Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland audio in partnership with IHeart Radio.

I can certainly tell you as somebody who used to suffer from panic attacks that if somebody said to me,

calm down. Don't you think I would have done that already? I would have already done that if I knew

how to do it, but I don't know how to do it because my body is like on fire right now,

and I feel like I'm going to die. And so it really becomes, how do I intervene at the

somatic, at the body level, so that I can unhook that.

Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement in her 2018 TED Talk declared that we as a society were collectively traumatized by the

reckoning we were having around sexual harassment and assault at the time.

That declaration felt like the truth to me and got me thinking about the other potential

collective traumas we might be experiencing as a society. I am deeply aware of the collective trauma

of repeatedly seeing black bodies murdered on camera. For me, as a black trans woman, the violence

against trans folks that is often also captured on camera repeatedly, I found also deeply traumatizing.

A global pandemic, the greatest economic downturn

America has experienced since the Great Depression.

Collectively, we are experiencing trauma on top of trauma.

My own work in therapy over the past four years has focused specifically

on trauma resilience. And if we are indeed collectively traumatized, how do we collectively heal?

So, to have this conversation, I wanted to talk to my very own therapist, Jennifer Burton Flyer.

I mean, I talked to her all the time, but I wanted to have that conversation here publicly

to talk about how we can build trauma resilience individually and collectively.

I really believe it's one of the most important skills we can develop right now.

Jennifer is a licensed marriage and family therapist.

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