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Unlocking Legacies and Releasing Burdens explores the ancestral burdens and trauma associated with Black Americans and offers a meaningful path to healing and wholeness. After years of study, Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby delves into the roots of intergenerational pain, sharing powerful insight and ways to:
Spark transformation,
Let go of the shackles of negativity, and
Free your mind to flourish
Crump creates a light conversational approach to the practical methods of breaking the chains of trauma, as she helps you to peer into the murky and complex world of how long-held and harmful cultural norms have weighted Black Americans down.
Inside you will learn:
§ A breakdown of ancestral burdens and how the legacy of Black people continues to ripple across the modern world
§ Powerful ways to decolonize your mind, body and soul to release burdens and set yourself free
§ How you can reclaim your thoughts and emotions to pursue integration and strive toward wholeness
§ Why healing the wounds of the past is essential for helping new generations to flourish
§ And much more
Gain deeper understanding of generational trauma and set yourself free from the harmful cycle of toxic beliefs. Dr. Swaby will pave the way for you to heal and help you to define new, positive legacies that will empower your family and enrich your community. Don’t waste any more time being chained to your past; the keys are inside
Unlocking Legacies and Releasing Burdens!
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens
How to Let Go of Generational Traumas & the Wounds that Keep Us Chained to the Past
Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby
Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby
Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby
Author Photo by Cyrus Sila Ndolo
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
The resources in this book are provided for informational purposes only and should not be used to replace the specialized training and professional judgment of a medical health care or mental health care professional.
The author can not be held responsible for the use of the information provided within this book. Please always consult a licensed and/or trained professional before making any decision regarding the treatment of yourself or others.
Published by BooxAi
ISBN: 979-8-9854129-1-8
A 5-WEEK ONLINE COURSE
A 5-WEEK ONLINE COURSE
As a thank you gift for purchasing my book, you will receive two bonus items, 100% free.
BONUS ITEMS (VALUED AT $599.00) INCLUDE:
*FREE ACCESS TO MY 5-WEEK UNLOCKING LIMITING BELIEFS ONLINE COURSE
*FIVE 15-MINUTE 1-ON-1 POWER COACHING SESSIONS WITH A PROFESSIONAL COACH/COUNSELOR
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“Break Every Chain”
This book is dedicated to
my children, Carlos Jr. and Kaelyn,
This book is also dedicated to my brother, Link,
who left us too soon but will always be remembered by these two words he used at the end of every text message,
“GIVE THANKS.”
Foreword
There is no better time than now for a work of knowledge, understanding, and compassion such as the book that you are about to read by my friend, Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby. The resources and information provided in these pages can open your eyes to a new world.
Anxiety, toxic stress, and pressures of life bombard each of us every single day. The world seems to be spinning faster and more out of control than ever. The individual hurts and disappointments in life must be dealt with in a calm and assuring manner. The pressures of life overwhelm adults while the youth are experiencing stress from every side that no other generation has endured before. However, there is hope. There is always hope. The very book that you have in your hands is a great place to start.
The work of Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby is tremendous, and the way she influences so many people in her community and around the world does not go unnoticed. As you read Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens, you will discover that life is full of many different hurts, pains, and traumas, and if we are not prepared to face those storms head-on, then healing will be delayed, if not unattainable.
I have come to know Gayl and have admired her heart and her work for many years. One of her many traits that is immediately recognized is her compassion for others. She has a tremendous gift of teaching, training, and sharing her wisdom with so many others that will soon be released to the world to counsel hundreds of other hurting people. She is truly a champion for those who have been hurt, and this book is just a glimpse of her wealth of knowledge.
The importance of breaking the cycle of generational traumas is huge in this world that is continually being filled with more stress and anxiety as each day goes by. The tools and techniques found within these pages are tried and proven to help. Read this book, take notes, and underline, circle, and highlight the paragraphs that touch you. Make Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens your life workbook that you will not only read once but will also keep handy to help you throughout the many years to come.
Just when you feel the storms will overtake you… Just when you feel that darkness could not get any darker... The rain begins to stop, and the clouds begin to part. Then the most miraculous gift of promise appears through the fading clouds—a rainbow. The promise of hope.
This book will be the beginning of that realization of hope.
