coercion, deception, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This never heals the trauma. Instead, it increases the first person’s dirty pain by reinforcing harmful and aggressive survival strategies as standard operating procedure. It creates a sense of ongoing unease in the first person’s body that he or she

then must override. It may also provoke a reflexively defensive or aggressive response in the second person’s body. Sometimes people inflict this pain on others deliberately, but more often it occurs spontaneously and unexpectedly. Something triggers a person’s trauma; his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever is nearby." (Menakem, 62)

Castile, and Tamir Rice, and countless other human beings whose lives were taken from them—may be partly redeemed. This book can help us make that choice, and to navigate the unknown waters into which we will need to sail." (Menakem, 320)

All our sensory input has to pass through the reptilian part of our brain before it even reaches the cortex, where we think and reason. Our lizard brain scans all of this input and responds, in a fraction of a second, by either letting something enter into the cortex or rejecting it and inciting a fight,

flee, or freeze response. This mechanism allows our lizard brain to override our thinking brain whenever it senses real or imagined danger." (Menakem, 30)

"An embedded trauma response can manifest as fight, flee, or freeze—or as some combination of constriction, pain, fear, dread, anxiety, unpleasant (and/or sometimes pleasant) thoughts, reactive behaviors, or other sensations and experiences. This trauma then gets stuck in the body—and

stays stuck there until it is addressed. We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about,

believe in, or yearn for. This is why people get murdered for disrespecting other folks’ relatives or their favorite sports teams. It’s also why people get murdered when other folks imagine a relative or favorite team was disrespected. From the body’s viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical,

visceral sensations. The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety." (Menakem, 31)

"The body wanted to fight or flee, but wasn’t able to do either, so it got stuck in freeze mode. In many cases, it then develops strategies around this “stuckness,” including extreme reactions, compulsions, strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusual avoidance strategies. Over time, these can become embedded in the body as standard ways of surviving and protecting itself. When these strategies are repeated and passed on over generations, they can become the standard responses in

families, communities, and cultures." (Menakem, 32)