Resmaa Menakem: Finding Fear in the Body (TRAUMA)

Written By Alexandra Brockman

Therapist and social worker, Resmaa Menakem, is the author of the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and originator of the Somatic Abolitionist movement. I met Resmaa many years ago, when he was one of the few voices in this space—Resmaa calls himself a communal provocateur and this is true, as his work challenges all of us to recognize and acknowledge that we’re scared. And that much of this fear is ancient. We were supposed to talk today about trauma in relationships, but our time together took a different turn—Resmaa jumped at the opportunity to put me in my familial and familiar fear. It’s hard, or at least it was for me, but hopefully you’ll stick with us to see how this works. This is the third part of a series on trauma, and it won’t surprise you to hear that Resmaa also trained with Peter Levine, who we heard from last week. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNAN: I want to talk to you about sort of everything, but maybe we start with My Grandmother's Hands and then we move to monsters in law and relationship and how so many of these things intersect. I feel like the last time we spoke was I don't even know if we were staring at each other on zoom, but it was years ago when, your book My Grandmother's Hands was establishing an entire space that's now been joined by many others. It's great to be first, right? But it was a different time and yet it's still the same time, right? What's changed for you?

RESMAA MENAKEM: I’m older. I'm getting ready to be a grandpa.

ELISE: Oh my God.

RESMAA: Yeah. Yeah. My daughter is doing June. I'm a little bit wiser. And a little bit more in my understanding of what we're up against, both my own being in the black body in this country and then watching what's happening in the Congo and watching what's happening in Palestine and watching all this. It's like the same imperial bullshit over and over and over and over again. And so I'm understanding myself differently now in terms of the collective, in ways that even when I wrote my grandmother's hands that I didn't. And so, yeah, that's changed.

ELISE: You might disagree with me on this, but I feel like when My Grandmother's Hands came out, there weren't that many books like it. And this wasn't a conversation that was being had. I mean, your book hit many bestseller lists and stayed there, but it wasn't a conversation that was culture wide.

RESMAA: right. Yeah.

ELISE: It feels like it is more so maybe not at the level at which it needs to be, but as you watch that happen? How does that feel? Do you feel like is it making you more optimistic?

RESMAA: The next thing I say, I don't want you to take it as me coming at you. Okay. I'm not coming at you. This shit is fucked up. Like what's happening and has happened for the last four or five hundred years is crazy. The same people that were doing it to my people in the 1600s are the same people, their descendants are the same people that's doing it now. And they're and getting filthy rich off of what they call free labor and free land and extraction. I have what I call a charred pessimism. Right. And what I mean by that is that there is a quality of my pessimism that I think is instructive. And the charredness of my pessimism is really because of what I see across time has happened to people who don't have a military, who don't have a nuclear arsenal, right? And who don't have access to water, like my pessimism comes from watching and seeing fire burn across people's bodies. And when people ask me the question about optimism, it always churns up the energetic load for me. It just, it makes things spin for me because I'm not sure what people are looking at. My book, I believe stood in a long line of books. I think, I actually think that Giovanni's book helped my book. I think what James Baldwin wrote, you know what I mean? Like my book built on that. It took the embodiment thing and may induce that lens, but my ancestors, you know, Grace Boggs, like you know, all of my ancestors were in my grandmother's hands. And so what happens for me, because the book was successful and I believe it into a field that hadn't been really tapped into but what, I found started to happen, was that people started to co opt it and use it for whatever fuckery they wanted to use it for. You know what I mean?

They took embodiment and made it something that the people that I intended it for couldn't use. It's the same way that they did intersectionality, right? And made it into something that was specific about the condition of Black women in a particular field, Black and women. When Sis came up with that, that's what she was Trying to discuss and now it means everything and now people use it to actually hurt people. And so there's a structure component that modernity in this system always adapts to. So, yes. My book was a book that opened up the field. But it's also what I see is I'm constantly trying to fight the capture of it, the co-option of it. I'm noticing I'm having to do. I'm noticing that I'm having to correct people a lot about how to use the work. And what it means.

ELISE: And maybe optimism isn't the right word because you talked about sort of using a metaphor of like a washing machine of as all of this stuff gets reactivated in the culture. And I think for many white people like me, it was like, Oh, I had no idea that this sediment was in this washing machine.

RESMAA: Where did it come from?

