Season 6, Episode 21: Jenny and Danielle and Rebecca on this current Trauma moment

Rebecca W. Walston: https://rebuildingmyfoundation.com

At Solid Foundation Story Coaching, we believe that stories shape our lives. Our experiences—both joyful and painful—define how we see ourselves and interact with the world. Story Coaching offers a unique space to explore your personal journey, uncover patterns of hurt and resilience, and gain clarity on how your past shapes your present. Unlike therapy, Story Coaching is not about diagnosis or treatment. Instead, it’s about having someone truly listen—without judgment or advice—so you can process your story in a safe and supportive space. Whether you choose one-on-one coaching or small group sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to share, reflect, and grow at your own pace.

Jenny McGrath: https://www.indwellcounseling.com

I am Jenny! (She/Her) MACP, LMHC I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, Certified Yoga Teacher, and an Approved Supervisor in the state of Washington.  have spent over a decade researching the ways in which the body can heal from trauma through movement and connection. I have come to see that our bodies know what they need.  By approaching our body with curiosity we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom our body has to teach us.  And that is where the magic happens! 

Danielle S. Rueb Castillejo: www.wayfindingtherapy.com

Danielle (00:06):

Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, spirituality. We're jumping here and talking about this current moment. We just can't get away from it. There's so much going on, protest kids, walking out of schools, navigating the moment of trauma. Is that really trauma? So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Danielle, Jenny and Rebecca,

Rebecca (00:28):

A sentence that probably I'm going to record us. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not. But I feel like everyone is, is traumatized, and I'm only using the word traumatized because I don't have a better word to say. I think there's very little time and space to give this well reasoned, well thought out, grounded reaction to everything because there's the threat level is too high. So trying to ground yourself in this kind of environment and feel like you're surefooted about the choices that you're making feels really hard. It is just hard. And I don't say that to invalidate anybody's choice. I say that just to say everything feels like it's just difficult and most things feel like there are impossible choices. I don't know. It just, yeah, it's a crazy maker.

Jenny (01:45):

I agree with you. And I also feel like it's like we need a new word other than trauma, because Bessel Vander Kott kind of came up with this idea of trauma working with veterans who had gone through the war. We are actively in the war right now. And so what is the impact of our nervous system when we're not going, oh, that's a trauma that happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but every single day we're in a nervous system. Overwhelmed. Is there a word for that? What is that that we're experiencing? And maybe trauma works, but it's almost like it doesn't even capture what we're trying to survive right now.

Rebecca (02:31):

Yes. And even when you just said the idea of nervous system overwhelmed, I wanted to go, is that word even accurate? I have lots of questions for which I don't have any answers, like minute to minute, am I overwhelmed individually? Is my people group overwhelmed? I don't know. But I feel that same sense of, it's hard to put your finger on vocabulary that actually taps into what may or may not be happening minute by minute, hour by hour for someone. Right? There might be this circumstance where you feel, you don't feel overwhelmed. You feel like you could see with startling clarity exactly what is happening and exactly the move you want to make in that space. And 30 seconds later you might feel overwhelmed.

Danielle (03:35):

I agree. It's such a hot kettle for conflict too. It's like a hot, hot kettle. Anytime it feels like you might be at odds with someone you didn't even know it was coming. You know what I mean? Jude, which just amplifies the moment because then you have, we were talking about you got your nervous system, you got trauma, whatever it is, and then you're trying to get along with people in a hot situation and make decisions. And also you don't want to do things collectively. You just want to, and also then sometimes it needs to be all about this long process, but if ice is banging at your door, you don't have time to have a group talk about whistles. It's just like you can't have a group meeting about it. You know what I'm saying? Right, right.

Speaker 2 (04:37):

I think if you, and I remember us having this conversation in a total other setting about what's the definition of trauma? Is trauma this event that happens or is it the feeling of your system being overwhelmed or any other host of things? But I think if we think about it from the frame of, are the support systems that I have in place either individually or collectively overwhelmed by a particular moment in time or in history, maybe that's a decent place to start. And what I think is interesting about that is that the black community is having this conversation. We are not overwhelmed. This is not new to us. This whether it's true or fair or not. There's a lot of dialogue in the black community about, we've been here before, and so there is this sense of we may not be overwhelmed in the way that someone else might be. And I still don't know what I think about that, what I feel about that, if that feels true or right or fair or honest. It just feels like that is the reaction that we are having as a collective culture right now. So yeah.

