You Cannot Heal What You Erase
By Dr. Denise Renye
The recent removal of the slavery exhibits from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, PA in the United States is not simply troubling. It is actively harmful. It is an act of historical denial that functions as institutional racism, and it carries real psychological consequences.
The policy justification matters. This action is being taken under a federal executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” That language is not neutral. It is a form of gaslighting.
Gaslighting occurs when reality is inverted, when harm is reframed as care, and when truth telling is labeled distortion. Calling the removal of documented historical facts “restoring sanity” does not clarify reality. It destabilizes it. It asks people to doubt what is verifiable, embodied, and already known.
Erasing history does not make it disappear. It pushes it out of conscious awareness, where it continues to shape belief systems, power, and behavior without accountability. In clinical work, this pattern is familiar across cultures. When someone attempts to erase or bypass their own past rather than integrate it, the result is not healing. It is fragmentation.
This is especially true with trauma.
When formative experiences are denied, minimized, or rewritten, the psyche does not become free. It splits. Parts of the self are exiled. Memory, affect, and meaning lose coherence. A person may insist they are fine, while their body carries hypervigilance, grief, or rage. Symptoms emerge. Patterns repeat. What has not been acknowledged continues to seek expression.
This dynamic does not stop at the individual level. It scales.
Removing the visible acknowledgment of slavery from a national historical site in the United States is not a neutral administrative decision. It is a psychological act. It communicates whose suffering is allowed to be named and whose must be pushed out of view. It reinforces a hierarchy of whose history remains in public consciousness and whose is treated as expendable.
That is racism in action. Not only structurally, but psychologically.
For Black Americans in particular, this kind of erasure functions as retraumatization. It echoes a long standing cultural message: your pain is inconvenient, your history is negotiable, and your reality will be altered to preserve dominant comfort. This is not symbolic. It has real effects on the nervous system. Chronic stress, grief, mistrust, and anger do not arise in isolation. They are shaped by repeated encounters with invalidation.
In clinical spaces, I see how repeated cultural invalidation lives in the body long after policy decisions are made.
Right now, a lot of public dialogue is comparing ICE and federal immigration enforcement in the United States to Nazi Germany. That comparison often positions these tactics as foreign to American culture, as if systems of domination and violence are something imported. The reality is different. Much of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and related agencies are doing aligns with ways this government has historically treated Black and Brown Americans: forced family separations, terrorizing patrols, detention without transparency, and violence enacted with impunity. These tactics are part of established practice in the United States.
What feels newly alarming to some people is not actually new, but part of what many white Americans are seeing more clearly now.
One stark example is the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who was shot and killed (executed) by a U.S. Border Patrol agent during a “federal immigration enforcement operation” on January 24, 2026. Videos and eyewitness accounts show Pretti unarmed and holding his phone, trying to assist others when he was pepper sprayed, tackled, and shot multiple times by the agent. Pretti was a lawful gun owner with no serious criminal history, and his family says the official account that he posed a threat does not match what they saw. His death has sparked protests and widespread concern about federal law enforcement tactics.
At a collective level, this kind of gaslighting has predictable effects. When leaders insist that removing truth is an act of clarity, or that denying violence is an act of sanity, people become disoriented. They question their perceptions. Communities fracture. Trust erodes. This is not stability. It is psychological destabilization.
In trauma theory, splitting is a defensive maneuver that keeps incompatible truths apart. Good over here. Bad over there. Pride without grief. Freedom without enslavement. This defense may create the illusion of order in the short term, but over time it corrodes integrity. Healing requires something different. The capacity to hold contradiction without retreating into fantasy.
The exhibit that was removed did not attack the founding ideals of the United States. It told the truth that liberty and enslavement existed side by side. That the same ground where freedom was proclaimed also held profound violence. This is not an accusation. It is an accounting of historical reality. Reality does not disappear because it unsettles identity or myth.
What makes this moment especially destabilizing is that denial is being modeled by those in power. When authority figures enact gaslighting, it signals that truth is unsafe and that reality will be rewritten rather than reckoned with. That message itself is traumatizing.
Collective trauma is not only inherited from the past. It is actively generated in the present when systems repeat the dynamics of silencing, erasure, and domination. This is not unique to the United States. But how a nation publicly handles its history reveals a great deal about its psychological maturity.
As a psychologist, I see the cost of discouraging truth every day. When people are not allowed to name what shaped them, shame deepens, confusion increases, and relational trust erodes. The same holds true for communities and nations. When history is silenced, it does not go quiet. It goes underground, where it resurfaces through reenactment rather than reflection.
I am from Philadelphia. I was shaped by a city that has always held contradiction. Vision and violence. Ideals and their failures. What made that city formative for me was not a myth of purity, but the insistence, at its best, that complexity be allowed to remain visible.
Care for a place, like care for a self, does not require erasure. Anything that must be protected by denial is already brittle.
You cannot heal what you erase.
Not in a person.
Not in a family.
Not in a country.
History that is removed does not disappear. It waits. And what waits unacknowledged is far more likely to be repeated than repaired.
A brief pause to regulate
If you feel activated reading this, that makes sense. Before moving on, try this short grounding practice.
Sit with both feet on the floor.
Place one hand on your chest and one on your lower belly.
Inhale slowly through your nose for a count of four.
Pause gently for a count of two.
Exhale through your mouth for a count of six.
Repeat this three times.
Let your shoulders drop.
Let your jaw soften.
Notice the support beneath you.
Regulation is not avoidance. It is what allows truth to be metabolized rather than overwhelming.
About the Author
Denise Renye, M.Ed., M.A., PsyD, C-IAYT, CPTR, CST, is a licensed clinical psychologist, sex therapist, and consultant based in the Bay Area, California, United States, working with folx around the globe. She has over 20 years of experience working with trauma, embodiment, sexuality, and relational dynamics. Her work integrates depth psychology, somatic approaches, and trauma informed care, with a focus on helping individuals and systems move from fragmentation toward integration.
If you are interested in trauma informed perspectives on healing, embodiment, sexuality, and collective psychological dynamics, you can read more essays or learn about my clinical, consultation, and educational work at www.wholepersonintegration.com. You are welcome to share this piece with others, globally, who are grappling with how history, power, and trauma continue to live in the present.