Wekesa Madzimoyo teaches parents, social workers, mental health professionals, and others interested in our mental health how to use story and particularly the Harriet Tubman Warrior-Healer-Builder Story to facilitate our mental healing in this online class.
When: Saturday, Dec. 14th 11:30am-1:30pm Eastern
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The Araminta WHB Harriet Tubman Story for Healers and Helpers: Controlling The Narrative; Controlling Our Future
She led us out of physical bondage (slavery); maybe her true story can lead us out of psycho-social bondage as well.
Features:
*Discovering Araminta Harriet Tubman - the storyteller
*Countering Injected Racials Scripts which warp her story and our stories
*Shaping the intersection of our people's narratives and our personal stories for our success
This two-hour training session will use Tubman's story to examine both the power of personal narratives and our people's narratives to create success, failure or both.
African people were the first storytellers. We knew story's powerful force to create or destroy. We used it effectively by telling new-born naming stories (naming ceremonies) and by telling family stories, then Djali (griot) stories about the history of our village or our people and the afterlife.
Today, Black people have become more consumers and repeaters of other's stories - alien stories. The chains of captivity were heavy and brutal. They constrained us - restricted our movement. But captivity was costly and stimulated our acute resistance.
The real goal was to break our spirits and to alienate us from our people's stories, making us ripe for alien stories to take hold. These dangerous stories injected into our consciousness do much more than constrain us.
They guide us to:
- Live other people's stories
- Extract meaning from our lives based on their values, visions, and fears
- Evaluate our lives and success based on how well our lives and our stories serve their interests
- To create broken stories of our own lives and our people's lives
What's worse? When we become aware that these alien stories don't serve us - when they hurt us - the memory (story) of the brutality - induces us to blame ourselves. As Dr. Amos N. Wilson would say - "It's a very slick system."
What is this got to do with Araminta Harriet Tubman?
Tubman, the storyteller, is often overlooked. We marvel at her bravery and revolutionary action and rightly so! We often miss that the story precedes the revolution (change). Through stories, she became the authority in her life and over her life. Can we take a page from her book to become the storyteller that she was?
Scholarly and popular stories about Harriet - including the recent movie - inject harmful racial scripts. You will learn how to counter these scripts to tell a more authentic and compelling story of our heroine and ourselves. The corrected story inspires and instructs us to "do Araminta.
Narrative Therapy:
While narrative therapy is an established field of personality psychology, clinicians often ignore the damaging or uplifting effect of African peoples' narratives that we carry.
Our people's stories shape family narratives, which in turn shape our personal narratives and personal power. Too often personality therapy alone is too puny to help us heal the wounds of oppression.
Let us - the healers - control the narratives and prepare us to change the world!
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