It means to be resisting in this moment or taking care of yourself in this moment? Just for you, just for Rebecca. Not for anybody else. Honestly,

Rebecca (06:25):

I have been in a space of very guarded, very curated information gathering since the night of the election back in November of 2024. So part of my selfcare sort of for the last, I don't know what is that, 18 months or something like that, 15 months or something has been, I take in very little information and I take it in very intentionally and very short burst of amount of time. I'm still scanning headlines, not watching the news, not taking in any information that's probably in any more than about 32nd, 62nd clips because I cannot, I can't do this.

(07:38):

Someone, Roland Martin who is this sort of member of the Independent Black Press, said this generation is about to get a very up close and personal taste of what it feels like and looks like to live under Jim Crow. And I was scrolling to the puppies, I cannot absorb that sentence seriously, scroll on the Instagram clip because that sentence was, that was it. I was done. I don't even want to hear, I don't want to know what he meant by that. I know what he meant by that, but I don't want to know what he meant by that.

(08:36):

I a lovely neutral grass cloth, textured, right? The way the light lights off of it be the very little imperfections. It does something to make a space feel really special, but it's still very ated it. Yes. And I would say this is like if you want to try wallpaper, if you don't want the commitment of a large scale pattern just is a great way to go. I think if there's here the jaguar off the top.

Danielle (09:16):

It's interesting when you pose a question, Rebecca in our chat this morning about white America waking up. The people that I've noticed that have been the most aware for me outside of folks of color have been some of my queer elders, white folks that have been through the marches, have fought for marriage equality, have fought for human dignity, have fought as well, and they're just like, oh shit, we're going, this is all happening again.

Rebecca (09:59):

I think that that comes, again, a lot of my information these days is coming from social media, but I saw a clip of a podcast, I don't even know what it was, but the podcast was a black male talking to someone who appeared to me to be a white female, but she could have been something else. She didn't exactly name it, but whatever it was they were discussing like the dynamic between men and women in general. And the male who is the host of the podcast asked the female, what gives you the authority as a woman to speak about men and how they do what they do. And her answer was, and I'm going to paraphrase it, the same thing that gives you the authority as a black person to talk about white people, if you are the marginalized or the oppressed, everything there is to know about the oppressor, things about the oppressor that they don't know about themselves because you need to in order to survive. And so that is what qualifies. That was her answer. That's what qualifies me as a woman to speak about men. And when the sentence that you just gave Danielle, that's what I thought about. If you've ever had to actually live on the margins, something about what is happening and about what is coming from experience, you've seen it. You've heard it, you've heard about it. And

Danielle (12:00):

I was just thinking about, I was just talking about this yesterday with my editor, how for Latinx community, there was this huge farm workers movement that ran parallel to the what Martin Luther King was doing, the civil rights movement and how they wrote letters and solidarity and Dolores Huta, these people in 90, they're in their nineties. And then there was this period where things I think got a little better and Latinos made, it's like all of that memory in large pockets of the United States, all that movement got erased and traded in for whiteness. And then that's my parents' generation. So my mom not speaking Spanish, raised not to speak Spanish, all these layers of forgetting. And then it's me and my generation and my kids we're like, holy shit, we can't tolerate this shit. That's not okay. And then it's trying to find the memory, where did it go? Why is there a big gap in this historical narrative, in recent memory? Because says Cesar Chavez and all those people, they started doing something because bad things were happening for centuries to our people. But then there's this gap and now we're living, I think post that gap. And I think you see that with the two murderers of Alex Preti were Latinos from the Texas border that had come up from Texas and they're the actual murderers and they unli him. And people are like, what happened? What happened?

Are they perpetrating this crime? What does all of this mean? So I think when we talk about this current moment, it just feels so hard to untangle. Just

Rebecca (14:01):

I think you said, I think you said that there was this period where there's all this activism that's parallel to the civil rights movement and then all that disappeared in exchange for whiteness, I think is what you said.

