Two Mental Traps Distracting You From Finding Belonging As a Mixed Person
When it feels like people don't fully understand you or what you've experienced as a mixed person, it's really hard to feel comfortable and relaxed in social situations -- or just in your body in general. It doesn't really feel like you have anywhere you can really land.
When folks come to me for help they're full of questions like, Can I trust this person? How do people read my racial identity? What are people going to say if I identify as Black or Chinese or Persian?
The monoracism you’ve experienced keeps you hypervigilant and in your head. You feel like your identity and your mere existence is too complicated for others, to the point where you might self-select out of monoracial or monocultural centered spaces (or any space where you might be rejected).
And worst of all, you feel like you're the only one having this experience – like you’re in an intersectional category of one, trapped in the echo chamber of your own mind.
The problem is this can feed into mental traps that keep you feeling even more isolated and alone.
In this blog, you’ll learn about two mental traps mixed race people fall into and how somatics can help you navigate hard moments without getting stuck.
Pause and Practice
I want to acknowledge that while I'm going to offer solutions or alternatives to these mental traps, that what's really going on is your body's way of trying to keep you safe. It’s reacting and adapting to all the ways that you have felt othered, misunderstood, and rejected. So I invite you to say to your mind, I see you. I hear you. Thank you for trying to keep me safe. Thank you for all that you do to make sure that I don't let my guard down.
It might feel weird sometimes to talk to yourself. But it's so powerful and healing to turn inward towards yourself and to initiate a conversation that you've probably longed to have with others for so long. You’ve wanted to be seen, witnessed, and validated – and while you definitely deserve that from others, you can also offer it to yourself for now.
Mental Trap #1: You’re Fixated on Not Feeling Understood
The first is that you're extremely fixated on not feeling understood by some people, to the point where you automatically shut down or cut people off the moment you smell misunderstanding. But if you are primarily measuring your belonging based on whether certain people or everyone always understands you completely, you might be missing out on meaningful relationships.
Let me be clear - I don't want you to stay in any relationship where your reality is questioned and I never ever want you to bypass your sadness, your grief, your rage about all the places where you've been made to feel like you weren't enough.
But I also know our brains are sometimes SO good at detecting disconnection that they can also obscure your perception of all the good connections in your life or the possibility of connection with people who just don't understand you yet.
Sometimes our bodies need help to heal and refocus on the bigger picture to find that space where you can definitely protect yourself from harm, while also staying open to the right connections – even with people who don’t fully understand your experience yet, who might even be projecting their own insecurities or lack of belonging onto you.
Story Time
I had a really interesting conversation with a friend last fall.
They told me they were dating someone who was mixed (My friend is Black). My friend felt from this person a deep yearning to claim Blackness and to be in Black spaces. But this person only had 1 Black grandparent, was light skinned, and generally white-assumed by others. That made my friend uncomfortable and they asked me: At what point, at what percentage or blood quantum are you be Black enough to be in these spaces? It feels like it's discounting like my own reality as a black person who's clearly read as Black.
I sat with my friend in this question and offered some perspective to my friend on the mixed experience, the fucked-up-ness of racial purity, and the reality that things are complex and imperfect. And in doing that, they actually opened up to deconstructing their worldview of race and identity. They ended up sharing a bit about their own experience of feeling protective of their Blackness because they've had times when they have felt, even though they're clearly read as black, that they were not “Black enough” in the right ways.
This conversation brought this friend and I even closer. It illuminated something I’ve come to understand through this work around race and trauma, which is that usually, people criticize and reject as a way to protect their own sense of belonging, in a world where identity and belonging is so conditional and fraught.
Obviously this is a friend of mine who I feel safe with – but I’ve also done a lot of my own racial trauma healing to be able to sit in these kinds of conversations. This messiness around race and identity and belonging is part of being human in this moment in life. And this kind of messiness is also not necessary a red flag that means someone is unsafe to be in relationship with.
I can say for certain that feeling less hyper focused on who doesn’t understand me has helped me to deepen my relationship with people where I might have decided to drop them in the past. And these are now some of my best relationships.
Mental Trap #2: You’re Fixated on Finding the Perfect Words to Describe Your Identity
Another mental trap I see folks fall in is being really focused on how they should identify.
If you're somebody who feels like, if I just knew how to identify, then I'd feel like I belonged...then I’d be able to defend my identity to others, you might keep going in circles.
The truth is there's no singular or perfect way to identify as a mixed person. You might look one way phenotypically, but grew up proximate to a different culture. You might identify different ways in different spaces. You might identify with multiple monoracial or monocultural terms.
