Episodes
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What it takes to be in true coalition
Photo by Kelly on Pexels Hey there everyone— In 1981, the musician, cultural historian, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, gave a talk at a feminist music festival. That talk, “Coalition Politics, Turning the Century,” was reprinted a few years later in Home...
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The question that stops your phone obsession
Asking: What is it I think I'm going to receive can be a way into understanding the wishes and longing that drive our compulsive phone checking. At a systems level, the phone serves to recirculate the social consensus, lulling us into believing that social change is impossible. It is difficult to...
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Action Snack:
Grief, Ruthlessness and Patience are three strategies to use to figure out what's important and then do it. How structural inequality and oppression influence our ability to determine what's important, and take risks. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other...
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Finding Focus
--finding focus isn't about social media and lack of self confidence --it can be hard to determine what's important if you haven't been given the tools to determine your own desires and needs --what it important; and how to act, is inseparable from the context of power and oppression within which...
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Mechanisms of Grounding
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit therapysocialchange.substack.com
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Action snack: Can you tell the difference between sadness and low blood sugar?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit therapysocialchange.substack.com
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5 questions that will expand your thinking about mental health
--The roots of the medical model in the DSM III 1980 --The anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s --Individual versus systemic roots of mental distress --Treatment in the context of individualism or system wide violence This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other...
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Part III Song for Alabama
---Bias against the American South --The Republican Southern Strategy --The far right legislative agenda in the context of Southern mythology --American dismissal of the South --The erasure of Southern complexity and actual demographics This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this...
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Part II Where are my people?
--How the mainstream media represents the Alabama IVF case --The exclusion of non white people from the media response to the case --The erasure of the LBGTQ family in coverage of this case --An analysis of the decision in relation to 7 Mountain Mandate --Eugenics, Theology, and State Law This is…
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Part I The Alabama IVF Decision: An Explainer
Discusses February 16, 2024 Alabama Supreme Court Ruling declaring embryos children --wrongful death of a child --fetal and embryonic personhood --mental health impact of Dobbs Supreme Court decision --how IVF works --loss of property versus wrongful death --anti-abortion movement This is a…
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Leap (year)
--What it's like to have to change, or choose change and not know how to do it --Change in the context of privilege --Strategies to survive freefall This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...
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Action Snack: How to Jam the Circuits of Authoritarian Propaganda
--How propaganda works --Overwhelm as evidence of mental defeat and propaganda success --Strategies to return to power and not feel overwhelmed This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit therapysocialchange.substack.com
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How to listen to the cold
--How to discern the difference between the mind's story and the body's sensations --Sitting with fear and uncertainty --Listening and silence as roots of the creative process --Joy Harjo's poetry This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...
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You can do it!
--The change model of New Year's Resolutions --How change really happens --Self improvement versus structural change --including all aspects of mind, body, spirit in change making This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes,...
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Stripping down to the bone
--An examination of the Story of People and how it's breaking apart --What it's like to live between two worlds, one that's collapsing and another that isn't here yet --How to stay with uncertainty instead of believing we can predict what's coming This is a public episode. If you would like to...
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The Crucible of Disney’s Room #3
--The difference between ideation and execution --Disney's Three Rooms of Creation --Grief as a part of finishing --Grief and Transformation in the context of COP28 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...
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Can writing spur a person into action?
How can we make complex problems approachable through writing? How can writing help people act, make change in the world? How do we better understand why people are turning away from reading because they find our current problems exhausting? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss...
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Looking in the Mirror
Objectification is the act of turning something living and vibrant and changeable into a thing. It’s one of the key preconditions for an ideology to work. I cannot evaluate my value in patriarchy, or in white supremacy, until I can see myself through its gaze. I have to step outside my experience...