(14:23):

And if I said, if I heard that incorrectly through my cultural lens, please let me know that. But I think that that phrase is actually really important. I think this notion of what whiteness requires of us and what it requires us to exchange or give up or erase it, is something that we need to meander through real slow. And in this moment, we're talking about people of Latino descent in the United States, but we could easily be talking about any other number of cultural groups. And I have to ask that same question and wrestle with those same answers. And I think I saw recently that, again, this probably could have happened anywhere of a dozen places, some part, somewhere in the country, there's some museum that has to do with African-American history and the markers were being taken down.

(15:52):

But you can watch it in real actual time, the required eraser of the story. You can watch it in actual time. If you lay a clip of Alex Pertti's murder up against the Play-by-play that came out of the Department of Homeland Security, and you can watch in real time the rewriting of what actually happened. So your sense of there's this gap where the story kind of disappears. What has it been 60 years since the timeframe and history that you're talking about 1960s. It makes me wonder what was on the news in 1960? Where were they? Where and how did they intentionally rewrite the story? Did they erase markers? Did they bury information?

Jenny (17:16):

Where I have a few thoughts. I'm thinking about my Polish great-grandfather who had an engineering degree, and to my understanding of the family's story, because it's not often told, and he worked in a box factory, not because he wanted to or that's what he was trained for, but in the time that my great grandfather was here, Polish people were not considered white. And even my dad spent most, he spent his childhood, his early childhood, his family was the only not black family in his community. And his nickname was Spooks growing up for his first few years in life because he was the only light-skinned kid in his neighborhood. And then with the GI Bill, Polish people got adopted into whiteness. And that story of culture and community and lineage was also erased. And just the precarity of whiteness that it's like this Overton window that shifts and allows or disallows primarily based on melanin, but not just melanin based on these performances of aligning with white supremacy. And we don't tell these stories because I think going back to nervous systems, I do think,

And I don't think a lot of white bodies want to contend with them. And so then we align more with the privileges that being adopted into whiteness floor to ceiling.

Rebecca (19:47):

You had just finished telling the story with the GI Bill that Polish people got adopted in to whiteness. And that story and that sort of culture, that origin story disappeared off the landscape. And you might not have said the word disappear. That might be my paraphrase.

Jenny (20:07):

Yeah. And I think on a visceral level, on a nervous system level, white bodies, whatever that means, know that story, whether that story is told or not. And so I think white bodies know we could be Renee, Nicole Goode or Alex Prety any day if we choose not to fall in line with what whiteness expects of us. And I think there are many examples through abolition, through civil rights, through current history, it is not the same magnitude of bodies of color being killed. And white bodies know if I actually give up my white privilege, I'm giving up my white privilege. And that the precarity that whiteness gives or takes away is so flimsy, I think. Or the safety that it gives is so flimsy.

Rebecca (21:15):

I mean, I agree with you times a thousand about the flimsy ness and the precariousness of whiteness. Say more about the sentence, white bodies know this because if the me wants to go, I don't think they do. So yeah, say more.

Jenny (21:41):

Well, I will say I don't think it's conscious. I don't think white people are conscious of this, but I think the epigenetic story of what is given up and what is gained by being adopted into whiteness is in our bodies. And I think that that's part of what makes white people so skittish and disembodied and dissociated, is that the ability to fully be human means giving up the supposed safety that we're given in whiteness. And I think our bodies are really wise and there is some self-preservation in that, and that comes to the detriment and further harm because we are then more complicit with the systems of white supremacy.

(22:46):

That's what I think. I could be wrong. Obviously I'm not every white body, but I know that the first time I heard someone say that to me in my body, I was like, yep, I know that fear. It's never been named, but having someone say white bodies probably know, I was like, yep. I think my body does know. And that's why I've been so complicit and agreeable to whiteness because that gives me safety. What do you think, Rebecca?

Rebecca (23:32):

I am probably I'm that am the ambivalent about the whole thing, right? Partly I get the framework that you're talking about. I've used the framework myself, this idea that what your body knows and how that forms and shapes how you move in the world and how that can move from one generation to the next epigenetically without you or spiritually without you necessarily having the details of the story. And also, I'm super nervous about this narrative that I'm nervous that the narrative that you're painting will be used as an excuse to step away from accountability and responsibility. And because I think this sort of narcissistic kind of collapse is what tends to happen around whiteness, where you're so buried under the weight of everything that we can't continue the conversation anymore. And this is the whole why we cannot teach actual American history because some white kids somewhere is going to be uncomfortable.