ELISE: So in that sense, at least It feels like it's becoming more and more conscious for people, not that they necessarily know how to attend to it or process it or be with it, but it feels like at least people have some idea of what this is and some attachment. I do think that in general, you mentioned the word embodiment and I want to talk about that because obviously it's so core to your work, but that so many people in general are just, disembodied, right? I interviewed Peter Levine for this series too, because when we don't have that core connection, for whatever reason, people are like, I don't know what you're talking about, right? So can you talk about embodiment In the context of your work and what you're talking about?

RESMAA: It's interesting, you know, the word soma, like somatic, that word comes from a number of different places, one of the meanings of the word comes from a Swahili word meaning to educate and to learn. , it also comes from a Latin word, which means body and nucleus and all this different types of stuff. My idea of really SOMA or SOMATIC is really around how do we begin to create a living embodied anti racist generative culture by which we use the body as a mechanism to learn and stoke the intelligences, right? And part of what happens for me when it comes to race is that I'm not opposed to Things gnawing at people, right? My work is not to try and necessarily get to resolve or get to fixing things, right? My idea is that there is an emergent process that we have been divorced from primarily as human beings, and especially as human beings who have been subjected to imperialism, enslavement, land theft, colonization.

We really want to avoid any type of gnawing, right? And what I believe is that we have to begin to get more familiar with the gnawing because the gnawing tells us where the edges are at. The gnawing tells us where are the possibilities, the old ways that we've been captured, that we've been trying to find the answer to things. We've tried to traverse that, and the only place to find the more emergent ways, the ways through something is through The places we have yet to traverse, the places, the things that we normally would say, that's off the table. That is absolutely off the table. Those are the places now, when it comes to liberation, that you're finding that people are now willing to say, well, maybe that's not off the table anymore. Maybe when I'm watching my babies being murdered with white phosphorus, that's no longer off the table. Maybe when my children are put in cages, like we did here in America just a couple years ago, maybe certain things are no longer off the table. Maybe when in Michigan, people don't have access to clean water.= Maybe we need to actually move in a direction where we can actually investigate and interrogate and inquire into things. Because the structure says it is not possible, that we absolutely start to interrogate those things. And so for me, my work really is about getting conditioned so we can actually deal with the 400 years of charge that comes up when we try and deal with race, deal with the gnawing that won't let us sleep, that works it up and stop trying to find the off ramps. One of the things I see about white bodies is that white bodies can yoga the hell out of anything.

ELISE: Say more.

RESMAA: white bodies a kale salad and everything's good. Or some sourdough bread toast and a yoga mat. And the world is a good thing, leaves white bodies no leisure. What I've been trying to say is that that's exactly what white bodies need to stop going. They need to stop trying to sue the things down that don't need to be sued. When you can't sleep at night and you feel and you have a sense that there's this added weight in the world and your antidepressants are no longer getting at it, that's where you start. that your feet are walking around in America and sloshing in indigenous blood. Maybe the fact that you are connected through creation itself is why you can't sleep. And that something needs to be done and that the world is calling you to begin to do something with other bodies to make sure that this particular thing would healed and don't continue to happen. Maybe, the reason why you're experiencing what you're experiencing is that we are literally killing the planet. And that impact, because we are part of creation, not apart from creation, the impact of that shows up as depression, shows up as melancholy, shows up as rage, shows up as terror. Maybe that's what that is. And your attempts, to yoga the shit out of it, really is a warning mechanism, not a healing mechanism.

ELISE: I love that so much of your work. I know we're going to get to Monsters in Law, which is more couples based, but that it's group work. And how important is it when you go into a police force, or when you're working in a cultural institution, or when you're working with groups, is this sense, this trauma field, or the way that all of this is held, how much of it do you feel like is localized and responsible to specific lineages versus just something that's felt by everyone regardless, like you might have moved from Sweden 10 years ago and you are living in it, right? Or you just moved here from Japan, it's present to you even if you might not have a direct relationship with it, or do you feel like it's more directly in our family or ancestral lines and that's what we're contending with?

RESMAA: So I don't work with police departments anymore. It was too much terror on my body to work with them. There are many police departments in many of the leadership and police department is very invested in this kind of warrior mentality towards communities. Especially communities that look like mine. I had to get to a point to where that had to be off the table for me now, it is a brutal endeavor to work with a system that, from its inception, especially here in America, has been to control bodies that look like mine. And so I'm saying that to say that the way that I think about that question, is all of those pieces are always happening all at the same time. So, especially when it comes to trauma or brutalization of victimization. We're always dealing with the historical, the load, the spring loadedness of it. We're always dealing with it. We're always dealing with the intergenerational pieces. We're always dealing with the persistent institutional pieces, and we're always dealing with the personal pieces, all balled up in like one of those rubber band balls, right?

