Juneteenth: Freedom was always ours, now we have to heal like it

June 19, 1865. It took two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation for enslaved people in Texas to finally be told what had already been declared: that they were free. Two and a half years of bondage that was legally over but practically unacknowledged. Two and a half years of someone knowing the truth and choosing not to tell it.

That delay is not a footnote. That delay is the story.

And for those of us doing this work right now, in this political moment, in this country, in these therapy rooms,  that story is not ancient history. It is the framework through which we must understand what our Black clients are carrying, what we are carrying, and why this work is both urgent and sacred.

Freedom was declared. But nobody came to tell them. Sound familiar?

What Juneteenth Means Right Now

Let me be clear: Juneteenth is a celebration. It is joy, it is community, it is music and food, and the kind of collective exhale that only happens when people who have survived something hard find each other and breathe together. That matters. That is healing in action.

We cannot talk about Juneteenth in 2025 without acknowledging the weight of the present moment. Because right now, Black Americans are watching DEI dismantled in real time. Programs built to create access…gone. Executive orders rolling back protections that took decades to establish. History is being legislated out of classrooms. And the message underneath all of it, spoken or unspoken, is the same one that always shows up: your experiences do not count. Your history is inconvenient. Your healing is optional.

 It is not optional. It is not inconvenient. And your clients are feeling all of this, whether or not they name it in session.

Racial trauma is not just about what happened in the past. It is a living, breathing, ongoing wound that gets reactivated every time the news cycle drops something new. Every executive order. Every viral video. Every institutional rollback. Our Black clients are not just processing history. They are processing yesterday. They are processing right now. And so are many of you.

 To the Clinicians Carrying This Too

I need to say something directly to those of you who are Black, who are people of color, who are working in this field while simultaneously navigating the same racial trauma your clients are bringing through the door.

You should not have to do this. You should not have to contain your own grief, your own fear, your own rage about what is happening in our country while also holding space for someone else's pain. The fact that you show up and do it anyway is not evidence that it is okay. It is evidence of your extraordinary capacity. But capacity without support becomes depletion. And depletion becomes harm.

Please hear me: your nervous system matters. Your processing matters. Juneteenth is also an invitation for you, not just your clients, to reclaim something. Rest. Rage. Grief. Joy, whatever yours looks like right now. Give yourself permission to feel it without immediately turning it into a clinical framework.

You are not just a clinician. You are a person. A whole, layered, impacted, resilient person. And that person deserves care, too.

EMDR, Racial Trauma, and What the Research Keeps Telling Us

One of the things I love most about EMDR, and one of the things that makes it uniquely positioned for this work, is that it does not require the client to verbally narrate every layer of their experience. For Black clients who have spent a lifetime having to explain, justify, translate, and perform their pain for others, that matters enormously. The body does not need a translator. The nervous system tells the truth whether or not the words are there.

But we also have to be honest: EMDR was not designed with Black clients at the center…the foundational research, the early protocols, the default assumptions about what constitutes a resource, what safety looks like, who gets to be believed about their experiences. And so part of our work as Groundbreakers clinicians is to hold the tool with cultural humility while we use it.

That means:

• Recognizing that for Black clients, the "worst memory" may not be a discrete event. It may be the accumulation of a thousand small cuts, the chronic low-grade exposure to a world that communicates, over and over, that their life is worth less. 

• Understanding that intergenerational trauma is not metaphorical. The epigenetic research is clear. What our ancestors survived lives in the body. A client does not have to have personally experienced slavery to carry its weight.
•  Knowing that "secure" is not the same as "safe." If you have been in any of my trainings, you know I will say this until I cannot say it anymore. Safety implies an absence of threat. Secure means we have built enough stability together that we can move through the threat. For Black clients in America right now, asking them to feel "safe" may be asking them to deny their reality. Asking them to feel secure in your relationship, in their own capacity, in their sense of self, that is a different, more honest, more clinically sound request.
• Expanding what counts as a resource. Ancestral connections. Cultural pride. Community memory. The knowledge of survival is passed down through generations. The image of a grandmother who endured things we cannot name and still found a way to love. These are not "nice to haves." For many Black clients, these are the most powerful resources in the room.

 Healing Is Reclaiming Identity

Trauma has a particular way of convincing people that they are the wound. That's what happened to them is who they are. For Black clients, this is compounded by centuries of a dominant culture actively working to define them through stereotype, law, through erasure, surveillance, and the constant negotiation of what it means to exist in a body that others have decided means something. EMDR gives us a way to interrupt that. Not by telling clients who they are, but by creating the conditions for them to remember. To access the parts of themselves that existed before the trauma took up so much space. To develop a narrative that is fuller, more honest, more theirs.

