My Grandmother’s Hands: A Therapist’s Review of Resmaa Menakem on Racialized Trauma

BOOK REVIEWS • April 09, 2026

The Session Where the Book Came Up

Lourdes sits across from me with her coat still on, though she’s been in my office for ten minutes. She’s a partner at her firm, the kind of woman who reads case law for fun and has never once been late to anything in her adult life. “I finished the book,” she says, and her hand goes to her sternum without her seeming to notice. “I don’t know what to do with what happened while I was reading it.”

She means My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem’s book on racialized trauma, which she picked up after eleven years of talk therapy left her competent at naming her feelings and no closer to feeling settled in her own skin. “I can explain everything about my anxiety,” she tells me. “I’ve done the work. I know the childhood stuff, I know the attachment stuff. But there’s this tightness that lives under my ribs that no amount of explaining has ever touched.”

In my practice, this is one of the most common things I hear from driven women who’ve already done years of good cognitive work: they understand their history, and their body has not gotten the memo. Lourdes had read plenty about trauma before. What she hadn’t read, she said, was a book that located trauma specifically in the body, and specifically across generations, and specifically along racial lines that she’d never had language for.

“My grandmother never talked about what she survived,” Lourdes says. “But I think I’ve been carrying it anyway. Not the story. The weight.”

I’ve sat with a lot of versions of this moment. A woman who has done everything right by the standards of insight-oriented therapy, who can narrate her family history with precision, and who still feels a low hum of dread she can’t locate a cause for. Menakem’s argument, in short, is that some of what we carry was never fully ours to begin with. It was handed down through bodies, not just through stories.

That idea, more than any single passage in the book, is why I keep recommending My Grandmother’s Hands to clients like Lourdes. Not because it offers a diagnosis or a fix, but because it gives shape to something many of them have felt for years without a name.

What My Grandmother’s Hands Is Actually About

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies was published by Central Recovery Press in 2017. Resmaa Menakem, a therapist who has spent decades working with trauma, wrote it as both a clinical text and a direct address to Black, white, and law enforcement communities in the United States. His central claim is straightforward and, in my experience, clinically underused: racialized trauma is not primarily a story we tell about the past. It’s a pattern the body carries into the present, often without conscious awareness.

Menakem doesn’t ask readers to intellectually understand racism better. He asks them to notice what happens in their chest, their jaw, their gut, when race enters a room. That’s a different kind of work than most books on this subject offer, and it’s the reason I think of this less as a history book and more as a somatic manual with historical grounding.

Menakem’s term for his approach is “somatic abolitionism,” a phrase that does a lot of work in a short space. He’s arguing that dismantling racialized trauma requires more than policy change or better conversations about race. It requires people, of every background, to do direct physical work with their own nervous systems. He writes that trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality, decontextualized in a family can look like family traits, and decontextualized in a people can look like culture. That line reframes a lot of what shows up in my office as “just how I am” or “just how my family is.”

He also draws a distinction that I’ve found genuinely useful with clients: “clean pain” versus “dirty pain.” Clean pain is the discomfort of facing something difficult in service of growth. Dirty pain is the suffering that comes from avoiding, denying, or blaming rather than facing what’s true. Neither concept is unique to Menakem, but the way he applies it to racialized and inherited trauma gives clients a way to sort what they’re feeling without immediately pathologizing it.

What the book does not offer, and what I want to be honest about, is a tidy checklist. Menakem resists reducing his approach to a simple numbered method, and I’d rather describe his work accurately in general terms, settling the body, building what he calls body literacy, learning to metabolize distress rather than discharge or suppress it, than hand you an oversimplified list that flattens what’s actually a longer, more relational process.

The Research Behind the Body’s Memory

Part of why I take Menakem’s framework seriously, clinically, is that the broader research literature on intergenerational trauma has caught up to what he describes experientially. This isn’t fringe science anymore.

The landmark study here comes from Yehuda and colleagues (2016) in Biological Psychiatry, which found measurable epigenetic changes, specifically in methylation of the FKBP5 gene, in the children of Holocaust survivors. The children hadn’t lived through the Holocaust. Their bodies still carried a biological signature associated with it. A broader review by Bowers and colleagues (2016) in Neuropsychopharmacology surveyed the mechanisms behind this kind of intergenerational stress transmission in humans and found consistent evidence that parental trauma exposure shapes offspring stress physiology well beyond what upbringing alone would predict.

Racialized trauma specifically has its own growing evidence base. Gaston and colleagues (2023), publishing in JAMA Network Open, documented associations between racial and ethnic discrimination and hypertension, one of many findings connecting chronic exposure to racism with measurable cardiovascular strain. This is the kind of evidence Menakem points to when he insists that racism is not only a social or moral failure but a physiological stressor with a body count.

