- My name is Phebe Sessions.
I'm a long term member of the faculty at the school
for social work and I'm very, very pleased
to have the opportunity to introduce
tonight's speaker, Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra.
This lecture is taking place during the schools
annual conference and I would like to welcome
those in attendance from our field agencies
all over the country as well as professionals
here from the wider community of the Pioneer Valley
and of course our own school for social work
community of students, faculty and committed others.
During the winter and spring of 2016 the
social work practice sequence was
greeted by a wonderful surprise.
The publication by the American Psychological
Association Press of Dr. Tummala-Narra's book,
Psychoanalytic Theory and
Cultural Competence in Psychotherapy.
We saw immediately a great opportunity to advance
and deepen the education of our students
through the adoption of this timely book
as a required text for our required course
in clinical social work practice.
The book generated a very enthusiastic response
from students and instructors.
All students in the class of 2017 have been
educated with this book as a primary text.
All students in the class of 2018 are currently
being educated through this text, but the text
is only the start of Dr. Tummala-Narra's
influence on our curriculum.
She has, in addition, published very extensively
on a range of topics and her writings
have contributed to all areas of the curriculum.
I have sited some publications which represent
the diversity of her interests though it only
scratches the surface of the extent of her writings.
An examination of attitudes toward gender
and sexual violence among Asian Indians
in the U.S., cultural oppression and
human trafficking, exploring the role of racism
and ethnic bias, the experience of ethnic
and racial group membership among immigrant
origin adolescents, psychotherapy with refugees,
emerging paradigms, cultural competence as a
core emphasis of psychoanalytic psychotherapy,
and two of my favorites, voices of older
Asian Indian immigrants, mental health implications
and revisiting community work
from a psychodynamic perspective.
In addition, I am eagerly looking forward
to tapping into teaching on diversity,
the mutual influence of students and instructors.
Dr. Tummala-Narra received her Doctorate
in Clinical Psychology from Michigan State University.
She was subsequently an advanced fellow at
the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at
Massachusetts General Hospital and a
post doctoral fellow in the Victims
of Violence Program of what is now
the Cambridge Health Alliance.
She is currently an associate professor
in counseling, developmental and
educational psychology at Boston College
and an independent practice in Cambridge.
She has served on the APA Division 39 Board of Directors,
the APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration
and the APA Task Force on Re-envisioning
the Multicultural Guidelines in the 21st Century.
Her lecture tonight will be on identity choice
and constraint in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
Thank you so much for that lovely introduction Phebe.
I am so delighted to see all of you here.
I'm really excited to be here.
Thank you for the honor of the invitation
to join you this evening.
I'm really hoping that whatever I present to you
today will lead to discussion in ways that
feel most important and most relevant to you at this moment.
So as you heard in the introduction,
my interests are pretty varied and tonight
I'm hoping to address an issue that is
very close to my heart that has to do with
identity development and so I will say
a little bit more about what my formal lecture
will be but I wanted to start today by sharing
with you just some slides, some images of
where we've been over the last few months in our country.
Let's see if I can work this.
There we go.
Okay so you're gonna see just some images
of what's been happening around
the country actually in terms of resistance.
So the title of my lecture today is on
Identity Choice and Constraint in
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and so of course
at the very core of it lies what happens now
and what is happening now in our country and in the world.
So here, I'm gonna just flip through these images.
Black lives matter, Dakota Pipeline, right,
the protest Defense the Sacred,
Water is Life, you all know this.
(audience laughing)
Women's march, right?
Not yours to grab.
More photos from the women's march.
The airport protests.
Refugees welcome.
I love my muslim neighbors.
Right, more similar signs.
No human is illegal,
and I love this one.
These are two fathers with their children
on their shoulders and one is Jewish, one is Muslim,
the children and the little boy has a sign
that says hate has no home here.
Right and the little girl, you can't see her sign
but it says love is love.
Here we have a protest outside of a conversion center
in Arizona and here you have a sign,
you can't fix me, I'm not broken and then this mother
in the background, my daughter is not broken.
Here you have an activist from Russia originally.
Ask me why in Russia they want to kill me.
This is a gay activist.
You've seen this I'm sure.
We the people are greater than the fear, than fear,
and this is the final one I'll show you today.
If he builds a wall, I'll grow up and tear it down.
All right so I'll just leave it on this slide.
He gives me a lot of hope.
Okay so most of us, if not all of us, experience
both choice and constraint in the development
of cultural identity and this process is fluid
and dynamic throughout our lives.
While identity is complex and layered,
I will focus this evening on the complexity
of cultural identity formation within
the confines of social oppression and trauma
and within the open spaces of exploration
both within and outside of the therapeutic relationship.
So I'm not gonna, of course, attempt to address
every aspect of identity or cultural identity
but I'm going to just try to focus on the issue
of choice and constraint particularly around
the issue of race and immigration in the U.S.
from a psychoanalytic multicultural and
feminist perspective, so I think
from a more integrative perspective.
So with that I'll begin.
In the United States race takes a particular form.
I'm not black or white or indigenous to the U.S.
So from this frame of reference I'm
perceived to know little about race.
When you are not categorized along these lines
you are seen as on the outside, yet I know
that I'm not on the outside of American race politics.
Indians in the U.S., and more broadly South Asians,
have like every other cultural group
that is raced upon migration develops
a framework for understanding race and
more often than not these frameworks
are less visible and more likely to be
dismissed by notions of immigrants as people
who choose to come to the U.S. and
indeed immigration entails a choice.
However, immigration is certainly not
a choice for most children and becoming
racialized is also not a choice.
Many adults who immigrate to the U.S. are
unaware of the deep entrenchment of racial politics
and racism in the U.S. and it's
impact in the future generation.
In the case of South Asians, which is my ancestry,
due to history of European colonization in South Asia,
race and racism are not new experiences
post migration, however, they do take a
unique form in the United States.
So I'll share with you some personal information
that informs how I think clinically and theoretically.
I was born in Hyderabad India which is a large
multicultural city with a long history
of tensions between Hindus and Muslims
and among people of divergent Hindu castes.
I immigrated to the U.S., to the Bronx
in New York City specifically, with my parents
and my older brother when I was seven years old.
An age when I could remember vividly the anxiety
and the sadness of separating from extended family members.
As a Hindu in India I had belonged to a
majority religious group, although I belonged
to a minority Hindu caste and this caste
was frequently victimized by verbal harassment
and physical violence and this became
an impetus for migration for my family.
So the experience of being an insider and
an outsider were familiar to me even before
migrating to the U.S., however I had not
identified as an Indian person or as
a person of color until I came to the U.S.
In India I was a Hindu of a particular caste
and in the U.S. I adopted new labels,
Asian American, South Asian, Indian American,
person of color, racial minority.
In my early adolescence, which was in the 1980's,
I lived in northern New Jersey.
So we moved from the Bronx to a
largely white suburb in New Jersey.
This was an era that later became known
for the Dotbusters, a street gang that
victimized people of South Asian origin.
Have you all heard of the Dotbusters?
Okay, most people have not.
It wasn't, it's not remembered in our history, largely.
So this was a street gang that, a white street gang
that would victimize people of South Asian origin.
There were documented murders, assaults and so on.
My brother and I often walked home from our
predominantly white school feeling anxious
about whether or not we would be followed
and harassed by these kids from a neighboring town
who would seek us out on the walking path from school.
