The Worst Part of Feeling Like You Don't Fully Belong Anywhere As A Mixed Race Person Is Actually What That Feeling Is Holding You Back From
I see this in the clients I work with all the time.
You feel like your privilege cancels out your pain, so you can't talk about how genocide is affecting you or show up at a Black Lives Matter meeting.
You feel like you can't go to an indigenous grief ritual because you have too much privilege and you don't have that lived experience of the other people there. Or you won't be seen even as having the lived experience, even if you do.
You feel like, because others don't see your heritage through your phenotype, so you can't attend an affinity space like a retreat for women of color.
You feel like you won't be accepted for all of who you are, so you hide the part of you who's nerdy, or you don't ask for help when you need it because you feel like you're a burden and people will see you as the person who always needs something -- Or maybe you compulsively offer to help others even when your capacity is limited.
You fear that you’ll be “found out” or outright canceled, so you constantly monitor how other people will interpret what you're saying, or you don't market your amazing business on social media, even though you really want to.
And while it’s admirable to be so thoughtful about how other people experience you, that often also means that you're missing out on a lot because your doubts and your insecurities are in the driver's seat.
You're not getting the connection you want. You're not getting the professional opportunities you want. You're not getting the life experiences you want.
All because you've had so many experiences of feeling like you didn't fit into boxes that made sense to other people. These experiences of being microaggressed and misunderstood are so painful.
And this all has boiled down to you learning, on an emotional level, that your complexity is a problem; that you're too much of something and not enough of something else.
Let’s break down how this happens – because it comes from somewhere.
Racialized Trauma in
Biracial and Multiracial Individuals
I want to validate that lot of the experiences you've had as a mixed race person - the negative experiences and the frequency with which they happen, ANDthe fact that they've been happening your whole life – are truly traumatic. They are a form of racial trauma, stemming from monoracism, the racism that specifically discriminates against those of us who don't fit into these like pure racial categories.
And it's traumatic in an ever-present way, where the source feels hazy, where you – or others – might think it's not that big of a deal because it's just the way life is. But your body knows otherwise.
I mean, think about it. In our society there's a constant policing of racial boundaries. As a mixed race person, you get a lot of questions and comments that are unsolicited. It's dehumanizing. And this is on top of whatever microaggressions you get for the stereotypes that are associated with the monoracial identities you also hold.
All of this reminds you that you're different. It erodes your sense of dignity. It erodes your sense of belonging. And it is a core human needs to know that you belong, that you matter, that your needs matter.
The Neurobiology of Trauma: How it Impacts Your Brain — and Life
The fact that this is all happening consistently – and starting so early in your life -- shapes how you see yourself and how you navigate the world, both consciously and subconsciously.
On a neurobiological level, it forms neural pathways that shape your core beliefs about yourself, your core beliefs about the world, and your behavioral patterns. This is because your brain internalizes all these awful experiences you're having, even if it's a bunch of little experiences that cumulatively add up, and it uses that information to anticipate what danger awaits in every interaction.
So, again, I want to validate that being mixed race can come with a lot of trauma and that the way that your brain adapts to like anticipate this danger, to anticipate the rejection, is your brain and your body's way of adapting to kind of keep you safe to either (1) prevent that from happening or (2) to help you to do whatever you need to get the connection, the love that you need.
But the challenge is that this level of trauma shrinks our neurological capacity to hold complexity. Here’s what I mean by that.
Over time, these traumatic experiences cause your psyche to fragment. This means there are these distinct neural networks that stop talking to each other or they don't communicate so well. As a result, the protective response starts to transcend the situation where the fear is warranted and is actually adaptive and it starts to generalize to a lot of other situations.
What You Need to Know About Trauma As a Mixed Race Person
Under stress, your brain needs simplicity. But that’s only supposed to last for short periods of time, assuming we escape the tiger that’s chasing us up a tree. But the persistence of racialized trauma creates a simplistic perspective that becomes what we assume to be the ultimate truth about how the world is and how people see you. In turn, there is a sense of urgency that starts to drive your experience. In a lot of the mixed race clients I work with, this creates a strong core belief that I'm too much or I'm not enough, that there’s nowhere you will be seen in your full wholeness, and full complexity.
More specifically, it can feel like there's nowhere that people will understand that:
Yes, you're Venezuelan even though you don't speak Spanish
Yes, you're black even though you miss a cultural reference
Yes, you've experienced discrimination even though you're light-skinned
Yes, you have grief about the war in Lebanon even though you don't live there.
It feels like because you have these experiences where people haven't understood these things about me, you’re never going to experience mirroring and validation, the kind of response you actually want anywhere. Everything becomes filtered through a very black and white lens.
This also transcends into like also not being able to hold other people or a moment in complexity either.
So when someone misunderstands you, you assume there's no pathway to clarify what you meant and you just shut down.
When someone makes an assumption about your identity, it confirms that you don't belong in that space at all and you should just give up and retreat.