On the cultural and epigenetic inheritance side, Lehrner and colleagues (2019) in Development and Psychopathology examined how cultural trauma gets transmitted alongside epigenetic changes, reinforcing that story and biology move together rather than in separate lanes. And Harnett and colleagues (2023) in Psychological Medicine found that prior trauma exposure itself, not race as a fixed category, accounts for many of the observed differences in how people’s nervous systems respond to subsequent stress. That distinction matters. It tells us the differences researchers observe across groups are explained by what people have actually lived through and inherited, not by some inherent trait.

None of this research proves every specific claim in Menakem’s book. What it does is validate his central premise: trauma, including racialized trauma, is not simply a story stored in memory. It changes how bodies regulate stress, and it does so across generations. That’s not speculation. It’s a documented pattern with a real research trail, one I think about often in nervous system regulation work with clients whose distress doesn’t map neatly onto their own life history.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

Here’s what I want to name plainly: the women I work with are not exempt from any of this because they’re successful. If anything, ambition can be one of the most effective ways to outrun a body that’s carrying more than it’s let on.

Lourdes is a good example. She built a career on being unshakeable. Depositions, board meetings, custody negotiations for other people’s children, none of it rattled her outwardly. But she described a specific pattern to me: in rooms where she was the only Latina attorney, in meetings where a colleague made a comment that was almost, but not quite, something she could call out, her body would do something her mind hadn’t authorized. Her jaw would tighten. Her breath would go shallow. She’d feel, in her words, “ready for a fight that hasn’t started yet.”

She’d been in somatic therapy before, briefly, and had learned some grounding tools. What she hadn’t connected, until she read Menakem, was that this readiness wasn’t just her nervous system reacting to the room. It might also be an inherited alertness, something passed down from a grandmother who had very good reasons to stay alert, reasons Lourdes had never been told the details of and might never fully know.

“I used to think I was just anxious,” she told me. “Now I think I might be responding to something real that happened before I was born, and my body never got the message that it’s over.”

That reframe didn’t resolve anything by itself. It did something else, which in my experience is often more useful early on: it took the shame out of the pattern. Lourdes stopped treating her jaw-clenching and her hypervigilance as a personal failure of composure and started treating it as data. A body doing exactly what bodies do when they’ve learned, across generations, that certain rooms require readiness.

I see this constantly with driven women navigating spaces that were not built with their safety centrally in mind, whether the axis is race, gender, class, or some combination. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish neatly between “this specific threat” and “the category of threat my body has learned to expect.” It responds to pattern. And a woman who is high-functioning on the outside can still be running a background process of bracing that she’s never had a framework to name, let alone address. That’s precisely the gap Menakem’s book fills for many of my clients, not by resolving the pattern, but by making it visible and less isolating.

What the Book Gets Right, and Where It Asks More of You

I recommend My Grandmother’s Hands often, and I recommend it with some real caveats, because I think both things can be true about a book at once.

What it gets right, in my clinical view, is significant. Menakem puts the body at the center of a conversation that has too often stayed in the area of policy and ideology. He gives readers language for something they’ve felt but couldn’t name. And he insists, correctly, that healing racialized trauma is not a purely individual or purely intellectual task. He writes, “White body supremacy has been taught to us through the body, and it is through the body that we heal it,” a line that reorients the whole project of anti-racist work toward something more embodied and less performative.

Where the book asks more of the reader, especially driven women navigating layered identities, is in its scope. Menakem’s focus on race is deliberate and necessary, and it’s also not the whole of most women’s lived experience. Many of my clients carry racialized trauma alongside gendered trauma, class trauma, and family-of-origin wounds that interact with each other rather than sitting in separate compartments. The book doesn’t fully map how those layers compound. It also doesn’t offer much guidance on the specific, moment-to-moment challenge of staying regulated while actively performing in a professional space that wasn’t built for you, which is a daily reality for a lot of the women I see.

I return to that line often with clients who feel embarrassed by their own hypervigilance. A woman who scans a room before she speaks in it isn’t broken. Something in her, or in the people who came before her, learned that scanning kept them safe. The task isn’t to shame that response out of existence. It’s to widen the range of responses available, so scanning becomes a choice rather than the only setting the body knows.

Both/And: Your Lineage Shaped You and You Are Not Only Your Lineage

Devorah came to see me after a period she described as “unraveling for no reason.” Her grandparents had survived a genocide most of her extended family still doesn’t discuss directly. Her parents built a life defined by vigilance, saving, over-preparing, treating stability itself as something that could be taken away without warning. Devorah, by contrast, had a stable childhood by any objective measure. Good school, safe neighborhood, no single traumatic event she could point to. And yet she moved through her adult life bracing for a loss that had never come.

Reading Menakem alongside our work gave her a frame that talk therapy alone hadn’t fully provided. “I kept looking for the thing that happened to me,” she said. “But the thing that happened, happened to my grandparents. I just inherited the alarm system.”