This was everyday.
Our home was vandalized with racial slurs
etched into the snow in our front yard.
So, by the way, do you know why it's called the Dotbusters?
Because of the bindi that many Hindu women wear.
So it was called the Dotbusters based on that.
These painful events made it very clear to me
that being seen as different meant that one
is an outsider even though we were seemingly
acculturating to mainstream culture,
learning how to participate in it both
at work and at school.
We spoke English fluently, wore western dress
and ate western food, however these changes
did not secure insider status but instead
created feelings of otherness, hopelessness
about belonging in a new country.
Well one might think, well this was
a long time ago and now it's 2017.
Back then maybe you lived in a racist region
of the country, maybe you lived in a certain part,
a certain neighborhood, maybe that was the exception.
This a common misnomer and this is something
that we hear in racial narratives
in the United States over and over again.
However we know that the problem of race
and racism continues from one generation
to the next and across regions.
I can see this clearly when my older son is
called the N word in his middle school cafeteria
and when my younger son in elementary school
is told by a classmate that he will never
get the part of Willy Wonka in his school musical
because Willy Wonka is not brown and
this is all in Lexington Massachusetts,
which is progressive, liberal, affluent town.
So to me race and racism remains a problem of
everyday life for those perceived as the other.
By the way, he did get the Willy Wonka part.
(audience laughing and cheering)
So that was hopeful.
So, all right, so I'm going to move now from the personal to
somewhat more academic and also professional.
I'm gonna talk a bit specifically about
constraints related to race and immigration,
conflicts inherent to the development of
cultural identity and the intrapsychic
and interpersonal implications of immigration and race.
Okay so let's think about the effects of
social oppression with more depth for a moment.
In recent years psychoanalytic inquiry
has expanded understandings of social
and contextual issues relevant to identity.
Discrimination and stereotyping contribute
to a powerful social mirror and social unconscious.
This idea of the social mirror which was
a beautifully articulated concept by Carola Suarez-Orozco
who is an immigration researcher at UCLA,
who took Winnicott's idea of mirroring
in the mother infant, mother toddler diad
and extended it to the types of messages
that are fed back to individuals from
the social environment outside of one's home
and outside of the parent child relationship.
But these, the social mirror and social unconscious
as it's been described shape self images
and perceptions by others both of which
are recreated consciously and unconsciously
in ones life and certainly in
the therapeutic relationship as well.
Attention to social oppression and it's effect
on the psyche in psychoanalytic literature
has brought to the foreground the inextricable
connection between what clients and
therapists experience outside and what they
experience inside the therapeutic relationship.
So therefore, it's worth looking at,
how different forms of social oppression
influence identity and relationships.
The effects of unconscious implicit or
aversive discrimination are insidious
and they have lasting effects over the lifespan.
My client, bringing this to a clinical example,
my client who's a Dominican American woman
in her 30's reported that she never
quite understood why she felt increasingly
distant form her boyfriend who was a white man.
She deeply admired him.
She fell in love with him, but months into,
we couldn't quite figure out what was the issue really,
why should couldn't quite settle down
with him and months into our work
she remembered that her boyfriend had told her
at the very start of their relationship
just sort of in passing that he'd never thought
that he'd be attracted to a girl from the Caribbean,
specifically a black girl as he did not
find women with darker skin attractive.
I asked my client at that moment how she felt
about this statement and it's as if though,
you know in that moment in therapy she just
sort of wanted to glide through it
and began her next sentence and
I had to stop her and I said, you know, hold on.
Just say what you said again.
Let me hear it one more time.
And so then I asked her to tell me what
she felt when he said this to her and she said,
at the moment she didn't find it offensive
but over the course of the relationship,
it lasted about eight months, she felt that she
was never quite able to settle
in fully and be with her boyfriend.
We were then able to talk about racism
that affected her identity and her life choices.
This is an illustration how injustice in both
subtle and explicit ways leaves a
lasting impact on the individuals psyche.
I want to note that if we had not explored
her experience of racism then I may have
attributed the problem she faced in her
relationship to only her conscious and
unconscious fears of commitment and
intimacy which of course is highly individualized,
right, in terms of conceptualization.
The negative affects of stereotyping
can further present themselves in the
transference and counter transference
a client may seek or avoid at different moments,
a therapist of a particular cultural background
as an attempt to find someone who will
understand him or her or they completely
including social identities and
experiences of marginalization.
In a different example a client who's been
targeted for racism may have a more difficult
transition to working with a therapist
who's either affiliated with or perceived
as affiliated with an oppressing group.
The therapist then in turn may find himself
or herself or themselves, emotionally distancing
from the client who's perceived as
disinterested in the therapists desire to help.
So you see how this becomes cyclical
and this issue becomes a point of avoidance
and think about the different types of things
that we tend to focus on in psychotherapy
and traditional psychotherapy.
We're not afraid to talk about sex,
which is really interesting.
We're not usually, increasingly we're
less worried about talking about money
although I think that's still a taboo
in certain ways, but this is really difficult.
Race is a traumatic subject.
It's a traumatic topic, yet when we don't talk
about it the issues still are there right?
They don't go away.
Different types of social oppression share
common effects with respect to intrapsychic
and relational worlds but also have distinct
effects based in historical and cultural context.
Colonization and slavery of people of color
in the U.S. and elsewhere has left
a painful legacy of distrust and disavowal.
More recently relived in the overt acts
of hatred during and since Donald Trump
has campaigned for the presidency.
The use of terms like law and order in his
campaign bring people of color back
into the position of subjugation and immigrants
to a position of being the dangerous other.
Within psychology, challenges faced by people
of color continue to be located almost exclusively
within the confines of either individual
characteristics or attributes assigned
to specific cultural groups.
For example, the issue of acculturation
among immigrants has traditionally been thought
to be a problem of conflicting values across context.
People say, well they're intergenerational
conflicts in immigrant homes.
The parents have one world view that's
closely tied to the heritage culture
and the children have an American world view,
whatever we consider to be American, right,
more mainstream dominant culture kind of thinking.
Yet in the acculturation literature, rarely
do we ever talk about the idea that
each member of the family is actually having
a very unique and separate independent
acculturative process that is rarely talked
about explicitly within the family environment.
So it could be that the parents are experiencing
challenges at work or in their neighborhood,
the children are experiencing issues at school
and what happens and often times in homes
of immigrants is that there isn't
a real conversation about it.
Nobody actually knows what the other is going through.
So what I'm saying is that true that cultural
world views can shift across family members,
within family members over time,
however acculturation, the concept
of that rarely acknowledges the idea
that external threats and demands also
influence what's happening within the family
and largely this is unspoken, but
when we think about how we talk about
acculturation gaps between parents
and kids we still attribute it
to a problem of their culture.
A problem that lies in the family.
Not what somebody, an individual
or a family is actually adapting to.
Social oppression operates in the psyche in profound ways.
Chinua Achebe, in describing European colonization
in Africa, pointed out the task of dispossessing
others and he said, this task of dispossessing
others requires a story that's fabricated
by the colonizer that deems the colonized people
as lacking intelligence, uncivilized
and unable to care for themselves
without the oversight of the colonizer.
Does this sound contemporary to you?
It does to me.
