Dr. Jacqueline Dyer, a social work scholar and ordained Baptist minister, describes the path from inherited trauma to peace in three moves. First, name honestly what history did to a people. Second, grieve it fully and together, using the lament the Bible already provides. Third, walk toward shalom, the wholeness God intends. In her account God is active at every stage, and most of all in lament, which is how he gets into the wounded places. The scars are real, and they still do not get to say who a people are.
Whose wound, and how deep?
“Historical trauma” gets used loosely, sometimes as a slogan and sometimes as a dismissal. Dyer’s version is specific. She does not claim that every Black person carries the same injury or that history explains every hardship. She claims that a people’s collective past leaves marks on the present, and that many of those marks take the form of grief that was never allowed to finish.
She is also careful about whose history she means. Dyer is an immigrant from Jamaica and frames the hurt as something running through the African diasporic community broadly. Then she narrows her focus to the United States, because that is where she lives and works. The Jamaican and African American stories overlap without being identical, and an honest account of inherited pain has to say which one it is telling.
Her central claim holds two things together:
So it’s about the movement ultimately from despair to hope, and recognizing that though there is a point at which our history has been marred by just damaging contact with another culture, and it has left lasting scars, that is not the definition of who we are.
The key word is “point.” Dyer places the trauma on a longer path that began before it and continues after it. She also refuses to wave its influence away: “I’m not going to say it doesn’t, but it is not the sole entirety of how we define who we are.” That balance decides what healing can mean. If trauma were a people’s definition, getting free of it would mean losing themselves. Because it is one point on the path, healing can mean becoming more fully who they are.
She begins with history in order to set the stage, and her phrase for the task is “acknowledging what is.” What she names is the first contact between African and European peoples, which she describes as damaging from the start. She grants that human beings have always built hierarchies, and that older caste systems often turned more on class and social role than on skin tone. Her argument is that this contact produced a new hierarchy organized around race.
Naming does practical work. It lets a person connect present pain to a real cause instead of blaming themselves for it. Of that pain, Dyer says: “It doesn’t come out of thin air. It has a connection to something that is a part of who I have been, that is a part of my history.”
She goes further and says the pain sometimes shows up in people’s very skin and bodies. In this conversation she states that as a social worker’s observation, without citing a specific study or mechanism, so readers should hold it at that strength. Her case rests on something more modest that is hard to deny: a people’s history shapes how its members carry stress and grief.
How grief learned to stay quiet
Dyer’s most original observation concerns how grief itself was shaped. Grief signals that something is wrong. Under oppression, sending that signal carried risk:
Well, in the presence of a perpetrator, the person who is acknowledging that something is wrong will cause the perpetrator to sometimes inflict even more pain, because they don’t wanna be reminded that they’ve done something that has caused hurt.
The result was a learned restraint. “So we’ve learned as a group to tamp down and to find other ways of dealing with our pain.” She chooses her words carefully here: “We don’t necessarily hide it, but we don’t always acknowledge that it’s there, and we don’t give room for it to be fully expressed.” Full expression was reserved for extreme moments, such as the immediate death of a loved one.
That precision keeps her from caricature. Black communities feel and mourn deeply. “Now we grieve communally,” she says, and families comfort each other in their own ways. The pressure comes from the surrounding society. According to Dyer, research shows that the loss of a parent or a child can take years to mourn without anything being wrong. The wider culture runs on a shorter clock: “So we’re expected to get over it in about six months, and after six months, people look at us like, what’s your problem?”
Put those two pressures together and the outcome is predictable. “But in the context of a society that doesn’t give permission to grieve, some of that gets waylaid and it gets pathologized.” Grief that a community held back for safety gets labeled a disorder when it finally surfaces. Dyer compares the damage to the way sin warps a personality. The ability to express what is true gets bent by a message that says not like that, not for that long, and who do you think you are?
Restraint was never the whole story. Dyer’s chapter draws on the spirituals and the blues, and it identifies the Black church as one of the main places where this community voiced its pain and its hope in God at the same time. The same people who learned caution in front of their oppressors built music and worship that carried lament for generations. Her proposal recovers that inheritance and extends it.
What lament gives back
Here the argument turns theological. Grief trained to stay small finds room in Scripture. Dyer points to the psalms in which David asks God to break his enemies, and she declines to get stuck debating the ethics of those prayers. “I want us to get caught up in the intensity of it.” Many Christians assume biblical grief should be gentle and contained. The Psalms show people crying out at full volume, and God keeps those cries in his book.
