11/30/2025
We LOVE this Educational Awareness: For those working in community with both systemic and collective trauma this may support your unlearning so we can learn how to hold space, treat and understand without stigmas & unconscious bias when working with racialized families, youth, & individuals.
Let’s get the real education from the lived experiences of the community themselves.
1.
When we treat trauma as an individual failing, we erase the systems that created the conditions for harm.
Systemic and collective trauma are not personal flaws — they are inherited survival responses rooted in colonization, displacement, racism, and structural violence.
If we do not understand this, we unconsciously pathologize racialized communities instead of supporting them.
2.
Trauma shows up as patterns: silence, secrecy, shame, hoarding, hyper-independence, distrust, emotional withdrawal, and “just push through.”
These are not character defects — they are adaptive strategies passed down from people who were forced to survive with no safety, no rest, and no resources.
When we work with families or youth, we are not just meeting the person in front of us, we are meeting their history.
3.
Unlearning stigma means shifting from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you, your family, and your community?”
This reframe protects dignity and allows care workers, educators, and service providers to hold space without bias, judgment, or saviorism.
4.
Communities living with the emotional legacy of slavery, migration, and systemic neglect develop their own ways of coping — some healthy, some harmful — but all rooted in survival.
When we dismiss those responses as “bad behaviour” or “poor choices,” we miss the deeper story of unresolved grief, inherited fear, and generations of unmet needs.
5.
Educational awareness must begin with lived experience.
Policy makers, clinicians, teachers, and community workers cannot meaningfully support racialized people without listening to the people themselves.
Textbooks do not explain what it feels like to be raised in a home shaped by unspoken trauma — elders and survivors do.
