Episode 3: Reclaiming Narratives (Black History Month Edition)

Welcome to My Mother’s Trauma, a podcast exploring feelings about families, what to do with what’s passed down to us, and how to break the cycle for more justice and liberation. I am your host, Kim Loliya. Let’s take a moment to breathe.

Greetings everyone and welcome to this Black History Month special edition episode as I’m recording this in October and that’s when Black History Month is happening in the UK.

We mark this month at a different time to folks in the US, Canada and other countries but as borders are colonial I wanted to welcome folks from all over the world into the month and into the conversations that we’re going to be having and especially as Ilike to get involved in what’s going on in the US in February, I think it’s only fair that we have a reciprocal arrangement and that we unite as black folks in the diaspora wherever we are.

And for this month we have lots of events coming up which I’m really excited about. a couple of quick announcements. For those based in London we’ll be offering a community workshop for Black History Month exploring Black stories of survival and the link to register for that is in the bio. I’m really excited to be doing something in person. It feels like a special treat to be able to meet in 3D in this tech age. We don’t get to do that a lot and it’s special over the course of this month to have at least one space where we can see each other and know each other in an in-person setting. It’s kind of like receiving a physical letter rather than an email, it feels different. For those who would like to celebrate with us virtually we have an incredible panel on decolonising therapy that will be taking place at the end of the month and mid-month we have an equally incredible live interview and Q&A with the one and only Shocka that I’m also really looking forward to. You can find all the links for these events in the show notes. If you’re interested come along and

I super look forward to connecting with you and seeing you either virtually or in person.

So the theme for this year’s Black History Month is reclaiming narratives and I wanted to spend some time with that in this episode and see what we make of it. It’s the kind of theme that’s wide enough to mean so many different things to different people which is the best kind of theme.

But I’m going to go with my gut and share a bit about what comes up for me knowing that it might be really different to what comes up for you and that’s okay. Perhaps a starting point could be whether we can own that our narratives don’t always belong to us.

The theme is about reclaiming our narratives but in order to do that we also need to understand that we’ve lost our narratives along the way, that others have robbed us of our narratives, whether that’s people, whether that’s corporations. And it’s enraging to think about the extent to which we have lost our narratives and we’ve become brainwashed by oppression.

I read somewhere that children in America can recognize 300 brand logos by the time they’re three years old and it’s probably not that different in other Western countries.

It’s so wild to think that before we can even talk we have narratives that are implanted by others into our brain. Before we’ve even developed a sense of our identity and of our values of who we want to be in the world, brands have swooped in and they fed us their story. And that story is so familiar we think that it’s who we really are and this all happens at an age where we haven’t developed the ability to think critically and even decide if we want to keep the narratives of others or reject them

So that work can’t happen at that time. We then grow up with these narratives and at some point we might be faced with a choice. We might have a need to excavate, to see the narratives that have been implanted into our brains and decide if we want to keep them or if we want to let them go. And this can be a hard process of unlearning but it’s one that starts with knowing that it’s possible to do this work if we want to, if we feel called into doing it, if it feels like it’s the right time. And if we decide to do this work there might be possibilities for healing, power and liberation along the way.

So who do these narratives belong to if they don’t belong to us? Well, it’s usually those who profit from a particular belief system who also happen to propagate it. So if we follow the money, so if we follow the money it’s likely to at least in part reveal who’s involved whether that’s people or systems or both.

And it’s really subtle. It’s not necessarily obvious to identify these narratives and these people and structures work in a really subtle way and that’s why there are so many people who think that they are free independent thinkers who struggle with the idea that they’ve got these narratives knocking around in their head that might not be their own and the more political and radicalised you are the harder it is to recognise that you might not own all your narratives and that these people and structures are profiting from these narratives being in your head. But in a way it’s not just those who identify as being political or radicalised, it’s really all of us in one way or another. I’ve never met anyone who’s managed to be completely narrative free and who’s managed to protect their mind completely from this kind of junk.

So in a way it could be quite freeing to acknowledge that this is a collective issue and that we need to reclaim our narratives on a much bigger scale. It goes way beyond us because it’s just completely impossible to live in this world without having to come to terms with what we’re fed by the systems that we exist in. And choice is a key component of this work, it’s primarily about choice. The right to choose whether we want to keep a narrative or let it go.

Even if it’s implanted by a corporation we might want to keep it, we might not have the spoons to work with it right now or even we might not feel safe enough to work with it right now so pragmatically we might choose to let it, so pragmatically we might choose to just let it be and that’s really valid.

When I see clients for therapy it’s quite scary how often I hear narratives that are stated as facts and that a client is not at all aware that what they’ve said is a narrative and not an absolute fact. It’s like there’s no internal alarm that goes off in our head to let us know that something isn’t a fact, it’s a narrative. So they sound just like our normal thoughts and that’s what makes it hard to work with them because we can’t distinguish them from our day-to-day chatter in our head.

And what I’ve done thinking about my practice and the narratives that I hear day to day, I thought that I would come up with some made up examples that are common narratives that I hear from people in my work and that can help contextualize how narratives can show up in practice and we can start to see where they might come from and what kind of work we could do with them. Let’s do some digging around these narratives. I’ve picked out some examples that might be helpful in illustrating how oppression can move in narrative form.

And the first example is the narrative that I’m not good enough because I have darker skin. The second one is my mum didn’t love me because I wasn’t as academic as my siblings. And the third one is if people really knew me they would reject me.

All three of these narratives have something in common, they tend to involve other people and they have some kind of theme or undertone of rejection which is also really common and they also can have an intergenerational component.