He further noted, what is both unfortunate
and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed
is forced to bear in the act of dispossession
itself and subsequently in the trauma
of a diminished existence.
In contemporary times attempts to reclaim
and reposes is not without danger as people
of color are often perceived as ungrateful
for the freedom they possess today
or too sensitive to comment about race.
In these cases race and racism are thought
to be problems of the past,
irrelevant to the modern society.
We had a black president, Barrack Obama.
We're post racial.
The problem of dispossession further implicates
the invisibility of whiteness and the projection
of racial otherness onto people
designated as people of color.
More recently whiteness has been touted
as the requirement to be a real American.
We can see this in the political rhetoric
about making America great again.
The relationship of the individual to
a broader social system that either protects
or places individuals at risk for danger
plays an important role in intrapsychic life.
When institutions fail to protect individuals
and communities they create traumatic stress
and interfere with the ability to
develop safe object relations.
Further, when a system denies or minimizes
the occurrence of trauma, the affects are
more severe as they involve a sense of betrayal
by forces that are meant to protect survivors.
Lilian Gomez Diaz, she developed a concept
called post colonization stress disorder
and this is in contrast to PTSD.
Which, what she does in this concept of
post colonization stress disorder is that
she locates pathology not in the individual
or even a particular event but
rather in broader social structures.
She pointed out that PTSD doesn't capture
the problem of racial trauma and proposed
an alternative diagnoses of
post colonization stress disorder.
It's similar in some ways to Judith Herman's
concept of complex PTSD but it refers to a process
that's repeated, prolonged and ethnopolitically mediated.
Post colonization stress disorder alters
group identity, relationships and world views
and some intrapsychic consequences can involve
complicated mourning, remembering of the past
and imagining of the future and a sense of not having home.
It's worth noting that a number of scholars
drawing on research and clinical evidence
have called for the inclusion of racial trauma
as an etiological factor in PTSD and
complex PTSD but specifically PTSD in the DSM-5.
However, it continues to be excluded from
our current diagnostic systems and I will say
that there are a group of us who advocated
and wrote to the DSM task force about this issue
but we were told that we simply
did not have enough research evidence.
I think we have enough.
Traumatic stress rooted in social oppression
poses challenges to a sense of safety as we know.
In fact many of our racial minority clients,
when describing experience of discrimination
wonder whether these incidents actually
were discriminatory of whether they're being
too sensitive, a perspective that they have
partially internalized from mainstream society
that keeps their actual experience at bay
to maintain and perpetuate the status quo.
Derald Wing Sue and colleagues and John Dovidio
have elaborated on this problem of
subtle ambiguous expressions of racism in particular
microaggressions with Derald Wing Sue's work.
So research in this area indicates that
these interactions are pervasive and detrimental.
Interestingly Derald's description of microaggressions
as a real phenomenon in the experience
of racial minorities has been met with resistance
with some psychologists who claim that
the concept of microaggressions is pure nonsense
arguing that all people suffer
verbal and behavioral insults.
These psychologists have also drawn attention
to the ambiguous nature of microaggressions
suggesting that cross racial interactions
interpreted as microaggressions may in fact
reflect factors unrelated to race or racism.
There was a whole back and forth in
the American Psychologist which
was published in 2009, 2008, 2009.
Now Sue and colleagues responded to these
arguments by underscoring the fact that
people of color struggle with the ambiguity
of microaggressions and often attribute
unconscious or unintentional racism
to personal reactivity or sensitivity
and yet are left wondering about the intention
and the behaviors of the people who
directed these microaggressions towards them.
But the question, who's interpretation or
narrative is privileged is raised here, right?
Which interpretation is correct?
They posed, so Sue and colleagues response
to these critics was the following,
"If you want to understand oppression do you
"ask the oppressor or do you ask the oppressed?"
Stereotypes, right, lie at the base
of microaggressions and other forms
of discrimination and stereotypes embody
the wish to get rid of social problems
by locating them in individual deficits, right?
It's a way to diminish individuality.
It's important to consider how stereotypes
are projected and internalized.
We're all socialized with stereotypes about
groups that we identify with and
those who we don't identify with.
Stereotypes reflect both curiosity and
rejection of those considered to be the other.
Ambivalence towards people outside the mainstream
is further illustrated in current
sentiment towards immigrants, right?
Ricardo Ainslie suggested that the presence
and increased visibility of racial
minority immigrants in the U.S. trigger
a sense of collective anxiety where
dissociative defenses maintain an emotional
distance from a potentially threatening group.
As such, immigrants are the scapegoats
for economic and social problems.
They're taking our jobs away, the real Americans.
Fockery Davids from England further suggested
that internal racism reflects a normal
pathological organization in mainstream society
where people of the marginalized group are
recruited into a structure of defenses that protect
against anxiety and fear of that marginalized group.
They maintain the racist position and
perpetuate an avoidance of personal responsibility.
He, in fact, would argue that in a racist mindset
we remain convinced that our prejudice view
of that object, of a particular object, is true.
To the extent that contrary facts are assimilated
in a way that in essence confirms our view.
In other words, a paranoid interpretation
about the marginalized group created by
a dominant group becomes a part of internal life
of members of the marginalized group
where fantasies about specific cultural groups
are mistaken to be facts and think about
how much information we are absorbing
everyday about various groups.
Even though consciously we reject them perhaps,
but unconsciously they lie in our minds.
It's very powerful.
In addition to recognizing the realities
of social oppression it's important
to recognize how it's influence on
socialization processes within families
and communities and societies.
In a recent study that was published last year,
along with some students I conducted
a study that, it was a focus group study.
We conducted discussion groups with various
adolescents in a high school from
different backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds
and racial backgrounds and we asked them
questions about their identity and
how they form their identity and
what about the messages they receive at home
and at school and so across,
we learned some really interesting things.
At home generally they received positive messages
about their cultural groups, about
prioritizing education, about what
a good person that they are and so on.
At school many of the adolescents experience
microaggressions, stereotyping and other types
of discrimination by teachers and peers
and I would say an equal number, sort of
an equal extent of the teachers and
the peers which is really concerning.
For example, in one of the group interviews
a Cuban American student described a feeling
of connection to other Latinos and this person said,
"I feel really proud of being a Latina
"because I remember after 9/11 a lot of people
"went to help clean up the city.
"The most people who went were Latino's.
"That made me feel very proud."
On the other hand, a different response
from another student in the same exact group,
a Guatemalan American student who's
fluent in English followed this discussion
with her comment, "My teacher came up to me.
"She grabbed me by my shoulder
"and she says loudly, Hello. How are you?
"Do you understand?
"Nod if you understand."
Now the disparity between experiences at home
and at school in this case is striking
and we would hear this over and over again.
We interviewed students who are
from Haitian American backgrounds,
from South Asian backgrounds, from Chinese
and Korean and Japanese backgrounds
and we saw this pattern over and over again.
These were ninth and 10th graders.
So when you think about this disparity,
we have to raise the question of
how socialization experiences of children
and adolescents either facilitates or impedes
a sense of belonging in mainstream society
and how and from whom these
adolescents actually seek help, right?
Who are they talking to when they have these experiences?
Are they even talking to anybody?
And another thing we learned is that most of them
would never go see a guidance counselor
or a school counselor to talk about these issues.
