In America, oppression doesn’t always scream—it whispers. It settles into our everyday routines, expectations, and inherited beliefs. As Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Caste, caste is not fueled by hatred alone—it thrives on habit. Over time, those habits harden into truths we stop questioning. They become the rules we live by, often at the expense of our well-being.

As a trauma-informed General Psychologist and founder of Resilience In Me, I’ve come to understand that the systems we fight externally are often mirrored internally. Racism and inequality don’t just show up in institutions—they show up in the nervous system, in the ways we carry stress, shrink ourselves, and mistake surviving for healing. These mental blueprints—shaped by generational trauma and social order—don’t just happen. They are taught, modeled, and reinforced.

Layered over this is a uniquely American tug-of-war between two clashing ideologies: Objectivism, which promotes self-reliance and individualism, and Altruism, which values collective care and interdependence. One tells you to go it alone, and the other reminds you we can’t do this without each other. Neither is inherently wrong, but both can be harmful when applied without context or compassion.

For Black and Brown communities, the pressure to survive within systems not built for us often means we lean into hyper-independence. We internalize messages like “Don’t let them see you cry,” or “You have to work twice as hard.” These messages are rooted in Objectivism, pushing us to be strong, self-sufficient, and silent. But when strength becomes our only identity, we lose access to vulnerability. We forget that rest is not laziness, and asking for help is not failure—it’s an act of resistance in a society that wants us to carry everything alone.

And here’s the double-edged sword: when strength becomes how we are known, it also becomes how we are dismissed. The world sees our resilience and assumes we don’t need support. The perception is that we’re fine, that we’ve “got it,” that we don’t break—so help is neither offered nor expected. We’re told to keep picking ourselves up, again and again, from the same stunted bootstraps we were never given to begin with. The burden becomes invisible, but the weight never lifts.

Altruism, too, carries complications. It can offer the warmth of community and the promise of shared struggle—but without cultural humility, it can quickly become saviorism or emotional codependence. Well-meaning help that lacks understanding often reopens wounds instead of healing them. And sometimes, collective care still places the burden of healing on those already doing the heavy lifting.

True justice demands more. It requires that we unlearn the internalized beliefs that keep us in survival mode. That’s the heart of my work: helping people rewrite the mental and emotional scripts passed down as protection, but now operate as limitations. Through trauma-informed coaching and the Global Personal Realignment Theory, I guide others to reclaim what was lost, self-trust, emotional safety, and identity rooted in truth, not trauma.

We begin this process by naming the stories we carry. Stories about worth. About rest. About strength. We learn to regulate our nervous systems, not to perform peace, but to feel it. We stop overfunctioning. We stop overexplaining. We choose softness without shame.

Because the caste system didn’t just teach us how to behave—it taught us who we were allowed to be. And healing means rejecting those limits, not only for ourselves, but for the generations that follow.

The work of racial justice must live in our systems and our stories. It must challenge policy and patterns. It must unmake laws and unlearn beliefs. Because if surviving was the only thing expected of us, thriving is the revolution they never saw coming.