Healing is not just about reducing the distress around a memory. It is about what becomes possible when the distress is no longer running the show. It is the client who stopped introducing themselves as "the kid who got left" and started saying "I'm someone who knows how to find my way back." It is the recognition that resilience is not the absence of pain, it is proof that you survived it.

Juneteenth says: the freedom was always there. The declaration had already been made. What changed was the moment someone finally came and told the truth. Sometimes our work is exactly that helping someone receive a truth about themselves that has always existed, but that no one has ever said clearly enough for them to believe.

Juneteenth says: the freedom was always there. Sometimes our job is helping someone receive a truth about themselves that has existed all along

Joy Is Not a Luxury. Joy Is Regulation.

One of the things Juneteenth does beautifully is insist on celebration even in the context of an incomplete freedom. The people who first gathered on June 19, 1865, knew what had been done to them. They knew the world they were stepping into was still designed to harm them. And they celebrated anyway.

That is not denial. That is sophisticated emotional intelligence. That is the understanding, born of survival, that joy is not something you earn after all the hard things are resolved. Joy is a practice. Joy is medicine. Joy is, in the language of our work, a regulatory resource.

We talk a lot in EMDR about building resourcing, helping clients access states of calm, strength, and connection that support them through reprocessing. But I want us to think more expansively about what that looks like for Black clients. It may not be a peaceful beach. It may not be a serene meadow. It might be the memory of Grandma's kitchen on a Sunday. The feeling of a cookout where everyone looked like them. A church choir. A barbershop. A family reunion where the laughter was so loud the neighbors complained.

Cultural connection is not a supplementary resource. For many Black clients, it is the foundation. It is what exists underneath the trauma. And when we invite clients to access it — really access it, not just name it , we are connecting them to something that has survived everything history has thrown at it. That is powerful. That is regulatory.

That is healing. Let your clients feel their joy in the therapy room. Let it take up space. It belongs there as much as the grief does.

History as an Anchor, Not Just a Wound

Here is something I want us to sit with: for Black Americans, history has often been presented as a site of trauma. And it is,  there is no honest account of this country's history that does not involve extraordinary, documented, intentional harm done to Black people. We do not minimize that. But history is also a site of strength. And when we only frame it as the former, we do our clients a disservice.  

The same history that holds slavery also holds resistance.

The same history that holds redlining also holds the Harlem Renaissance.

The same history that holds the murders also holds the marches, the music, the art, and the organizing that reshaped the world.

Both are true. Both are part of the inheritance.

What We Are Being Asked to Hold Right Now

I want to name something plainly: our clients are coming into session carrying the active weight of a political environment that is dismantling protections, erasing histories, and signaling to Black and brown communities that their safety, their security is negotiable.

That is not hyperbole. That is the news cycle. And the news cycle becomes the nervous system activation that shows up in our offices. 

This means we have to be thinking clinically about collective trauma in real time. We have to be asking ourselves: Is what is happening in this session purely historical, or is there a current-day trigger keeping this wound open? Are we helping clients process old material while new material keeps landing? Are we attending to the compounding effect of chronic racial stress on top of individual trauma?

It also means we have to be willing to name what is happening in the world. Not as political commentary, but as clinical context. You do not have to have an opinion about policy to acknowledge that your client's nervous system is responding to the environment they are living in. That acknowledgment, that simple act of saying "yes, what you are sensing is real, the threat is real", can be the difference between a client feeling gaslit and a client feeling believed.

We do not get to be neutral in this moment. Not because we are advocates instead of clinicians, but because pretending there is nothing happening outside the therapy room is its own form of clinical harm.

We do not get to be neutral in this moment. Pretending there is nothing happening outside the therapy room is its own form of clinical harm.

A Note as We Enter This Season

Juneteenth this year falls in the middle of a particular kind of storm. And yet, the celebration will happen. Because that is what this community has always done. It has found the joy inside the grief, the resistance inside the pain, the connection inside the isolation.

As a Groundbreakers clinician, I am asking you to carry that same energy into your work. Not toxic positivity, not pretending things are fine when they are not. But the kind of grounded, clear-eyed hope that says: healing is possible even in hard conditions. Freedom is worth pursuing even when it is incomplete. People can integrate the weight of history and still find themselves standing.

That is the work. You are doing the work. And I am profoundly grateful to be in community with clinicians who take it this seriously.

Happy Juneteenth. Rest. Celebrate. Feel it fully. And bring that wholeness back to the work.