(25:04):

And so I get it. I got it. And it makes me super nervous about what will be done with that information. And I think I also think that, and this could be that my frame is limited, so I don't want this comment to come off a, but I think there's not enough work around perpetrator categories and buckets. And so where we tend to go with this is that we go, that harm moves you to victim status and then victims get a pass for what they did because they were hurt. There's not enough to me work, there's not enough vocabulary in the public discourse for when that harm made you become a perpetrator of harm as a collective group and as a consistent collective narrative for hundreds of years. And so that makes me nervous too. What I don't want is, and this is I guess part of the same sort of narcissistic collapse is that we go from cows harmed, and I do believe there's significant harm that happens to a person and to a people when they are required to be complicit in their own eraser in order to survive that. I absolutely believe there's massive harm in that. But how do we talk about then that the reaction to that is to become the perpetrator of harm versus the reaction to that is to learn to move through it and heal from it and not become the group that systematically harms someone else. And there's some nuance in there. There's probably all kinds of complexities there, but that's what my head is around all that, what I just said.

Danielle (27:18):

I have a lot of thoughts about that. I think I would argue that it's a moral injury, meaning? Meaning that the conditioning over time of attachment instead of what I wrote to y'all, the attachment isn't built as an attachment to one another. It was reframed as an attachment to hierarchy or system. And therefore for a long time, you have a general population of people that don't have a secure attachment to a caregiver, to people that it's been outsourced to power, basically a church system or a government system that's protecting them versus a family and a community, their culture. And in that you have a lot of ruptures and it leaves a lot of space. If your attachment is to power versus belonging to one another, you're going to do a lot of violent damage. And I would argue that that's a repeating perpetrating wound in the collective white society, that attachment to power versus attachment to community.

(28:48):

That's what I think. I could be wrong, but that's what I've been writing about.

Rebecca (28:56):

That's a pretty brilliant application of individual attachment theory to collective identity and yeah, that's pretty brilliant actually.

(29:09):

That's a very nuanced way to talk about what happens in that exchange of a cultural identity for access to the category. White is to say that you advertise to community and family and you tether and attach yourself to power structures, and then you hold on for dear life.

Danielle (29:32):

You can see it playing out across the nation. It's not that republicans and evangelicals aren't, they're actually arguing against an attachment to community and belonging and saying, we can do these things because we have power now and we're attached to that power. Jesus. They're not attached, I would argue. They're not attached to Jesus either.

Rebecca (30:00):

Now you want to start a whole fight. How is that attachment structure that you're identifying? And I'm going to steal that by the way, and I will quote you when I steal it. How is that a moral injury?

Danielle (30:18):

Well, for me, immoral injury is like someone who goes to war or goes into a battle or goes into a situation and you, at some point, someone consciously violates what they know is right or wrong. And so someone took a whole boat over here, a whole journey to do that. So even the journey itself, there's no way, it doesn't matter if they didn't have social media. It doesn't matter if the pilgrims of whatever we want to call them, colonizers didn't know what was here. They know that on lands there are people, and in that journey, they had a decision that was separating themselves saying, when I get there, I deserve that land no matter what's there. So they had all, I don't know how many months it takes to sail across the sea. It was like a month or a couple months or something. You have all that time of a people becoming another kind of people. I think

(31:25):

That's what I think. You talk about the transatlantic slave trade and that crossing of the water. I think in some ways white people put themselves through that and there's no way, I don't know a lot of ways to explain a complete detachment from morality, but there's something in that passageway that does it for Yeah,

Rebecca (31:51):

I get it. I mean, you're talking about maybe even on the pilgrim ship that landed in Jamestown passage. But

(32:02):

If you read, I saw this in a book written by an author by the name of Jamar Tis. He's talking about the earlier colonial days in the United States, and he's talking about how there's a series of letters that he recounts in the book. And so there's this man that is making the journey from England to the colonies, and he professes to be a missionary of Christianity. And what he's discussing in these letters is sort of the crisis of faith that if I get here and I proselytize someone that I encounter a Native American or an enslaved African I do in their conversion to Christianity, am I compelled to grant them their freedom

(33:04):

And the series of letters that are back and forth between this man and whoever he's conversing with on the con, and you'll have to read his book to get all the historical details. They basically have this open debate in the governing days of the colony. And the answer to the question that they arrive at both legally and religiously or spiritually is, no, I do not. Right? And whatever it is that you had to do to yourself, your faith, your understanding of people to arrive at the answer no to that question feels to me like that moral injury that you're talking about.