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How to tolerate what happens when you stop
One thing I’m curious about is the space between stop and go. I don’t know about you, but when I actually stop something, I feel awful. Some days it takes everything I have to refuse the old coping. Most days I notice how much of what I tell myself I should be doing, or even want to be doing…
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Notes on Rot
Last week I listened to an interview between the arts consultant and therapist Beth Pickens, who specializes in working with artists and wrote Make Your Art No Matter What, and Austin Kleon, the author of a number of bestselling books, like Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work. Pickens was...
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How to think about violence from a systems perspective
It is often said that the dominant culture of the United States is “individualist.” This is a tricky term, because the concept of individualism has its own history and context and is leveraged in many ways in our popular and political cultures. I think that when the dominant white culture of the...
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Mainstream trauma treatment can invalidate the survivor’s experience
In my last post I wrote a bit about how PTSD became a diagnosis. This week, I’m going to talk about how the diagnosis shapes trauma treatment, and why there can be a gap between the way a clinician approaches trauma treatment–what they think is most likely to bring people relief–and what the...
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About that van der Kolk profile in New York Mag last week . . .
The anthropologist and historian of science Danielle Carr, who is currently an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics, published a piece in the most recent issue of New York Magazine profiling therapist Bessel van der Kolk’s trauma work, academic career, and the ways...
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The false promise of discipline
Imagine a change you’re wanting to implement: an exercise habit, a meditation practice, a weekly phone call with a far-away friend. Or maybe you want to “subtract” something: sugar or caffeine; screen time; criticizing others. What happens when you picture yourself making this change? What words…
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Hillsong
Examines the question of how evangelical churches struggle with childhood sexual abuse, and what we might do to stop it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit therapysocialchange.substack.com
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Ghost Pride
In the interim, I thought I’d tell you about something cool that’s happening with Pride this year in Portland, Oregon. Like many cities, Portland celebrates Pride in June. Pride happens in June to honor the Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969. But this year, the committee that plans the Pride...
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What I did on my vacation:
After I got home it occurred to me that perhaps I was off base, thinking there was something exceptional about raising the subject of whiteness on San Juan Island. After all, is what I am describing so different from dynamics that might occur in a small rural town that is largely white? Or in an...
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Three ways to introduce the topic of whiteness or white identity in a therapy session
The individual, “identity-based” approach Clients who do not have a strong self-concept that they are racialized as white—by which I mean they do not have a regular practice of seeing themselves as a white person, moving around in a world that is coded by race—may unconsciously see themselves as...
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Let's talk about Liberation Health!
This week I want to talk about the Liberation Health Model. The word “liberation” in the model honors and acknowledges the work of liberation theology, out of which grew liberation psychology, a way of thinking about healing that was practiced by Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Spanish-born Jesuit priest...
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Countering The Psychological Effects of a Blizzard of Violence
From my perspective, perhaps the most effective impact of these events is psychological. After the Dobbs decision came down I wrote about the ways the law is an act of psychological warfare. I see the Kacsmaryk decision as an effort to recontain the political force and energy that has arisen to...
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Is your body a machine or a fiesta?
Have you all been following the coverage of the diabetes drug Ozempic? Ozempic is the brand name of semaglutide, one of a series of drugs in the category GLP-1 receptor agonists. The drug, which mimics a hormone, works by suppressing the body’s production of glucagon. Since glucagon cues the body...
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It's ok to be a beginner
I was on Mt. Tabor last week and as I walked around the circular path at its top I saw the little hemlock in the picture at the top of this post. I had an instant fondness for it, propped between two helpful sticks, guiding it up towards its neighboring trees. Because the tree is shorter than I…
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What is the diagnosis code for extractive capitalism?
Hey there everyone— Today I decided to share some information I gathered this week—much of it in very mainstream places—on the impact of inflation on ordinary people and the ways corporations are trying to use “inflation” as a way to continue to increase their prices and maintain their profits,...
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Seeing versus Knowing
Have you heard of the Bechdel test? Named after Alison Bechdel, the graphic illustrator and creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, the test is the result of a 1985 strip in which two lesbians consider going to a movie. One of the characters says she’ll only see a movie if it meets a simple...
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Welcome new subscribers!
