5 Things I Re(Learned) as a Therapist and Human in 2021
This piece is an expansion on an Instagram post briefly outlining the 5 learnings.
Content note: mentions of suicide, police, self-harm, mandated hospitalization, racial violence
One of the most beautiful things about getting to work as a justice-oriented therapist…
is being able to engage with and shift in liberatory ways alongside community (or as the industry calls them — clients and colleagues) in very intimate and vulnerable ways. I am incredibly grateful and blessed to learn from and with community members with shared visions about what it might feel like to envision, practice, and co-create more liberatory ways of being, relationships, and worlds.
In 2021, I learned so much about relationships, systems, and joy. I also learned that while “therapist” is my official job title, all that I learn in and about “work-related” topics becomes a part of my embodied practice as a human being, beyond the role and work of a therapist.
And thus, in reflecting on the shifts of 2021, I offer you a handful of the many things I learned and relearned as a therapist and human. Whether you are a mental health practitioner or just another being in the pursuit of collective liberation, I hope that something here resonates with you.
1. My own lived experiences of mental illness, suicidality, and self-harm are incredibly helpful in how I support clients through anti-police, harm reductionist care, blurring between peer support and therapy.
In a supremacist and capitalist society that values institutionalized credentials and qualifications, I had previously learned to devalue my own lived experiences and how they (could) inform my therapeutic practice. But in the past year, I started to realize just how powerful and helpful it is to honour and integrate these embodied knowledges that can not be intellectually taught by academic institutions.
My lived experiences of mental illness, chronic suicidality, self-harm, and police-involved mandated hospitalizations have helped me navigate these challenges in clients through compassion, understanding, harm reduction, and community-based care.
I haven’t read all of the research and I frankly don’t have a ton of formal training around suicide prevention (in addition to my core training). But I have the embodied knowledges of what it’s like and what it takes to survive through these challenges. I have also had the experience of supporting suicidal community members and their care pods.
Mental health “how-to’s” from top-down research can be helpful, and yet they are often incomplete and for some folks, even harmful (because the industry was not built for the most marginalized and in fact, it has and continues to play a significant role in their oppression). It is crucial that we recognize the embodied knowledges of those with lived experience, the ones who (have) experience(d), live(d), and survive(d) these challenges themselves.
And yes, there is a way to integrate lived experiences into client work in a consensual way that does not center the practitioner. The industry’s dominant understandings of self-disclosure assume that the practitioner is exposing their subjectivity only when self-disclosing, and assumes objectivity at all other times which, frankly, is a fucking joke. We are all, always subjective beings (vs. objective and neutral) and there are ways to use our subjectivities for and beyond self-disclosure in intentional, empowering and helpful ways in therapeutic work.
All that to say, I now question if the therapy that I do is even therapy, because I definitely blur the lines between peer support and therapy, especially with particular issues.
Shoutout to Sonny Jane at @LivedExperienceEducator on Instagram for writing extensively on the importance of lived experience and peer support.
2. When collective trauma impacts me as well, I may do less holding space for clients and more grieving with clients, still without centering myself. It is dehumanizing to pretend that I’m totally okay. It is also binary thinking to assume that I am totally incapable if I am grieving.
The morning after the Atlanta shooting in March 2021, I had 4 sessions booked, all with East Asian women. I allowed myself to grieve and cry before sessions that morning, but of course, I was still devastated. I checked in with myself on whether it would be ethical or not to proceed with these sessions, given my different capacity, while also recognizing that this was probably the moment when these individuals would want to attend therapy.
I managed to show up to these sessions, but my approach as a therapist was quite different. Rather than the usual expectation of holding space for a client, I allowed myself to be honest and grieve with them. Thankfully, these folks humanized me as well and understood that I would show up in a different way that day. We talked about what happened and its impacts on us. While I didn’t go off about my own experiences and still centered the clients, I allowed myself to expose a little more of myself. I didn’t ask as many creative questions as I might have at full capacity. I did more reflecting with and paraphrasing, conversing. We talked, sat, and felt together.
Whenever I try something new or different (especially something that feels rebellious to what I was taught in training), I ask clients how it resonated for them, what they found helpful and what they would’ve preferred instead. At the end of a session, one client shared that they were glad I didn’t pretend that I was okay, that it was nice to feel and process together.
Grieving with was a form of humanizing myself, connecting in community, and undoing the binary that a therapist is either burned out and incapable or at full capacity. When systemic violence is ongoing, marginalized therapists must find ways to humanize ourselves while doing this work.
3. “Go to therapy” as a substitute for addressing and dismantling systems of oppression that cause so much trauma is how institutions and governments use neoliberal policies [and tactics] to turn mental health care into another profitable industry.
