Anwar White connects his father's abandonment in third grade to how trauma shapes bonding patterns, arguing that dating coaching requires somatic work to rewire the nervous system. He frames banter and flirting as embodied proof of safety for Black and brown women navigating constant micro-aggressions.
Chapters
Yeah.
So why was I doing this? I was doing this because I was in hyper productive mode and overcompensating because I felt like I had a lot to prove in my blackness and my gayness and maybe for you, wallets in your womanhood. But also what I needed to really address were my father wounds. And for many of you, it's actually probably going to be your mother wounds. But what I had to do was realize and actually come to terms with because for many of you who don't know me, my father abandoned me and actually was very violent and abusive to me and my mother.
And left the house when I was in third grade.
And so a lot of my thoughts and my opinions about men were centered around him. And I had to heal that. I had to make sure that that little boy that heard his dad and his mother arguing and fighting verbally and physically.
That he felt saf.
Because ultimately what was happening is I would think about all of those times where my mother and I had to pack up our stuff and leave the house in the middle of the night while he was working to get away from him.
And so my foundational knowledge, my emotional connection to men was based in this trauma.
I'm sharing this with you so that you understand that this work is deeper.
This isn't because a lot of us are not familiar with dating coaching work, but we go this deep and you have to if you're going to really level up.
Okay.
Yeah. Your foundational knowledge bonding pattern from men is going to be based on your experience of the masculine energy.
And for some of us, that masculine energy is very much rooted in our mothers. Some of it's. Some of us, it's our fathers.
Either way, we're going to have to deprogram those bonding patterns and create new and different ones.
Which means creating different neural pathways in your brain. And for us black people, somatically, within our bodies, because we hold everything in our bodies, Black people. That's why dancing comes very natural to us because we've had to dance away our traumas for generation over generations.
So when I'm telling you things like I want you to banter and I want you to flirt like this, it is because we're going to need to. Oops, hold on one second. These objects is used for some protection.
Okay. I needed to know I was a real person. But what I was saying is somatic work is very important.
Part of this work is rewiring your brain and your body. So part of this, when I'm asking you and I'm encouraging you to flirt, to banter is because you're gonna need the physical evidence to do that and still know as a black or brown woman that you're still safe.
And once you establish that, you'll be able to do it like this all day, every day. That's what we're doing in this program. And by the way, I get it. When you are navigating micro and macro aggressions all day, every day, your nervous system is always going to be on high alert.
Yeah.
So I hope that this is helpful for you as you start to maybe think about dating and healing and trauma and somatic work in a different way.