Dr. Gregory Williams
Author of Shattered by the Darkness: Putting the Pieces Back Together After Child Abuse and When Dark Clouds Come: The Road Map to HOPE
Endorsements
Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens is an important addition to the theories addressing the mental health of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby uses her personal experiences, her academic research, her travels, and her professional training to develop a book that is insightful, engaging, informative, and transformative. She challenges people of color to recognize the historical impact of White supremacy on our mental health, our self-esteem, and our personal and collective development. Dr. Swaby examines the damage done in the United States by a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. Her approach uses a variety of tools to address this legacy, including several methods developed by her (e.g., P.A.U.S.E. and the collective care wheel).
This book can be helpful to clinicians and clients who are struggling with intergenerational trauma and are looking for culturally competent methods to address the long-term psychological impact of oppression and White supremacy. Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens is not a passive and abstract approach to this intergenerational trauma but a call to action for personal and collective healing for communities of color. This book encourages healing using a step-by-step approach to the healing process. In a time of increased White supremacy, as evidenced by attacks on Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project, this is a much-needed volume to encourage wholeness and healing.
Edith C. Fraser, PhD, ACSW, LICSW
Retired Professor and Coauthor of Saving Marriageby Applying Biblical Wisdom
* * *
When I read the opening chapter from Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens, I was immediately engaged and enthralled. The words are so powerfully crafted by Dr. Gayl Crump Swaby that they immediately spoke to me in a deeply personal and reflective way. In fact, the honesty in which Dr. Swaby shared her narrative gave me permission to interrogate and revisit my past traumatic experiences and those within my family that I still carry.
Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens provides the reader, who may be bearing longstanding and generational trauma, with a pathway to freedom from wounds held much too long. In this time when biological, economic, racial, social and emotional pandemics plague people, especially those who are Black, people of color, vulnerable and marginalized, Dr. Swaby’s book comes at the right time. It is healing centered and will become a balm in Gilead for anyone who reads it. I recommend it with boundless enthusiasm.
Ron Walker, Executive Director
The Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color
* * *
Gayl Crump Swaby has written a must-read for any person of color who wants to transform their life from generational trauma to healing. Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens encourages the reader to go below the surface of deeply rooted culturally burdensome beliefs to release them and to take control of their path to wellness for themselves and the generations to come.
Julia Mejia, Boston City Councilor At-Large
Chair of the Committee on Civil Rights
Chair of the Committee on Small Business,
Workforce Development
* * *
Compounded on top of our legacy of communal trauma, which existed pre-COVID, we are going through a pandemic while in a time of race reckoning. Our trauma is at an all-time high. Dr. Crump Swaby has provided a life-and-academic informed guide that helps us not only as individuals but as a People.
James 'Jimmy' Hills, Host,
#javawithjimmy|Mental Health Advocate
Contents
Introduction
1. The Beginning
2. The Legacy and the Burden
3. Types of Legacy/Ancestral Burdens
4. Decolonize Your Mind, Body, and Spirit
5. Explore, Unlock, and Release
6. Releasing the Burden
7. Reclaiming Your Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions
8. Healing the Wounds
9. “Me” to “We,” Our Collective Healing
10. Passing the Baton:
A New Beginning
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Introduction
“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you will bleed on people who didn’t cut you.” ~Unknown
“By going through the agony of healing, you no longer pass the poison chalice onto the generations that follow. It is incredibly important and sacred work.” ~Unknown
“No Woman, No Cry” ~ Bob Marley
Vulnerability. “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley is usually the song I hum along to when I am hurt and denying myself of feelings, especially those that lead to emotions that make me want to weep. As a result, both in the past and sometimes now, I have gone through life without the ability to be my authentic self with the people I love—not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t or wouldn’t allow myself to be vulnerable. I simply couldn’t permit myself to feel then and still have days when I deny myself permission to feel now. However, lately, I have been spending a considerable amount of time reflecting on who I am, who I want to be, who I am becoming, and how I want to move in the world. To say it has been a challenge is an understatement; still, I am learning and growing. I am making the conscious decision to “sit with me” and to evolve.
After the passing of my father, I have learned things about myself and my history that have rocked my world. This process began eight years ago, which was two years after my father died. I remember the day I received the phone call like it was yesterday. I was on my way to a client’s home for a counseling session, and my father had been in the hospital for more than a week after being rushed to the ER during his weekly dialysis treatment. It was October 16,2010, just after 2:00 p.m., when my brother called to deliver the news. As I listened to him relay the message, I went completely numb as I continued driving.
