When the Mosque Stops Feeling Safe. The Somatic Weight of Islamophobia, Religious Trauma, and the Fear We Inherit
A note from Chief Traumatologist Seema Sharma, PhD, written in the days after the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, with care for everyone whose body has been carrying this week in silence.
On Monday, May 18, 2026, two young men opened fire outside the Islamic Center of San Diego. Three people were killed. Amin Abdullah, a security guard who placed himself between the gunmen and a building that held as many as one hundred and forty children, and whose actions officials later said prevented far greater loss of life. Mansour Kaziha, a longtime staff member of the mosque. And Nader Awad, who lived across the street and was part of that community. Two men called for help and were unable to flee. The attackers, both teenagers, took their own lives a short distance away. Investigators recovered writings filled with hatred toward many races and religions, and the attack is being investigated as a hate crime.
This happened in a building that houses a children's school. It happened to a congregation that arrived at prayer that morning the way millions of Muslims arrive at prayer every morning. Looking for refuge.
If you are Muslim and you are reading this, your body already knows what I am about to say.
You did not need a news alert to feel it. You felt the contraction in your chest before the headline finished loading. You felt the old familiar pull to make yourself smaller. You felt the way your shoulders lifted toward your ears without your permission. You felt your nervous system do what it has been trained, across decades and across generations, to do whenever a Muslim death becomes news in America. Brace. Scan. Calculate. Contain.
This is not weakness. This is not overreaction. This is not anxiety in the casual sense of the word.
This is trauma. And it lives in the body long after the news cycle moves on.
The fear did not start with you
Here is something I want to say plainly, because it is rarely said.
The fear you are feeling this week is older than this week. It is older than you.
When I sit with clients carrying religious and racial trauma, one of the things we come to understand together is that the nervous system does not only learn from what happened to us. It learns from what happened to the people who raised us, and the people who raised them. A child does not need to be told a story of danger to absorb it. They learn it in the way a parent's voice drops when certain neighbors are mentioned. In the way a grandmother's hand tightens at a checkpoint, an airport, a border. In the silence that falls over a dinner table when the news comes on. The body is listening long before the mind has language.
Researchers studying the descendants of people who survived genocide, displacement, and persecution have found that the effects of overwhelming fear can echo into the next generation, shaping how a child's stress response is calibrated before they have lived anything of their own. This is the heart of what we call intergenerational trauma. It is fear passed down. Not as a story. As a setting in the body.
So when a mosque is attacked, the response in a Muslim body is not only a response to this attack. It is a response to every attack that came before, including the ones that happened to your parents and your grandparents in other countries, other decades, other languages. Your body is keeping a record that reaches back further than your own memory.
This is why two people can read the same headline and have entirely different bodies afterward. For one, it is a tragedy in another city. For the other, it is the confirmation of something their nervous system has been bracing for their entire life, and that their family braced for long before they were born.
What Islamophobia does to a body over time
We tend to talk about discrimination as something that happens in moments. A slur. A stare at the airport. A comment in a meeting. A pat down that lasted too long.
But the body does not experience these as separate moments. It experiences them as a pattern. And a nervous system exposed to a long enough pattern of threat stops returning all the way to rest. It begins to live in a low hum of vigilance that never quite switches off. This is the part of Islamophobia that does not make the news. Not the single violent act, but the decades of bracing that surround it.
This chronic activation has a cost. Bodies that live in sustained vigilance carry it in their sleep, their digestion, their immune function, their capacity for joy. The research on chronic stress and discrimination is consistent and sobering. What looks like a personal struggle with anxiety or exhaustion is often a body that has been doing the work of survival for a very long time without rest.
And here is the cruelty of it. The vigilance that protects you also wears you down. The very adaptation that kept your family safe across generations is the same adaptation that is now exhausting you.
This is the same understanding that grounds all of our work in religious trauma. The wound is not only what was believed or what was said. The wound is what the body had to become in order to survive it.
When grief and fear arrive together
There is something particular about grief that is braided with fear.
Ordinary grief, if any grief can be called ordinary, asks the body to feel a loss and slowly metabolize it. But when a loss arrives alongside the message that you and the people you love could be next, the body cannot fully turn toward the grief. It is too busy guarding. The mourning gets postponed. The fear takes the front seat. And so a community can be in deep grief and never fully get to grieve, because the nervous system is still scanning the exits.
If you have noticed that you cannot cry this week, or that you feel numb, or strangely flat, or unable to focus, this is why. Numbness is not the absence of feeling. It is the body's way of holding feeling that is too large to hold all at once. It is protection. It is also, in its way, a kind of grief that has nowhere to go.
