The Fear of Breakdown and Racial Grief

“No time to grieve. No time to feel your anger. You just keep going. That’s what we do in my world.” Brittany, an African American woman in her 30s, shares these words and then sits silently in our session. She had been talking about watching her cousin get arrested for a crime he did not commit. Her cousin was eventually released from police custody; however, the pain of the injustice lingers for Brittany. She proceeded to tell me that her family always “did things by the book,” in a conscious effort to avoid racism. Her cousin’s arrest marked a moment of reckoning when her privately held fears came to be felt viscerally. Her fears always lie just beneath the surface and this time, she felt hopeless.

Brittany’s agony amidst a racist society speaks to a long-standing collective collapse centered on slavery and racism. As she noted in one session, “You never know when someone will try to pull one over you when you’re Black.” She and her family have little choice but to protect themselves within a racialized society. They anticipate what may happen, based on what has already happened to someone in the family or other African Americans. There is little time and space to mourn.

Winnicott, in the Fear of Breakdown (1974), articulates how a patient’s fear of breakdown signifies a lack of experiencing something that happened in early life amidst a disruption in the facilitating environment. He states that the patient “must go on looking for the past detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future” (p. 105). Such a nuanced perspective is too easily diminished in contemporary U.S. society which typically assumes a linear, finite process of mourning where a person is supposed to resolve painful experience on their own, forgetting rather than remembering. There is a societal expectation that suggests, “get over it fast.” For Brittany and so many people of color, the repeated message to “get over” histories of slavery and