And it becomes so overwhelming that people are willing to just say, if I have to contend with all of that, we probably won't survive. So I'm just going to stay from here on. I'm just going to try and intellectualize, but the only intelligence that I'm willing to give any type of freedom to is intellectual intelligence, but my body and my whole body is experiencing the vibes of what's happening the images and the cadence of those images. The meaning making and the shifts between those meanings, the behavior and urges that I thought or that I allowed to be present. The sensation, what's on my palm, what's in my throat, what's in my belly, what's in my chest, what's behind my eyes, what's the temperature that moves up and down the texture, the pressure, all of that stuff.

And the imagination, all of those intelligences never get any room to practice because we think everything is about cognition and everything is about the way that I think and if I could just think about something correctly, then I can figure out how to feel better, how to do better, how to be better. And in that process, we become divorced from creation. And so I think that part of the problem is that people think that if I could just figure this out on a personal realm, in the personal field, then I'll be good. But when the load comes in from the historical, because I have not, and because this world says you shouldn't pay attention to those pieces, I don't know what to do with that. When it comes in from the intergenerational, I don't know what to do with that. When the persistent institutional stuff is wearing and withering my body, I don't know what to do with it. So I look for the nearest thing to try and get rid of it, to try and rage against it, to try and subdue it. In the beginning, it may work. And then over time, it loses its efficacy because I have to begin to develop ways of not just doing it individually, but also do it with others. Because what's happening to me is not just individual, it's communal, horrors that we're experiencing aren't just individual, they're also communal. So only developing individual responses to a communal horror is inadequate. And yet we keep reaching for that sourdough bread and yet we keep reaching for the things that help to kind of soothe us, but they don't help to condition and temper us.

ELISE: Hmm. And when you can get a group together, what's the effect? Is it that people start to understand what it looks like to have a container?

RESMAA: What happens is, what I tell people is that it's going to take at least nine to 13 generations before, particularly white bodies know what the hell race is. One of the things that Dr. King said is that he fears, and this was shortly before he was murdered, he fears that he has led his people into a burning building. And what he was talking about was that white people have been mass educated as it relates to his vernacular at the time, as it relates to the Negro and who the Negro is. White people have been mass educated in the realm of who I am, right? D. O. Hughley said one of the most dangerous places for a black man is in the mind of white folks, right? And what Dr. King was talking about was that because of this mass education over hundreds of years, white bodies think that they know who the Negro is and because they do not, they have a skewed understanding of who the Negro is. But they also have a skewed understanding because of that, of who they are.

And until white bodies start to begin to engage in a mass reeducation, until they begin to do that, he fears that America is on death door. Right? And when I'm doing my work with bodies, I am slowing it down and doing work with those particular bodies, not to get to some place that gets fixed, but for them to begin to play with and get conviction by and tempered by the 400 years of charge of race so they can be better prepared and understand what space is, understand what resource is, understand what discernment is, as it relates to race specifically. So when I'm working with bodies, Every emotion, every sensation, every vibe, there's a lesson when people begin to work with it with like bodies, they begin to work with it with each other, not just in my workshops, but when they leave each other, when they reach out to each other, when they're scribing, when they're working with these intelligences, they have some place to go and continue to practice. And over time, they can begin to develop room around race and pigmentocracy specifically, not around a book club, not around reading a book, but around what shows up when a particular somatic elicitation occurs, and how do you begin both individually and together and communally nibble on it, as opposed to trying to gorge on it and fix it.

ELISE: Hmm. When you're working with groups, is everyone's own familial history part of the conversation? or is that too intellectual?

RESMAA: You did it. You're right there, right there. Right there, right there. Like, that, what you just did? That's what we start to interrogate right there. We stay there. We go with that. There was a hitch there. There was this thing that you were saying, and then you hitched. We stay there. Investigate there. We say, okay, what was the vibe quality of that? what was the quality of that? Which state? Because what happens is, is if you stay there, what begins to happen is something starts to move and shake. And quick, if you stay, now, if I let you continue to like go on, like, like I tell people all the time, we use verbalness to get us out of our bodies most of the time, right?

ELISE: I relate. Yes.