Some of us inherit these harmful narratives from our parents or from other family members. They can be passed down explicitly because we were told these narratives as we were growing up or they can be implicit because we’ve seen how our parents behave. We’ve noticed their body language in particular situations and off the back of that we’ve created a narrative. So in order to deconstruct these narratives we can start with a simple question. What people or structures are invested in us having these narratives?

In the first example of feeling lack of self-worth because of your skin, companies who make skin lightening creams definitely profit from you not feeling good enough but it’s not just those companies it’s also everyone who’s invested in white beauty standards as well as everyone who’s invested in patriarchy. All of those people don’t want you to believe that your skin is beautiful and that you’re worthy as you are. So that’s a ton of people who are upholding that narrative and who profit from it as well.

In the second example if you feel like you’re not worthy of love from a parent because you didn’t do as well at school compared to your siblings think about who benefits from you having low self-worth and low self-esteem.

It’s not just those who profit from white supremacy but it’s also ableism, classism, patriarchy and all the other systems that do well when you don’t feel good about yourself.

It’s also the food and alcohol companies who offer you their products when you feel low. It’s the social media conglomerates who encourage you to numb that lack of self-worth with scrolling. They also profit from your low self-esteem. So we’re really talking about hundreds of thousands of people if not millions who are invested in that one belief in thinking that because you didn’t do as well as other people you don’t deserve love. With the third example that was the one where there’s a fear that if people knew you they would reject you and that’s a really common narrative that we have.

It’s a narrative that’s based on existential shame, that feeling that people would fundamentally judge you for you being authentically yourself. So if you’re in shame because of a narrative like that you could be more prone to avoiding or rejecting people in your life and that could then affect your mental health. And in order to struggle with poor mental health you could then become reliant on other coping strategies for example shopping as a way of numbing your feelings.

So we have social isolation that leads to consumption in lots of different ways but it could also lead to overworking and then it’s your boss or your company that benefits from you doing overtime and not going on holiday or taking any time off, so again it’s this huge domino effect with all these different pieces of oppression that are connected and one narrative can be a trigger for all of these systems and people to then profit off of our suffering. So have a think about who are the culprits for you, who is profiting from your oppression and what kind of narratives are they using to do that?

And out of all the narratives that get implanted into our head by our culture and especially as it’s Black History Month we need to talk about some narratives that specifically relate to being black like being told that black people have never done this particular thing historically or this thing is just not a black thing. Those narratives, they tend to show up in fields like STEM because somehow it’s acceptable for us to be musicians and performers but not scientists or coders. We can be nurses but not doctors or writers. And so much of this comes from us being written out of our own histories. So it can feel like there aren’t many of us doing a particular thing but that’s only because

We don’t have enough examples of those who have come before us and it’s hard to be what you can’t see. In the last year or so I started growing my art practice from scratch and

It’s been so nurturing finding black people who make similar work to me. I remember the moment I found these folks and found their work online. It was like my brain completely rewired in a moment and about a hundred new narratives exploded in my head. They suddenly became available, suddenly I had a feeling that this was possible, that I could do this because I had seen other folks do it as well.

So it’s not just about weeding out harmful narratives because that will leave a big empty space that might just get filled up with more negative narratives and as they say, nature abhors a vacuum. So we need to consciously plant new generative narratives and that’s what I’m hoping we’ll be able to do during Black History Month this year, but also beyond as we travel throughout the year.

I feel like this theme of reclaiming narratives is about going into the wilderness and finding those narratives that make us feel powerful, the ones that society maybe doesn’t want us to have but they still make us feel good and they light us up.

Reclamation is such a deliberate act.

I feel like we’re being invited to be intentional about that process, intentional about how we reclaim narratives. It’s not an accident, it requires a kind of labour but there’s also a reward as well.

And having said the word deliberate I’m thinking about our ancestor Audrey Lord and how she used that word in her poetry. Audrey’s energy is very deliberate so if we’re doing this work with our narratives and we’re feeling exhausted because it’s a lot we might be able to remember Audrey and remember Audrey’s work to get some kind of support or even imagine that she’s cheering us on.

Every Black History Month I think about the Black folks who are left behind during this important time for our community. The disabled and chronically ill folks who can’t get to venues. The queer and trans Black folks who are afraid of violence and aggression in Black majority spaces.

Those who don’t have the money to pay for the bus, those who are too mentally unwell or immunocompromised to be in a crowded room, those folks are black too and they deserve to be centered in our celebrations. It’s not liberation if it doesn’t include all of us.

There are many tangible examples of what accessibility can look like. So in that sense it’s possible to do things differently. We just need to ask ourselves what else is possible.

And this is a narrative that I would like to reclaim and be more deliberate about in October and beyond because I would like more black folks to feel that they have a seat at the table during a month that centers us and our empowerment. And I hope that you will join me and that we can be more deliberate together. And I look forward to hearing what kind of narratives you would like to rewrite during this month and beyond.

Thank you so much for listening. I wish you an empowered month of taking up space in community. I wish you an abundance of radical knowledge sharing and wisdom and I wish for you and knowing that we’re out here living our glorious lives against all odds. Enjoy the month.

If you’d like to learn more about intergenerational trauma, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive ways to heal, check out blackpsychotherapy.org. We offer classes, programs and talking therapy for individuals, couples and groups. If you’d like journal prompts, decolonial musings and special discounts,

You can sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes, where you can also find a link to submit a question for me to answer in a future episode. I super look forward to connecting with you again and take care.