What Are You Reading? The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power
The Invisible Ache is a learned view that encourages Black men to address common mental health challenges from a variety of perspectives. There is the perspective, for example, of recognizing that the challenge is not limited to individuals experiencing a mental health disorder but rather is a pervasive element of being a Black man.
The authors are well-qualified to provide focus on this topic. Courtney Vance is an award-winning, welltraveled actor with a background of undergraduate training at Harvard University and graduate study at the Yale School of Drama before embarking on a career that has taken him to stardom on both stage and screen.
Dr. Robin Smith is a licensed psychologist and author, trained in counseling psychology at Temple University and recipient of a theological degree from Eastern Baptist School of Theology. Assisting them is Charisse Jones, the award-winning New York-based journalist who graduated from USC.
The book is unique in immediately zeroing in on a very specific personal experience: the trauma that lays the groundwork for the multiple levels that the authors systematically unfurl. While performing on Broadway early in his career, Vance received the breathtaking phone call from his mother that his father has committed suicide by shotgun.
BANG-BANG!!! Sudden death. No warning. Conroy Vance, a strong patriarch of a Dad with two children who insisted that his kids attend private school in the Detroit area. Nothing short of university-prep academic performance would be tolerated at home; and so, the kids complied. But as the story unfolds, Dad had an aggressive demon crawling inside of him associated with a mother who had been molested many times beginning at the age of 9.
Raised in a foster home, Dad concealed this hurt for 30 years, through a solid marriage and childbirth until it was too late. Courtney Vance’ s assessment provided the kind of hit and miss recollections that occur to all of us when we think we’ ve missed the signs. 30 years later, Courtney’ s godson committed a similar act of self-immolation.
But this book provides a veritable manual that encourages Black men to lift the mask so often felt and to seek safe spaces in which to examine their feelings, communicate and heal. There is a timely element to this dialogue of details, including the impact of a once in a century pandemic, a country rent asunder, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Ahmaud Arberry. A resultant take no prisoners political movement … a nation on
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 43