Black women are taught to wear a cape — to push through the stress, hold the family together, and keep going no matter what. But survival isn’t healing, and Marsha Evans has spent years watching that cape get mistaken for strength, until the body forces a different conversation. She’s a licensed professional counselor, sound healing practitioner, and yoga teacher who founded Willow Tree Counseling and Educational Center in Fairfax, Virginia, with more than seventeen years of experience in trauma-informed care, play therapy, and somatic work.
Her message on this week’s episode of The Color Between the Lines is direct: survival is not the same as healing, and most people don’t recognize they’ve been in survival mode until their body forces the issue — through hair loss, weight that won’t shift, or a full collapse.
The Cape Isn’t Strength: Survival Isn’t Healing
Evans works primarily with Black women navigating the pressure to hold everything together, and she says the pattern is consistent: the body keeps score long before the mind admits there’s a problem.
“We are the black women with the cape, and a lot of people are saying, take the cape off.” — Marsha Evans
That cape shows up as pushing through exhaustion, minimizing pain, and treating collapse as the only acceptable stopping point. Evans’s clients often don’t notice survival mode until it shows up physically — which is exactly why she starts with the body, not the mind.
What She Tells Clients Stuck Between Survival Mode and Healing
Evans says people often expect a complicated fix, when the more honest answer is slowing down enough to hear what the body is already saying. Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, and Evans offers small, physical resets: sitting in silence, breathing deliberately, or humming a favorite song, which she says releases oxytocin and shifts the body out of alert mode. She also teaches grounding as protection against absorbing other people’s chaos, pointing to mirroring neurons as the reason an ungrounded parent can amplify a child’s distress instead of calming it. Part of that grounding, she says, means being deliberate about the news: not disconnecting, but choosing when to engage instead of staying constantly plugged in.
The Fried Chicken Test
Evans’s most memorable teaching tool is deliberately simple. She tells clients to eat a food they’ve always loved, and pay attention.
“Have a piece of fried chicken, for example… see how your body reacts and responds to the fried chicken. Do you get a headache? Do you get a stomachache? Does it make you sweat at night when you’re in the bed?” — Marsha Evans
The point isn’t the food. It’s teaching people to notice a body that may be responding differently than it did twenty years ago — a first step toward listening instead of overriding. It’s the same shift that separates survival mode from real healing.
The Science Behind the Sound Bowls
Evans doesn’t separate the spiritual side of her practice from the clinical side. Her sound healing work is built on specific frequencies she says produce measurable effects on the nervous system.
“From the scientific standpoint, it’s 432 hertz… different hertz will elicit a different reaction from your body.” — Marsha Evans
She extends the same logic to everyday listening habits, noting that genres carry different physiological effects — part of why she considers sound, not just talk therapy, a legitimate clinical tool.
Her Own Turning Point: Choosing Healing Over Survival Mode
Evans traces her own path back to childhood — at twelve, hearing her mother cry at night while navigating a mental health journey with Evans’s brother. That memory shaped her decision to work with the whole child, first in education, then in counseling. Her own healing work began in earnest in 2012, and eventually led her to leave the fast pace of the D.C. area for rural Southwestern Virginia, where she says she finally learned to slow down. She’s direct that healing, in her view, requires real physical community — not virtual connection — which is part of why she pushes clients toward building an actual support network, even without a large budget. Her own path underscores the point of this conversation: survival isn’t healing, and real healing only starts once the performance stops.
Bring This Conversation Into Your Classroom
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Watch the Full Episode
Watch and Learn More
Marsha Evans — Willow Tree Counseling and Educational Center: https://www.marshalistens.com/
American Psychological Association — Stress effects on the body: https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/body
Psychology Today — The Power of Humming.
Related reading on this site: — Dr. Pierre Johnson: “The Fibroid Slayer” blog post.
Your story matters. — Esther Dillard