You Cannot Heal What You Refuse to Remember

Nothing can be changed until it is faced. It’s an idea James Baldwin returned to often, and it remains the first, most uncomfortable truth about healing for Black people in America, and across the African Diaspora. Before there is restoration, there is reckoning. Before there is peace, there is the long, difficult business of looking clearly at what was done, what was lost, and what, against every conceivable odd, survived.

That survival and generational trauma is the foundation that must be acknowledged and built on. We must rebuild, and with intention. We must manifest and engineer our psychological agency in a world that seeks to remove all sense of agency from us. And this is not only a Black thing, or an Ally thing, this is a human thing and has existed since there were oppressors as well as the oppressed.

The Architecture of Survival

Long before the DSM existed, before insurance codes and therapy copays, before the word “wellness” was packaged and sold back to the very people it was taken from, Black and Indigenous communities had already built intricate systems of care. Griots carried the weight of collective memory, understanding that a people who don’t know their story are a people who can be convinced of anything. Elders and Aunties served as advisors, living libraries of hard-won truth and reminders of cautionary tales for their collective babies. The Black church, Ifá, the hoodoo root worker, the grandmother who pressed herbs she could name in three languages, all of these were forms of clinical practice, whether credentialed institutions ever recognized them as such or not. And they still exist in some places, to be observed with a grain of salt.

They were not primitive. They were precise.

Food was medicine and memory. A plate of something slow-cooked was also an act of resistance, a refusal to forget who you were before someone tried to make you into something else. Music was entertainment AND intervention, it soothed your soul and reminded you that you had a soul. Baldwin understood this well. He knew the spirituals his people sang were not passive cries into the void, they were active technologies of endurance, coded and carried in the body long after the mouth had stopped singing.

This is what mainstream mental health has so often missed, and what culturally competent care must insist upon: the body knows things the intake form never asks about.

The Weight of Ancestral Memory

For Black people navigating racial trauma, past and present, disconnection from ancestry is not a cultural inconvenience. It’s a generational wound. When you don’t know where you come from, you cannot fully know who you are. And when you cannot know who you are, you become vulnerable to every story someone else wants to tell about you instead. In therapy, we know that your internal identity will determine your outcomes.

Baldwin warned us about exactly this. He wrote, in different words across different essays, that the price of belonging was too often identity itself. The demand, historically and persistently, has been that Black people purchase acceptance by agreeing to forget. By assimilating. By shrinking.

Reconnecting to ancestral wisdom is the refusal of that bargain.

That knowledge is structural. It provides what psychologists now call a secure base, a foundation stable enough to do the hard work of living.

Practical Acts of Return

You don’t need a ritual degree or a pilgrimage to begin. Reconnection is available in the ordinary.

Set a photograph of someone who came before you where you’ll see it each morning. Cook something your grandmother made, even imperfectly, even from a written-down memory. Let music from your lineage move through you without judgment, Baldwin was right that real music touches something the intellect can’t defend against. Journal in the voice of an elder you knew or imagined, and ask what they see when they look at you now. Sit outside and let yourself be held by something larger.

The act of remembering is our navigation and our return to ourselves.

In Akan tradition, this is called Sankofa, the bird that flies forward while looking back. You cannot know where you’re going without understanding where you’ve been. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s epistemology. It’s how you find your footing in a world with a vested interest in keeping you disoriented.

The Therapy Room Has to Be Larger

Modern mental health is beginning to understand what traditional healing always knew: you cannot treat a person in pieces. You cannot separate the psyche from the body, the individual from the community, the present suffering from its historical roots. The body keeps score.

Culturally competent therapy makes room for the whole story, not just symptoms and coping strategies, but lineage, spirit, narrative, and the particular texture of what it means to move through the world in this body, in this country, in this time. More clinicians are building exactly these spaces: rooms where the full self is not just tolerated but welcomed and where healing is understood to be communal as well as individual.

Because Baldwin also knew this: isolation is part of the design. The antidote isn’t just self-care, although that is critical. It’s community. It’s witness. It’s someone who sees you clearly and refuses to look away.

You Are the Continuation

If you’re carrying something heavy right now, and many of us are, here is what the ancestors would want you to know:

Your healing is not separate from your history. Your healing is rooted in YOUR story. The strength that got your people through the Middle Passage, through Reconstruction’s betrayal, through every generation of specific and inventive cruelty. That strength lives in your nervous system and it is available to you.

Remember that.

And then, if you need help, real, sustained, culturally grounded help, reach for it. Not because you are damaged. But because you come from people who understood that healing has always been a collective act.

We rise together. We always have.

Written by Tamara Pommells, LPC, LCADC, ACS.