(34:07):

Cardiovascular system powers, everything we do.

Jenny (34:10):

I mean, it makes me think, Danielle knows that this is one of the few Bible verses that I will always quote nowadays is Jesus saying, what good is it for someone to gain the world and lose their soul? And I see that as a journey of forfeiting. Whatever this thing we want to call the soul might be for power and privilege.

Rebecca (34:42):

It reminds me of my kids were young and we were having a conversation at the dinner table and something had happened. I think there might've been a discussion about something in the history class that opened my kids' eyes to the nature of racism in the United States. And one of my children asked me, doesn't that mean that we're better than them?

(35:17):

And as vehemently as I could answer him, I was like, absolutely not. No, it does not. It does not mean that, right? Because you feel that line and that edge for a kid, a fourth grader who's learning history for the first time and that edge that would push them over into this place of dehumanizing someone else, even if it's the proverbial they and my insistence as his mother, we don't do that and we're not going to do that. And no, it does not mean that. And my whole thing was just, I cannot have you dehumanize an entire group of people. I can't, I'm not raising kids who do that. We're not doing that. Right. Which is back to Michelle Obama saying when they go low, right?

Rebecca (36:37):

It is that sense of that invitation to a moral injury, that invitation to violate the inherent value of another human being that you have to say, I'm not doing that. I refuse to do that

Jenny (37:18):

I know I'm a few years late and watching this movie, but I just watched the Shape of Water. Have you ever seen it

(37:26):

And there's this line in it where they're debating whether or not to save this being, and the man says it's not even human. And she says, if we don't do something, then neither are we. And this really does feel like a fight for my humanity for what does it look like to reject dehumanization of entire people groups as much as I even want to do that with ice agents right now, and things like that that make it so hard to not put people in these buckets. And how do I fight for my own humanity and willingness to see people as harmful and difficult as they may be as sovereign beings, and what potentials can come if we work to create a world that doesn't split people into binaries of victim or perpetrator, but make space for reparative justice? I don't know.

Rebecca (38:58):

You used the phrase reparative justice, and my thought was like, I don't even know what that is. Trying to even conceptualize any sense of that in this moment is, I mean, again, I heard a podcast of this some white man who I think is probably famous, but it's not in a cultural circle that I run in, not this race, but however he is major Trump supporter publicly in his celebrity is a Trump supporter. And he's talking on the podcast about how watching what has happened with ICE the last couple weeks has changed his perspective that he feels like it's this tipping point in his sentiment that I didn't think things like this were possible in America. And now they are. And the person that he's talking to is a black man who's pissed that you even are saying the sentence, I didn't think this was possible.

(40:04):

Pissed in a way of, we've been telling you this shit for 400 years, excuse my French, you can edit that out and you didn't listen. And if you had listened, we might not actually be here in this moment. And so even that conversation to me feels like attempting to do something of repair in some capacity. And you can feel the two people that are trying to engage each other just be like, I mean, you can feel how they're trying. They're sitting in the room, they're talking, they're leaving space for each other to finish their sentence and finish their thought. And you still just want to go, I want to beat the shit out of you. And I am sure they both felt that way at different moments in the conversation. So yeah,

Danielle (41:12):

We were in the I know. Because it's all like, I know there's all that we talk about, and then when we walk off the screen, when we get into the world, I know Rebecca, you mentioned someone got stopped at a checkpoint or my kids marching around town or Jenny, I know you're out in the wilds of Florida or wherever. I just

(41:38):

Yeah. Yeah. I just think there's all of this we talk about, and then there's the live daily reality too, of how it actually plays out for us in different ways. Yeah. Now I saw you take a breath. Yeah.

