Lisa Fields put the problem plainly to therapist and author Sheila Wise Rowe: “usually when you talk about healing, you think about something happened. I work on processing what happened, but then that’s with the assumption that nothing’s gonna happen tomorrow.”
Racial trauma often does not give you that tomorrow. So what do you do? Rowe offers no way to make the blows stop, and she does not pretend you can finish healing while they keep landing. Her counsel is about enduring: stop living as an island, find a safe enough place to be honest, let God narrow what you are responsible for, and hold lament and celebration together. These are ways to keep breathing under a weight that has not lifted.
Why does the usual healing advice run out?
The usual advice was built for a single wound. Rowe’s account of racial trauma explains why that model breaks. She describes it as interpersonal, but also generational and systemic. It includes blatant acts of racism and also the small slights that seem like nothing on their own. Rowe says research shows these microaggressions add up over time, and that cumulatively they can do more damage than one large traumatic event such as a car accident. That is her claim, drawn from her clinical training, and it names something many people already know in their bodies.
Add a season of constant bad news, and the load compounds. Rowe recalled that after the protests of 2020 it felt as if the world and the church might be at a turning point. Five years later she sees hard-won rights being stripped away, and with that loss come anger, grief and, for some, hopelessness. Her diagnosis of why healing feels harder now is simple: “literally every day there’s some new assault.”
This matters before any advice is offered. If you are struggling to process pain that keeps renewing itself, you are attempting healing under conditions the usual model never imagined. The first honest step is to stop measuring yourself against a timeline that assumed the rain had stopped.
If that hopelessness has turned into thoughts of ending your life, please call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and let a real person carry some of this with you today. What follows is for the long stretch.
Why does Rowe start with community?
Rowe begins with a confession about how many of us have learned to live. She asked “how much have we really bought into this notion that we’re just this little island,” where the island is just me, my spouse, my children and my house.
She contrasts that with what formed her: relatives who migrated from the South and looked after the people on their block, a grandmother in Virginia who fixed plates for strangers, and neighbors in Johannesburg who shared an orange or a glass of water when they had almost nothing. What she saw in each place was care that ran both ways. Someone who gives today knows they will need help tomorrow, so neither giving nor receiving carries shame. For a person under repeated injury, that matters. Asking for help becomes ordinary instead of a confession of weakness.
“We have got to lean back into that,” she said, because “we’re not alone in this.” The scale she has in mind is small. Rowe is plain that the contribution “may not be a whole lot, and it may not be just money.” Watching a single mother’s child for an hour counts. A small act like that fits inside a depleted life, and it gives a person something to do besides absorb the next blow. When trauma keeps coming, private resilience runs dry. A web of small mutual care gives you more than your own reserves to draw on.
What if community is exactly where you got hurt?
That is the strongest objection, and Lisa Fields raised it herself. Fear gets in the way of community: the fear that someone will tell your business, the fear of being hurt again, and for many people the memory of family wounds that made them more guarded in the first place.
Rowe takes this seriously. She traces how early formation shapes what we believe about God, ourselves and other people, and whether we were ever nurtured. Where that support was missing, fear makes sense. Her counsel has two parts. First, find safe enough spaces to actually process and unpack what happened. Second, pray for God to show you where your community is, and stay attentive to where the Holy Spirit may be shining light on a path. She echoes Isaiah 30:21, “This is the way, walk ye in it,” as a prayer for direction rather than a guarantee of a particular group.
She also refuses a common church reflex. “I’m not one to just say, well, you just need to just deal with your family,” she said. You can pray for your family and work toward healing with them, but sometimes it does not happen. “And in some instances, it’s not even safe.” If someone in your home is hurting you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. The community Rowe describes may be a smaller group than you expected, in a place you did not expect, and it never requires going back to the people who harm you.
A trained counselor can be one of the first safe enough spaces for this kind of processing, and Rowe herself practiced as a therapist for many years.
What makes a space safe enough?
Rowe has stopped using the word safe. She says safe enough, because “no place is a hundred percent safe.” That small change does real work. If you wait for a guaranteed-safe community before you trust anyone, you will wait in isolation, and isolation does its own damage. If you expect a perfect space, the first disappointment seems to prove that no one can be trusted.
Her method is patient. Enter slowly instead of jumping in. Find even one person you trust and talk honestly about your bad experiences in communities that claimed to be safe. Watch how people in a space treat one another, and how they treat you. If you are worried about gossip, notice how people already talk about each other. That is a clue.
