“When a culture refuses to believe that it has anything to do with what is occurring, it cannot do anything about what is occurring.”
Executive Summary
Howard Denson believes that there has to be an unidentified root cause constraining the advancement of African Americans, and that if it could be identified and truly understood, then strategies could be developed that would allow the African American community to eliminate its self-destructive behaviors and heal itself. Over decades of study, this Harvard MBA identified the root cause, created healing modalities, and developed a blueprint for the healing transformation of the African American community.
Two full-day workshops have emerged:
Understanding the African American Experience:
A Case Study in Cultural Intergenerational Trauma
and
The Healing of the African American Community:
A Blueprint for Transformation.
These workshops have been presented to more than 500 African Americans and to almost 100 licensed mental health professionals.
Presented as an immersive experience, utilizing Socratic and experiential teaching methods, participants report an immediate, personal, and transformational healing which they describe as one of the most significant experiences of their lives.
Many alumni report becoming better students, not returning to prison, finding and keeping jobs, healing family riffs, and finding peace in relation to rape, incest, physical and mental abuse, racial self-hatred, and guilt.
Mental health professionals report a completely new perspective on the African American experience and greater empathy, compassion, and understanding of clients.
The workshops engender an empowering and transformational recontextualization of the African American experience, recognition of one’s personal potential, the reality that today’s constraints are principally self- constraints, the revelation that true healing is self-healing, and the realization of exactly how the African American community can heal itself. This process was named transformational healing, for it is an epiphany that literally changes life trajectories, one person at a time.
Financial pain can be mitigated (food stamps, Section 8, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, prison, etc.). Healing from cultural intergenerational trauma however is personal and spiritual. A full recognition of personal worth, personal potential, and the power of self-love in action are the prerequisites of self- empowerment and the claiming of one’s full human dignity. Transformational healing is necessary before one can become the primary agent in their own empowerment, because a spiritual blockage requires a spiritual solution.
The potential of the body of knowledge presented in these workshops cannot be overstated. It may well be the catalyst for the healing of the African American community and for achieving racial reconciliation in America. It may well improve cost-effectiveness of social service organizations and government assistance programs by presenting clients ready, willing, and able to be active agents in their own empowerment. It may well reduce the racial academic achievement gap, and inform how conscious cultural change can improve the quality of life.
Transformational Healing, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is now seeking funding to implement research and testing, which will incorporate state-of-the-art social science research design and evaluation methodology, to identify and report the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of these workshops. Relationships are being cultivated with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work of Washington University in St. Louis to engage professors to provide research design and evaluation services, for the research must be unassailable.
It is assumed that workshop alumni will consistently demonstrate superior outcomes to those of the control groups. The studies will be conducted utilizing targeted population samples that are at the beginning of important human endeavors and experiences: entering high school, junior college, or college; immediately after being engaged by the criminal justice system (juvenile or adult); before re-entering society after incarceration; as an employee orientation or staff development experience for social service agencies.
“Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves. Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result while it is only a possibility – people who will act to make possibility real.”
Werner Erhard
“Professor Judy Atkinson argues that trauma becomes expressed as anger, violence and criminal behavior, where ‘rage turns inwards, but cascades down generations, growing more complex over time.’ Anger, hopelessness, worthlessness and genuine opportunities and disconnection run like a common thread through the experiences of both victims and perpetrators...”
Australia Human Rights Commission – 2008 Social Justice Report
“Empower yourselves with love. Create a healing community of love And you will thrive beyond your wildest dreams.”
Howard Denson