Permission to be human
Psychologist pens book on how detrimental the ‘strong Black woman’ image is to women’s mental health
Strength is a term that’s often been seen as an asset rather than a weakness. But when the term relates to Black women, it can be detrimental. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg Szchool of Medicine, knows this all too well from seeing it in her practice with clients.
It’s why the clinical psychologist penned the book “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women” to show how the image of the strong Black woman is silently suffering, masking traumas, and how it can get in the way of seeking help for the root causes of suffering.
As Burnett-Zeigler writes in the introduction of the recently released book, “Although we generally accept the label of strong Black woman with pride, on the other side of the mask are stress, anxiety, and depression that lead to unhealthy behaviors such as emotional eating, poor sleep, and neglecting selfcare. The mask allows us to show only a fraction of our true selves to the world. We wear it as a way of coping with our pain. It’s our survival tactic. I believe the strong Black woman mask is preventing us from being our authentic and abundant selves.”
“I’ve been talking about mental health in the Black community for some time and I think now it’s especially urgent — we’ve seen that in COVID, with the civil unrest, the unresolved trauma that our community is facing,” she said. We talked with Burnett-Zeigler to learn more about Black women pivoting from surviving to thriving, and giving Black women permission to be human rather than expect to be superhuman. The following interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: You provide a road map for Black women to strike a balance between strength and vulnerability in the book. What does that road map look like?
A: Our enduring strength or what we’ve understood to be strength is not the full answer. Certainly that helps us to be resilient and helps us to be able to make it on a day-to-day basis, but that’s really not the way for us to fully deal with what’s on the inside. Understanding what trauma looks like, being able to take a self-assessment and see how trauma shows up in our body, in our relationships, how trauma shows up as anger and fear of how we’re interacting in the world, how it shows up as hopelessness, that’s what I try to do in the book. I show different people that I’ve worked with in therapy, people that I know in my clinical practice that have experienced the full spectrum of trauma, and how trauma has shown up in their lives, and hope that people seeing these stories might be able to say, ‘I struggled in this way’ and be able to recognize the way that trauma might be showing up in their individual lives. Something that I underscore is practicing self-compassion. As Black women, there’s so much that’s expected of us, and the harshness of the world and difficult life experiences can really play in a grueling way in our mental health. I want to really shift that message to one that gives us more grace, gives us more compassion, gives us more permission to think about ourselves and prioritize ourselves.
Q: How do you respond when women say: “My trauma is less than others and doesn’t warrant professional help?”
A: There is a spectrum of trauma, and how those experiences impact individuals. There are narratives that exist in our community whereby our feelings, our response to trauma can be discounted or minimized, whatever that experience might have been. No matter what someone is presenting to me in therapy, I remind people that your feelings are valid regardless of someone else having experienced something that might be labeled as “worse than.” You are entitled to the space to own that and to know that it’s real.
Q: We all know how the strong Black woman image can be harmful, but how is it helpful?
A: The helpful is the resilience, the ability to push through, the ability to make a way out of no way, the ability to care for others. But the harm is when that care comes as a consequence to ourselves. The harm comes when the caring for others means that we’re not paying attention to ourselves, when caring for others means that we’re not setting boundaries.
Q: You wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune about the mental health of your clientele following Breonna Taylor’s death. Given Derek Chauvin’s sentencing, what is the consensus now?
A: What I’m seeing now is the collective weight of everything that has happened over the course of last year — from Derek Chauvin to Breonna
Taylor to COVID-19 on top of the challenges that so many of my clients would face under normal circumstances. What I’m hearing now is a collective exhaustion, feeling depleted, wanting to be rid of this heaviness that’s been present for the last year. COVID-19 forced us all to reshift our lives and the conversation around mental health because everybody was stressed. When everybody’s stressed, talking about stress and anxiety and depression, no longer is it an “other people” thing, it’s an everybody thing. It opened up this global common experience that people were grappling with their mental health. Now the flip side of that is, while more people are getting help, the access has also decreased because providers are full. I see it in my own practice, I see it in the practices of my colleagues where the demand has increased dramatically.
Q: There aren’t enough mental health practitioners to help everyone. How can people find help?
A: Some of the things that I recommend to people who are seeking care: Think about the support that is in your immediate network that you might not already be accessing, being vulnerable to those friends and family who might be able to offer some informal support that you’re not taking advantage of. For many people, that may include their spiritual or religious community. Another important gateway for people who are expressing symptoms of depression or anxiety, is a primary care provider, a good way to link to mental health treatment. And for those that are employed, a lot of larger employers offer employee assistance programs.