A Call to Healing Asian Racialized Trauma
Jessica Cho Kim, LCSW is an Asian American psychotherapist, researcher, parent, and current doctoral student in social welfare at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.
25 March 2021
Asians don’t understand our racialized trauma. Not because we don’t feel it deep in our bodies as we move through our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. But because we don’t talk about it. We don’t know how to. Our parents didn’t bring it up. Our teachers didn’t profess it. Our politicians never mentioned it. There is no discourse, no social movement, no textbooks, no hashtag to express the racialized psychic condition of being polite outsiders devoid of a real human face, tepidly dis-liked, reflexively dismissed, and lacking in political agency.
But as a mental health provider, I do understand trauma. When people are faced with stressors beyond their capacity to successfully overcome, we can experience myriad physical, emotional, and cognitive reactions. Many responses are often involuntary, reflexive, and out of our immediate awareness. At a rudimentary level, we can have hyper-arousal responses of “turning on” such as panic, intrusive thoughts, and fearful avoidance, or hypo-arousal responses of “turning off” such as dissociating, numbing out, and withdrawing from those around us. We can be filled with fear, shock, confusion or shame. Some effects are short-lived while others can have a lasting impact on how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Ultimately, trauma robs us of our most basic human need – safety.
Thanks in large part to Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda’s landmark study[1], our understanding of trauma in recent decades has evolved our initial prototype of combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder to a more expansive investigation that includes adulthood physical and mental health consequences of cumulative adverse childhood experiences. Indeed, we now know that even common albeit painful experiences such as parental neglect, parental divorce, or experiencing the death of a loved one can produce traumatic responses wherein the chronic and pervasive effects of relentless stress hormones can lead to physical illness like heart disease, gastrointestinal disease, and cancer. However, we are nowhere near establishing the breadth and depth of the effects of pervasive race-based traumatic stress[2], particularly among Asians living America.
In light of rising anti-Asian xenophobia and violence in our country, even seasoned trauma-informed clinicians don’t conceive the opportunity cost of adhering to seminal works like Bessel van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps the Score[3] in guiding an assessment of their Asian clients. Lacking in general racial literacy, much less specific to Asians, the vast majority of therapists are not asking, “How is racial discrimination affecting you?” “What is your family’s migration story?” “What struggles did your family endure?” “Where do you feel seen and heard as an Asian person?” What gets missed over and over again in the radar of even the most empathic therapists when working with Asian Americans are the cumulative effects of the ambiguous losses and complex racialized trauma so many of us have endured – the nebulous yet undeniably embodied ways in which many Asians living in America experience erasure, ridicule, exploitation, and violence – all while being told our perceptions are not real.
What can racialized trauma look like? When I read the headlines about the fatal shootings of Asian women at massage spas in Georgia, I did what I did with every other newsfeed of anti-Asian violence and kung-flu rhetoric over the last year. I immediately shut down. I went numb, I felt nothing. It was ironic given my public outrage over George Floyd’s murder. This is a classic trauma response often overlooked by its more popular “fight or flight” cousins, namely freeze. Freezing encompasses the attempt of our body’s parasympathetic nervous system to protect us when we don’t perceive it will benefit our situation to attack or escape the source of danger.
So, we do nothing and instead wait for the danger to pass. In other words, it’s the typical response when we feel helpless to act yet still need a way to feel safe. This response often results in feeling stuck, paralyzed, numb, and surrounded by anticipatory dread. In the animal kingdom, we see this play out in small prey just before they’re about to be devoured, and sometimes the ensuing loss of interest by the predator at what now appears to be an already lifeless meal leads to the narrow survival of the smaller animal. This is sort of akin to the countless children lying at night in dark bedrooms who upon hearing scary noises coming from their closet immediately pretend they’re dead. Well, I went to that place over and over again during this pandemic. And pulled the proverbial covers over my head to hibernate.