RESMAA: know what I mean? Like let me explain. And what you're watching when that happens is that people are leaving. At the same time that they're talking, it looks like they're explaining it. They're really embodied. That's what it looks like. They're embodied. Right? And what I try and do in my practice and in my training and with bodies is I try and get them to pause, wait, wait, wait, just wait. As you starting to begin to tell me about all of the stories and all of that type of stuff, what is the sensation content, what's the intelligence? What's the urgings that because you're telling the story, you can't work with the urging, what you drop in to urging for a moment? Now you might not be able to stay there, but let's, right... and then what you start to notice is that things start to begin to unwind in this kind of spiral stuff. That's why you have to have a container, because as it starts to unwind, all the people's bullshit and the ways that they do it, the way that they blow it through each other, starts to begin to also make itself known. And so that's why I say the thing around nibbling and not gorging.

ELISE: Yeah. I remember, this is now years ago, but just having you talk me through a process and I've thought, you know, not a fraction as deeply as you about this, but trying to understand in myself, like, where's my fear? Who am I afraid of? I've, you know, done the Harvard, the implicit bias test...

RESMAA: that's right, that's right.

ELISE: Yeah. And one thing I will say is, and obviously, you mentioned intersectionality, and we think about these Venn diagrams of race, gender and class. I'm a half Jew from Montana. And my fear is highly localized around class and men and there's like a hotbed of white supremacy in Montana and Idaho.

RESMAA: Mm hmm.

ELISE: That's my somatic, like, I will run if I'm in an alley with a white man who appears poor.

RESMAA: That's right. That's right.

ELISE: I don't know.

RESMAA: Right? Can we do something? Because this is pretty juicy. You see how big my eyes got? You see how big my eyes got? I was like.

ELISE: I'm finding my running shoes right now. Okay.

RESMAA: That's right. Yeah. So let's just take one little nibble. We don't have to do the whole thing. Just one little nibble. You've said something. You've said, I'm a half Jew from Montana, so I just want to just stay there. I want to do nothing else. And I'm here with you. I'm right here with you. I'm a half Jew. You're a half Jew from Montana. You don't have to report. You don't have to say anything. I'm here with you. Yeah, right there. Right there. Right there. Just notice that right there. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to hold it. You don't have to namaste it. I'm holding this. I'm holding it with you, right? Yes. I'm a half Jew from Montana. Now, if I would imagine, you don't have to report. I would imagine that when you say that you're a half Jew from Montana, there's a part of that, even if it's really tangential, there's a part of that you experience as historical, goes beyond Montana. Notice that load. Notice that load. You said big time. And I'm watching. I'm here with you. I'm here with you. Notice that load. Yeah. Good breath. Good breath. Good breath. Just notice, when you say big time, I want you to notice where do you notice the big time? Is it in you? Outside of you? In your chest? In your face? In your belly? How do you notice? Big time.

ELISE: It's in my chest. It's in my jaw, in my eyes.

RESMAA: Yeah. Notice your jaw. As you notice your jaw, is there an urge that comes along as you notice your jaw? Any urging. Is there anything that wants to be done? Yeah. Is there anything that wants to be? Yeah. Yeah.

ELISE: Just want to smile and laugh through it.

RESMAA: yeah.

ELISE: Yep.

RESMAA: yeah, notice that laughter, notice that laughter, notice that laughter and smile and do it. Just notice that. And I want you to notice, as you do that, is there any emotional quality, any emotional quality to that laughter?

ELISE: It's an interesting question.

RESMAA: Is there any emotional... I'm going to say this a number of times, is there any emotional quality? To the laughter? Is there any emotional quality to the smile? Is there any emotional quality to the laughter? Being a Jew from Montana, a half Jew from Montana, what do you notice?

ELISE: A desire to make it light, friendly, non threatening, conciliatory.

RESMAA: Pause, pause. Now open your eyes, slowly open your eyes, good breath. Now look around and you should look around the room, look behind you, raise your hips, look up, look down, find a way that you can leave that room, ways that you can escape. And that piece was always there, un interrogated, un looked back, uninquired into. And so these conciliatory pieces, these pieces to tamp it down, these pieces to be a good, half Jew, to be acceptable, to be right, all of those pieces are historical, intergenerational, institutional, and personal, and many times, you know, bodies that have been marginalized, that have been brutalized, that have been victimized, those pieces don't get worked with, intended to. The narrative takes the place of that. And so, what happens is that over time, when people have been victimized, this is what I call the victim perpetrator interaction pattern, that when you are brutalized and you are victimized, you learn both the victimized pieces and the perpetrator pieces at the same time.