The passage she returns to most is the refrain of Psalm 42. Psalm 42:5 reads in the KJV: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.” The genre matters. This is poetry, and the speaker is arguing with his own soul. He states the despair plainly before he claims hope. Then the refrain comes back in verse 11 and again in Psalm 43:5, which tells the reader that one statement of hope did not settle the matter. The psalmist has to walk the same ground more than once. That repetition supports Dyer’s insistence that healing is a process. She reads the passage as a journey from despair to hope because, as she puts it, “the body, the mind, the spirit is not designed by God to live in those places.”
She brings the body in as well. Dyer reports that emotional tears, unlike reflex tears, carry stress hormones out of the body. That is her summary of research, and her theological point stands on its own: “So God has designed us so that there is healing in our tears.” Weeping belongs to how God made people.
Then she describes what lament accomplishes:
We no longer have to hold it in and figure out ways to bottle up all of this energy. We get to release it in healthy ways, and we get to allow God into those spaces that have been wounded.
Here is where God enters her answer. He waits at the end of the road, and he also comes in through the grief itself. Held-in sorrow keeps the wounded places closed. Sorrow released before him opens them.
The same logic shapes how she handles clinical depression, which she says her framework does not ignore. “So depression can be assisted in both ways medically and socially interactionally.” Medication can rebalance the body’s chemistry, and talk lets a person express what they feel. That second form of help runs on the same principle as lament: what is spoken can be released. A person whose despair has a medical cause needs the medical help too. Dyer keeps a spiritual direction practice and a separate counseling practice, and she distinguishes them. Spiritual direction attends to how God is moving in a person’s life. Counseling looks at how environment and personality interact, and at the stories people tell themselves that leave them trapped. Seeking that care is no failure of faith, a point Jude 3 Project holds plainly, and lament before God belongs alongside it.
She also insists the work is shared. Her hope is for “creating communal conversation and expressing, yeah, it’s been hard, but put your hope in God and yet praise him, you start someplace.” A wound carried by a people needs a community willing to say out loud what happened.
For those who have no words, she points to Romans 8:26: “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” She has in mind the person who says, “All I can do is moan or rock or groan.” Even that silence has a place in Scripture.
Is calling racism a principality a dodge?
The sharpest objection concerns her language about racism. She calls it a specter and reaches for the biblical category of principalities:
But there is a way in which, and the Bible does talk about principalities, that the way that the system, this racist process has settled into the culture within this country, it has invoked this particular kind of principality that is very insidious.
A skeptic might hear superstition. An activist might hear an escape hatch, as if blaming spiritual forces lets human systems and choices off the hook.
On superstition, Dyer is direct: “I don’t believe in magic in that kind of way.” She uses the word specter to describe something that adapts to its surroundings. She says that in the 1960s it could no longer show itself openly, so it went underground, and in later periods it resurfaced. Her claim concerns persistence: “But the core of what it is has always been consistent. It’s about hatred of one people for another.”
On the escape hatch, the biblical text points the other way. Ephesians 6:12 reads: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Paul is saying the struggle is larger than any single human opponent. He is not saying human evil is unreal. Dyer did not cite the verse by number, and faithful Christians read Paul’s language about powers differently. Some see personal spiritual beings at work, while others also see structures and systems in view. Her reading is one interpretation. What it does is describe an evil larger than any one person, which explains why it outlasts any one law. That fits the conviction that sin is both individual and structural, and it leaves human responsibility fully intact.
Where the path ends
Dyer calls the destination shalom, a Hebrew word for peace whose range includes wholeness and well-being. Christians, she says, live in the now and not yet, already healing and not yet whole. “Now, I wanna be very clear, it’s a process. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
Her closing image comes from John 11. John 11:44 records that Lazarus “came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes,” and Jesus tells those standing by, “Loose him, and let him go.” Dyer hopes readers will give themselves biblical permission to grieve “so that they can express what they need to express and come out from under and remove the grave clothes and step into the light.”
The detail that matters is who does the unwrapping. Jesus gives the life. Then he hands the next task to the people around Lazarus. That is the shape of Dyer’s whole proposal. The resurrection power belongs to God, and the grave clothes come off in community, as people make room for one another to grieve.
It also returns to her point about peoplehood. Dyer observes that in America, “We never just get to be a people.” Her community is always described in relation to the dominant culture. She admires the way some Native American nations name themselves with words that mean the people. At the end of her path, a people stops taking its name from its injury or from those who caused it, and receives its identity from the God who made every people in his image.