Rebecca (41:59):

Do they feel like really disconnected?

(42:19):

I actually think this conversation, I think, and I don't mean this one, I mean this sort of ongoing space that we inhabit in each other's lives is actually a pretty defiant response. I think there's every invitation for us to be like, see, when I see you,

(43:03):

I know that you some stuff going on personally, and you picked up the phone and called me the other night, Danielle, just to say, I'm just checking on you. And I was like, crap. Right. I mean, with everything that I know that you have going on both collectively and personally for you to pick up the phone and call me and go like, I'm just checking on you.

(43:41):

Right? But there's this swirl of, there's a whole conversation the black community is having with the Latino community right now that is some version of, screw this. And you, we not we're, it's not entirely adversarial, but it's not entirely we're doing this dance around each other right now that you could have easily just have been like, I'll talk to you in 27. You could easily have been like, I have too much going on that can't actually tend to this. Whatever it is that you heard in my voice or read on my face that made you call me, you could have chosen not to and you didn't. And that's not small.

Danielle (44:49):

Yeah. Thanks for saying that. I really do believe love is bigger than all of what we say is the hate and the crimes against us. I really do believe every day we wake up and we get to be the best. We get to do the best we can. Jenny,

Jenny (45:26):

I just feel very grateful to know you both. Yeah. I think this to me is part of what fighting for our humanity looks like and feels like in the midst of systems, creating separation of who we should or shouldn't commune with and be with. And I just feel very grateful that I get to commune and be with both of you.

Danielle (46:18):

Oh, good question. Do you ever feel like you're your own coach? So I have the Danielle that's like sometimes I get into trouble that Danielle, and then there's also the part of me that's like, you can do it. You got this, you got it. You can do it, so you're going to make it. So I got the coach. I had to bring her out a little bit more later lately. Also, just like I just got back from watching my kids do this walkout and man, just hearing them scream the F word and jumping around town, blowing whistles and being wild, it just made me, I feel so happy. I'm like, oh, we're doing something right. The kids, they're going to be okay. They know. So I think just I've really tried to just focus on my family and my off time. Yeah, that's kept me going. What about you two?

Jenny (47:31):

I have been doing standup comedy, open mic nights in Pensacola.

(47:40):

And it has been a very nice place for me to release my healthy aggression. Aside from the hosts, I've pretty much been the only woman there. And most of the comedians are racist and sexist, and I get up and give lectures basically. And I've been really enjoying that. It has been a good way of off-gassing and being defiant and giving me some sense of fight, which I've liked to, that has been self-care for me.

Rebecca (48:30):

I would probably say, actually I had to, I have this elliptical, one of those under the desk kind of pedal thingies that, and the other night I had to get on it. I feel like my whole inside was just racing, but then on the outside, I'm just sitting here, all right. And I was like, I have got to get whatever this is out of me. So there was this moment where, and it took probably 15 minutes for my body to actually start to exhale and for my breathing to kind of normalize. And that isn't because I was exerting so much energy. It took that long of just moving to get whatever it is out of me. And then also, I had this really, really great moment with my son, how you're saying, Danielle, that your kids, and then you feel like, oh, they're going to be fine. He was watching a documentary or he is watching a movie, some movie about black history, what he does. And the movie referenced this written communication between two slave traitors, one of whom was in the United States and the other one who was in the Caribbean. And they were discussing how to basically break the psyche of a person so they would remain in slavery,

(50:15):

Which is a crazy sentence to say, but literally they're discussing it back and forth. They're talking about how you bake a cake. And my son read it, and then he came and sat next to me and he was like, did you know about this? Not about the letter itself, the letters, but about the content in them. He was like, did you know this is what they think about us? Did. These are the things that they say and do that are purposely designed to mess with our psyche. And it just spawned this really great conversation for an hour about all kinds of things that made me go, he's going to be all right. In the sense of where I ended up, where I ended up going as his mom was like, yes, I knew. And now the fact that I raised you to do this, or I raised you to do that, or I taught you this or that, or I kept you from this or that. Does that make sense now? And then, yeah, it was just actually a very sweet conversation actually.

Danielle (51:38):

I love that. I do too. It's been real.

 

 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.