Why insight alone does not settle an inherited nervous system
Many of the people I work with are thoughtful and self aware. They understand their history. They can explain intergenerational trauma more articulately than any textbook. And still their bodies will not soften.
This is the limit of insight. You can understand exactly why your nervous system is braced, and your nervous system will remain braced anyway, because it did not learn its fear through understanding and it will not release it through understanding alone. Traditional talk based approaches can be genuinely valuable, and many people are helped by them. But a fear that lives in the body, and that was placed in the body before language, often needs to be met in the body.
This is the heart of somatic therapy. In somatic work we do not ask the body to think differently. We help it, slowly and with great care, to have a different experience. To feel, perhaps for the first time, what it is like to come down from vigilance in the presence of another person who is steady. For trauma that is locked in the system as image and sensation, approaches such as EMDR can help the body finish processing what it was never able to complete. None of this is fast. None of it is forced. The body has its own timing, and that timing must be honored.
A note on who I am, and who this is for
I want to be transparent with you. I am not Muslim. I write this as a fellow human being and as a clinician who has spent a lifetime studying how fear moves through bodies, families, and generations, and who has sat with healers across five continents.
I do not write this to speak for the Muslim community. I write it because the work of healing, and the fight for a world where no one braces at the door of their own place of worship, belongs to all of us. Compassion is not the property of any one tradition. Neither is the responsibility to stand beside one another. If I have gotten anything wrong in how I have held this, I welcome being taught.
What helps, gently
If your body has been carrying this week, here are a few things worth knowing.
You do not have to be productive through your grief. Numbness, exhaustion, and difficulty concentrating are not failures. They are a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do.
Co regulation matters more than you think. Being in the presence of steady, safe people does something for the body that no amount of solitary coping can. Reach for your community if you can. Let yourself be held.
Limit the intake when you can. Your body cannot tell the difference between watching footage of violence and being in danger. Staying informed does not require flooding your system.
And if you find that the fear is not lifting, that sleep will not come, that you are more reactive or more shut down than you recognize in yourself, this is a reasonable moment to reach for support. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something happened, and bodies were not meant to carry this alone.
If you are not Muslim and you are wondering what to do, the simplest answer is also the truest. Turn toward your Muslim friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Say you are thinking of them. Be willing to sit in the discomfort. Keep showing up after the news cycle ends.
A closing word
The body that braces is not broken. It is loyal. It is doing the work it was given, often the work it inherited, often work that began long before you arrived. Healing is not about forcing that body to stop protecting you. It is about slowly, patiently, showing it that there are places and people and moments where it is finally safe to set the weight down.
To everyone carrying this week in their body, I see you. The fear is real and it is old and it is not yours alone to carry. May you find, somewhere, a place to set it down.
With warmth and respect,
Seema
This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individual mental health care. If you are in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
FAQ
What is intergenerational trauma and can it really be inherited?
Intergenerational trauma describes the way the effects of overwhelming experience can be passed from one generation to the next, not only through stories and parenting patterns but through the way a child's stress response is shaped early in life. A child can absorb a family's fear without ever being told what happened. Researchers studying descendants of people who survived persecution and displacement have found measurable effects on how the next generation's nervous systems respond to threat.
Why do I feel so affected by an attack that did not happen to me directly?
Because your nervous system does not file threat by geography. When a place of worship is attacked, a body that has spent a lifetime bracing for that exact possibility responds as though the danger is near, even if it happened in another city. This is especially true when the fear was inherited, because the body has been preparing for this since before you were born.
Can therapy actually help with racial and religious trauma, or is it just talking?
Talk based approaches can be genuinely helpful, but trauma that lives in the body often needs to be met in the body. Approaches such as somatic therapy and EMDR work with the nervous system directly rather than only through insight. The aim is not to talk you out of your fear but to help your body have a different experience of safety.
I feel numb instead of sad. Is something wrong with me?
No. Numbness is one of the body's most common responses to a loss that feels too large to hold. It is a form of protection, not a failure of feeling. For many people the grief arrives later, once the body senses it is safe enough to let it through.
How do I support a Muslim friend or loved one right now?
Turn toward them. Tell them you are thinking of them. Be willing to sit with them in silence rather than rushing to fix anything. Keep checking in after the news cycle has moved on, because that is often when the loneliness of grief is heaviest.
If this week has settled into your body and will not lift, you do not have to carry it alone. At Holistic Trauma Therapy we offer somatic, culturally attuned care for religious trauma, racial trauma, and the fear that arrives across generations, in Pasadena and virtually throughout California. When you are ready, we are here. You are welcome to reach out for a free consultation.
