I remember our firstborn watching me and my ex-husband have a disagreement on the phone. His dad took a tone with me that I did not like and I said I was about to end the conversation because it appeared that he was upset about something that had nothing to do with me. I told him that if he was upset about the summer schedule, he was welcome to be a part of the planning process next summer and told him to have a good day.
I am not really sure what was going through my son’s mind, but I saw him processing. Together, we read part of “The Four Agreements,” and discussed two of them: take nothing personally and be impeccable with your word. I’d like to think he was processing how I modeled these agreements while maintaining my dignity and honoring his dad’s. When we discussed being impeccable with our words, my son pushed back pretty hard, mentioning that he was about that retaliation life, and that he was not going to “take that level of disrespect.”
“The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom” is a self-help book written by Don Miguel Ruiz. Photo courtesy Amazon.com
Most of us have a level of trauma that does not allow us to manage our response to perceived disrespect. After reading “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies,” I was wondering how much of this is generational trauma masquerading as Black culture. Severely emotionally underdeveloped human traffickers taught us how to respond to embarrassment. We learned that the way to respond to having our intellect challenged, our physical strength tested, or embarrassment was to inflict physical and/or emotional pain. Black people learned that the powerful inflict pain when embarrassed.
But we also learned that tolerance for embarrassment is the safest response for those unable to wield their physical power. Safety can be a hell of a drug. It is what our brain craves and remembers, even when circumstances have changed—even when we no longer need to be protected.
As my mentor says,
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