They are socialized to believe that you don't
actually have to get help for something
like this, that this is normative.
Right, this is the norm so therefore
you have to adjust to it.
So again there is absolutely no point
of trying to resist it because it will
happen over and over again.
So I want to say a couple of things
about multiple marginalization.
We know that many individuals face multiple
types of oppression both within dominant context
and within their own ethnic or racial communities.
It's important to note that all aspects
of a persons identity are intertwined
and each aspect such as race, gender
or spirituality does not develop independently
of any other aspect of identity.
Relatedly, oppression related to any one
aspect of identity can be mutually reinforcing.
So people facing multiple forms of marginalization
cope with conflicting loyalties to different
communities with whom they affiliate and identify.
This type of conflict is illustrated in
one of my clients who is Iraqi American.
She told me in one session, "It's hard for me
"to talk about sometimes how the men
"in my family are more dominating.
"If I tell outsiders they will think
"that our men are all terrorists."
For this client, her experience of being dominated
by men in her family is compounded by her
experience with racism and stereotyping outside the home.
So what does this do, right?
It limits her possibility of openly voicing
her distress in either context.
Multiple forms of marginalization are also
faced by immigrants and refugees escaping persecution
from their countries of origin and
living with discrimination and fear
of deportation in the U.S.
Very recently I met a client, a new client,
who is an immigrant from Venezuela with whom,
and he contacted me because he was intensely anxious.
He was having panic attacks and having a really
hard time sleeping and when I asked him
about the source of it when we talked
on the phone at first he said,
"well, I'm afraid I'm gonna be deported."
And there's something about that statement
right there which becomes a presenting problem right?
The anxiety is not intrapsychic anxiety.
It is only because of the reality.
This is not neurotic anxiety.
This is real and so here he has witnessed
multiple murders of loved ones while in Venezuela
where political persecution is an ongoing reality.
He has legal status in the U.S. but
the consequences of losing his documentation
are so dire that he lays awake at night
fearing for his life both in the U.S. and in Venezuela.
So where is his intrapsychic space?
Where is he, right?
He is neither here nor there and Andrew Harlem
has written a beautiful paper about
this concept of exile around what it feels like
because when somebody is an exile, intrapsychic exile
and this traumatic space, that they are lost in transit.
That home is neither here, there, anywhere
and so intra psychically one lives with fear
and anxiety and never quite arrives
and never quite leaves, right, as in the case
of voluntary immigration where
safety in some ways is more secure.
Now even in instances that do not involve
imminent danger in a country of origin,
immigrants fear that their legal status
does not matter any longer in the U.S. today.
In fact I remember the morning after the November
presidential election, asking my husband
if our passports were up to date,
the first thing I did when I woke up.
I was like, are the kids passports updated?
We're both naturalized U.S. citizens
and our children were born in the U.S.
If I'm feeling this way, imagine.
Shortly after this conversation I went to work
and taught my psychology of trauma class
where many of my students wept and some of them
talked about their dismay towards immigrants for,
who voted for Trump and one student said,
"How could they have voted for him?
"Did they forget where they came from?
"All of a sudden they think they're white."
Right, this is the complexity of this issue,
so we are indeed in a crisis state right now
This is a traumatic state that we are in.
Conflicting loyalties across host and
heritage cultures are further complicated
in the case of interpersonal violence
that occurs within a community, within a family,
as the survivors compromised sense
of safety shapes cultural identity.
Several scholars have described the experience
of sexism and sexual violence among women of color
who develop ambivalence about their heritage cultures
and feel compromised in developing
a positive ethnic identity.
Recently Chris Yee, my colleague from Los Angeles,
introduced the concept of cultural dissociation
and this is an experience of merging between
the suffering of the traumatized person
and the heritage culture.
A person who experiences cultural dissociation
may distance the self from participating
in cultural traditions, speaking in a
native language or heritage language
and from interacting with similar ethnic people
and instead identify with only mainstream cultural norms.
According to Ye, cultural dissociation is
untenable as the experience of trauma
inevitably reappears in relational life
disrupting a persons sense of stability.
As such, what she does is caution therapists
to carefully attend to the problem of
differentiating between a clients
traumatic experiences and normative experiences
within the heritage culture and community
in order to effectively explore ethnic identity.
It's important to consider that people
who are marginalized within their cultural groups
also face challenges in developing a sense of authenticity.
When people of color are told by members
of their own communities that they're not
real members of the group, you're not black enough,
you're white identified, you're a coconut,
you're a Twinkie, I'm sure there are many
other things and they face discrimination
from people outside and a compounded
stress from within the group.
Members of a cultural group can become
screens of projection for a cultural groups
fear of losing a sense of collective identity
that protects against the discrimination
by those outside the cultural group.
So this is why often you might see people
trying to uphold a more positive image
of their cultural group or their racial group
or their religious group, right, as a way
of protecting against that discrimination
because if I actually reveal what I'm doing
and what I'm really feeling and all the complexity of it.
That I like certain things, I don't like other things,
these things stress me out and these things are positive.
If I actually am truly myself, right,
then that stereotyped projection will be
so hurtful and damaging not only to me
but those who I love and care about
and those who I identify with and this is a big problem.
I will share with you a quick vignette about
this where I recently did, completed a study
looking at, examining, it was a quantitative study.
It was an online study where I asked questions
about sexual violence and attitudes about
sexual violence within the Asian Indian community
and so these were participants, participants
who were invited had to be of Asian Indian origin.
So Indian American, it could be first generation,
second generation and I had a whole range
of responses from participants or
potential participants, people who received
my invitation letter and anywhere from,
thank you for doing this work because
we don't talk enough about sexual violence
in the Indian community in the U.S.,
to other people saying, why are you doing this research?
Are you trying to reify stereotypes about
South Asian men being dominant, being
aggressive sexually towards South Asian women?
So you can understand see, doing research in this area
is not without it's complexities nor it's dangers
I would say or it's critics but it's an
interesting thing even to try to examine
a problem within a particular community
like this because it is so compelling to try to
protect an image, an impression seen by
those who are not Indian and it isn't fair.
It is absolutely a constraint on identity development.
Now cultural identity from a psychoanalytic
perspective is an amalgam of multiple
group memberships that interact with each other
and it's a complex, I would say the multiplicity
of identity implicates and interaction
of oppression, privilege, marginalization
across dimensions and layers of experience
that occur within the family, community, society and so on.
And a contemporary psychoanalytic view
contrasts from other psychological models
that support linear, sequential or conscious level
processes in racial and cultural identity development.
Now these models are important.
I learn a lot from them because they
describe particular statuses, racial identity
statuses for example or particular
experiences in a given time period.
However, they do not capture the dynamic nature
of how cultural identity continues
to transform within a persons life.
There's also an emphasis in psychoanalysis
on unconscious conflict and subjectivity
of internal experience that contributes
to a more complex understanding of cultural identity
and the development of coexisting
divergent cultural identifications.
In recent years we've had growing media attention
to racial profiling, violence against
African American men and boys in particular.
Less so in terms of the violence
against African American women and girls
although that is obviously a reality that's persisting.
But when we, when you have these traumatic events
that you're exposed to as a person of color
you have to prepare children and people
in your community to protect themselves
in potentially dangerous environments.
So certainly these are conversations that I have
with my two sons and that my husband
has with my two sons around how you
behave in a certain way in public.
