Self-Care Tips For Women Who Aren’t White

Limited income, stressful jobs, and daily traumas mean Black and Brown women need a more intense, less expensive pamper routine

Photo: Gary John Norman/Getty Images

It’s up to us to take ownership of how we, as women of color, define and refine our own healing practice. And news flash, that won’t always mean spending cash on a hastily-done manicure or expending energy decluttering your house when all you really want to do is sleep. That’s according to Thema Bryant-Davis, PhD, known as Dr. Thema on social media, a licensed psychologist, ordained minister, sacred artist, and past president of the Society for the Psychology of Women who is also known for her life-affirming tweets.

“I think one of the important things to know about healing is that it is not absolute. It does not mean the end of all distress,” says Bryant-Davis, who also hosts the Homecoming podcast. “I think sometimes the way people talk about it makes it seem like ‘well if I heal, it should never, ever bother me again.’ The truth is that it ebbs and flows, but you learn strategies so that when and if it reemerges we have the capacity to hold it and hold compassion for ourselves.”

Here’s what else the tenured professor of psychology at Pepperdine University (where she teaches clinical skills to would-be doctors learning about trauma in diverse populations) had to say about personalizing the self-care rituals that everyone else is touting without regard to how WOC fit into the mix:

Self-care is not something you can purchase or accomplish. It’s a process you honor and own within yourself.

“It is so important for us to name and acknowledge the impact of poverty, the impact of lack of resources, lack of access to resources — that those things do create stress,” Bryant-Davis says. “I think it’s insincere for us to not acknowledge that our finances can and do affect our mental health. To honor and nourish ourselves is not a limited activity for the wealthy. Whatever our income is, we can still take consistent and significant steps to honor ourselves.”

Bryant-Davis insists that self-care is not always tied to vacations and retail shopping. Self-care can exist in meditation and prayer, self-help books from the public library, listening to podcasts, watching workouts on YouTube, being mindful of what we choose to put into our bodies, or reducing our time with stressful people.

The key is to look for ways that are accessible for you to take care of yourself.

To honor and nourish ourselves is not a limited activity for the wealthy. Whatever our income is, we can still take consistent and significant steps to honor ourselves.

2. Self-care is not about shiny, easy things. It’s real and complex, and requires vulnerability. In order to care for yourself, it’s time to identify your trauma.

“Trauma is more about growth and progress than absolute recovery. And sometimes when people use the language of recovery, they think they’re going to go back to who they were before. But our experiences do change us. So it’s not that my recovery takes me back to my prior self but that I have grown in the aftermath, and I have made progress, and insight and meaning of my life,” Bryant-Davis says.

On this healing journey, it’s also important to note that there’s a difference between everyday stressors and traumatic stress.

“Most of us, every day, are juggling multiple demands and roles and that can be stressful but not usually overwhelming,” she says. “But events that overwhelm usually impact resources and capacity to cope.”

According to Bryant-Davis there are different forms of trauma that we don’t often consider:

Natural disasters

Interpersonal trauma, which is where one person or a group of people have done something to you and that can take the form of domestic partner abuse, sexual assault

Medical trauma

Traumatic loss, where you’ve had a loved one who was murdered or took their life

Societal trauma that takes the form of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and microaggressions.

The key to identifying your trauma and how it shows up in your own life takes time, support, grace, mindfulness, and holding compassion for ourselves even if society tells us otherwise.

“Not everyone who experiences trauma develops post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” Bryant-Davis advises. “Not every event crushes our psyche but some experiences really can have lasting consequences and we don’t have to be superhuman and superstrong and pretend that we are unaffected.”

Self-care is not always tied to vacations and retail shopping. Self-care can exist in meditation and prayer… or reducing our time with stressful people.

3. Scrolling, reading, commenting, posting, liking are not self-care practices that lead to healing.

“The key piece is application,” Bryant-Davis says. “Many times we can hear information and we can either repeat it or repost it but it needs to start showing up in our lives. So it’s translating it from head to heart. I would encourage people to consider therapy because if you just see a post, you’re interpreting that post through your lens. And we all have blind spots — all of us have things we miss just based on our life experiences. In therapy, there is an exchange.”

Bryant-Davis highlights that therapy makes space for accountability, interpretation, feedback, and the opportunity to speak your own truth. When you’re reading a book, listening to a podcast, or scrolling social media, you’re simply digesting information but that is not enough to really take care of yourself.

“There is a part of healing which is in the telling of the story. We need a place and space where we have a voice to really talk about our experiences to tell our stories and to recreate the narrative of our lives, how we understand our lives, and how we shape our meaning out our lines.”

4. Exercise your right to block access to your energy and your time.

“Setting boundaries is a form of self-care,” Bryant-Davis says. “Take a sacred pause. When people ask you to do something, stop giving them a quick answer. Some of us are shaped to give a quick yes before we have thought about the demands, the time requirements, what else we have on our plate.”

“Even if you’re thinking it might be something cool to do, always say to people ‘that sounds interesting, let me get back to you.’ Because then you can give yourself pause to really consider if you really have time, do you really have the energy, do you really understand the fullness of what they’re asking you because sometimes things can be a lot more time-intensive than people originally let on. So start from that place.”

On this self-care journey, multiple things can be true at one time and we can hold space for our self-care that starts from what’s within and not what we are without.