When someone says, I actually can't help you move or I can't help you with this emotional issue you're having, it feels like, I must be a burden.
When someone's upset because you missed their birthday party, it feels like you'rea total failure.
Outside of Mixed Race Belonging, I’m a trauma therapist, and in trauma therapy we call this coupling. Essentially, that means that two things get associated with each other. In simple terms, X equals Y.
This means that you’re missing out on the opportunity to be vulnerable in those moments -- to reach, to move in for connection.
That can look like saying something like,
Hey, I think you actually misunderstood what I said there.
Actually, you didn't know this about me, but I'm Kenyan.
In those moments when you feel like the opportunity is lost, your brain is struggling to hold the duality. It feels like everything is in competition rather than the pure fact that in a single situation, for instance, you and your friends' needs are just opposite right now.
Here’s what's important for you to understand -- in these situations, for your brain it’s not really that the situation itself feels unsafe, it's that the feeling you experience in that moment is unsafe. The disappointment, the shame, the sadness. You learned, somewhere along the way, that the feelings that come with being misunderstood, misread, misattuned, and rejected are as life-threatening as a hungry tiger running at you.
So you disconnect, you avoid, You get no practice at being with those feelings, which are normal feelings.
In reality, it's safe to feel those feelings when you have the nervous system capacity to do so. But if you keep avoiding the hard moments, then your risk tolerance doesn't get to stretch. The avoidance causes you to lose trust in yourself. You don't feel like you can do hard things. You don't know how to be vulnerable. And so:
You trip out over wanting to ask someone to hang out.
You don't tell people about your amazing massage therapy business.
You don't share how what your friend said about your hair really landed with you.
The Shift You Need to Make
To Feel Less Afraid
and More Satisfied In Your Life
But here's the thing, underneath it all, there's a part of you who's been exiled, who continues to long for more.
There is a bind between two desires, one for safety and one for connection, and they feel like they're in competition.
I see often in the clients I work with that the one for safety wins because, you understandably want to feel safe. Reaching for safety is a well-conditioned muscle.
But here's what I want you to understand: real healing isn't NOT feeling rejected. AND it isn't abandoning your very real drive for safety either. It's your ability to hold complexity and still feel whole.
Inside your mind, that looks like
This was so disappointing and I'm still whole.
It's feeling like someone didn't fully see you and still knowing in your core that you are whole.
And this ability to feel your wholeness happens by coming into relationship with your inner world and having more trust in your inner system (aka the different parts of you).
It's your ability to notice your fear and insecurities and not be overpowered by them. It's the difference between feeling like you're drowning in that sense of emptiness or not enough or too much versus standing on the edge of the pool and being able to see that feeling without being completely flooded by it, or letting it take over the drivers seat.
I think of it as like an I got this vibe. No matter how nuanced, complex, tangled a situation is, no matter what pain and grief it generates inside, I got this.
This is a sense of security that you can take with you. It becomes something that can hold you so that, when you want to take a risk to be vulnerable or move through a conflict, you can do that and feel held in the uncertainty before you get to the end. Because when you have that sense of self-trust, that sense of wholeness, that I got this, that I'm gonna be okay, that this hurts right now, but this isn't my whole experience, you can discern more clearly just how much danger you’re in and take the kinds of risks that you need to take to have the kind of life you want to have.
Let me be clear -- you'll still be able to discern when a situation is really unsafe or compromises your sense of dignity. And you'll be able to walk away when someone mistreats you and without internalizing it. But when you walk away, it’s with the energy of That person feels this way about me and I'm going to walk away and I'm still whole.
But the benefits don’t stop there – because you're also going to be able to understand that:
Sometimes people are sharp with you, not because you're light skinned, but because they're having a bad day.
Sometimes when someone misreads your identity, they actually might be able to affirm your identity and see you if you provide them with more information, right?
When you have this sense of security and self-trust
You can hold your privilege and your pain and confidently navigate movement work without dominating space or shrinking your reality.
You won't interpret misattunements or mismatches in your interactions as being about you or such an overpowering part of your narrative to the point where you just stop trying or you're too scared to try.
And you'll be able to hold complexity during conflict. You’ll trust that you can each have your perspectives and your needs without feeling so fixated on being right that you lose the opportunity to be in connection.
This capacity for complexity, this self-trust, is going to help you to shape a new narrative about your life because
You'll feel BRAVE.
You’ll be able to feel the fear and do it anyway.
You'll be able to build intimacy with others because you'll be able to tolerate all the uncertainty in the process.
One of my clients put it really well – she said that after a hard, complex interaction, she walked away “feeling like an absolute badass.”
How I Can Help You
If you want to feel like an absolute badass, the finish line might not be as far away as you think. It all starts with becoming a compassionate witness and steward to your own body, mind, spirit.
And I can help you with this here at Mixed Race Belonging. Sign up for my email list and get exclusive content that will help you show up as your whole self without shrinking, shapeshifting, or simplifying anything about who you are.
