How Can We Make Progress After Floyd’s Death?

Since George Floyd’s death, the United States has launched into a national reckoning with race. Combined with other recent deaths of unarmed Black men by police and compounded by the COVID-19 lockdown, Floyd’s death was met with an explosion of emotion that expressed the growing tension between the police and African Americans.

Although Floyd’s death sparked many important discussions on policy and racial progress, some of the protesters channeled their anger into riots. High emotions swayed political discourse from constructive to destructive.

As Americans consider how to move forward as a nation, we must ask how we can use this reckoning to generate real progress in race relations — without letting our emotions destroy the very tools that make some solutions possible.

Releasing Our Emotions

As important and justified as our emotions were in response to Floyd’s death, we must not allow fear, anger and mistrust to drive our policies. Although it is important to acknowledge our emotions and let them inspire us to act, studies have shown that if our emotions are too exacerbated, our autonomic nervous system gets deregulated and part of our brain shuts off, causing us to become polarized and lose our ability to be in control of our actions — all of which affects our thinking process and drives us into impulsive behavior.

We must not allow fear, anger and mistrust to drive our policies.

In a topic as important as racial justice in America, we all need to take time to process and release, allowing our emotions to empower our actions without overriding them. There are many tools that help release emotions, allowing us to discharge the excess but retain their power to drive constructive actions. For example, when you feel overly agitated, tap your knees 25 times and take deep breaths until you feel calmer. You can also pay attention to your feet planted firmly on the ground, imagining you are sending roots into the earth, and then look around you and count 10 different shapes around you, or 10 different textures or 10 objects of the same color. Notice how your breath deepens and you feel more grounded and present, less in your emotions and more in control.

Leaders must have a role in diffusing our emotions, too. Those who validate these strong emotions — but do not decry the destructive actions they sometimes inspire — will unwittingly inflame them instead of calming them. Leaders must call for calm, reflection and assessment for the best interventions. The capacity to demand changes based on thoughtful interventions is what will transform the exposure of the suffering into the steps that will put an end to it.

The media can also play a part in quelling emotions. The media should immediately release all available information, including full videos of events, to prevent misinformation. The media can also de-escalate further unrest by reporting how emotions that fuel destruction can cause not only tremendous economic and psychological damage to allies but also can create backlash that harms the justness of the cause.

But perhaps the biggest change we can make to allow us to seize this opportunity to make progress is to listen to the suffering of some in our communities, speak to our desire to heal it, and choose words that make them feel accepted, honored, loved and cherished. We need to ask these communities what their needs are and how best we can reach out for healing, apology and empathy.

A movement for redress and justice will gain much ascendance if it moves towards recognition and reconciliation, acknowledging all parties involved and requesting the changes needed without ostracizing any element of our society.

The opportunity is here to push racial equality forward and heal the country from its past, hopefully once and for all. For that, we must validate the depth of collective trauma, offer healing, reparative words and actions and make sure that we do not create other collective traumas in the process. By regulating our own emotions and then listening to one another, we can channel our emotions into healing policies. We have an opportunity to make unquestionable and durable change. It must not be missed.

Gina Ross, MFCT, is Founder/President of the International Trauma-Healing Institute USA and (ITI-Israel. Her latest book is “Breaking News! The Media and the Trauma Vortex: Understanding News Reporting, Journalists and Audiences.” You can reach her at Gina@GinaRoss.com