Sometimes I identify as mixed, sometimes I identify as Black, sometimes I identify as multiracial, sometimes I identify as multicultural. Sometimes I use, I talk about all the sort of lineages in me, Scottish, Turkish, Irish, English, German, West African, all of it.
Race – and Racial Identity – is Highly Complex
In reality, race is so much less pure and fixed than monoracism would like to have us believe.
Race is a social construct. It's both made up AND also a very real way we have learned to make meaning of who we are and where we belong – in part, because it’s a very real way we are politically empowered or oppressed in our society.
Race is not just phenotype or DNA. It is a highly complex, heavily policed, context dependent construct that is often determined by DNA, phenotype, cultural proximity, and other factors – depending on who you’re talking to and in what context you’re talking about it.
I definitely don't want to minimize that racial identity can be a doorway into belonging. But at the end of the day, belonging doesn't entirely depend on how you identify or how you look phenotypically.
The Somatics of Belonging
At the end of the day, belonging is affective, meaning that it is something you feel. It is not something that can be concretely defined. It is the experience you have in your body when you feel seen, held, and met in your reality.
The thing about feeling seen, held, and met is that those that feelings can become an imprint, a core belief about where you belong and where you fit in, a somatic and emotional memory that you can take with you everywhere you go – just like the memory of being rejected can follow you everywhere you go, causing you to fall into these mental traps.
This means that when you can cultivate that memory, that knowing, that feeling in your body, belonging doesn't depend on feeling like everybody understands you. Belonging doesn't rely on feeling like you absolutely belong in every single space that you are in or every single person you come into contact with. It becomes a feeling that you can reference back to where you do have it, whether that's in your body, in community with other mixed people, in your family, with nature.
When you have an embodied sense of belonging - you can stay in interactions and experiences long enough to see how people receive your input, like I did with my friend, instead of popping off or crawling away the moment you detect misunderstanding.
I knew that sharing my perspective with them didn’t mean I wasn’t Black enough – even if they ended up feeling that way. I didn’t have to adopt their perspective or pledge allegiance to one way of conceptualizing Blackness in order to maintain our connection. I followed my curiosity, instead of my fear of rejection, to see if they were open to understanding more of my experience as a mixed Black person. I showed them that someone else self-identifying as Black didn’t threaten their own Blackness.
How the Mixed Race Belonging Collective Can Help
If you’re someone who often feels lonely, isolated, or out of place, you could benefit tremendously from working on building that belonging imprint I describe in the section above.
This is exactly what we do inside the Mixed Race Belonging Collection – an online community for mixed race folks where you’ll learn somatic practices that will help you respond to and recover from being microaggressed and misunderstood in real time.
The Mixed Race Belonging Collective is grounded in a somatic approach. And while somatics is – at it’s simplist – about reconnecting with your body, it is also – more broadly speaking -- a practice in building more pathways toward connection where there has been a history of disconnection.
All the trauma and oppression you have endured in this lifetime has fractured your relationship to yourself, to others, to land, to culture, to your ancestors.
But the doorways never completely close. Every time you reestablish any single one of these pathways, you gain a sense of support that can carry you through the highs and lows of the mixed race experience. You become more resilient.
And that’s what we are constantly doing inside the Mixed Race Belonging Collective, an online community where you’ll learn somatic practices that will help you respond to and recover from being microaggressed and misunderstood in real time.
Inside the Mixed Race Belonging Collective there’s a workshop called HELD, where I teach a simple somatic practice that will help you build more pathways toward connection - to yourself, to others, to land, to culture, to your ancestors.
These are all what I call ‘portals to belonging’ and in addition to the somatic practice, you’ll also get a long list of ideas about how you can repair or deepen your relationship to any one (or all) of these portals.
You may have tried somatic practices in the past, only to be disappointed when you’ve been unable to shake the trauma out of your hips.
What I offer inside the Mixed Race Belonging Collective is an approach that is curated to specifically address the mixed race experience. I bring nearly 10 years experience as a trauma therapist, 13 years as a yoga teacher, and 20+ years of experience as a community health educator rooted in liberatory praxis. Everything I teach is about cultivating a deeper sense of connection and belonging – to yourself, to others, to land, to your ancestors, and more.
There is literally nothing else like this around.
AND - This work will help you heal not only your mixed race belonging wounds, but all the ways you struggle because of your other marginalized identities.
Without it, every moment of being misunderstood will reinforce these mental traps you keep falling into.