I knew this feeling all too well and hated the familiarity of it all. Racism is something I wish to long forget, like an old bully you regret ever letting get to you. But random, jarring echoes of ching-chong-guk dot the landscape of my childhood. As a little kid, it didn’t matter that I never actually knew what the hell they meant. You could always feel what they meant - something about me was wrong, defective, and ugly. Never in private, these slurs were usually yelled out in the broad daylight of a street, hallway, or mall where even responsible adult witnesses didn’t blink an eye, which to a young person signals that the whole system feels this way about you. The harmful impact of the ongoing, random, and unprovoked nature of such microaggressions[4] are grist for the mill in better understanding how racialized trauma responses are elicited.
Heart racing, heat flooding my face, wanting to disappear, by early elementary school I eventually learned to build up a wall that became a fortress over time – as long as I didn’t let anything bother me, nobody could hurt me. The only problem with that kind of numbing is that your body can’t selectively block good feelings from bad feelings, and the result is a muted version of yourself in a dull black and white movie that was once vibrant with the colors of your authentic self.
There is a name for this kind of ambiguous loss of self. David Eng and Shinhee Han, professors at University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University respectively, call this racial melancholia and racial dissociation in their book titled the same[5], in which they poignantly capture the nuances of how Asians are racialized as having no race in America where our social contract is to be compliant and colorblind. Asians have been simultaneously assimilated and excluded from social political domains in this country and to survive here is be a chameleon of sorts, changing and mutating to whatever shape necessary as a form of harm reduction as it were. The cost of course comes to your dynamic personality, your unfiltered development and expression, your fully embodied Asian self.
Racialized trauma can be vicarious. This sense of marginalization solidified into a cynical hardness in my heart every time I watched how people interacted with my parents. The furrowed brows of irritated confusion and patronizing patience from store clerks, school administrators, or parents of classmates at playdates always activated my hypervigilance into damage control mode where I was ready to intervene at the very moment right before things unraveled into embarrassing misunderstandings or just as the white person became too uncomfortable.
I cannot pinpoint the moment when I internalized the cardinal rule that I needed to apologetically prevent white people from being too inconvenienced by my family’s oriental awkwardness. But it was a lesson of survival I swallowed at a young age like a pill of shame - we were outsiders, lucky to be here, and sorry for any trouble to the American system, please bear with us as we adapt. We promise not to take up too much space, talk too loudly with our unpleasant accents, or break any social rules you provide.
This survival metaphor wasn’t hyperbolic as I learned one day that my petite mother had been physically assaulted by a belligerent white man twice her size at her own frozen yogurt store, a business, by the way, I was secretly relieved wasn’t a stereotypical dry cleaning operation. Avoiding one stereotype however could not protect my mother from the fury of a racist man that his teenage daughter was let go from her job after she had refused for weeks to mop the floors at closing, by the audacity of a foreigner with broken English. My mother was able to dodge the plexiglass waffle cone stand he hurled across the counter at her head, but the experience left her feeling unsteady in her own store for a long time.
What went through his mind as he drove over? There was no civil phone call to discuss the matter. He had one aim, which was to give this oriental lady a piece of his mind about her place in this country – to him, my mother was not a person, she was some Chinese bitch. My parents didn’t like to talk about what happened that day and it felt like something to be ashamed about, and certainly not something to dwell on.
It hit me one day as an adult that I had spent my entire life stepping aside on the sidewalk whenever a white person was walking toward me. Why did I automatically do this? After all, the sidewalk was public property. As an experiment one afternoon, I resisted the urge to move out of the way only to find that we literally bumped shoulders. Nothing could convince me otherwise that day – Asians are invisible here. Except of course when I started to be “seen” sexually.
Asian women have an added intersectional burden of how we move through spaces in America. It’s disturbing to reflect back now at how young I was the first time I heard the usual ching-chong-guk laced with a novel me-love-you-long-time and konnichiwa. I was in 5th grade when my white friend’s much older teenage cousin tried to intimidate me with these rhetorical questions into the corner of the bedroom when we were momentarily alone. Even her father made comments about my body, how nice and slender oriental women were, whenever I got into his car.
