How Racial Trauma Affects our Nervous Systems and Finances
One of the things I do in my work is help people feel safe in their bodies. I look at how trauma affects our sense of safety, how that affects our nervous systems and in turn affects our financial behavior and holds us back from expanding.
So I thought it would be good to share some of the teachings here today.
Please note: you can substitute what I wrote about racism with abuse. Physical, emotional and verbal abuse affects our sense of safety in a similar manner. And of course when we come from situations of abuse and also experience trauma, the effects are layered.
The link between racism, safety, the nervous system & financial behavior
On a macro level Black people have experienced a lot of physical abuse from the time of our ancestors until today, which left us feeling physically unsafe.
But let's not forget the violence that comes from daily microaggressions and how that can be registered by the brain as scary and can make us feel unsafe and cause us to become hyper vigilant.
What happens when we find ourselves in spaces (at work or even our kids who are at these racist schools) where we are constantly experiencing racism and registering micro-aggressions/ danger (emotional, verbal or physical) 24/7 and always have to be alert and watching what we say and do?
How does that affect us?
1. Physical and emotional safety
This constant need to be vigilant and aware of every move we make, can lead us to this feeling of not being safe and always on guard.
If our ancestors lived with a chronic feeling of "not being safe" (or we lived with that feeling as kids which just compounds onto the ancestral fears) that feeling of unsafety would have been passed down to us.
To survive danger, human beings go into a state of fight or flight and usually run or fight the danger and then their nervous systems calm down and process the trauma when the danger is gone.
But what happens when humans, like our ancestors, and now us, are in a state of perpetual danger and never feel safe because of colonization, apartheid, slavery, shootings or even micro aggressions?
To survive the constant danger, our ancestors learned to be hyper aware and turned their nervous systems on and kept them on, so they were ready to run or fight.
And some of us inherited this trait because we were born into the same scary situations.
So now imagine being in an environment (workplace or school) where your system is registering constant danger, all day?
Some of us just feel scared and anxious for no reason, constantly exhausted, lack of clarity and just feel stuck because when we're scared we also "freeze" which comes across as procrastination and an inability to take action financially or otherwise.
There is a branch of psychology that links procrastination to anxiety.
Also can you imagine the exhaustion that comes with being constantly alert and strategizing every small action and how much energy that takes away from our minds, especially since the mind already has a limited amount of energy for decision making?
Is it any wonder that so many of us are too exhausted to make good financial decisions (this is known as decision making fatigue) around financial freedom because so much of our decision making energy is being used on basic survival?
Being ready for danger may sound good, but it's not, it means heightened stress hormones, a constant fight or flight feeling, anxiety, which leads to a host of physical ailments and let's not forget our womb issues.
These racist workplaces are actually costing us money and so much more in the long run and here we are thinking we are making money.
2. Recreating environments of safety within our relationships
When we've lived in unsafety or with this feeling of unsafety for a long time, and we stay alive, our subconscious can start to believe that this feeling of unsafety is what keeps us safe and we will find ourselves recreating situations that make us feel unsafe, just so we can always be on guard and feel "safe".
So think about how systems of oppression start to change how people relate to each other and how that violence we experience at a macro level starts being replicated at a micro level with physical violence and rape...
This is also a huge part of why we recreate the same stressful financial situations, because the mind wants to have that feeling of unsafety, so the nervous system can switch on and give us the illusion of being safe.
That's why for soo many of us, relationships with no drama are boring and not stressing about money feels strange, because lack of stress calms the nervous system and trauma has taught us that is NOT okay.
This is also why we can stay in abusive relationships, don’t leave and keep going back even if it means death because trauma changes the wiring of our brain. It confuses us to see dangerous situations as safe. This goes deeper than self love or self worth.
3. Vows of invisibility
If they can't see us, they can't harm us/kill us.
This is simple logic and most of our ancestors stayed safe by staying invisible or just staying under the radar as much as possible.
So our vows of invisibility are tied to physical safety, especially for Black people.
4. Not good enough
A huge part of not feeling safe is that it changes the way we see the world, the way we interact with it and the way we see ourselves as part of the world.
But not only that, the core tenet of racism is that Black people are inferior and less than, in essence: not good enough.
The system is designed to make us see this and reinforces it in overt and subtle ways, which changes the way we see ourselves and our abilities, which affects our confidence and our belief in ourselves around building successful businesses, making money and even how we parent our kids.
The way we see ourselves affects soo much - if we see ourselves as unsafe and unprotected by the Divine it will affect how we show up in the world, our ability to receive, which in turn affects our finances.
If we can start to heal our traumas and release them on a physical level, rewire the nervous system, we can start to feel safer in our bodies, which can help us feel safer with money and start to change the way we behave with money at a faster rate and it is easier to release our vows because part of us can start to see that we no longer need them to keep us safe.
This is why we need to work on integrating and processing trauma so we can feel safe in our bodies so we can calm our nervous systems and expand financially.
Trauma work has to coincide with work on racism, colonization and patriarchy because for Black, Brown and Indigenous people, our financial trauma also stems from these systems of oppression.
If this resonated with you and you wanna learn more about feeling safe in your body; this is the work I teach in the #MoneyMagic course. You can check out the course at the link below.