Previously, I have dismissed the value of my therapeutic offerings because it felt like we are mostly responding to systemic violence that just keeps going. Therapy felt like that metaphor of bailing water out of a sinking boat instead of mending the hole in the boat. And through learning more about neoliberal tactics, I realized that this is exactly what institutions and governments do. Rather than addressing the systemic root causes of emotional challenges and traumas, people are constantly steered towards mental health services and the mental health industry profits as a result.
Now don’t get me wrong. I definitely believe in increased access to mental health care and services, including institutionalized ones. However, it becomes a serious issue when therapy is framed as a substitute for systemic and structural change. When this occurs, the mental health industry becomes another arm of the capitalist state — denying systemic issues, pathologizing individuals for their problems, and profiting off of their pain. The more that systemic violence grows and is maintained, the more the mental health industry profits.
The reality is that there is only so much we can do in therapy, which mostly addresses issues on an individual level. I have often sat in session with clients navigating systemic violence feeling helpless with them. While we can explore all the available emotional regulation techniques, coping mechanisms, and strategies for self-advocacy and institutional change, there is so much that we can not do in therapy.
Keeping this in mind, I firmly believe that therapy is not enough. As mental health practitioners who are complicit in this capitalist system (especially those with more privilege and power), we must push for political, systemic changes as well.
4. One of my main roles as a therapist who is complicit in this capitalist system is to help clients cultivate forms of de-institutionalized mental health care rooted in community care and relationship building.
I think (or hope?) it is standard industry practice to help clients be less reliant on therapy and us as therapists. However, what isn’t as explicit is the importance of de-pedestalizing therapy as a healing modality (I struggle(d) with this myself) and cultivating de-institutionalized forms of mental health care rooted in community and culture.
Psychology as an industry has only been around for maybe 150 years. Healing and therapeutic relationships/activities have existed since the beginning of time. Especially given the incompleteness of Western counselling psychology and the industry’s complicity in interlocking systemic oppressions, it is crucial that we lean more on de-institutionalized, community-based forms of mental health care and healing rooted in liberatory relationships.
What feels healing for you? What feels like care for you? Do that. Therapy is one option (and oftentimes a very helpful option), but it is not the option.
I, myself, am taking a break from therapy at this time and instead have been leaning more into writing, meditation, forest walks, ocean dips, good morning voice notes with friends, memes, music, sunshine baths, food and flower deliveries from friends, kitchen table conversations, book clubs, community gatherings, prayers to ancestors, and cuddles.
There are also community-based care practices in navigating suicidality, self-harm, and crisis management, but maybe let’s get to those another time.
5. While critique is an important part of navigating grief and rage, it is the envisioning and co-creating of alternative, more liberatory worlds and relationships that will sustain us. Liberation as a process and a practice.
In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes,
We hone our skills of naming and analyzing the crises. I learned in school how to deconstruct—but how do we move beyond our beautiful deconstruction? Who teaches us to reconstruct? How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear?
This resonated with me deeply, having been mostly fixated on the critiques of what was not working, simmering in my rage and grief for years. While I knew how to identify what needed to change, I had spent very little time on imagining and co-creating alternatives — asking myself, what would a liberatory world look like? Feel like? What would I embody once we got there? What can I practice embodying now?
Deconstruction of what is, without envisioning and co-creating liberatory alternatives gets incredibly exhausting. If we only focus on responding/reacting to ongoing injustices without being rooted in a larger vision, there is little room for imagination, joy, or excitement. Critical analysis of the current reality is important in identifying the problem, and yet it is incomplete on its own. Radical imagination and co-creating alternatives alongside addressing immediate injustices is required to ground us in sustainable and irresistible (thank you, Toni Cade Bambara) revolutions.
Learning Through Community
I personally do not believe in individual knowledges, as knowledges are most often co-created, cultivated, expanded upon in collective and relationships. In the recognition of collective knowledges, I’d like to offer a thank you to some of the humans/beings for shaping my learnings in the past year:
Gabes Torres, Maverick Lumen, Emmett Martyniuk, Meera Dhebar, Travis Heath, Jennifer Mullan, Nicole Albrecht, my Average Asian crew, Sonny Jane, Melody Li, adrienne maree brown, Prentis Hemphill, my instructors and the activist scholars whom they introduced to me, and every single one of my client-community members.
Support, Compensate & Connect
If you have learned something from this piece and would like to send some appreciation or compensation (if you’re learning as a more privileged practitioner), you can Paypal me or send an e-transfer.
I also welcome words of appreciation or collaboration opportunities on trainings and workshops via email!