Alongside our enriching psychotherapy training online, we proudly presented the much-anticipated annual 2023 Wise Therapy Spotlight publication -a compilation of profound essays and captivating artwork from our esteemed psychotherapy training community. We extend our sincere gratitude to all contributors who shared their insights and talents, making this publication a true testament to the brilliance within our community.
A special congratulations to our featured authors! Your responses to the pivotal question, “How, as a community, do we repair a sick world when it is anguished with mental suffering?” have left us inspired.
If you’re interested in downloading the full Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2023 Issue, Click to Download the PDF now.
We Cannot Build Wellness on Lies
Adekemi Oguntala, MD
The mental health community cannot repair the world of its mental anguish. It is itself a system and has its own shortcomings and so it cannot help empower others until it does its own work to feel the full effect of its own power or agency. We cannot do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. So much of mental health the way it is currently done has been to reinforce wellness in a sick societal structure. Therapists have removed social justice as part of who they are and provided care to help people adjust to a system that invalidates who they are and deprives them of agency in a perceived utopia. Perfectionism has never saved the inner mental world and it has repeatedly been the ultimate downfall of external worlds. In order to relieve the world of its emotional, psychological and physical anguish, we will need to tell people the truth. The truth that who they are is good enough not because they comply, but because they exist. To do this, we will have to be more transparent in how we represent standards of society. We will have to rid ourselves of our own denial and betrayal blindness and talk about the social, emotional and physical truth about why people are suffering.
Social Truth
The social truth of why people are suffering is because the social structure has been designed to have certain people fail. Furthermore, those people who were designed to fail are supposed to be otherized people, those that do not comply with social norms of race, gender or religion for example. But the truth is that even if you can comply, the system is designed to have you fail. This truth would create camaraderie not competition and comparison, which would be deadly to a system that protects very few. This was the message of Fred Hampton, who was associated with Black Panther Party and organized the Puerto Ricans, blacks, poor whites, etc and this alerted the FBI. The system needs us to rank ourselves so we destroy each other. We have to learn from history. When there was no ranking a phenomenon occurred called the Bacon Rebellion. The Bacon Rebellion, which occurred from 1675-1676, was the first conflict on American soil based on class. It showed the elite class that if there was no ranking psychology so that poor whites saw themselves as no better than poor blacks then they would inherently work together for their common cause of financial and social equity. The elite in order to ensure this never happened again created whiteness. This ensured that the poor whites would never see their plight as intertwined with people who were otherized. This brilliant idea became a generational trauma of denial and manipulation on impoverished whites that prevents unity to overcome all sorts of injustice directed at all people.
Bacon and his co- elites proceeded to encourage the need for slavery in Virginia and movement of indigenous off land, which involved more lying. These lies being told across all systems and generations would allow physicians, mental health clinicians and school systems to practice their systems in accordance with a lie no one had ever directly been told, but was repeated and normalized through more lies and manipulation even when they didn’t make sense.
The fear of a select few elites to this day is that if we are socially connected and critical thinkers, it would change how society voted, how it advocates for individual changes that impact the whole. We would empower others to see they are not alone in their suffering so they can see how the personal is political and that fact has never been lost on those in power. Critical to maintaining the current structure is that all oppressed people, which includes white people, emotionally disconnect from their bodies and never truly feel the extreme discomfort of lies they too were told about themselves. This is what prevents the compassion and connection to think critically instead of complying with social norms that do not benefit them either.
Emotional Truth
The emotional truth of why people are suffering is because the structure from which people get emotional support is frequently controlled by systems that limit the information that would not just help people heal, but make them less controlled and manipulated by those who abuse for their own purpose.
For centuries if not more, indigenous populations have known the value of community and working together. The power of psychedelics not pharmaceuticals to help people feel the connection to the universe creates a sense of well being and connection to others, even those not in their tribe. “I am not my neighbor’s keeper, I am my neighbor.” This message of connection with others and the universe is espoused by Iyanla Vansant and encourages a sense of oneness through emotional stability and wellness.
When we teach through whichever system we offer our gifts: medicine, mental health, politics, education that we are responsible for each other and decisions are made from this mindset then the community is as important as the individual; not more and not less. We disprove that there is a ranking system and allow teamwork when we constantly teach the emotional truth of awareness of connection to our somatic system over external validation, we base our worth in our approval and not the approval of others. This mindset of somatic connection to ourselves and others never diminishes and removes a solipsistic desire to be better than to have power over and to manipulate.
Physical Truth
Finally, the physical truth of why people are suffering is critical because we have come to think in a very narrow minded way about what physical health is and where it comes from. The source of physical health is emotional health and this is why the key to helping the emotionally anguished cannot be unifaceted. Healing is multifaceted. If we understood that the effects of emotional, financial and social manipulation create a somatic or physiological reaction in the body, which over time creates disease; then it would be hard to manipulate someone into believing that you only need a physician to make you well. The Still Face Experiment proved that repeated invalidation is perceived as physical pain. The experience of humans is repeatedly invalidated and created the train response that leads to incredible suffering in humanity. Isn’t this what we are seeing when a person in the Congo places themselves on fire to bring attention to their suffering while the world holds its face still for days and weeks on end?
