If We Aren’t Grieving, We Aren’t Healing

A Testimonio on Grief as a Trauma-Informed Practice

Abstract

In this paper I explore the multifaceted and politicized nature of grief, arguing that grief is a powerful practice for healing from trauma. To situate grief as a missing, yet necessary, ingredient in the trauma-healing nexus I turn to my own experiences, offering a testimonio of my own journey alongside grief, specifically from March to December 2020—the months leading up to my first semester as a tenure-track professor. In sharing this testimonio, I challenge the landscape of education which often pathologizes emotionality and decenters the body, particularly for People of Color, and instead offer an example of what learning to be in an embodied relationship to grief looked like for me as a Latina woman, educator, and scholar. I end with extrapolating the practices that nurtured my relationship to grief and how I incorporated them into my pedagogy in order to make space for grief in my classroom.