Where Does The Healing Start?

“We are traumatized and living traumatic experiences,” Howard K. Hill told a filled Bethel AME Church. ​“Some of us are in denial, and some of us are perpetuating the trauma.”

How to change that for African Americans was the subject of a symposium on racial trauma and mental illness.

Several of the city’s foremost African-American leaders and clinicians led a wide-ranging discussion that touched on the historic, race-based trauma that black people have endured for centuries to the modern reality of unarmed black people who are killed, or die in the custody of those who are sworn to protect them, the police.

The event, which was open to all members of the public, was held this past Thursday night at Bethel AME Church. It was sponsored by the Theta Epsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the Clifford Beers Clinic, the Community Action Agency of New Haven, the Community Healing Network, the Department of Family and Children Services, NAMI Connecticut and the NAACP of Greater New Haven.

Gary Rhule (pictured), a former emergency room doctor and author of Sailing on Broken Pieces: Essential Survival Skills for Recovery from Mental Illness, moderated much of the discussion. He laid out the work: ​“Faith-based organizations are where we go for help,” he said. ​“After Charleston, we’re not safe there. Schools aren’t safe in the wake of events like Columbine and Sandy Hook. Where are we safe?”

And a man from the audience had and even harder question: Where do we begin to address the issues?

The answer? There are no easy answers.

Enola Aird (pictured), founder and president of the Community Healing Network, reached back 400 years to talk about where the healing has to begin.

“For at least 400 years we have been living according to a script that was written for us,” she said. ​“The heart of that script is that we black people, we are inferior, we are less than, and the world is conditioned to treat us as such,” she said. ​“Every single day, we are made to remember that our lives are of no value. That black lives don’t matter as much as white lives.

“When are we going to stop performing to that narrative, and write our own,” she asked. Aird, who is an advocate for what she called ​“emotional emancipation,” said the work of healing such historical trauma involves attacking the historic narrative of white superiority and black inferiority. She said emotional emancipation looks like ​“a broad based movement for healing and wellness; no one should be excluded because no one is unaffected.”

For state Department of Children and Family Services Deputy Commissioner of Operations Michael Williams, who also happens to be a pastor, healing for the black community means finding a way to talk about at least ​“three things that are taboo in church”: the physical discipline of children; domestic violence; and sexual assault and abuse.

“These issues are very real and profound, and they cause us as a department to make some very tough choices in the lives of children,” he said. ​“Children with untreated traumas grow up to do thing that we wish they wouldn’t do.”

Cathy Patton (pictured), president of the Theta Epsilon Omega Chapter of AKA, said part of the healing process that has to happen is a re-education of black people around who they are and what they have contributed to a society that doesn’t value them. That re-education has to start not at school, where people tend to receive an incomplete picture of the contributions of African Americans, but at home.

Thretha Green (pictured), a psychologist with Clifford Beers’s MOMS Project, added that not only does that re-education have to happen in the home, but it has to be reaffirmed in the community. Green, who became of mother of three by the time she was 21, said that it was the adults in her life who kept her pushing to pursue all that she has ultimately achieved.

“We have to teach our boys who grow up to be men, and our girls who will become women that life matters, education matters,” she said. ​“They are smart, beautiful and anything they want they can achieve.”

She said that also means when traumatic things happen, whether it is violence at home, or even when school friends are killed, the community has to rally to aid of children and help them through a healing process.

“We have to advocate for our children,” Green said. She said when children in New Haven are murdered, she doesn’t see the same level of crisis response for the children who are left behind to deal with the ongoing emotional trauma that she sees in suburban schools. When New Haven children are experiencing trauma at home and acting out at school, she said children are more likely to be labeled and punished rather than treated for mental illness. ​“We often hear that our children are monsters, while other children have mental health issues,” she said.

But how do people rebuild the strong sense of community and maintain it beyond Thursday’s event, in a society at-large that values individualism, a man from Stamford asked.

The Rev. Bonita Grubbs (pictured at the top of the story), director of Christian Community Action., said part of the work is to engage. ​“We have the opportunity to engage in activity that creates collective action,” she said. ​“But it’s hard. We have our own things going on, and goals that we want to set for ourselves.”

Dori Dumas, president of the NAACP of Greater New Haven, said she’s encouraged that people are trying to move the needle on social justice and issues of inequality in things like education, housing and even the issue of law enforcement, but one of the hurdles that black people continue to face is access to health care and that includes mental health care.

How does a community that feels resource poor, build a safety net to address so many problems?

Hill (pictured) said he has long tried to use his professional experience to get at some of the very issues, particularly the economic issues, that came up during Thursday’s symposium.

“The reality is that we lack an economic base to do some of the work that needs to be done on our own,” he said. ​“We don’t have a lot of wealth, but we spend the most money.”

He said the community has to figure out how to leverage its spending power in a way that benefits more of the organizations that are doing the work of addressing issues such as mental illness, that are also in constant competition with organizations that are better connected and funded.