How do you deflect, right?
So my older son is a tall, muscular boy,
17 years old who has been identified by others
as South Asian, Middle Eastern, Latino.
He sort of can be seen as various different
ethnicities and so how do I prepare my 17 year old
son who gets profiled, by the way,
every time he's in the airport.
He goes on a school trip, he's the one
pulled out in the airports and so this is a reality
and we have to then, in this particular parameter
that we're working with, we have to then
prepare children to potentially face
some type of discrimination or negativity.
So unfortunately these, these types of experiences
form strict parameters around how one can develop ones self.
So when we think about identity formation
we tell our kids, you could be whatever you want to be.
Now is that really true in all
the situations that I described?
Do I want it to be true?
Of course, but is that true?
And these are the kinds of dilemmas that
families, parents and children face.
Right, what is reality exactly?
And when it's ambiguous and when you're told
that that's not really happening over and over again, right?
This is a state of confusion.
Let me move on to speaking a bit about
conflicting loyalties within communities.
People develop cultural identities we know
across multiple contexts with contradictory narratives
and shifting happens for most people who
identify as racial minorities or cultural minorities,
sexual minorities where you have
shifting unconsciously from one context to another.
So I have to present myself a certain way in this context
and then in another context I can be this part of myself.
Right, but you're not quite every fully yourself because
the context around you does not allow for that.
It does not tolerate the other aspects of you.
So this is an example of my client
Crystal that illustrates this.
She's a Jamaican American woman who moved
to the U.S. with her family when she was
in her teens and she told me, "It's like you have
"to act a certain way when you're with certain people.
"That's true for everybody I guess but it's also different.
"People see me and they think, this is a black woman.
"I have to act a certain way so they
"don't see me as negative.
"So I try to act like them, like they want me to.
"Then I go home and I'm Jamaican.
"Not black or anything, just Jamaican, just me."
Hiding aspects of the self can be used to protect
against anticipated discrimination but
it comes at the cost of increased anxiety related
to a sense of falseness and a sense of invisibility
and this is the kind of cost that I'm talking about.
Shifting for many people does not really rely
on real choice but rather operates unconsciously
through a dual sense of self that's necessary
for survival and sometimes for thriving also in context.
A person has to be creative in terms of dealing
with this dilemma of managing public and
private selves in order to cope with the stress
that accompanies shifting and despite
how seamless it seems, largely because
it's unconscious, shifting poses
a risk for individual experience.
The experience of not having a home.
In some cases an individual can develop split
identifications with important people
in their lives who remain separated as a way
of bearing the anxiety of two or more contradictory
cultural beliefs that clash with each other.
For example my client Ravi.
He's a first generation Indian American
man in his early 30's.
He told me that he had not introduced his white,
Irish American girlfriend to his parents
although he and his girlfriend had talked
about the possibility of getting married.
So this was a serious relationship.
Ravi, since moving away from home
to attend college, gradually revealed less
and less about himself to his
parents and his family members.
However, when he went to visit his family
he would say, "I feel happy.
"I feel grounded."
And he would describe similar experiences
of being with his girlfriend and
at the same time could not image bringing
these two disparate worlds together.
As he expressed different parts of his identity
when he was with her versus when he was with his parents.
Specifically he felt that he was more American,
independent, adventurous when he was with
his girlfriend and more Indian and oriented
towards his family when he was with his parents.
He imagined that his parents and his girlfriend
would not connect with each other and
that they were way too different from each other.
He fantasized that if the parents and the girlfriends
knew about each other and knew each other
that they would not approve and
consequently be disappointed with him.
You see how this comes back to this
internal conflict, right, the intrapsychic conflict.
In essence, in an effort to cope with
the anxiety of divergent cultural identifications
which he had developed in multiple contexts
had lived a dual existence in which self states
associated with each aspect of his cultural identity,
the American, the Indian, were disconnected
and he seamlessly shifted across Indian
and mainstream context and over time began to feel
as though he didn't know who he was
and where he actually existed.
In psychotherapy our work focused on the ability
to imagine a safe enough way, there's no
safe way here, but there's a safe enough way
of bringing his worlds together and
to mourn the ways in which his worlds
perhaps would not be able to merge as he had wished.
So I will say about him, also add,
that he came to me referred by a therapist
whom he had worked with for about two years.
This was a white, female therapist who
I had a very close relationship with but
she sensed somewhere along the way in working
with him that he wasn't revealing certain things to her.
That he wasn't telling her everything about himself.
You'll see the parallel of what I just talked about
in the therapy relationship and so the therapist
thought maybe he should see somebody
from a similar ethnic background
and this is a very controversial thing, right?
It's a very difficult dilemma.
Do you refer?
Do you try to figure out how to work with this client?
Is this client willing to engage?
Is he ready to engage?
It's a very complex question.
I do believe this particular therapist worked
really hard to figure this out
and struggled with this dilemma.
It was not a simple, I can't deal
with this so I'm gonna refer you.
It wasn't one of those, but she did struggle
with this and he disagreed with the therapist
and he said I don't want to work with
an Indian therapist or a South Asian therapist
and he absolutely was against it for many,
many months and he specifically chose
a therapist who was not South Asian
or Indian because he did not want to talk
about his personal matters with somebody Indian
and so when he arrived to me you can imagine
his state of mind when he's sitting with me
and it was very uncomfortable when we first met
and when we sat together he told me immediately,
I just want to tell you that I'm
not attracted at all to Indian women.
(audience laughing)
Now how can you not think psychoanalytically
when you hear this?
So I said, okay.
Thanks for telling me.
(audience laughing)
So this is how we began, right.
So we had to work through tremendous amount
of ambivalence around not just what I told you
about his relationship with his girlfriend
and his parents but the ambivalence was present
in the here and now in the therapeutic relationship
and we had to figure out a way in which we could
talk about it and it took many months
to be able to go there because he was not
interested in having an intimate connection with me.
It was very difficult, but we worked
together for several years.
I will say that.
Okay, so I think I have just a couple minutes left
so I'm going to just say a couple of things
about mourning because this is a critical issue
in psychotherapy that I didn't touch upon yet.
There are a couple of theorists who I absolutely adore
in psychoanalytic literature, this is David Ang
and Shin Hye Han who extended Freud's concept
of melancholia into describing what they call
racial melancholia and what they do is
a beautiful analysis of how race and
Freud's concept of melancholia meet
and they specifically talk about the
Asian American experience and what they say
is that even when Asian Americans are born
in the United States they're treated as foreigners
due to phenotypical markers and this of course
can apply to many other cultural groups
as well not just Asian Americans.
But in the case of Asian Americans the myth
of model minority or the notion that Asian Americans
are economically, academically, professionally
successful, immune to everything,
immune to personal problems.
This idea works to dismiss the reality
of discrimination against Asian Americans
and serves and what they call a melancholic
mechanism facilitating the erasure and
loss of repressed history and identities of Asian Americans.
Racial melancholia involves the internalization
of the model minorities stereotype
which becomes a partial success in the sense
that it serves as a way of being seen
in mainstream society which becomes,
so it becomes a way of being seen
in mainstream society but it's also a failure.
So it's a success that you are seen as something,
the model minority I guess which is seen
as positive in certain ways, but
it's also a partial failure in that Asian Americans
contend with an unattainable ideal of whiteness.
