ABOVE: Trauma Psychiatrist Dr. Alauna Curry
“Why do I do anything I do? Why do I think my thoughts? Why do I feel this way about something? Why am I like this? Who taught me and who taught them? Asking yourself these questions will be some of the most painful, yet perfecting conversations you will ever have […] It is time to become more aware of your thoughts, informed about your emotions, and motivated to practice being your most skillful self.”
— Dr. Alauna Curry, in Empathy Skills Practices for Traumatized Humans
Dr. Alauna Curry is a trauma psychiatrist who served as a practicing PTSD specialist. She provided intensive trauma treatment for U.S. military veterans (including some at the Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center here in Houston). After years of treating post-traumatic stress, she discovered that psychological trauma was at the core of any mental illness. That led her to create and develop the Empathy Skills Practice, a cognitive behavior program. In a three-day virtual webinar that ran from Feb. 2-4, Dr. Curry took participants through “The Trauma C.U.R.E” (Creators Using Radical Empathy), a five-hour daily Zoom that revealed surprising information about our own thoughts and feelings. Dr. Curry led the group each day, encouraging members to push past their fear and move into a different mental headspace.
The Trauma CURE Event
On Day 1, Dr. Curry took us inside Module 1: The Creator Identity Crisis. (Throughout the course, she refers to us humans as “creators.”) In that module, we’re confronted with the incredible fact that we have 3.3 billion base pairs of DNA, and the results make us all almost identical: Humans are 99.9% genetically the same. It’s the 0.1% that causes the differences — in skin color, eye color, height, weight, build, and more. But we all, Dr. Curry says, share a three-part identity: animal, human, and spirit. We’re not just composed of cells, tissues, and organs; we contain thoughts and feelings, too.
In Module 2, participants delved into the meaning of empathy and how impactful it can be in healing trauma. But what is empathy, really? “Empathy, at its highest application, is the exercise of stepping outside of one’s own perspective, and using your imagination to appreciate the world of another,” she says, “through their eyes, ears, and experience.” Dr. Curry repeatedly reminds us that “Empathy is LOVE”:
- Listen and look with suspended judgement
- Observe the emotions of all involved parties
- Validate different perspectives
- Express yourself skillfully
Empathy means stepping outside your own viewpoint to imagine someone else’s world through their experience. It’s at the heart of Dr. Curry’s Empathy Skills Practice™️, a unique methodology designed to activate the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), the most evolved part of the human brain. “The PFC, your brain’s ‘CEO’, can overrule and tame the input of the traumatized primitive brain programming, helping one to slow down enough to engage the parts of the brain that can see the short- and long-term goals,” she writes. “ESP™ helps you guide your body (including your words) towards more effective behaviors, leading to better overall outcomes.”
Dr. Alauna Curry (center) and team
Dr. Curry emphasizes that empathy is an essential function of the human experience: “To lack empathy is to have an emotional, psychological and spiritual blindness. It is to operate in a state of disconnectedness from reality. It is a delusional state (meaning a fixed, false belief that does not respond to clear evidence to the contrary).”
Module 3 focuses on trauma, defined as any event (usually negative) that changes the way you see yourself, others and the world. It can affect both physical and psychological well-being and even relationships. There are many faces of trauma, and it can take many different forms. In one of the more eye-opening moments of the conference, Dr. Curry presented a list of traumatic events or circumstances and asked participants to identify how many applied to them:
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Verbal/emotional abuse
- Bullying and intimidation
- Climate-related disasters (fires, floods, hurricanes, etc.)
- Hunger or food insecurity
- Religious trauma
- War (military combat or secondary exposure)
- Grief
- Gun violence
- Medical issues/illness
- Parental illness/caregiver struggles
Many of these traumas disproportionately affect Black people. Feeding America, a nonprofit network of more than 200 food banks, determined that Black communities face hunger at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is most often associated with military service, specifically combat. And a series of reports revealed that Black Vietnam veterans had higher rates of PTSD, in part because they were more likely to be in combat than their white counterparts. (Yet they were more likely to be denied for disability benefits.)
But PTSD can also apply in other contexts, including sexual assault and gun violence. And it can even be experienced in response to racial trauma (police brutality, racial profiling, and racially charged violence). Partly because of these factors, Black people have been shown to experience a higher lifetime prevalence of PTSD in comparison to other ethnicities. And the independent nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety uncovered unsettling data about the disproportionate impact of gun violence on Black people.
As one of the most traumatized groups in history, it is vital that we as Black people recognize our trauma to better access and maximize opportunities for healing. One of the most commonly recognized misconceptions discovered during the webinar is the notion that “Black people don’t go to therapy” or shouldn’t trust therapy. Dr. Curry stressed the need to move past these limits and evolve into a higher self. Emotions are a kind of communication system, she taught us; we can minimize and push them down, but we do so at our own peril.