The closer I got to my destination, the more I realized I needed to call someone. I couldn’t decide whom I should call first, my husband or my supervisor. I opted for my supervisor because I needed someone to say to me, “Stop! Don’t go any further. You need to cancel your appointment.” And that’s what happened. My supervisor asked where I was, and I told her I was on my way to a client’s house and tried to convince her that I would be okay and would cancel all other clients after that one. She immediately talked some sense into me and told me to go home. She assured me she would call my clients and cancel my appointments—all of them. I was thankful because if she had left it up to me, I’m sure I would have kept going and would have continued to see every client on my schedule. For me, it would have been business as usual.
After speaking with my supervisor, I called my husband and informed him of my father’s passing. He was very supportive and asked where I was and whether I wanted him to leave work and meet me at home. I told him no and guaranteed that I was headed home and would be fine. To this day, I cannot recall whether I cried; it is still a blur.
I drove around for what felt like hours and eventually found my way home. I later called my mother, who was still at the hospital with one of my older sisters and my youngest brother. We talked for a bit, and then I started to think about all the things I had planned for after work. I was home earlier than expected, and I needed to fill the time and the void I was feeling. I remembered I had a meeting at my children’s school, and despite what or how I was feeling, which I didn’t comprehend at the moment, I made the decision to attend the scheduled board meeting; I was a member, after all. Besides, I needed to think about other things. I needed to occupy my mind with anything else other than my father’s death. I was that strong, stereotypical Black woman…the one Bob Marley sang about…the one who doesn’t cry.
A few hours had passed since my brother’s call, and I was at the meeting. Yet all I could focus on was my father and trying to understand the impact of his death on me. I was on the schedule to make a presentation to the school board, but I couldn’t focus on the here and now. Questions and thoughts kept circling in my head. What does this all mean to me? And for me? There were no answers.
What I do remember is waking up the next morning and saying to myself, Something has got to change. I was not sure what, but the thought would haunt me over the next two years. It wasn’t until when I found myself sitting on my therapist’s couch on the anniversary of the day my father had passed with the same question lingering in my hippocampus that I had a breakthrough. Even now when I recall this moment, I have to stop telling the story several times. The tears are still fresh, as though his passing happened just yesterday. I must believe it was because I never really shed any tears then, which frees me to shed them now. I had not grieved for my father, and I am keenly aware of this now.
This story is only a preview of what led me to write Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdens. This book is about the many unspoken burdens I have carried all my life that are not mine to carry, nor should be given to others to carry. These are the legacies that hold secrets, joys, sadness, and, of course, burdens—some good, some bad, but hardships, each and every one. There’s no greater journey than the one within.
I spend a lot of time standing in front of people teaching, presenting workshops, leading seminars, or speaking. When I am not doing that, I see a handful of clients in my private practice. A lot of my topics center around trauma and healing. As a professor, many of the courses I teach or have taught focus on training students to become mental health professionals by integrating cross-cultural approaches to the treatment of mental illness and other stress-related life challenges. I have been teaching for more than fifteen years, as a full-time professor for one college and as an adjunct at several others. You can imagine the number of students who have crossed my path.
In the last two years, I’ve been focusing my work on historical and intergenerational trauma, as well as the legacy and ancestral burdens and their impact on my own life. Because of this new focus, my workshops, seminars, or speaking engagements now concentrate on how legacy and ancestral burdens play a massive role in how people see themselves and the world around them. I talk about the history of Black people and the impact of slavery. Then I talk about how we have held on to beliefs that are not our own to hold or to carry. These beliefs are crippling our families, our communities, and our young people.
It is at this point that I think about my father’s death and how he lived his life. He never stopped to smell the roses; he believed that to show emotion and to not work hard were forms of weakness. To be “human” was not encouraged and was looked upon as a deficit.
I look back at my choice not to allow myself to be present in the moment of feeling the death of my father. I think of myself and many others because these burdens we are carrying are keeping us imprisoned, shackled, chained, and enslaved emotionally, physically, spiritually, and psychologically. I have to talk about it so that others can release their burdens and create new, different legacies that will bring healing to their families, their communities, and our youth.