You learn what it's like to be brutalized, but you also learn what it's like to brutalize. That's the very little secret that people miss. And that what happens when a people are brutalized, their limitations and the brutalization gets lined up with their virtue. Right? Yeah, right there. And if that is not tended to, no matter which way they turn their heads, they can't see the limitations of their virtuous understanding. They can't see it because it's lined up with the victimization and the perpetration. And if they don't tend to that, what happens is, is that that particular alignment turns into righteous fury.

ELISE: Hmm.

RESMAA: And they can't get at it, no matter how much people say, you're doing this to me, you're doing that to me, you're doing this. They can't get at it because everything is lined up. That piece that you just touched on is both historical, intergenerational, persistent, institutional, and personal. It is not just about you. It is how your people and how half of your people, what happened to half of your people, and what got tended to and did not get tended to. And so that terror and that horror that comes up with white men who seem poor, that terror that comes up, even though you go...

ELISE: it's a pretty good...

RESMAA: this is a little terror, is what's bubbling and brewing underneath. When people are unwilling to do the work, to deal with the bubbling of that, with the creaking of that. And when you don't do it, It comes off as righteousness and fury and in reference to your question earlier around, is it happening? Is it localized and all that stuff? That's how we get at, what I just took you through is just a little bit of how you begin to get at this and how it's so spring loaded. Right? Rather than, it's only historical, it's only this, or it's..., no, it's all of that. The load of it is all of that.

ELISE: Yeah. And I would imagine that, I mean, not to go like too deep into my family history, but that then it gets compounded by anxiety now of saying, okay, well, my family managed to escape in this refugee status, by way of South Africa, where they were accepting white people.

RESMAA: Come on.

ELISE: Yeah, to Montana, where there's a large indigenous population. And, you know, so all of it starts to like, where did I come from and where am I allowed to be? And where am I not being harmful?

RESMAA: That's it. That's it. You see what I mean? That, what you just described, white bodies don't have any efficacy with that. You don't even know how we can go into that.

ELISE: yeah, I don't know how to resolve that at all.

RESMAA: You can't resolve it by yourself. So what's the next best thing? Shoulders up. Intellectual. Narrative. Because you even know it's something that needs to be tended to. You say your people landed in South Africa after genocide. Just that. Just that. There's so much that does not get tended to when you're running and coming out of genocide. Things don't get tended to. And so now you're smack in a place to where your white skin has currency.

ELISE: For me, for all of us, how do we come to peace?

RESMAA: There ain't no peace. There ain't no fucking peace. Listen, let me say it. If I don't get peace, In my black body, walking around in this pigmentocracy that white bodies created, if they don't get peace, what makes you think you're going to get peace? We keep looking for peace where all around it, children are working in diamond mines in the Congo, People are working to get shit so I can work my cell phone, we want this peace that cannot happen. Here's what I would say peace will happen when people invest in cultivating peace as opposed to war. Peace will happen. And one thing I know, for me, I know peace, I know I will never see it, but maybe I can put something in place to where I leave something here and my children's, children's, children's grandchildren can nibble off of and feed on what I've left here the same way I feed off of Frederick Douglass's stuff. Or Fannie Lou Hamer stuff, and I'm fed because of them, right? That's peace for me, right? I have an elder, Elder Mahmood Al Khati. Whenever I talk to him, I'm fed and I have a sense of peace because I know I'm in right alignment with him and right alignment with my ancestors and right alignment with my children's children's children. That's because of what I do. It's because of how I cultivate this because of who I'm with. It's because of we understand that there is something liberatory that must be done in order for this quote unquote sense of peace to at some point, look, listen, we're never going to have peace if we keep killing the planet.

ELISE: Mm hmm.

RESMAA: Because if the planet, this entity, this living entity that we're on, if we're killing it and it's shrieking and screaming and at this moment, trying to burn us off of it what makes you think there's some peace for you? And I'm not saying you.

ELISE: No, I know. I know. Yes. And I know you have the dirty pain, clean, plain idea. And so what is the work for us who, at least we don't want to make more pain, right? Like, we want to lower the dial on the projections, lower the dial on finger pointing, right? Starting to learn how to take responsibility for our own washing machines.