There's a hope of the American dream
that's transferred across immigrant generations
such that parents imagine that their
children will do better than them.
They'll succeed in achieving the American dream
in ways that were not accessible to the parent generation.
Yet this places children of Asian immigrants
at an impossible bind where racism and
othering permeate their efforts
to achieve the American dream.
So the mourning of identifications with
heritage cultures and with whiteness
becomes critical in addressing this concept,
this phenomenon or experience of racial melancholia.
So working through unresolved grief
and melancholia resulting from social oppression,
by recognizing and validating the connection
between past atrocities and present day stress
lies at the heart of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
We have to remember traumatic events that are
suffered by cultures and communities and
understand the depth of their effects because
if we don't witness and listen and attune ourselves
to what has happened, right, we miss an entire aspect,
an incredibly critical aspect of ones experience
and witnessing requires us to examine
our own feelings and our reactions
to our clients histories of oppression.
It engages conflict rather than
contributing to further repression.
As therapists we consciously or unconsciously
choose whether or not to explore experiences
of social oppression and marginalization.
Notice that by and large we're far more
comfortable talking about culture and
cultural differences than we are about
oppression based on culture, race, gender,
right, sexual identity and so on and class.
Despite the decision to initiate or deepen
the dialogue concerning oppression the
client's experiences remain and as therapists
we have to think about our own willingness
to engage with difference and similarity,
in privilege and marginalization with our clients.
So let me end with that.
Okay.
All right, thank you.
(audient applauding)
- So there's a time for questions.
There's a mic here and I have one roaming.
Who has questions?
- [Brianna] Hi, I'm Brianna. I'm a second summer
and so I'm reading your book right now in my practice class.
- Oh okay.
- So first of all I just wanted to thank you
so much for really producing something
that has become a core part of our curriculum
here because I personally as a student of color
and as a future clinician of color
am really grateful for your perspectives
in the classroom and the way that they
bridge so many of the concepts that are
important to me personally with the material
that's really interesting to me intellectually.
With that in mind I'm thinking about a lot of
the studies that you referenced and the ways
that it seems that, like, in terms of epistemologies
and like knowledge production within social work
and psychology there's this almost like enactment
of invalidating even like studies of microaggressions
and since you have written so much and
have been published so much and have done
such an amazing job of bridging psychodynamic theory
with a lot of these types of conflicts
in the literature I'm just interested
to hear your perspective in terms of
how we can continue to produce and
do a better job of privileging the sort of
perspectives that you bring and
that I'm sure like many others in this room
are hoping to bring in our careers?
- Yes okay.
That's such a great question.
Thank you so much for your comments and
this is such an important question because
you're thinking I think very deeply about
how we continue the work that we do but
also how it can have an impact at a policy level
I think is what you're getting to,
as well as you refer to curriculum, right?
Not only in the university level but also
beyond training and into practice and
I can tell you a couple of experiences
that I've had because as I mentioned
this is not the safest thing to study.
I don't know, I mentioned this to Phebe earlier today
but I don't know if you all
heard of the Professor Watchlist?
(audience murmuring)
Some of you have right?
This is an all right thing where they have posted
on one of their websites the Professor Watchlist
that includes a number of professors in universities
by name who, and if you look at this list
most of them are people of color, most of them
are studying issues like race, immigration,
class, sexual identity,
gender and these are
the professors that we're supposed to watch out for
because they are negatively impacting children's,
right, youth minds in using liberal politics.
So this is, this is where we're at in terms of
the degree of hostility and intimidation
and fear around people of color and
people of minority status and marginalized
status speaking about their experiences.
So my colleague Mahzarin Banaji who developed
the Implicit Bias Test at Harvard University,
she has faced numerous death threats.
She's a social psychologist professor at Harvard
who gets death threats regularly because
she came up with some research project
that illustrated that we all have implicit bias.
So these are real things and you can see
in conversations with someone as eminent as
Derald Wing Sue, right, having these back
and forth discussions and the American Psychologist.
Now, so this is the bad part and the
negative part but I will say that we need more.
We need more people in the field.
This is a very logistical kind of explanation but it's true.
We need more people in the field who study this.
We need people of color as well as
people who are not people of color.
We need to come together as a community
and this issue, these set of issues have to be
owned by everybody, not just the people
who can personally identify with some aspect
of these issues, but this becomes something that we all own.
So one of the things that I, and I'll share
one more kind of experience I had
and this is with a scientific journal,
this is psychology journal, a trauma journal
where I submitted a paper that eventually
got published there but the reviews were really telling.
This was a paper that examined the narratives
of survivors of complex trauma and
it explored their relational life from their own words.
So it was a set of interviews and qualitative data
analysis and one of the reviews that I got back
and this is a trauma psychology journal
said something, one of the reviewers said
something like, well we all know that
trauma survivors don't have good reality testing
so how are we to believe the accuracy of these narratives?
This was about four, five years ago so
this was recent and so we cannot assume
that people within our professions, right,
are thinking about the subjective experience of people.
You know because we also have paradigms,
research paradigms that are favored,
some over the other, right, quantitative
designs being favored over qualitative.
I do both partly as a form of defense
I will admit because, because if I can do both
and speak in multiple languages I feel like
I can reach more people and so this is part
of why I draw psychoanalysis into this because
for me I tend to have a little bit more credibility
in certain circles by the function that I also
do empirical quantitative research
in addition to empirical qualitative research.
So it's a little bit harder to argue with that
when you have multiple sources of evidence
but the reason, one of the reasons I do that,
aside from my love of that work, is because
there is, there are enough problems like this
politically within the professions let alone
outside of it and the other suggestion
I would have is in addition to continuing
to having more people study these areas
is to join task forces, join committees,
get politically involved within organizations.
We just completed a draft of the new
multicultural guidelines for the APA and
I've been on that task force now for a couple of years
and the kinds of influence one can have.
So I was able to get in there psychodynamic thinking.
I was able to get in there the idea of
self definition and the idea of multiplicity
and hybridity of identity.
Which as you know is quite different
from the original multicultural guidelines.
So you can have influence in those kinds of ways.
Yeah, I hope that gets your, maybe
a long winded way of answering you.
Yes.
- [Stacey Jackson Roberts] I'm Stacey Jackson Roberts.
I'm a lead therapist for LGBT Behavioral Health
in Baltimore city at a federally
qualified health center there.
I say that to kind of contextualize my question
and that's around this idea from psycho analytics,
psychodynamic thought around kind of rigid
and strict boundaries around dual relationships and.
- Yeah.
- [Stacey Jackson Roberts] Multiple relationships
if you will.
Particularly your call right at the end
is to become involved in different aspects
of the community and that's coming out of,
you know there was a recent discussion in an
online forum calling therapists that work
with the transgender community into that they
need to also become involved in the community
and what not and yet there was this tensions around,
how do we navigate that and maintain these boundaries
and what not and I see it in Baltimore where
I'm at a federally qualified health center
that the building is located in what we call the L,
which is the white, privileged area of Baltimore
and you've got east Baltimore and west Baltimore
that is very marginalized, lots of poverty,
lots of red lining historic and what not
and with the uprising a few years ago I noticed
that we've got largely white professionals
not connecting with really what's going on
in the therapeutic process around racism
and systemic racism, complex trauma and
they're often living in, you know,
Maryland's got five of the wealthiest
counties in the country of the top 25.
