Writehealing: a Sistah’s Circle Praxis to Heal and Liberate

Abstract

Black women disproportionately experience higher rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and cardiovascular disease; as well as misdiagnosed depression and anxiety and overdiagnosis of schizophrenia. The combined effect of gendered racism and intergenerational trauma amplify Black women’s health experiences. Healing these diseases by addressing the emotional root causes is critical. An imbalance of emotions like fear, withdrawal, apathy, listlessness, disgust, frustration, rage, anxiety, inferiority, submission, and bewilderment can manifest as physical representations of depression, anxiety, and other chronic health conditions. Heal the emotion(s), heal the disease(s) is a common approach found in Indigenous, African, and Chinese sciences, medicines, and ways of knowing. Black women experience gendered racism and intergenerational trauma due to the historical, ongoing, and contemporary daily trauma of living as a Black woman in the Americas. Navigating these oppressions in addition to other general stressors creates a need for an accessible tool designed to address and combat these emotional difficulties for Black women’s mental, emotional, and physical health. This explanatory mechanism of emotions and their inextricable linkages to physical representations of illness/disease provides a lens for understanding how to address the effects of chronic health inequities. Implications for community intervention, dissemination and research are discussed.