The heart of it is a discipline of honest sight: “it’s really being more attentive, not what you hope it would be, but what actually is it.” Rowe observes that people often decide out of hope or fear. They hope a place will be wonderful, or they fear it will be awful, and either way they decide on their own understanding. She points to Proverbs 3:6, “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” As a proverb, that verse is a wise principle about where to look for guidance, and it makes no promise that no one will ever let you down. It asks you to bring your discernment to God instead of handing it over to your hope or your fear.
Rowe also names the cost. Opening up to someone who loves you, even crying in front of them, is frightening. Will they let me down? Will they think it is stupid? She judges the risk worth taking. She has in mind one or two people who get to see what strangers online might otherwise see first.
How do you keep the flood from freezing you?
Lisa Fields described scrolling through a single day of posts that jumped from immigration to an executive order to a plane crash, and concluded: “if everything’s an emergency, nothing’s an emergency.” When every crisis demands your full attention, you end up in constant rage and anxiety without working on any of them.
Rowe agreed, and gave the image of the onslaught: “it really feels like drinking from a fire hose.” Her response is a question to bring before God: “What is the Lord wanting you to do and for you to fix on?” God may add something, take something away or shift your attention. But she is blunt about human limits: “Because you can’t do everything. You just can’t.”
She adds an observation that may be the most freeing thing in her advice for exhausted people. Under the onslaught, she said, “it feels like you don’t even have time to pray about any of it.” Narrowing your focus gives prayer room again. You pray into the thing God has placed in front of you instead of skimming the surface of everything.
Does focus mean looking away from suffering you cannot fix? Rowe answers with her own story. During xenophobic attacks in South Africa, when homes were being burned, she and her husband sensed God giving them capacity, and they had people stay with them, even though it was a frightening time and they were foreigners too. They did not announce it or put it in their newsletters. “It was simply a moment where the Lord was saying, I want you to do something.” She also warns that social media will tell you that you are not doing enough about one cause or another, while much faithful work happens quietly and never gets posted. Her point is that anxiety about everything is a poor substitute for faithfulness in one place.
Can you grieve and still look for hope?
Rowe thinks you must, and she treats them as companions. Her first reason is that “this is not the end of the story.” Individual and collective stories go on, and for believers they go on into eternity. But she does not let hope wait only for the end. “God is giving nuggets of hope, nuggets of joy, of peace every single day.”
Her examples are deliberately ordinary: a conversation while grabbing coffee, a moment in the supermarket checkout line, a word with a child at the playground. She pictures these as God’s reminders that he has not abandoned his post or stepped off the throne. And she explains why we miss them. If we spend all our time on social media, “our brains tend to skew towards the negative,” and we will not see the small moments or the big ones.
Some will hear this as forced positivity. Rowe answers directly: “we don’t dishonor the trauma and the horrific things that are happening by also celebrating.” The grief stays in her counsel, alongside the joy: “it’s holding lament and celebration, both because that’s life.” And then the practice: “We hold both of those things. We pray about both of those things.”
Scripture gives that practice a shape. The Psalms are full of lament, prayers that tell God the truth about pain without tidying it first. Psalm 56:8 asks God, “put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” That is poetry, and it pictures a God who keeps track of grief instead of hurrying past it. In John 11, Rowe notes, Jesus gave Mary and Martha room to grieve their brother rather than telling them to get over it. John 11:35 records simply, “Jesus wept.” He did that knowing what he was about to do at the tomb. Grief and hope stood in the same place.
What is God promising here?
Nothing in Rowe’s counsel, and nothing in these Scriptures, promises that the assaults will stop soon or that you will feel better by a certain date. Lament exists in the Bible precisely because God’s people sometimes have to pray while the trouble continues. A faith that only worked once the pain ended would have nothing to say to most of the Psalms.
What Rowe does insist on is companionship. Speaking about the slow work of sitting with hurt, she said “we’re not sitting in it alone,” and that “we can honestly go to God and say, I’m not ready.” God does not need you to perform a recovery you have not had. He can receive the truth.
So when trauma does not stop long enough to heal, the measure of faithfulness for now may be something other than arriving at healed. It may be staying honest with God about what still hurts, staying close to a few people who are safe enough to see it, and carrying the one thing you have been given while you wait. That is a life still being kept, even in the middle of the wound.