RESMAA: So dirty pain and clean pain is not a fixing. Dirty pain and clean pain is a temporary fix. Right? Let me ask you something, this is a funny thing, but I'm ready to ask you, have you ever been in a relationship with someone, and you're in this relationship, and y'all are doing whatever it is that you're doing. In your belly, something says, I should not be with them.

ELISE: Of course.

RESMAA: Have you ever been in a relationship where all your friends say, why are you still dealing with this person and something in you goes, wish I can let them go, but God damn, I just can't, you ever have been in that position?

ELISE: Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yes. I've done ridiculous things.

RESMAA: We all have been, you know, dirty pain, you know what it's like to do dirty shit when you can't educate yourself on it, right? And then, as you do it, then over time, maybe, if you're lucky, something shifts. And you go, I don't know what I'm going to do. Know I can't do this shit. That's clean. They're both painful. They're both painful. And as adults, most of the time, when it comes to the hard shit, to the stuff that is non negotiable, most of the time, we don't get a choice between pain and no pain. Most of the time we get a choice between clean and dirty. And then what comes next, After we make a choice on that, then something else we get to make choices on. When you do clean shit, you're dealing with clean pain. You're dealing with the pain of holding on to yourself. You're dealing with the pain of growing the fuck up. You're dealing with the pain of it. That's not no pain and, or no discomfort. And we've been conditioned to believe that when it comes to healing, that there should be no pain if we're doing it right. When that's not true, there is no kinks in the finals thing. I did an interview about three weeks ago and person asked me and he thought it was smart, right? He goes, well, Resmaa, you always talking about liberation and freedom and liberatory practices and stuff like that. Define for me what's liberation. Liberation is different for everybody and different, blah, blah, blah, blah. I want you to define for me what liberation is. I said, first of all, liberation is not a human invention. It is not a human endeavor only. It is part of creation. And I said, let me tell you a story. Imagine 600, 500, a thousand years from now, after we have gone through our sixth extinction level event, our sixth time on this planet of a reset, right? Six to five of the times on this planet natural resets, something happened, wipes off most of the things on this planet that's happened five times, right? We're on our way to our sixth, but we're promoting. We're the ones that's doing it. And we're doing it in such an exponential way, right? After this happens, something else is going to come about, right? So like after it happens, I said, imagine the thing that comes about is this predator. It looks like a lion that's walking around and it sees this prey and this prey is drinking water and this prey has this fur, these things all across it, it looks like fur. And this lion sees it, this lion like creature sees it when it begins to stalk it. And it's going very slow. It's very quiet. This creature doesn't hear it. All of a sudden, this lion reaches out and smacks it with this big, huge paw on the back of this thing. And as it does it this animal has twelve spikes on its back that shoots through the lion's paw and the lion in reflexes with the other one to try and get away from it. And those things shoot through the lion's paw, and then the lion grabs his hind legs to try and push it off, and the thing shoots through the lion's paw, and then the lion tries to bite it, and those things shoot through its mouth, and almost touch its eye. In that moment, both of those weaknesses know what liberation might look like. Knows what freedom might be, and what I say is that most of us only know liberation and freedom of that type based on the story that you just heard me say, not the experience of those two out. You understand what I mean? When I'm talking about these pieces, I am talking about a practice, a way of experiencing things in a liberated way, so you have room to be able to nibble on what liberation might be, nibble on what freedom might be, not based on my story, not based on the narrative.

ELISE: Beautiful. Resmaa, we did not accomplish our agenda. You're gonna have to come back so we can talk about monsters in law.

RESMAA: Alright. It's alright. It's alright. We can do it. We can do it.

ELISE: We're gonna do it. We're gonna do part two.

RESMAA: that's it.

ELISE: Thank you. Thank you. Great to see you again.

Thank you for sticking with us, we went off script, but this is Resmaa, this has been every conversation I’ve had with him has typically been experiential, always deeply uncomfortable, which is his point—is to hold all of us and whomever he is working with, and in this case it’s always been 1:1 but to hold me in the discomfort and to make me stay there, no yoga mats, no sourdough bread, no smile, no laughs. So thank you for sticking with us, his work gives me always a lot to think about. If you’ve never read My Grandmother’s Hands, it’s a beautiful book. He will be back to talk about Monster’s in Love, which is his book about couples therapy, and it’s related, it’s essentially about the stories we have and how we bring them into relationship and sort of knowing the animal you’re with. Alright, I will see you next time.

Alexandra Brockman
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