It was only through my time spent in therapy that I came to the following revelation. Throughout my life, I have always been committed to my cultural upbringing: the values, morals, and beliefs that were instilled in me. I never questioned my parents when they told me anything that I felt deep within me didn’t make sense. I dared not challenge them or even outwardly show I disagreed or had any thoughts about anything different from what they were telling me. I was a strong proponent of respecting other people’s cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values. Then a colleague of mine once said to me, “Not everything cultural makes it okay or makes it right.” Those words confirmed my revelation, and it was then that I knew releasing my burdens would be necessary. With this revelation came the first part of my breakthrough, which led to the breakdown of any belief I held on to about culture and what had kept me from seeing and understanding at a deeper level.
The next revelation I had came in 2018. I attended a workshop that talked about legacy burdens. This spurred my second breakthrough as to where these beliefs and structures I had become accustomed to and depended on had infiltrated my being without me realizing it.
In 2017, I was invited to speak at a prestigious college in Massachusetts to a group of 100 freshmen women of color about self-care. I learned that every year the college accepted 100 young women of color from top high schools who were usually in the top 5 % of their graduating class. As I prepared for this talk, I inquired about the population demographics of the group. What I learned was that they were mostly first-generation college students from all over the world. I also learned that many of these girls didn’t get to choose the course of study they would major in or pursue as a career. They were expected to fulfill a legacy of success that was passed down from one family member to another—with the added pressure that they had achieved more educationally than their families. Often they arrived at college with predetermined goals and expectations.
These expectations were so high and increasingly demanding that it often led to stress, depression, anxiety, anorexia, and other mental health issues. They were considered the best of the best and were expected to maintain that status at any cost. The administration and director of the program had come to realize what had been happening throughout the years and invited me to talk about the importance of self-care. On the day of my talk, the director of the program introduced me, and it was time for me to stand before those eager young women and share my tips for self-care.
As I looked out into that auditorium and into the eyes of those young women, the introduction of my speech changed. I froze, looked at the outline of my written speech, then looked back into the auditorium. What I saw was myself at 16 years old. Yes, 16—the age I graduated from high school and enrolled as a freshman at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama. I had left my birthplace of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, the place I had spent the first 16 years of my life, and was living in a new place, away from my family and my island home. I made an agreement with myself to work hard at any cost, even if I didn’t feel good. My parents had sent me there for one thing and one thing only: to get an education and a degree. Nothing else mattered.
I looked out at those freshmen women and realized that I had a lot in common with them. It was time for me to unlock a belief I had been carrying and release that burden by allowing myself to be vulnerable, transparent, and present in front of these girls without trepidation. I could hear the voices of my father and mother: “Don’t air your dirty laundry,” “Don’t tell other people your business,” and “Keep it to yourself.” Ringing in my ears were these four statements: “Don’t talk; don’t feel; don’t trust. Pretend nothing is happening.”
Deep down inside, standing in front of these young women, I knew I couldn’t hold that belief any longer. I felt an inner turmoil. I couldn’t stand still. There was an internal war happening, and I was the only one who could put a stop to it. So I did. I shared a part of my true self, a part of my story with these young women. It was the first time I had taken the leap of faith outside of my therapist's office, and though it was terrifying, it felt good. I had finally begun my journey to wellness.
In case you don’t already know, this book is about healing—healing the pains of our past and releasing those things that have been keeping us in psychological and emotional bondage. It’s a journey.
In this book, I talk about the many burdens we carry as Black people. Burdens are passed down from generation to generation, and many of these started or were inherited from our ancestors who were enslaved. I talk about historical and intergenerational traumas and how these experiences have continued to cause havoc in our lives and the lives of our children, our families, and our communities. I speak of the legacies that have become burdensome to a point where it causes our health to fail, our souls to weep, and our minds to be distracted.
One purpose of this book is to bring awareness to Black people about the importance of understanding where some of our beliefs about mental and physical health, and our spiritual practices might stem from. This book is for my brothers and sisters of the African diaspora. Whether you are African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, or Afro-Latinx, Unlocking Legacies & Releasing Burdensis for you. What it is not is an exhaustive revelation of legacy burdens due to the breadth and depth within the African diaspora. Although I understand that legacy and ancestral burdens are not limited to just Blacks, this book will unapologetically focus on those Blacks of the African diaspora.
Throughout this book, you will see many references to music and songs. I love music, and I have found that listening to certain artists and/or genres helps to feed my soul. Music reduces stress and comforts me. It lifts my spirits and energizes me when I feel down. It helps me to think more clearly when I am struggling through difficult times, and it reminds me of the beauty in the world and how much I have in common with others.
