Why Daunte Wright's Killing Is So Hard to Process
On Monday, when we woke up to news of yet another Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis, my mind flipped back to the weekend. That's when I watched Two Distant Strangers, the provocative Oscar-nominated short film about a young African-American man (played by Joey Bada$$). His character is stuck in a time loop, and every time he wakes up, he dies by the hands of police brutality—around the same place—but in slightly different ways. Although it was a movie, the story was powerful and felt very real.
As I came to terms with my own feelings about the latest killing—sadness, outrage, fear—my reaction took on a more sobering turn: I should know better than to feel this way again, I thought. That’s because Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark, and many others have lost their lives in similar ways that are unjust and unfair. Learning about these tragedies is a gut punch, and it’s demoralizing, and despite what I expected, it always hurts in the same way.
For me it’s also personal. I have black skin, and these victims look like me. Why does it keep happening over and over and over again, and this time, how could it happen again in the same place? But Daunte Wright’s death struck a slightly different chord, because it was just eleven miles from where George Floyd was murdered last summer. I thought that lightening doesn’t strike the same place twice. I guess I was wrong.
Because of this, it almost felt like I was the one who was stuck in a time loop. Like I was the one who was being forced to relive the emotions of hearing about another trauma for what seemed like the one-hundredth time. Except I wasn’t watching a film on Netflix. This was reality. But then I realized that it’s not just me, because these are traumatic experiences for all of us, regardless of what you look like or the color of your skin.
As a psychiatrist, I’m no stranger to conversations about trauma. Patients meet with me as they are struggling to process the emotional scars of sexual violence or witnessed death. Post-traumatic stress disorder is diagnosed if after being exposed to a traumatic event, you’re always on edge, or avoiding things that remind you of the trauma, or if you’re having intrusive thoughts related to it (like nightmares or flashbacks).
While diagnosing PTSD as a result of watching media coverage is controversial, it certainly does feel like all of us have a flavor of it right now because of the times we are living in. Many of us are avoiding difficult conversations about race. We’re worried that we’ll say the wrong thing, or we’re experiencing unwanted thoughts about what we’re hearing about or seeing on television that play through our mind on a loop.
So right now, we're all trying to process and recover from trauma together. But as soon as it feels like we've made progress, we wake up and we're reliving it all over again. What makes it even more difficult is that the trauma changes slightly; it mutates, it gets more savvy, so it's harder to escape. Every incident seems the same, but not quite. One day it’s images of a knee on the neck and the next it’s hearing about mistaking a gun for a taser. The lines between an honest miscalculation and bigoted brutality are blurred, but the end result is the same; a statistic that is painfully clear—about 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police in the United States.
You can, however, learn to process trauma, even if it means processing the same trauma over and over again. Processed trauma doesn’t mean putting your emotions in a box, it means allowing yourself to feel, to cry, or to be angry about it in the moment, without allowing those feelings to consume you. It means living peacefully with the reality that progress is a slow- burning flame, and that despite the recurring stings brought by familiar tragedy, with a good playbook, we can feel better prepared to move forward.
Here’s what you can do to process trauma.
Create boundaries
Unless you’re living on a private island, it’s almost impossible to completely avoid what’s happening in the world. What you can do is create boundaries for how you get your news. I find that reading the news is less triggering than watching it. You can also limit the amount of time you spend consuming the news. Do you really need to spend two hours watching pundits arguing their sides? If you're too triggered by it, just turn off the T.V. Creating boundaries is a better long-term solution than avoiding it altogether.
Pour water on the fire
When we’re triggered by a traumatic event, the sympathetic nervous system (or fight or flight response) is in overdrive. This means dilated pupils, elevated heart rate, and feeling on guard – all the time. That can make you uncomfortable pretty quickly. It also means that parts of your brain, like the amygdala (involved in processing fear and anger) are sensitive, so that you may overreact to small things. You can cool off your fight of flight response by actions that activate the parasympathetic nervous system; it’s like pouring water on the fire. Try meditation for a calming GABA boost (I love apps like Insight Timer and Calm). Or, if you’re not into meditation, watching HGTV tonight instead of your usual cable news network is a good place to start.
Talk it out
I don’t just mean going to see a therapist, like me, although we’re definitely here if you need us. Accessing your community is a powerful self-care strategy that can help with depression, anxiety, and overcoming the effects of trauma. I’m Black, my wife is Asian, most of my co-workers are White. Talking to them about what’s going on has helped all of us realize that we generally feel the same way. I always get ideas from them about how to process trauma that I hadn’t thought about before. These types of conversations are like a good dose of supportive psychotherapy as long as you’re really trying to understand each other.
I get it. Processing trauma once is hard. Processing it over and over again seems near impossible. But with a little time, and a little practice, you can make sense of what you're feeling as we all wrestle through this tough period of truth together.
You Might Also Like
