Black intergenerational healing and well-being: Reimagining posttraumatic growth.

For Black people of the African diaspora, who have survived generational oppression including enslavement, and exist in persistently hostile environments in which anti-Black racism is structural and interpersonal, an expansive view of posttraumatic growth (PTG) is required to promote personal and collective healing. Using the intergenerational healing and well-being framework, the authors examine historical and contemporary examples of personal and collective healing among Black people to reimagine pathways to PTG. Implications for helping professions when rethinking PTG in the context of systemic anti-Black racism are presented.

Reimagining traumatic stress studies as a participatory science grounded in critical self-reflection: A call to action.

Recognizing the need for a transformative shift to advance scholarship and practice focused on traumatic stress, this paper emerged from a special invited panel at the 38th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). The panel brought together scholars from interdisciplinary backgrounds, including psychology, public health, and social work, to share their unique perspectives and experiences harnessing a collaborative, critical, and strengths-based lens in research. This piece invites the field to consider the importance of cultural humility as a foundational, nonnegotiable practice in traumatic stress studies.

Conceptualizing healing through the African American experience of historical trauma.

For the African American healing journey, it is essential for cultural strengths that preceded and followed the original injury of enslavement, and consequent racially based trauma, to be recognized and elevated. Historical trauma has offered an important framework for understanding how the structural determinants of health are related to mass group-level subjugation for Indigenous people across generations, with a growing focus on protective factors. Here, we expand the application of the historical trauma framework to African Americans, with a focus on intergenerational healing.

In Their Own Words: How Black Teens Define Trauma.

Trauma is a subjective phenomenon. However, when examining trauma among low-income, Black teens, it is common to use established clinical criteria as the metric for identifying and evaluating its presence and impact. Little attention has been devoted to exploring how Black youth characterize trauma in their own terms.