Healing Racial Stress Workbook for Black Teens

Powerful skills to help you heal from racial stress and trauma, resist racism in your day-to-day life, and thrive.

If you’ve experienced or witnessed racism or discrimination, you may feel stressed, angry, sad, or anxious. You may have trouble focusing on school or enjoying time with friends. And you may even have moments when your heart races and you fear something bad will happen. You should know that you are not alone, and what happened to you isn’t your fault. Most importantly, there are tools you can use to work through these difficult emotions, regain your confidence, and move forward from your experience. This workbook can help guide you, step by step.

Written by a team of experts in Black mental health and wellness and grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this workbook offers evidence-based strategies to help you manage emotions in the face of race-based stress due to microaggressions, implicit bias, overt racism, and vicarious racism. You’ll also learn to find strength in your racial and cultural identity, and gain the skills needed to resist racism and thrive.

You’ll gain tools to help you:

• Name and define your experience
• Explore how racial stress can impact your thoughts, feelings, and behavior
• Create a “game plan” for responding to racism
• Apply what you’ve learned out in the world

With this workbook, you’ll see that you are not alone in your experience, and will find stress-relieving strategies you can draw on throughout your lifetime to stay well in body and mind. Finally, you’ll learn tips for navigating discussions about race and experiences of discrimination, so you can be empowered to stand up for what’s right and contribute to an antiracist society.

In these increasingly challenging times, kids and teens need mental health resources more than ever. With more than 1.6 million copies sold worldwide, Instant Help Books are easy to use, proven-effective, and recommended by therapists.