This strange code of behavior from older boys and grown men continued as I entered middle school and became commonplace by high school when I came to routinely anticipate the sexualized cat calls tinged with racist undertones on the street in the summertime from huddled construction workers, murmuring pedestrians, and obnoxious drivers passing by. It was as if they were all programmed with an automatic script, and as a young girl I couldn’t understand where these predictable broadcasts came from. What always left me feeling most on edge was how they didn’t see me as a person. I was a thing, something to be gawked at, collectively appraised, and used for entertainment. One time in high school, I found myself at a red light next to a truck driver honking erratically to get my attention, window rolled down, masturbating while cackling in delight. Just ignore him, don’t react, look straight ahead, this will soon be over too.
Gaslighting is the denial of the reality of another person. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and renown speaker, explains this phenomenon well[6]. Explicitly, it sounds like, “That’s not what happened, you’re being too sensitive, are you sure it was racism?” Complicitly, it looks like the scenes I described where good people stand by and do nothing. The prevailing message becomes that whatever racialized experience an Asian person is having, it is not as relevant, as serious, or as urgent as we may make it seem. Many Asians naturally assume a baseline level of trust in societal authority to which we defer and give benefit of the doubt, instead doubting ourselves.
It is precisely how gaslighting thrives as emotional abuse in domestic violence circles. It starts in families of origin where parents dismiss children’s perceptions, steadily over time. Children learn to question and blame themselves, maybe I am overreacting. As adults they enter abusive relationships with partners who manipulate their lack of personal agency. Over time, victims succumb to agree with their abusers and externally appear like a united front.
This has striking parallels with how the model minority myth racializes Asians into a taken for granted system of white supremacy. Internally, we’re repressed by self-doubt, apathy, helplessness and uncertain paranoia. Externally, we are thriving as an aggregate monolith. What are you complaining for? You people are doing so well. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
With each text thread circulating among my Asian American friends about what was happening, the han[7] in my Korean DNA swelled inside my adult body and rage swept to cover the old shame and push down any hint that I might still be affected by any of this. There is no point to getting worked up. Nobody cares. And just like that, I was stuck in freeze mode again, detached and safe from harm. Except this time, the forged nature of this phony kind of safety was something I knew would no longer be enough. Because now I’m a parent with three young children whose Asian faces are part of the racialized fabric of this society.
Racialized trauma can be intergenerational. I can participate in either proactively partnering with my children or passively existing alongside them as they navigate their racist world alone. The former is my only chance at repairing the effects of hate and the latter is to repeat its legacy in another generation. Intergenerational trauma is perpetuated by the loss of conditions that are necessary for healing to be supported. But how do we begin to provide these conditions?
A hallmark of collective trauma work is to bear witness to the grief, according to Linda Thai, a trauma therapist and educator[8]. This also pertains to the racialized trauma the Asian community is experiencing at this moment in our history. Collective inner grief as an Asian community allows for the possibility for there to be collective outer mourning as a country. In order to mourn we need allies to be a container for us, validating our experience, letting us know we are seen – as humans, as Americans.
This is especially relevant for Asian American parents who are desperately seeking guidance in this age of heightened xenophobia and Asian hate. Many Asian parents I speak to fear they will induce more harm and unnecessary anxiety by discussing racism with their children. What parents need to understand is the actual unseen harm we are complicit in by pretending everything is fine when it is not, as we were conditioned to do through the gaslighting of whiteness in our own lives.
Repressing our own racialized trauma stifles our parental capacity to be present as resources for our children when they are faced with racism. Do our children feel they can safely share with us what a classmate said to them or will our overreaction make them regret they opened their mouth? Do they feel they will be understood by us or embarrassed for bringing it up? In what ways have we unwittingly modeled internalized racism by denigrating other Asians?
