The Link Between Racial Trauma, Allostatic Load and Manifesting Money
Soon, I will do a whole webinar unpacking how the trauma of colonization, apartheid and slavery affects our allostatic load and how this impacts our health, nervous system and finances.
In a nutshell: the allostatic load refers to the various ways the body (and nervous system) responds to stress.
There's whole scientific research, even in medicine, being done on this.
When a person is constantly exposed to stressful situations such as racism and microaggressions, the body gets overloaded and it becomes harder and harder for the nervous system to process ish.
(This is the actual definition of trauma as well - events that happen so often, they are difficult to process because the nervous system is overwhelmed).
So imagine being exposed to daily microaggressions and overt racism...that ish overloads our entire nervous system and makes it harder for our nervous systems to get back to baseline functioning.
And because racism is a constant freaking never ending nightmare, we are always on edge, our nervous systems are always on, which affects us physically because we are always trying to process and integrate events, thus overwhelming our entire system and making us exhausted and making it hard to think of other life events.
(So if you’re Black and constantly exhausted AF, this is one of the reasons).
So even when people tell us to get into pleasure and relax and go manifest things, it's not that easy.
We literally have to fight a nervous system that’s overwhelmed and screaming that we’re not safe (because micro aggressions and just wypipo being themselves).\
You cannot talk about trauma without talking about oppression
I am so tired of white healers who want to teach us how to heal without addressing oppression and making us believe that all you need to manifest is recite a few affirmations and visualize.
That is traumatic AF.
I would argue that White people's allostatic load is very different to Black people's - they feel safe and relaxed when they go about basic mundane ish, like being at the office and being surrounded by fellow white people at a meeting.
(In case you were wondering - the corporate space is hella traumatic for Black people, many of us have to code switch just to survive. Code switching is literally being in character for 8 hours just to make white people feel okay with our existence).
White people don't freak out when they see the cops or walk in "good neighborhoods", they don't have to be on their best behavior at all times in public.
So less stress and feeling safe doing basic mundane things.
Hello white privilege...I see you.
Their nervous systems are doing less work than ours on a daily basis.
We DO NOT always have this privilege, we are often on high alert in many countries, which means our nervous systems are on alert, so of course our healing journey is going to be different.
As far as I am concerned, asking Black people to heal and giving us the same manifesting exercises without understanding racial trauma and how it affects us, is unfair and violent.