Malcom X told us we had been bamboozled, and hoodwinked into believing in our own inferiority and helplessness. This truth was so dangerous there was an attempt to destroy his message. However, a parallel message has been happening in the field of medicine through indigenous populations throughout the world, various physicians like Hippocrates that said, Let thy food be your medicine.” Political thinkers like W.E.B Dubois, writers like James Baldwin, researchers like Peter Levine, Dan Siegel, Bessel Van der Kolk, Jennifer L Eberhardt, Harriet Washington to name a short list of innovators that have been clear that when we are invalidated or made to believe a truth that is inconsistent with the somatic truth we know -we become ill. 
Our physical disease is a result of denial of the truth that we are not supposed to live this way but we are told this is the way we should live so a small group of people live comfortably. Dr. Maté writes in The Myth of Normal that, “our current culture allows millions to die prematurely of diseases we know how to prevent or of deprivations we have more than enough resources to eliminate…worse he goes on to say that we have become accustomed -or perhaps better to say acculturated -to so much of what plagues us. It has become, for lack of a better word, normal.”
In order for the mental health community to make an authentic impact on the anguish of others, we would need to understand indoctrination and dogma designed to dehumanize so many diverse groups including white people who have also suffered from the toxins of ranking and manipulation. Books and theories that are rewritten to tell the truth of what is happening to us. All of us.
This ranking system has allowed self-shaming to reinforce the external messages that we are not good enough as we are. Believing this is what destroys us from the inside out. Then, as the final blow we are deprived of resources that are readily available to help us heal while being blamed for our own suffering. The physician says, if only you had come in sooner, if only you took the medication regularly. Every relationship has two parties but without owning our part we become complicit in the big lie about how physical truth and wellness comes from our relationships and only one member of the relationship is invested in your illness, which is a set up for failure, anguish.
The Future
The anguished are in many ways abused by a system that views them as objects. If we can empower them through mental health then they will understand why themes of helplessness and powerlessness invade their thoughts. The loss of autonomy and free will isn’t supposed to make us feel empowered, but controlled. When we do not realize we are being controlled then we are more likely to blame ourselves. Isn’t this the fatal flaw we believe we have? What if mental health revealed this secret that those in power aren’t really powerful, but have transferred their feelings of worthlessness to those too confused and doubtful to counter the punches. They seem rich and powerful, but it’s like the wizard behind the curtain. Mental health could be Glenda, the witch who tells the oppressed you had the power all along. Your authentic power makes you worthy of love and belonging and not your likes on social media.
By emphasizing listening to the body instead of listening to those outside of us to understand ourselves, we help the anguished develop an immunity to gaslighting, which allows the body to heal. The body is never asking for more money than it needs when it is healthy or even more power than it needs and so in a well state we can authentically live and trust the body’s message. This is what Tupac expressed in his song Change, “Let’s change the way we eat, let’s change the way we live, 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.” This work is not easy. It is no simple task to undo the dogma of control and manipulation but we will never reverse that burden of shame with a scarcity mindset. Thinking that we are not pretty, thin, rich, smart, perfect, man or lovable enough will never reduce the enormity of generational shame -only the truth and compassion can do that.
We are humans and in that humaness, we are flawed and so there can be no utopia where we thrive. However, building a society that understands that our differences and mistakes are accepted and learned from is a society built on compassion. Because we cannot do for others what we cannot do for ourselves, there has to be a reckoning with our own history before we can help others see their history. At every aspect of society, we must see where our rigidity manipulates others into believing that who they are is not good enough. It is clear this nonconformity is accepted when there are programs in place to support nonconforming groups without compromising their humanity. When we commit to the lies of inferiority and ranking of those in power, we support a society that protects financial elites.
When the personal is political from the top down then we create media that teaches the truth to a younger audience so they can educate themselves. When we are not rigid about what is a viable talent in the gifts people have and let go of there being only one way to be valuable we go to the people who need us and use what they use to give them the information they need. We become flexible and convey the information however they can hear it. We can support politicians, mental health workers and community activities that exemplify these principles and support the oppressed instead of big business.
Generational trauma occurs in systems and organizations and a system that only relatively recently acknowledged the existence of sexual trauma in children in the 1970s and refuses to acknowledge racism as a mental health condition cannot speak to all potential clients of its service. Diversifying those in charge and changing curriculums are only part of this endeavor. Creating programs that educate younger people on manipulation and coercion and what is truly normal developmentally e.g. individuation, rebellion and critical thinking are important to decreasing the impact of childhood trauma. The ACEs screening has given us a very superficial correlation of how these experiences produce adults that make decisions often from places of fear, unlovability, and a desire for power instead of courage, worthiness and an authentic sense of being.
We cannot build well-being states on lies, and manipulation. White supremacy has been our greatest teacher in this regard. We have yet to really metabolize this lesson hence why it has been duplicated throughout the world.
If you would like to be inspired by more of the essays and artwork published in the Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2023 Issue, Click to Download the PDF now.