This is the both/and I want to sit inside rather than resolve too quickly. Your lineage shaped you. The nervous system you walk around in was, in real ways, built by people who came before you, by what they survived, what they couldn’t process, what they passed down in a look, a silence, a way of flinching at a doorbell. That’s true, and the research on intergenerational transmission backs it up. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

And you are not only your lineage. Devorah’s grandparents’ history explained her nervous system’s settings. It did not have to dictate her whole life. Over time, she learned to notice when she was reacting to an inherited alarm rather than an actual present threat, and to make different choices in that gap. That’s not about erasing where she came from. It’s about no longer being fully governed by it without her consent.

I think this is exactly the tension Menakem is pointing at, even when he’s writing specifically about racialized trauma rather than the particular history Devorah carries. The body remembers. The body is also capable of new patterns. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out. Working with what intergenerational trauma actually means requires holding that tension rather than collapsing into either “it’s all inherited, I’m powerless” or “it’s all my own doing, my history doesn’t matter.”

Devorah still gets the alarm. She just doesn’t always answer it the same way anymore. Some nights, she told me, she can feel the vigilance arrive, and instead of acting on it immediately, she asks it a question first: is this mine, right now, or is this old.

The Systemic Lens: Why Individual Healing Is Not Enough

It would be a disservice to Menakem’s work, and to the women I see in my office, to treat any of this as a purely individual project. One of the most important things My Grandmother’s Hands insists on is that racialized trauma is not simply a private psychological matter to be solved one nervous system at a time. It’s a systemic wound with individual expressions.

Joy DeGruy, a social work researcher, developed the concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome to describe multigenerational trauma responses among African Americans stemming from centuries of chattel slavery, followed by ongoing institutional and structural racism. Her work, like Menakem’s, insists that some patterns showing up in individuals and families today have roots in historical conditions no single person created and no single person can resolve alone through personal effort.

Isabel Wilkerson, the journalist and author of Caste, offers a complementary systemic frame: that racial hierarchy in the United States functions less like a set of individual attitudes and more like an entrenched structure that shapes outcomes regardless of any one person’s intentions. Read alongside Menakem, her work makes clear why body-based healing, while necessary, cannot be the whole answer. A woman can settle her nervous system beautifully and still walk back into institutions, workplaces, and systems that were not built with her safety in mind.

This is where I think Menakem’s framework earns real credibility rather than losing it: he doesn’t claim that somatic work alone dismantles racism. He argues that racism cannot be fully dismantled without somatic work, because the nervous system is where policy and history actually land, but he’s clear that the work is collective and ongoing, not something any individual completes alone.

Clinically, this means I try never to let a client’s beautiful personal healing work become a substitute for naming the systems that produced the wound in the first place. Both things need attention. The inner work of co-regulation and settling matters enormously. So does not pretending that individual resilience is a fair trade for structural change.

Who Should Read This Book, and How

I don’t hand this book to every client, and I want to be specific about why.

My Grandmother’s Hands asks readers to feel things in their body on purpose, often uncomfortable things. For someone with a longer trauma history who hasn’t yet built much capacity to stay present with hard sensation, that can tip from productive discomfort into overwhelm. I generally wait until a client has some grounding skills and a working window of tolerance before I suggest it, the same way I’d pace any intense material in session.

That said, for a driven woman who has already done meaningful cognitive or relational work and still feels a bodily unease she can’t think her way out of, this book can be genuinely clarifying. It was for Lourdes. Months after our first conversation about it, she told me she’d started noticing the difference between old alarm and current reality in real time, not perfectly, but often enough to change how a hard meeting landed in her body afterward. “I still get the tightness,” she said. “It just doesn’t run the whole show anymore.”

If you’re newer to body-based work, I’d suggest reading slowly, in small sections, ideally alongside some support, whether that’s a therapist, a trusted friend, or simply permission to put the book down when it gets to be too much. This isn’t a book to power through. If you notice old patterns of childhood emotional neglect or family silence surfacing as you read, that’s worth bringing into your own therapy rather than processing entirely alone. And if reading brings up material you find yourself unable to remember clearly, that’s common; you might find it useful to understand what memory gaps actually mean before assuming something is wrong with your recall.

Menakem’s work also pairs well with structured trauma therapies. Clients doing EMDR or other body-inclusive modalities often find the book gives useful language for what’s happening in session, though it’s not a substitute for that clinical work. The same is true for readers who recognize themselves in patterns of overworking to avoid feelings, since that overworking is often exactly the strategy a settled body would no longer need.

Lourdes and I still talk about the book sometimes, months later. Not because it fixed anything in a single reading, but because it gave her a way to be curious about her own body instead of frustrated with it. That shift, from adversary to ally, from something to manage into something to listen to, is most of what I hope any client takes from this work. Her hands, she told me recently, don’t feel like her grandmother’s hands exactly. But she’s starting to understand what they were carrying, and that understanding has made room for something steadier to grow underneath it.

Warmly, Annie.

Related Reading

Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Joy DeGruy Publications, 2005.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020.
Menakem, Resmaa. The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. Central Recovery Press, 2022.

Medical Disclaimer