Bibliotherapy: The Right Book at the Right Time

I often say, “Everything there is to know, it can be found in a book.” I believe this to be true. Sometimes, I recommend books to my clients because the right book at the right time, can be a powerful complement to therapy. Using books in treating mental and psychological disorders is termed bibliotherapy.

During the pandemic, many folks have expressed having more time to read, coupled with heading into winter, I thought it would be fun if I shared what I am reading. I am committed to ongoing personal growth and I see a collective need for us to each do our own healing work.

In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Manakem, does a deep dive into how racialized trauma impacts white-bodies, black-bodies, and police-bodies. This book offers cognitive history and context for our thinking brains, experiential exercises to explore our emotional and body experiences, and body and breath practices to remember and reclaim our bodies as we move along on our healing journeys.

Here are some of Manakem’s key premises as stated in this book:

 ·      “…America is tearing itself apart.” The current political and social conflict in America started in the Middle Ages in Europe. “It is a battle for the souls and bodies of white Americans…If we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved…For America, it is an unavoidable time of reckoning.” 

·      “For the past three decades, we’ve earnestly tried to address white-body supremacy in America with reason, principles, and ideas- using dialogue, forums, discussions, education, and mental training.” Yet, we still have systematic racism and white-body supremacy in America. 

·      Trauma is passed down through multiple generations by our DNA expression, family systems, and societal systems, structures, and cultural norms. 

·      “This means that no matter what we look like, if we were born and raised in America, white-body supremacy and our adaptations to it are in our blood. Our very bodies hold the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors.”

·      “…our bodies scare the hell out of each other.”

·      “White-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.” White-body supremacy is a traumatic retention.

·      “Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different than our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness.” 

·      We heal primarily in and through our bodies, individually and collectively.

·      “Americans of all colors and cultures need to acknowledge the inherited trauma of white-body supremacy embedded in our bodies, metabolize this trauma, work though it in our bodies, and grow up out of it.”

Menakem hopes “America will grow up and out of white-body supremacy; Americans will begin healing their long-held trauma around race; and whiteness will begin to evolve from race to culture, and then to community.” He offers steps on how to work this healing process.

Since I am a Certified Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing trauma therapist, and deeply concerned about the state of America, I found myself underlining and making comments and questions like crazy in the margins of this book. I joined a book study group for white-bodied people to collectively process and work to become more aware and to grow out of white-body supremacy. Groups like this are happening around the country. If I can be a resource, please reach out.