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• African Americans regularly receive societal messages about their lack of value, powerlessness, and inability to ensure their personal safety.
• Perpetuated through media stories as well as common, everyday interactions, these microtraumas cause African Americans to experience a heightened sense of cortisol arousal, a pervasive feeling of doom, and a lack of trust in relation to their environment.
• The result is hypervigilance and intrusive exaggerated flight, fight, and freeze responses.
• Identify triggers and symptoms of microtrauma, as well as how it’s processed in the brain.
• Use mindfulness, faith-based rituals, deep breathing exercises, grounding techniques, and memory-processing activities to decrease frequency of reactivity.