When caregivers are physically present but psychologically unavailable, it becomes difficult for a child to reconcile their unmet emotional needs as the family neglects to appropriately resolve losses[9] - in the case of racialized trauma, the loss of safety. By openly sharing, inviting dialogue, and listening in our homes without artificially claiming to have solutions, we can co-create spaces of safety for our children to revisit as racial encounters and questions inevitably arise in the future.
Acknowledging racialized trauma is critical for our healing. It starts with the unhedged naming of a racist encounter as racism - deliberately making the invisible visible and not rationalizing it away as something else. We cannot change the hearts of racist perpetrators. But we can help ourselves not be vulnerable to gaslighting by elevating the voices of the Asian community at this time, protecting our realities, and bearing witness to our stories.
We are grieving not only the terrible things that did happen that shouldn’t have, like the brutal murder of 6 Asian women, but also for the myriad things that did not happen that should have happened, like the countless times our marginalization was not acknowledged by anyone growing up. To counter this, explicitly witnessing reactions to racism for others is to offer meaning and safe spaces for your Asian friends and family members.
In some respects, the reactionary rush for quick solutions can be a performative and politicized distraction that deflects from the harder more vulnerable work of telling our buried truths, one by one. But in doing so, we can begin the collective grieving of all we have silently endured at the hands of white hegemony in the past that we’ve futilely tried to forget, and in doing so, be better positioned to overcome the rising terrorism our community is facing today.
Doing this work requires starting with ourselves. Reconciling Asian hate and gaslighting toward our community with racialized trauma discourse is a call to healing for all mental health providers, Asian American parents, and allies at this moment in our history. The mental health effects associated with the extrinsic challenges in gaining acceptance as Americans should not be relegated as a phenomenon endemic to Asian Americans to undertake nor simply absolved as the immigrant plight. Having shared language is a first step to begin to repair our collective trauma. Name it to tame it, as they say.
For parents, working on healing from our own painful past with racism can better equip us to be attuned for our children who so desperately need us as they return to school in the aftermath of this racialized pandemic. Educating ourselves with the Asian American history that was never taught to us can inform our racial literacy and racial socialization parenting practices. If you are an Asian parent who is still in denial about how racism in this country has impacted you, I strongly encourage us to continue exploring this with others in the Asian community, keeping in mind that our indifference or apathy is likely a trauma response of hypo-arousal as it was for myself and so many others who didn’t have the resources to process our experiences.
For mental health providers, having a racialized trauma lens can improve cultural competence when serving Asian American clients who present with what seems like “ordinary” depression, anxiety, or alcohol and substance abuse. Contextualizing distress with systemic racism while incorporating body based somatic approaches including mindfulness and meditation practices can be transformative.
For allies, offering empathy and solidarity to your Asian friends, neighbors, and colleagues can help to loosen the stranglehold of psychic damage from over a century of gaslighting to our community.
We owe it to ourselves and to our beautifully diverse Asian American communities to be free from the long suffering of this pernicious strain of invisibility and rightfully claim our space in this country so many of us call home.
Connect with Jessica Cho Kim via LinkedIn, through Twitter (@JessCKim1) or Instagram (@handerstanding)
[1] Felitti, Vincent J., et al. "Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study." American journal of preventive medicine 14.4 (1998): 245-258.
[2] Carter, R. T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress. The Counseling Psychologist, 35(1), 13-105.
[3] Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books, 2015.
[4] Sue, Derald Wing, et al. "Racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice." American psychologist 62.4 (2007): 271.
[5] Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. Racial melancholia, racial dissociation: On the social and psychic lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press, 2019.
[6] Durvasula, Ramani. Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving A Relationship with a Narcissist. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
[7] Kim, Elaine H. "Home is where the han is: A Korean American perspective on the Los Angeles upheavals." Social Justice 20.1/2 (51-52 (1993): 1-21.
[8] Thai, Linda. Unnameable Losses: The Unmetabolized Ambiguous Grief of Adult Children of Refugees. Collectively Rooted Virtual Conference, 2021.
[9] Pauline, Boss, and Pauline Boss. Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press, 2009.