They're living in Howard County
which is the wealthiest county per capita.
They're not connecting with what's really
going on dynamically in the room as far as race
and identity and how to we not navigate that
without actually maybe taking a different
look at kind of where those boundaries are?
- So this is a really interesting question.
So how do we negotiate boundaries when we're
also trying to be part of the community in a sense right?
To involve the community in the development
maybe of the intervention or being a part
of the process of helping people get help
and access help and you're asking specifically
from a psychoanalytic perspective to it seems like.
- [Stacey Jackson Roberts] Mostly around that concept of.
- Okay.
- [Stacey Jackson Roberts] Sort of boundaries
around people that aren't there yet.
We call them Baltimore's small square for a reason
and particularly if I'm a transgender woman
working primarily with transgender individuals
specifically transgender individuals of color
who wouldn't have access to healthcare otherwise.
- Yeah.
- So how do I make sure that I'm doing good
clinical work while also being able to
still see those patients and what not?
- Yeah
- [Stacey Jackson Roberts] And being totally
conscious of their projected realities?
- Mm-hmm right.
Okay, so there, I'm gonna try to address this
in multiple ways cause there's so many
parts of this very important question.
Just you know, to contextualize this
theoretically, contemporary models in
psychoanalysis would advocate for more
self disclosure when it's appropriate right,
when it's helpful to the client and
I would extend that into a community as well.
So when, you know, I have gone into communities
where I have just talked about mental health,
you know about saying, just educating people
and educating myself in that process of what
they know about mental health and
about the therapists out there and
often times there are a lot of fears around
therapists who will actually get it,
who know who they are, who are curious
about them in a sensitive way, in a warm way.
Not curious in sort of this voyeuristic way
and so there, I think there's a way in which
we have to allow ourselves to be part of a
community in order to understand the community better.
So my, a large part of what I would advocate
is not just simply sort of going out
and applying a theory, you know, to a community
or to an individual but rather to really learn
and see, what is the experience and
have that inform and modify what I already
come in with in terms of my understanding and
so I think it has to be collaborative on some level.
If we believe that in the therapy relationship
the therapist and the client have mutual influence
and impact and I would say that if I'm not
being transformed by the person
I'm working with something is not going right.
You know, it's not just influence.
There's a transformation happening that I am
learning in such a way with depth
that something has fundamentally changed
about my understanding and I think that has to be respected.
So for me, those transformative moments
lead to better access and then I can also gauge,
you know, there's certain people that
I will not refer to at this point in my
profession right, because I already know
that they're not gonna listen to certain things.
They're not, they have not developed
that attunement towards certain issues.
We all know this right?
I'm just speaking I think what we all know,
that there's certain things that we pick up on
colleagues or people that you know,
are in our professions and so, but
unless I talk to the client about what they need
and what they want, what their experience is, I won't know.
So I think it's important that you stay
a part of that community but also be very clear
on what your role is, you know, and where you
might run into each other again or
how do we negotiate our boundaries
and have an open conversation about that.
I don't think it's something we can determine
without talking to the people themselves.
Is that getting to your question.
- Stacey Jackson Roberts] Yes.
- Okay, thank you.
- [Moderator] Question on this side of the room here.
- [Jade] Hi, my name's Jade.
I'm trying to figure out how I'm going
to ask this question but basically
my, you know, in the Asian community
and I'm speaking in general here,
there's so much stigma to mental health.
- Yeah.
- [Jade] And a lot of the interventions and
the treatment that we're learning are very,
I mean are based on western ideals and
like very Eurocentric and I'm just curious,
how do we reach certain populations where,
you know like I know Chinese communities
are very kind of, the stigma's so strong
that we can't even talk about it.
- Mm-hmm.
- [Jade] And how do we engage them
and also provide interventions that
are like culturally sensitive?
- Mm-hmm.
- [Jade] And I'm just curious what your recommendations are.
- Yeah that's a great question.
So how do we engage communities where
there's a great deal of stigma around
mental health issues, seeing a therapist
and maybe some unfamiliarity with it as well, right?
So what I have found and I've worked
with Asian American communities in particular
because I used to direct the Asian American
or the Asian Mental Health Clinic at the
Cambridge Hospital years ago and one of the things
that we would do is outreach but
the way that we did outreach often times
with the first generation mostly was,
and by first generation I mean the folks
who grew up in another country and arrived
as adults and the second generation would be
those born and raised in the U.S., so the,
we kind of did it differently with different generations.
So with the first generation we paired up with
our primary care doctors and we would do
health fairs and at the health fairs
we would have mental health tables
and we would just sit down one on one
in lines of people and talk about,
what do you know about mental health?
What do you think happens in therapy?
And we would have guides, you know, written
information as well as just informal conversations
and it's, you know, because for many of the
first generation folks they were,
they thought about health more holistically.
It wasn't sort of separated into this thing
and that thing but rather it's how you feel
and so we did that and but I would say
that that worked with some first generation.
There were others who came in with the help
of someone else in their family or a friend
or when something reached a crisis level,
when there was a problem that became a crisis.
Another category of first generation folks
would come on their own because they had
a very different acculturative experience
than other people in their same generation.
So the reason I'm pointing this out is because
there's so much variation within groups
and across individuals and what people have been exposed to.
So we can't only assume that, okay
this is a first generation person so they
think this way and a second generation thinks another way.
In fact in the clinic that I directed,
we saw equal numbers of first and
second generation Asian Americans.
We saw equal numbers of men and women
which was also unusual because in the
general psychotherapy population we see
mostly women, more women than men I would say.
So it was unusual so we were surprised by that.
So I think you have to sort of think about
who the community is, what their particular
needs are and what the variations
within the community might be.
But I think, you know, we would do a lot of
informal, out of the office kind of work you know.
Sometimes it would involve home visits,
sometimes it would mean we met at the Dunkin Donuts
down the street because they didn't
want to be seen in a clinic you know,
they didn't want to enter a hospital.
They wanted to sort of just talk and that was okay.
So we modified what we did to figure out what made sense.
So you know, those are some ideas.
Yeah.
- [Audience Member] So I have a question.
Thank you so, I'm here.
- Where are you?
Okay.
- Should I stand up?
- Yes you're here.
Sorry I was just scanning the room.
- [Audience Member] So I'm the child of immigrants.
My family immigrated here from Panama.
So I'm first generation American
and they came here and became what they
describe as subjugated, marginalized minority
and although they knew that they were black
in Panama they considered themselves Panamanian
just like your client considered herself Jamaican
and I thought that was really interesting
and it's a really, it's interesting conversation
with my parents and I and so there's something
about the way in which they hold onto
their culture that didn't allow them
to think of themselves as less than
in a country that the only, the only story
that they have of black folks or
folks of color are less than.
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] And so you didn't speak to that
in terms of resiliency, or holding onto peoples culture.
- Yes.
- [Audience Member] Like my mom speaks Spanish,
that's her mother tongue and people would
make fun of her because she had an accent,
but she got jobs because she can speak mother tongue
and then when she got around other people
that spoke Spanish they could speak about
the system and about white people in their
mother tongue and have a hell of a time doing so
and it was their sort of everyday act of resistance.
- Yes.
