Post 6 – Session 4 – The Ghosts in the House
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: Intergenerational trauma, racialized fear, and embodied inheritance
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Client: Pauli Murray Date of Birth: November 20, 1910 Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Session Transcript
Therapist: Tell me about the time you returned to North Carolina after your grandfather’s death.
Client: “I remember being at the train station. A group of white men surrounded me, staring, trying to decide what I was. I froze. My body wouldn’t move or speak. Then Aunt Pauline came—her voice cut through the noise. She pulled me close, and the men stepped back. I remember her hand on my shoulder. That’s how I knew I was safe.”
Session Summary
This session explores the transmission of fear, safety, and survival across generations.
Pauli recalled traveling back to North Carolina after her grandfather’s death — a trip marked by a frightening encounter at the train station where several white men surrounded her, questioning her racial identity. The client described being “frozen,” unable to move or speak until Aunt Pauline intervened, grounding her in protection and belonging. This became the body’s template for both terror and safety — fear held in the muscles, comfort found in touch.
Aunt Pauline consistently emerges in Pauli’s story as her secure base — a nurturer, teacher, and emotional anchor who offered wisdom and structure amid chaos. But following her grandfather’s death, the household atmosphere changed. Her grandmother’s mental health declined, marked by vivid hallucinations that the Ku Klux Klan was breaking into the house. At night, she would leap from sleep, dragging a shotgun across the floor, and barricade the doors in terror.
Pauli described lying awake, her body tightening at every sound. Over time, her grandmother’s terror became her own. She grew afraid of the dark, unable to sleep, haunted by inherited fear that “the Klan was coming.” Through somatic exploration, the therapist and client identified how hypervigilance became wired into her nervous system — how her body learned to anticipate danger even in silence.
During this same period, the client recalled moments of refuge across the street, in the home of two school-age girls who, like her, were orphans. Their brother worked during the day, leaving the three girls to care for one another. In that small home, Pauli felt safe — enveloped in quiet companionship and understanding. The shared loss between them created a wordless bond; they did not need to explain their fear or grief. The therapist reflected that this was likely Pauli’s first embodied experience of communal safety — a stark contrast to the nightly terror she was running from.
This session revealed how intergenerational trauma and racialized fear were carried and expressed through the body — yet also how connection and nurturing, particularly among women, became reparative forces in Pauli’s life. Aunt Pauline’s steadiness, the companionship of the orphaned girls, and Pauli’s own capacity for empathy all became part of her internal architecture of survival and love.
Therapist Notes
As I sat with this memory, I felt the tension move through my own body — a heaviness in the chest, a tightening in the jaw. This was not just Pauli’s fear; it was ancestral, the sound of generations bracing for footsteps that might never come.
I imagined the scene — the rifle scraping, the silence after her grandmother’s screams. I sent warmth to the small part of her who stayed awake through the night — the watchful one whose body would not let her sleep. And to the child who found safety in the company of other girls, I sent gratitude. She found rest and connection, and that connection extended into safety, where something new was able to emerge. Their shared play and laughter became medicine — soothing their nervous systems, grounding them in the present.
For a moment, I, too, felt joy as I imagined their giggles breaking through the weight of fear, ushering them into a small sanctuary of Black girl joy, magic, and sisterhood — a space where comfort did not require words and healing could happen quietly.
In their laughter, the body remembers that joy, too, is resistance.
