Each year we open submissions for our Annual Wise Therapy Spotlight, where we ask a question of particular importance to our wider therapist community. We are always moved by the depth and generosity of our community voices.
This year, we asked our community, What Is the Soul of Therapy? Read more about our inspiration for this, our 5th edition, in the letter from the editors and Academy of Therapy Wisdom founders, Brian and Ian.
Continue here to read the submission by Adekemi O. Oguntala. We hope you enjoy it as much as we all did.
Therapy: Becoming an Integrated Story of Inherent Worthiness
Your emotional and physical health is a form of protest. This is what I tell my patients and clients. Some people march, some boycott and I offer that decolonizing your view of yourself and being emotionally and physically healthy are the most powerful things you can do. They are powerful actions because they involve the courage to know you matter and that is a revolutionary act. We are not socialized to believe that we are born worthy of love and belonging, but that what we do or have makes us worthy. We ultimately spend our lives fighting the desire to hope that it is true we are inherently worthy while simultaneously feeling we are worthless. The origins of psychotherapy did not promote this decolonized view of the SELF. Instead, what has always been critical to maintaining power has been that our minds remain confused about our worthiness. This has made the relationship that some have with mental health and how it leads to physical health a challenge. Each social and political climate that desired absolute power has been thwarted by someone or some group that dared to believe in the truth of their inherent worthiness. This is the essence of therapy.
“And let’s change the way we treat each other
You see, the old way wasn’t workin’
So it’s on us to do what we gotta do to survive” -Tupac Shakur
This decolonized view of therapy feels, to me, like the essence or soul of therapy; to allow you to “integrate” the parts of yourself per Dr. Dan Siegel so that you can see your connection to everything. The goal is to be able to tell a cohesive story about yourself and this means you have to understand not just what happened to you, but understand the sociopolitical context in which those events happened to you. Many of the authors we read do not discuss decolonizing the thinking that creates the beliefs that shape how our caretakers attach to us and cause so much trauma. As a result we as mental health promoters cannot promote authentic mental health within the context of validating a society that promotes our confusion and self-deprecation. You cannot change what you cannot acknowledge and this leads to people who have done therapy promoting ideals that continue to judge and dehumanize others while saying all the correct buzzwords to prove their certificate of therapy completion. Therefore being a good emotional health worker or therapist involves doing this work on ourselves, first.
By decolonizing the way we see emotional health we can identify the origins of our belief system that are not just grounded in our family home or people with whom we interact, but the society, social and other groups and the need to belong or connect to others. By seeing this very basic need in ourselves, we can model genuine compassion for ourselves and others. This is difficult when our own denial about abusive parents or toxic relationships makes us advise our clients to remain with abusive parents and in toxic relationships because “after all, don’t you want to have friends?” A client of mine was told. Another was warned they “would regret not having a relationship with a father” that did not respect their boundaries no matter how many conversations they had. My work on myself has pushed me to read about the history of how many cultures were colonized and deprived of their integrated story. This allows me to see how we are all connected and how difficult it is to risk that connection to learn about yourself. It removes the hierarchy of trauma and so I can see how we are truly connected in our suffering and not in our joy. I can see that the definition of shame means nothing if I cannot express the feeling my client is having out of compassion for the part of them that feels limited by vocabulary and understanding. This is the avenue used to validate what they are feeling and not what I think they should do based on societal norms designed to make them conform. This is not empathy which can overwhelm and make the day carry a weight that eventually leads to burnout. Rather, I become the one who validates emotions no matter how painful the experience. Of course, it is painful to be with people who call you a friend, but have no time to listen to your heartache. And of course it is painful to have to call someone a father who has not been fatherly towards you. This validation is a core principle that allows me to validate the human in front of me while seeing their cultural and spiritual unique qualities.