- [Audience Member] So there is something very different
about me because I grew up in that culture
and then just considered myself Panamanian
for a very long time until I became black
like in college, but then when I became black
I entered into black feminism so I didn't
have that space of subjugation in a way
in which I think my nieces and nephews
are coming up against it.
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] So I want to know, great conversation
and I felt like there was a space missing
in terms of the resiliency of our culture
so I want to know what happened with that
and along with that, how have you used
culture and people's sort of holding onto
that sense of themselves that has
nothing to do with American racism
as a space for potential healing,
reconciliation and potential.
- Yeah, that's a great point.
I didn't focus on resilience and I didn't focus on,
on sort of the choices people have, you know,
that they can access, partly because of time
and my focus was elsewhere today,
but it is an important thing because
I think alongside of experiences of marginalization
there are also experiences of hope
and they're acts of resistance as you say.
There are also experiences that people
draw great strength from their cultural communities,
ethnic communities, religious communities
and so on and their families of course,
whatever the parents and grandparents
and relatives are passing on.
One of the things that I find, what I wanted
to focus on today was that even in those
situations where one has access to choice
in terms of who they can be and what they can
experience interpersonally in those spaces,
those spaces are challenged by a broader structure
and so the point is how do you then
retain those and hold onto those things
that feel good, that give you pleasure?
And I think that people do this everyday
and I think parents do this with
children all the time in particular.
Siblings do this for each other and sometimes
on some days you're cheered up by the fact
that you can revel in yourself and in a culture
that you love and for some people
it's more complicated because if
they're being traumatized within a family,
within a community, they don't have
access to that same kind of pleasure you know?
So it's a complicated thing.
I think there's a lot of individual variation
in how culture is experienced and sometimes
it's absolutely full of pleasure and joy
and excitement and I think some of the research
that I mentioned with the focus group studies
with the kids, the teenagers, they expressed
a lot of pride in their cultural heritage.
They loved it.
They talked about participating
in different celebrations and activities.
They had such a good time.
They felt connected and then in the very
same conversation you had this other part
of their experience being expressed
which was, but we could never
talk about that here in school.
Do you see what I mean?
So it felt really separated over and over again
and that's what I see with a lot
of folks in my practice as well.
When it becomes like they're multiple worlds
that cannot be put together reasonably enough,
not that they can fully be integrated,
but that's what causes this stress and the anxiety.
Kids would also talk about, in that particular study,
we asked them for recommendations.
We said, well what would you want to see
different at school to bring more of yourself
into school, for people to see who you are?
Cause a lot of them talked about this invisibility
that they felt cause they felt all this joy at home
and in different community activities
and then they'd go to school but
nobody would know anything about that experience.
It was just completely invisible.
So they said, well why don't we have,
you know, a culture fair where we're talking
about our own cultures in a positive way?
Why don't we just celebrate it and
so that's what we ended up doing.
So this particular study was a participatory action,
research study that led to various discussions
and celebrations but also some other deep,
you know, sort of more difficult dialogues
I would say in the school about identity
and what's being seen and what's not
and that particular study led to other kinds
of a film project actually where the kids
documented their experiences of being invisible
and what aspects were invisible and what weren't,
including things like being bullied
for having a disability and other aspects of identity,
but thank you for raising the point though.
It's very important.
- [Shawna] Hi my name is Shawna.
I'm a second summer as well so I'm reading your book.
I just noticed as I was listening to you
that I got emotional and, you know,
thinking about concepts and experiences
like constraint and dissociation and melancholia
in relation to marginalized identities
and those lived experiences and so I'm sort of
trying to tease out, like there's this
expectation that therapists sort of work
through their own shit, but what if that shit is ongoing?
- Yes.
- You know, and in the air that we breath
and I'm also wondering about like what that means
for being in the room with clients as these things
are not just actively impacting them but us.
- Yes.
- So just wondering if you had anything to say on that?
- Yes, yeah, very important point.
So how do we deal with our own stuff
and deal with it when we're with the client
and this is active at the moment.
This is not like, let's reflect on something
that a crisis that happened a year ago.
It's not like that.
We are in the crisis now so you're absolutely right
that this is an enormously stressful time for therapists.
I will say this, and for me, I can talk
about my experience and what some of my colleagues
have been dealing with too but
maybe it's best to start off with an example.
So I have a client who I've been working with
who voted for Trump and I have a few like this
who have voted for Trump and I've had to,
you know I did not, just to contextualize this.
(audience laughing)
In case you didn't know this already, but,
so I felt you know, this was hard
to sit with him after the election.
I kind of wanted to jump out of my skin and scream at him.
I was, so I had to sort of acknowledge
my own aggression but the first session
we had after the election I had to,
I just sort of, I literally had to pinch myself
to keep myself together because I was
so devastated after this election and how could,
how could I suppress that in that moment.
It was very painful and then I, so we had
a few sessions where I think I said very little.
I was very unusually quiet and I just sort of
let him talk and then I would just feel sick
in my stomach after the sessions and
I had to talk with a colleague of mine,
a couple of colleagues, we would discuss
this feeling that we were sharing with some
of similar kinds of experiences and we thought,
what is going on with us that we can tolerate
and bear so many things but this feels
so unbearable right now because
the threat is very imminent to us.
You know, it's not, it felt like the client
is supporting the eradication of me in a sense, you know?
So it cut to a core part of me.
This wasn't just sort of like oh, that's my
political view point and that's what I believe.
No, this cut down to like the very core of my life
and so and the life of so many people
that I love and care about including
my other clients you know who are weeping and in grief.
So it's, it was unbearable and I think
I had to acknowledge that and work through it
separately in order to sit with him again,
and this was a client I've been working with for some time.
So it's not a new client and at some point,
about six sessions later, he asked me
if I had feelings about the election.
(audience laughing)
They always know.
So and I said yes, of course I have feelings
about the election and he said,
I don't know if I really want to know the answer
and I said, okay I won't tell you then
and so, you know, we had to sort of go back
and forth like this but it ultimately he wanted
to know at least a little bit more and I told him.
I said, I feel hurt by it.
You know, I'm scared and this is why
and so this is a very unusual thing for me to do
but then again I'm reminded, as I'm saying this,
I'm reminded of Ilany Kogan's work.
I don't know if anybody's familiar with her work.
She's an Israeli analyst who talks about
sharing a moment with her patient where
they were in the midst of war and they both
had to sort of put on these gas masks
amidst war in the middle of therapy as they were
continuing to talk and it felt a little bit like that.
It felt a little bit like, okay,
let's just both put our masks on to breath here
because the tension is so deep and the conflict is real
and so I would say you have to be able
to talk with colleagues that are like minded
and people who have different opinions ultimately.
Once you can overcome the initial shock in crisis.
I don't think you can do it when you're in crisis.
I really resented the people who would say,
well go and find out what the other side thinks,
the day after the election.
I was really angry at that cause I said,
I'm in no mental space to do that right now.
I'm in grief and don't ask me to do that.
So you have to be a bit real with yourself
in terms of what is possible,
what is humanly possible for you.
It doesn't mean you're going to be in that space forever
but I think you do have to honor those moments
about yourself and then work towards
being in a different kind of space.
That's very hard.
- [Moderator] That brings us to the end of our evening.
So if you want to join me
in thanking Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra.
- Thanks.
(audience applauding)