Photo by Bruce Jastrow on Unsplash Hello everyone! I’m taking a moment to say hello and thank you to folks who have recently subscribed to this newsletter. If you’re new here and you’d like to get oriented, this post talks about what structural violence is and how it works. Structural violence...
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Can Process Groups Help Cops Combat Police Brutality?
Last week I told you I was heading into a group training for the weekend. It was fantastic—very rigorous. I’m sitting with a lot, because it was long and demanding, and I haven’t had any time off yet to let anything really sink in. The group is rooted, in part, in Modern Analytic theory. One of…
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Action Snack: How are you negotiating gender and power?
Within the heteronormative binary of patriarchy, there are two genders, male and female, said to be expressions, at the level of behavior, of the biological sexual difference between men and women. These normative gender expressions are represented back to us by the dominant culture, which also...
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Aren’t You Just a Paid Friend?
I have a pretty detailed answer to the question of what makes a therapist different from a good friend, and much of it hinges on my understanding of the concept of transference. I told this client that therapy works in part because it evokes a transference relationship between the therapist and…
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Interdependence Report Back
Last week I wrote about the meditation on interdependence. I told you I was going to try it at the river and let you know what happened. The mountain was immense and the river was tremendous. I started thinking about the water in the river being the same water rushing in my blood. I looked out…
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The Tree and the Not-Tree
For me, it’s easy to engage the philosophy of interdependence, and mind-blowingly difficult to sit and actually perceive interdependence in real time. To perceive interdependence is to obliterate the idea of the self and the false sense that it is a being or thing that is separate from…
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Imagination Practice
What’s the difference between creativity and imagination? There’s an underlying assumption that creativity seeks an output, that it wants to generate a material artifact, either as a goal in itself (think “art as creative expression”), or to make an impact on someone else, or to generate money…
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The 30% Question
It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems. Individualist cultures see both the source and the solution to problems in the actions of individual people who are said to be rational, who know and understand their...
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Secret Rituals
I’ve been thinking about those almost imperceptible actions we take to remind ourselves of who we are. There’s a privacy in the smallness of the act: people who know you well still might not know you do that thing, say that phrase to yourself, make that small move with your shoulders when you…
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All I Want for Christmas is a Little Ideology Critique
My “Christmases” taught me there was no one Truth, and that just because you weren’t religious, that didn’t mean you weren’t impacted by culture and tradition and faith. They got me thinking about cultural collision and being of two nations, two worlds, two religions, no religion. They gave me an...
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The poles of prayer and violence
My client is a person with an abiding interest in the magnificence of life. He was not prompted to bring up prayer because of the shooting at Club Q. Nor was he inspired because this is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Our discussion was instead a continuation of our longstanding...
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Why Explaining Things to People Won’t Change Their Minds
Despite our knowing how complex it is to even persuade ourselves to change, let alone our clients, if we work in mental health, it’s often still the first impulse to provide information, or a helpful explanation of why X will be so much better if only Y happens. Facing the contradictions and...
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The Consequences of Speculation
* What is the psychic toll of being in a state of perpetual anticipation of a threat? * How does it feel in the body when we behave as if we aren’t in hyper arousal, when we play at rationality and calm, even as we’re consuming information designed to evoke a strong emotional response? * How…
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CBT's Achilles' Heel
The CPT protocol uses as its measure of effectiveness an assessment tool which the client fills out each week before session. The assessment lists all the symptoms outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s diagnostic category for PTSD. From week to week, the assessment tracks the level…
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Community in Darkness
It makes sense to me that trying to imagine the death of the dominant culture, and of ways of being that have been practiced for centuries, would engender rage and terror. It makes sense that the un-knowing of where we will be, on the other side, is enough to make people freeze up, not want to...
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Care
How do we become a “feminized” society—one that lauds and respects caring and empathy and that is full of people who are unafraid of facing death, of acknowledging our frailty, our uncertainty, our physical and emotional pain? If we better shared the work of caregiving, would this shift in our...