Description

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An urgent, wide-ranging account of racial trauma and its psychological impact.

Racial trauma is an inescapable byproduct of persistent exposure to repressive circumstances that emotionally, psychologically, and physically devastates one’s sense of self while simultaneously depleting one’s strategies for coping. It is a life-altering and debilitating experience that affects countless numbers of people of color over multiple generations. Unfortunately, the failure to consider the interrelationship between racial oppression and trauma limits clinicians’ ability to work effectively with many people of color who live amid sociocultural conditions that are injurious to their psyches and souls. Even when therapy is trauma-informed, it rarely devotes adequate attention to racial oppression and the pervasive trauma associated with it.

This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive overview of the anatomy of racial trauma and the debilitating hidden wounds associated with it. Racially sensitive trauma-informed interventions and strategies that centralize race and racial oppression in every facet of the therapeutic process and relationship are meticulously highlighted, making this a must-read resource for all practicing and aspiring clinicians.

About the Author

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Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, is President of the Eikenberg Academy for Social Justice and Clinical and Organizational Consultant for the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships in NYC. Dr. Hardy provides workshops, training, and consultations to a host of organizations and institutions throughout the United States and abroad. He is a former Professor of Family Therapy at both Syracuse University, NY, and Drexel University, PA. He is the author of Racial Trauma: Clinical Strategies and Techniques for Healing Invisible Wounds, and The Enduring, Invisible, and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness, both from W. W. Norton. He is also co-author of Culturally Sensitive Supervision; Promoting Culturally Sensitive Supervision; and Revisioning Family Therapy.

Praise For…

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Dr. Hardy's Racial Trauma is a long-overdue and deeply important guide to an essential topic, and to the effects of racialized trauma on our individual bodyminds, our relationships, our communities, and our collective consciousness. Every—and I mean every—clinician needs to read, reflect on, and make use of this book.

— Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, and author of My Grandmother's Hands, The Quaking of America, and Monsters in Love

Dr. Kenneth Hardy presents a potent analysis of the impact of racial socialization and racial trauma in the lives of People of Color. His account is made more powerful by his poignant narrative of racial trauma in his own life. But importantly, Dr. Hardy charts a hopeful path toward healing the hidden wounds of racial trauma and he paves the way for engagement across race to create a new voice for healers and organizations. A must-read for anyone seeking to heal, or help others heal, from racial trauma.
— John A. Rich, MD, MPH, Director, RUSH BMO Institute for Health Equity, and author of Wrong Place Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men

This book should be on every psychotherapist's shelf.... I have never read a book on racial trauma that was so helpful to me, personally, as a therapist.
— Zach Taylor, MA LPC, Director, Psychotherapy Networker