Publications

In this insightful and accessible book, Eugene Ellis tackles a challenging topic with candor, honesty and courage. He manages to clarify the complexity of the race construct and its debilitating impact on our bodies, mental health, and relationships, while at the same time to instil hope for healing this legacy. Readers will find themselves inspired by knowledge and empowered by awareness so that enriching conversations about race become possible.

This is a must-have book for all therapists working with people of African and Asian diaspora heritage who want to understand the impact of historical and modern-day racism on the Black British psyche.  This timely publication, in the context of Black Lives Matter and racial trauma, will help practitioners to create the space and dialogue for inclusive conversation and change with their clients and the wider community. Eugene has powerfully captured the nuances and fractures of trauma, where our minds and bodies have been dehumanised for far too long and takes us towards reclaiming our sanity and positive growth.

When the history of therapy’s engagement with race and diversity comes to be written, Eugene Ellis will be one of the most important figures in the narrative. In this book, he confirms his standing as a leading theorist as well as an activist. The innovative strength of the book lies in its focus on the body on how the race construct and its traumas are held in the bodies of people of colour and also of the white majority.

An essential read that facilitates the language of listening and hearing in the context of intersectionality and the racial construct. Launched from his personal and professional experience as a therapist, the author presents an insightful and empirical text. He addresses rage, vulnerability and trauma across racial lines and creates a pathway to the understanding of racial dialogue. He makes clear the unconscious processes of internalised racism and a sense of ‘community responsibility’. The book emphasises the multi-faceted positions of racism, mindfulness and body connections that trigger ‘racial arousal’. Examples of dialogue prompt further understanding and unravel ‘race construction’. An undercurrent of external and internal prompts such as white fragility and white privilege is used to contextualise interrelationships between African and Asian people and white people. This book is an important contribution to keeping the race conversation alive

In this comprehensive text, Eugene Ellis describes a pathway to racial understanding, speaking to both the history of racism and the psychology of race relations, interwoven with a mindfulness-based, somatically-informed model for addressing the effects of this history on all of us. He leaves us with much to converse about! 

How the mental construction “race” affects the inner life, the very bodies, of individuals is little recognised and less explored. The Race Conversation is a groundbreaking and timely study that brought me, a white English Buddhist, new awareness of my own inner experience and has already benefitted my participation in the “race conversation” through greater understanding of how the construction of race impacts on the psychic and somatic experience of People of Colour

This book has been written to help us take an honest look at who we really are. It is here to help us dig deep. It is here to heal the nation. I’m no psychotherapist, but I get it. After years of experience on the front-line helping people like me, Eugene has written a book that I believe can change the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to ourselves. He writes in a logical, accessible way, and makes The Race Conversation, our conversation

It would be impossible to exaggerate how important this book is for our times. Written, as it was, in the wake of Brexit, the Election of Donald Trump and of Black Live Matter, it tells of the way that race and the damaging way that conscious and unconscious ideas of race, are woven into society. This is a time when the divisive nature of race is beginning to be better understood but is, at the same time resurgent. Race is a construct with a terrible history that is held deep within the body of individuals and in communities, both white and non-white. Eugene Ellis brings both personal experience and psychotherapeutic insight into this, often fraught area, with compassion, thoughtfulness and rigour. This subject is one of the crucial issues of our age and needs people of his calibre to help us through to a more healthy and equitable society. He is one of the few people who can bring political, societal and psychological insights together to help us better understand what will make the difference for change to happen.