Implicit Bias and the Body

Written by Sandra Olarte-Hayes LCSW, Director of Equity

Our team at Colors of Austin Counseling recently read Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, a foundational book about racialized trauma and body-based healing. As I have tried to make sense of the experiences I shared in my last post around the unconscious/implicit bias and the hurt I’ve experienced becoming a non-normative parent, I’ve been thinking a lot about the body’s role in unconscious biases and the harm caused when we act based on them. This book has added depth to my understanding of what went wrong and it felt important to share some of these insights and realizations here to follow up on last month’s post.

Many of us believe that racism (and most bias) happens in the mind and is about cognition. We believe that through intellectual inquiry, we can identify our prejudices and educate ourselves out of them…if we only had more knowledge. A wealth of research has proven much of this to be false in that we actually can’t discover our unconscious biases through cognitive inquiry alone. Implicit association research shows that people respond with fear or preference in response to images of faces that are flashed on a screen before the picture even registers consciously and even if the picture flashes so quickly that they have no conscious memory of having seen it. These responses show up so quickly and so automatically that they occur before we even realize it and can intervene. When we try to analyze ourselves and figure out where our bias lies, our defenses and desire to see ourselves in a positive light (our self-serving bias) make it very hard to see clearly.

My Grandmother’s Hands focuses specifically on racism and White (body) supremacy, and I want to be really clear that I am not equating discrimination in the parenting community against non-normative parents with the long history of racialized trauma and bodily violence inflicted on Black people, families, and communities. These things are very different, and yet, Resmaa Menakem’s lens on the body and the nervous system’s role in in racism and racialized violence adds something important to our understanding of how implicit biases operate more generally. I believe that by better understanding what happens in the nervous system when we are around that which is different and which makes us uncomfortable, we can better understand why we hurt one another without even intending to.

One of the concepts from the book that has particularly helped me understand my recent experience is how Resmaa Menakem distinguishes between different types of pain. “Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It is pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really really, don’t want to say or do it, and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honestly and vulnerability…[It] enables us to engage our integrity and tap into our body’s inherent resilience and coherence, in a way that dirty pain does not. Paradoxically, only by walking into our pain or discomfort – experiencing it, moving through it, and metabolizing it– can we grow […] Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain” (pages 19-20). In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we would say that clean pain is pain that we accept, open up to, and practice curiosity around in service of our values. Dirty pain would be pain that we try to avoid or get away from where our avoidance efforts lead us to act out of alignment with our values.

When we feel emotional pain (fear, shame, disgust, anger, etc.), something happens in our nervous systems. Our bodies tend to relax and open when we are content and around those we feel safe with (those who are like us) and constrict when we are afraid, ashamed, or around people who are different from us and who our bodies perceive as unsafe. How we then respond to the discomfort and activation in our nervous systems’ matters. We experience clean pain when we allow ourselves to feel it. We sit with it, observe it, notice how our body reacts to it, process, and metabolize it. We experience dirty pain when we instead move straight into action to try to avoid looking at it. Sometimes we move into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn or dissociate to get away from it.

I don’t know what feelings come up for my loved ones when faced with the idea of our unusual, non-normative, non-biological family. But both the lack of support and the subsequent defensiveness makes it clear that something uncomfortable arises. My guess, based on the responses I received and my childhood experiences, would be some combination of fear, disgust, shame, and anxiety. People know better now than to say these things out loud, but I know with certainty (because people told me so) that when I was a child, people felt disgust, fear, and anger when they saw my non-normative family together and that this contributed to how we were treated and sometimes ignored. For many of us, it is easier to ignore, change the subject, distract, and move away from that which causes somatic discomfort.

Figuring out other people’s feelings actually isn’t my work to do, but I want to highlight how easily we can miss and hurt one another when we are driven by an impulse to get away from somatic discomfort rather than a desire to be with the people around us and our values. In the time since the conversations I described in my last post, the people around me have pressured me to move on and let them show me how supportive and unbiased they are when I have needed space and time to process. They have made grand gestures, tried to find quick fixes, and some have shown up with hostility when there wasn’t a quick fix or I needed more time. For many of us, shame feels intolerable and yet it is bound to show up when we hurt someone that we love, are told that we have acted out of alignment with our values, or discriminated based on an unconscious bias. I know that in moments where I have done these things, a large part of me has been desperate to get away from my shame instead of stay and be open to the experience of my feelings in my body. I believe that feeling shame is actually a very important part of our growth process and yet our difficulty being with it is a large part of why we show up with fragility in these moments.

I actually find all of this incredibly hopeful. If our instinctive response to the discomfort and activation in our nervous systems is to defend, make excuses, minimize, blame, ignore, lash out, and find a quick fix, then by learning to sit with and stay with these feelings we can make so much progress towards acting with intention instead of reacting to avoid discomfort. What would happen if we all, especially people with institutional power, could bring awareness to the activation that arises in the presence of that which makes us uncomfortable? What if we learned to identify where we constrict and learned to sit with it, breathe into it, and metabolize it instead of instinctively trying not to feel it? Would it help us actually identify where implicit bias lies? And what if we learned to breathe and settle in these moments? These are some of the questions that Resmaa Menakem’s book poses. I wonder if being able to sit with our pain would allow us to see one another and show up for one another much more even when we felt something hard. My sense is that we would hurt one another far less. The next time you encounter a family that looks different from yours, I encourage you to take a moment and to try.

To read the other posts in this series, check out September 2022’s post titled Invisibility, Normativity, and Parenting and January 2023’s post titled I Still Don’t Matter: An Update On Foster Parenting In a Normative World.