Therapy for Social Change Podcast

In the interim, I thought I’d tell you about something cool that’s happening with Pride this year in Portland, Oregon. Like many cities, Portland celebrates Pride in June. Pride happens in June to honor the Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969. But this year, the committee that plans the Pride parade changed the date. We’re having our Pride parade in July.  The committee announced it was moving the...

After I got home it occurred to me that perhaps I was off base, thinking there was something exceptional about raising the subject of whiteness on San Juan Island. After all, is what I am describing so different from dynamics that might occur in a small rural town that is largely white? Or in an affluent white neighborhood in a city, cordoned off from its working-class neighbors by its price? An i...

The individual, “identity-based” approach Clients who do not have a strong self-concept that they are racialized as white—by which I mean they do not have a regular practice of seeing themselves as a white person, moving around in a world that is coded by race—may unconsciously see themselves as “not racialized” and by contrast see people who are coded as non-white as having to cope with “having a...

This week I want to talk about the Liberation Health Model. The word “liberation” in the model honors and acknowledges the work of liberation theology, out of which grew liberation psychology, a way of thinking about healing that was practiced by Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Spanish-born Jesuit priest who trained in psychology at the University of Chicago. Martín-Baró was concerned that the individualis...

From my perspective, perhaps the most effective impact of these events is psychological. After the Dobbs decision came down I wrote about the ways the law is an act of psychological warfare. I see the Kacsmaryk decision as an effort to recontain the political force and energy that has arisen to overturn Dobbs and return rights to pregnant people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his decision...

Have you all been following the coverage of the diabetes drug Ozempic? Ozempic is the brand name of semaglutide, one of a series of drugs in the category GLP-1 receptor agonists. The drug, which mimics a hormone, works by suppressing the body’s production of glucagon. Since glucagon cues the body to raise its blood sugar, when it’s suppressed, insulin is better regulated and insulin resistance can...

I was on Mt. Tabor last week and as I walked around the circular path at its top I saw the little hemlock in the picture at the top of this post. I had an instant fondness for it, propped between two helpful sticks, guiding it up towards its neighboring trees. Because the tree is shorter than I am, I felt a kinship to it. What will it take for this small tree to survive? What will it need to learn...

Hey there everyone— Today I decided to share some information I gathered this week—much of it in very mainstream places—on the impact of inflation on ordinary people and the ways corporations are trying to use “inflation” as a way to continue to increase their prices and maintain their profits, even as inflation is said to be going down.  I’m going to summarize this information because I think it’...

Have you heard of the Bechdel test ? Named after Alison Bechdel, the graphic illustrator and creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For , the test is the result of a 1985 strip in which two lesbians consider going to a movie. One of the characters says she’ll only see a movie if it meets a simple criteria: * It has to have two women in it. * They have to speak to each other. * They have to talk a...

Photo by Bruce Jastrow on Unsplash Hello everyone! I’m taking a moment to say hello and thank you to folks who have recently subscribed to this newsletter. If you’re new here and you’d like to get oriented, this post talks about what structural violence is and how it works. Structural violence lands on the body, but what do we—we in mental health, in medicine, in healing practices—really mean when...

Last week I told you I was heading into a group training for the weekend. It was fantastic—very rigorous. I’m sitting with a lot, because it was long and demanding, and I haven’t had any time off yet to let anything really sink in. The group is rooted, in part, in Modern Analytic theory. One of the key aspects of this method is to translate feelings and thoughts into words, and to vocalize them in...

Within the heteronormative binary of patriarchy, there are two genders, male and female, said to be expressions, at the level of behavior, of the biological sexual difference between men and women. These normative gender expressions are represented back to us by the dominant culture, which also racializes gender. What the dominant culture represents as “White womanhood” is often quite different th...

I have a pretty detailed answer to the question of what makes a therapist different from a good friend, and much of it hinges on my understanding of the concept of transference. I told this client that therapy works in part because it evokes a transference relationship between the therapist and the client. The client “transfers” onto the therapist a set of assumptions about how relationships work....

Last week I wrote about the meditation on interdependence. I told you I was going to try it at the river and let you know what happened. The mountain was immense and the river was tremendous. I started thinking about the water in the river being the same water rushing in my blood. I looked out from my perch on the bridge, witnessing this entity I’ve been taught to label “nature” or the “earth” as...

For me, it’s easy to engage the philosophy of interdependence, and mind-blowingly difficult to sit and actually perceive interdependence in real time. To perceive interdependence is to obliterate the idea of the self and the false sense that it is a being or thing that is separate from experience, and thus can evaluate it, judge it, enjoy it, feel distant from it, etc.  Because I was reading his b...

What’s the difference between creativity and imagination ? There’s an underlying assumption that creativity seeks an output, that it wants to generate a material artifact, either as a goal in itself (think “art as creative expression”), or to make an impact on someone else, or to generate money for the creator. Imagination seems less attached to an output. I think of imagination as an force, buoya...

It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems. Individualist cultures see both the source and the solution to problems in the actions of individual people who are said to be rational, who know and understand their thinking and their desires, and who have the power and self determination to make changes, if they choose...

I’ve been thinking about those almost imperceptible actions we take to remind ourselves of who we are. There’s a privacy in the smallness of the act: people who know you well still might not know you do that thing, say that phrase to yourself, make that small move with your shoulders when you catch your face in the mirror. I wonder when the last time was that you had a chance to be the person you...

My “Christmases” taught me there was no one Truth, and that just because you weren’t religious, that didn’t mean you weren’t impacted by culture and tradition and faith. They got me thinking about cultural collision and being of two nations, two worlds, two religions, no religion. They gave me an experience of utter alienation and isolation and un-belonging. But they also gave me the ability to em...

My client is a person with an abiding interest in the magnificence of life. He was not prompted to bring up prayer because of the shooting at Club Q. Nor was he inspired because this is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Our discussion was instead a continuation of our longstanding conversations about meaning and purpose, embodiment and contemplation. There is something about the insistence t...

Despite our knowing how complex it is to even persuade ourselves to change, let alone our clients, if we work in mental health, it’s often still the first impulse to provide information, or a helpful explanation of why X will be so much better if only Y happens.  Facing the contradictions and complexity of embodied existence, we often cling to the simplicity of a logical explanation. We can thank...

* What is the psychic toll of being in a state of perpetual anticipation of a threat? * How does it feel in the body when we behave as if we aren’t in hyper arousal, when we play at rationality and calm, even as we’re consuming information designed to evoke a strong emotional response? * How might sustaining this level of contradiction keep us off balance, out of contact with our own known truths,...

The CPT protocol uses as its measure of effectiveness an assessment tool which the client fills out each week before session. The assessment lists all the symptoms outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s diagnostic category for PTSD. From week to week, the assessment tracks the level of symptom severity the client is experiencing, and their level of daily function. Each week, the sympt...

It makes sense to me that trying to imagine the death of the dominant culture, and of ways of being that have been practiced for centuries, would engender rage and terror. It makes sense that the un-knowing of where we will be, on the other side, is enough to make people freeze up, not want to speak. And at the same time, there’s the simple, common, goodwill: the hope that the little things, like...

How do we become a “feminized” society—one that lauds and respects caring and empathy and that is full of people who are unafraid of facing death, of acknowledging our frailty, our uncertainty, our physical and emotional pain? If we better shared the work of caregiving, would this shift in our priorities diminish the power of patriarchy and white supremacy to shape our world? This is a public epis...