiction” in tv show form - a decades long chronicle of the relationship between two gay men that starts during the McCarthy era of the 1950s and ends in the 1980s with the AIDS crisis. Based on a book by Thomas Mallon (although I understand the book focuses on the 1950s) this series makes very present the history of LGBTQIA+ oppression, touching on the intersection with gender and race, and unfortunately is quite resonant with the kind of persecution that is alive and well and becoming more so today.
The Mask You Live In
Documentary directed by Jennifer Newsom, available to view for free (1 hour 30 mins). This documentary beautifully unpacks the negative impact on the prevalent culture of toxic masculinity in the US not just on women but on our boys and men. It also shows the impact on gun violence, rape culture, homophobia, depression, alcoholism, addiction, and sexual abuse, powerfully articulated through both storytelling and data.
DEI as healing and joy
The list above may seem like tough subject matter, and it is, and I know we’re tired of having to be resilient, and wary of "trauma porn" but I think they also provide a pathway to understanding that what we’re experiencing now is not unique, and that people have always constructed systems to do terrible terrible things to each other, and also that beauty, joy and love persist.
I find it comforting that we are not better but we’re not worse than the worst we’ve ever been. For some people, the worst case scenario has already happened. And I think for many of us there is still a whole lot worse that things could be.
One of the amazing things about DEI work, at least DEI how we practice it at Co-Creating Inclusion, is that it is an invitation to relief, the relief that comes from healing in community, in collaboration, in creativity, in connection.
It’s an opportunity to heal that does not have to be extractive. It’s a chance to step out of disproportionate giving and taking and to experiment with a new kind of interdependence.
There’s a kind of synergy where there are healthy boundaries but also healthy interchanges between various parts of your life and you become more of an embodied whole.
This is also the joy and reward of decolonization, as LaVoya recently reminded me, given that colonization seeks to sever us into pieces, literally and figuratively, disconnecting us from ourselves, each other, and the land, and also from the truth.
The invitation
If you’re feeling dysregulated, if you’re feeling exhausted, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, the invitation is to consider - what is it that you need to understand? What information are you missing? Where are your blindspots? What truths are you missing? What context do you need to feel grounded in the trajectory of history and clearer about the part you can play?
What do you need to heal from the untruths you have been told, and the systems of oppression you have been subjected to?
Healing is not separate from the work - it is the work, as critical in times of crisis as ever. Hurt people hurt people. The cycle needs to be broken, internally, interpersonally, and culturally.
Banner photo from Unsplash+
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