The Cost of Healing in Silence: Navigating Racial Trauma and the Call for Culturally Responsive Care

by Ashley McGirt-Adair

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2026

About the author

Ashley McGirt is a psychotherapist, TEDx international speaker, author, and the founder and CEO of the Therapy Fund Foundation, a nonprofit focused on eliminating barriers to mental health care in Black and historically excluded communities. She specializes in trauma, racial trauma, leadership, health equity, mental health, and self-care. Ashley holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, operating a private practice where she addresses racial trauma, depression, and anxiety. Featured in Forbes, MSNBC, and HuffPost, Ashley also serves as the NAACP State Area Conference Health Chair. Through her speeches, workshops, and consultations, she empowers individuals and organizations to unpack emotional burdens, prioritize self-care, and foster healing and equity.

Reviews

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cost of Healing in Silence: Navigating Racial Trauma and the Call for Culturally Responsive Care by Ashley McGirt-Adair is a powerful read for anyone navigating racial trauma personally or professionally. As a longtime follower of Ashley’s work, I felt so much pride reading this book. It reflects the same integrity, courage, and care she has brought to her community-building efforts for years and it’s a text I’m excited to use with students and clients alike.

Ashley vulnerably integrates her personal story with clinical wisdom. She shares her upbringing, being raised by her grandmother, her mother’s time in rehab, her father’s incarceration, a period in foster care, and names how these experiences shaped her path to this work. Like many Black therapists, I saw parts of my own story reflected back. Her reflections from working across community settings, including hospice care, beautifully underscore the importance of cultural humility and honoring the full intersectional lives our clients bring into the room.

Ashley clearly distinguishes trauma from racial trauma, grounding her work in the legacy of scholars like Dr. Robert T. Carter and Dr. Joy DeGruy while also challenging readers to think critically about why racial trauma remains unrecognized in the DSM-5. She reminds us that racial trauma is not merely a psychological concept. It is a lived, collective experience rooted in history and ongoing harm.

Her story of grieving her grandmother at nine years old while feeling unseen by a well-meaning but culturally unaware therapist is especially eye-opening, naming how silence is often forced onto Black clients in clinical spaces. This book doesn’t just name the harm. It offers concrete tools, resources, and next steps toward culturally responsive, liberatory care. This book is both a call-in and a call forward, urging us to stop healing in silence and to remember that collective wounds require collective care.

[Kate Hergott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ashley McGirt-Adair has compiled data and experience into an informative breakdown of the need for culturally responsive care in all areas of medicine. Chapters dive into sensory memories, generational emotion numbing, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, health care without intersectionality, healing in community, and recognizing racist structures and systems that differently affect non-white people.
For each issue, she also provides reflection prompts and suggestions for therapists, and I feel this book can be so helpful for therapists and medical providers in providing culturally responsive care.