Stand Up, Speak Up, and Heal: Overcome Race-Based Traumatic Stress, Self-Advocate, and Stay Grounded

Healing is an act of resistance, and self-compassion is power.

Racial trauma is often more than one isolated incident; it's the daily stress of navigating a world that misunderstands or invalidates your experience. Over time, this stress can lead to anxiety, depression, fear, anger, and exhaustion. Stand Up, Speak Up, and Heal offers practical, culturally rooted tools to help you manage emotions, calm your body, and reclaim your peace.

Written by three BIPOC mental health professionals, this groundbreaking and practical guide offers dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills for calming your nervous system, managing intense emotions, and healing from the effects of race-based stress.

With this empowering guide, you'll learn to:

• Understand the emotional and physical toll of racial stress and trauma
• Stay grounded, centered, and in control
• Communicate boundaries and self-advocate with confidence
• Practice mindful self-care that nourishes your joy and energy
• Build lasting resilience and strengthen your community connections

With real-life stories, culturally attuned exercises, and "Mindful Moment Reflections" in every chapter, Stand Up, Speak Up, and Heal is more than a mental health book--it's a guide to collective and personal liberation. It helps you move from survival to strength, and from pain to power, while staying rooted in self-love and pride.

E. Sofia Mendoza, LCSW, identifies as a Salvadoran/Mexican American Latina and daughter of immigrants. She is a community mental health supervisor, clinical trainer, and private practice therapist specializing in social justice, complex trauma, and burnout among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) clients using dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.

Lisa Bolden, PsyD, is an African American psychologist, DEI consultant, and cofounder of the Emmada Psychology Center. She has over twenty years of experience in multicultural mental health, community psychology, and clinician training at institutions including the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University of Southern California (USC).

Lizbeth Gaona, PhD, LCSW, is a bicultural, bilingual Mexican American clinician, consultant, researcher, and associate professor at California Baptist University. In 2007 she cofounded the first Spanish DBT program for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, and she has published work on the concepts of cultural dialectics, anti-oppressive DBT, and the adaptation of DBT for socioculturally diverse populations.

Foreword writer Natalie Y. Gutiérrez, LMFT, (she/her) is a Puerto Rican licensed therapist and healer in New York, NY. She is author of The Pain We Carry. Gutiérrez specializes in supporting communities of color reeling from the soul wounds of racial trauma, colonial and historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, and sexual trauma.