“Who taught you to hate yourself?” -Malcom X
The most abusive experience we all share is invalidation and the subsequent gaslighting that occurs because of that. Malcolm X, an autodidact, said that “by any means necessary” we should seek the knowledge to validate ourselves since this is not something done in the traditional school system. He alerted us to the truth of being “taught to hate yourself.” It is profoundly impactful to realize you are taught to hate everything about yourself and become so separated from your true self that you do the job of self-destruction for the oppressor. To realize that this is by design helps alleviate the shame of not becoming what is most admired, external success. This kind of radical validation that you are not how others including parents define you, but how you have the courage to see the truth of yourself was mind blowing to me. This always feels like such a gift to understand why and then “redo” experiences in my past with this new knowledge. It explains why the shame is so intense. And, in no environment does this type of shame thrive than an authoritarian environment.
As the world became colonized, it became more authoritarian. This has less to do with skin color and more to do with the intense shame of not being good enough and acquiring “things” in order to obtain power to mask the feeling of shame. This is the environment that we will find ourselves in where the changes are so subtle and divisive that we could deny it was happening. You have to know what to look for. This always feels like the dynamic in a couple where one is employing coercive control on their family. One member is defensive and the other remarks on their defensiveness being their illness. Incredibly hard for so many to see. It is something you feel in your body because the body is the most accurate tool we have. In both medicine and mental health, it would be critical to understand this dynamic so we understand that when someone presents with a chief complaint that we can abstractly understand that physical symptoms and mental health symptoms are often trauma symptoms and trauma is the betrayal of someone’s boundaries for the benefit of one person in the relationship.
The spirit of deep inquiry and self-reflection cannot be done without an accurate history. This is the true reason we find ourselves repeating childhood patterns of trauma like the perfect geometric sections of fractals that are repeated in larger patterns with certainty and regularity. We act out our childhood familiarity while often denying that anything happened. We can be so ashamed of not having a strong and loving connection to our family that we pretend or have nostalgia for a past that did not happen. This makes it so hard to connect with anyone and this goes beyond culture, religion, sexuality, gender, politics and race. Without our own vulnerability about our own stories, we cannot have the impact we would like to have on others. We too spend our down time busy and distracted from what we are feeling. This is what Audrey Lorde meant regarding the concept of self-care we so often speak about. Taking care of our own spirit so that what overflows from that self-care we can decide to give to others.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” -Audrey Lorde
In the space of distraction, we emotionally disconnect and show up to life empty, tired and burned out. We are not prepared for anything thrown our way. The practice that brings us back into our bodies is validation. To do this requires radical amounts of compassion. Our shame carries so much weight that crawling from under it to speak of the trauma becomes the biggest act of courage we can show each day. It allows us to benefit from that courage through our vulnerability in authentic connections. Without overwhelming compassion, I may be judging what happened to you or what you did because of how I judge myself. This field, just like any helping field, can only remain sacred with the ongoing curiosity about how something makes us feel. Yes, this is the first question we have to ask ourselves because only then can we move our biases aside and see them a bit more clearly when they show up. In this space of compassion we can do as Iyanla Vanzant says, “call a thing a thing” so that the other person feels seen and validated as do we. Although I can deeply appreciate that there is a need for more diverse therapists, the truth is that in an internal space of curiosity, we are able to serve the needs of people who do not look, act, or believe in what we believe in when we are in this emotional space. The issue is that this cannot be done by an ideology of “I don’t see color, religion, oppression, etc.” This is another way of not being curious about seeing and validating the other person’s experience.
Maya Angelou said, “of all the virtues, the most important is courage because without it, you cannot practice any other virtue.” But, we are more likely to have courage when we acknowledge that we were stripped of our worthiness by design and our human journey is to dig it out and wear it like the bright being we are. We become curious with courage and this allows us to take risks and learn more to face the uncertainty of human interactions. Our childlike state when manipulated benefits someone and the only way to truly combat this is through our emotional health and this is the gift therapy offers those who obtain it in its most decolonized and authentic form.
The views expressed in this essay are not necessarily the opinions of Academy of Therapy Wisdom, its presenters or its staff. This is part of a series featuring the unedited voices of our community in conversation. All content is used with permission and is copyright 2024 by Academy of Therapy Wisdom. Only the author may reproduce their content.
To read more articles or download a free copy of the final publication visit Wise Therapy Spotlight.
