What Does Healing of A Nation Look Like – Juneteenth?

I sit with this question on Juneteenth, as an African American, female-identified Acupuncturist.

In my work as a healer, I see how trauma—particularly unresolved, intergenerational trauma—lives in the body. It shows up as anxiety: palpitations, shortness of breath, shakiness, the inability to slow down. It manifests as menstrual pain, high blood pressure, inflammation, digestive issues, depression, chronic anger, overworking, and the silent weight of hopelessness.

People are walking around with so much pain, and so much resistance to looking at it. It’s easier to keep moving than to stop and feel what’s under the surface.

Juneteenth marks the delayed announcement of freedom to enslaved Africans in Texas—two years after emancipation. But even after that message arrived, the promises of land and reparations were swiftly revoked. Lincoln was assassinated. Black communities were targeted, undermined, and burned to the ground—Tulsa is only one example. Education was censored. Dignity was legislated against. And state violence continues.

And the body doesn’t forget. Neither do we as a nation.

The healing of a nation looks like truth-telling—naming the generational wounds that continue to shape our bodies, communities, and systems. It looks like acknowledging that trauma doesn’t vanish with time; it embeds itself in the nervous system.

Healing looks like courageous love. Dr. Cornel West reminds us: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”  James Baldwin famously stated, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” If these words are true—and they are—then healing demands courage. It demands a collective willingness to face what has been too long ignored.

The healing of a nation cannot come through performative holidays or hashtags. It cannot come through temporary relief without structural change.

The healing of a nation begins when those with power choose integrity over comfort, accountability over guilt, and transformation over silence.Can we heal as a nation? I honestly don’t know.

But I do know we can’t heal without looking.

And I know that healing starts with love—real love. Not the feel-good kind, but the kind that tells the truth, that holds space, that repairs what’s been broken.

I want change. I want justice. I want peace in my nervous system and the nervous systems of so many of my patients.