Coloniality

Colonialism in Therapy: three invitations for our work

On July 23, 2024 by sarmientoverano

^{Featured photo credit: Ashley Batz}

By: Lucia Sarmiento Verano

With gratitude to the Feminist Therapy Network organisers and the participants to their anniversary event.

Introduction

Having had to push myself to the limit this year, by juggling work and research/study, I’ve been reflecting deeply about the reason behind my work. Even before finishing my therapy training course, I increasingly found myself talking to colleagues about oppression in mental health and most notably, colonialism and its impact. Almost naturally, I followed my anger and frustration at the violence witnessed where it led me: learning and unlearning about systems of oppression, and trying to share this knowledge while constantly inviting others in the profession to do the same. Of course, this anger is of the generative kind, the one that comes from love and deep care for my fellow humans.

Something became suddenly clear to me while preparing for my recent talk at the Feminist Therapy Network anniversary event. I said it at the start of said talk: I come offering a perspective that is almost never considered, even in liberatory spaces, at least in the mental health field. I come with a Global South perspective, a focus on anti-colonialism first and foremost, and with a specific set of invitations, which sometimes might read more like challenges. The invitations are about seriously confronting our own privilege and power. Not ‘checking’, as some like to say, but confronting.

As I mentioned during my talk, liberatory spaces are often focused on support and healing from oppressive harm, on shared struggles and learning about them. And this is good! These spaces are needed. However, one important aspect is sorely missing. The spaces where we come together to acknowledge, confront, and try to dismantle our inner oppressors. It can be the most painful and uncomfortable part of the work, and I say it knowingly. Most of the people who read this blog are located in the Global North, and as such, benefit materially from current dispossession, extraction, exploitation and violence in the Global South. As mental health professionals, we benefit from the current systems of oppression creating distress and categorising or pathologising people which perpetuates the need for our work.

Not only this, but we need to examine our role positionality as professionals who support people who come to us at vulnerable times in their lives. Many of us hold privilege outside of the therapy room, and one thing is clear, ALL of us hold power inside the therapy room. This is true no matter how much we’d like to run away from this reality (hello, person-centred approach). No matter how many therapists would like to imagine it, it is effectively impossible to equalise power in such a relationship, when one person is in need of support and the other holds space, skill and knowledge on the process. Now, the more aware we are of this and of our own inner oppressor and its pitfalls, the more we can prevent or mitigate risk of harm to our clients. But for that we have to be brave and confront our own shadows.

What follows is a reworked and modified version of the talk I gave on June 8^th, which offers the rationale and some helpful pointers for this work.

Our Colonised Minds

My first encounter with extreme poverty was at about 5 or 6 years old. It is one of my strongest childhood memories. Sitting in the passenger’s seat of my mum’s car, a child who had been waiting at the light for cars to stop came to tap on the window, begin for a few coins. This was a common situation in Lima during the 90s. I found myself facing him, both looking directly at each other, our faces only a few centimetres apart, separated by the car’s window. I thought we were the exact same age, and I saw myself in him. When we started moving again, I asked my mum a series of questions: Why is he here? Is he alone? Where is his mum? Is he not scared?

The responses I received broke me. My mum new better than to lie to me and always tried to explain reality as gently as possible. I was terrified for him, and of a world where he had to be left alone in the streets to beg. This is not my tale of woe and you do not need to feel any empathy for me. I was the privileged child in that encounter. I had a home to go back to and food on the table. That day a gaping hole opened in my chest. I asked myself a question that haunts me to this day: Why him and not me (in the streets)? And conversely, why me and not him (inside the car)?

That day, my eyes were opened to what a terrible world we live in. I spent most of my life needing to understand why and how, this world is set up like this.

In the quest for knowledge, through questioning sociology, history, political science and a brief stint in security studies I came to understand that the violence we see today is usually a direct continuation of the violent structure established in the past. If we take the Peruvian example, after political independence, colonial structures were copied, with minimal changes, onto the new Republic. In fact, Indigenous people’s situation deteriorated even more under the new government.

The point I am making is that if we don’t understand history, we won’t understand what is happening today, nor do we identify the origins of much of the distress people currently feel.  And it is important we understand it from the perspective of the peoples who ‘suffered’ history instead of dominant perspectives. The latter will only give us limited understanding, veiled in lies and omissions, perpetuating the violence. This is because dominant narratives exist to justify the current system and its violence.

This reproduction of colonial structures is not just a problem for people of the Global South, it is also not only in the past. As Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist, reminds us in his work about the Coloniality of Power (2000), this system has established hierarchies in all domains of life and controls them with specific institutions. Political and economic realms are under the nation-state and capitalism respectively; relationships, sexuality and gender under the structure of the nuclear, bourgeois family; and our minds, our knowledge and subjectivity under eurocentrism.

Hierarchies managed by these institutions exist globally, affecting people depending on their race or ethnicity, gender, neurotype, socio-economic class, etc. Social factors such as identity, background and access to opportunities, support and care have an immense impact on our mental health and wellbeing long-term. I’m saying nothing new here.

Yes, colonialism is first and foremost about a material reality, political and economic oppression, land dispossession and exploitation. It is ALSO, about cognitive and psychological violence and domination. If people do not assimilate, believe in this system, adopt it for themselves, then the system would not be produced and reproduced. In doing so, groups of people become marginalised over and over again, across geographies and across generations.

However, in the process of adopting this system, or being socialised into it, violence is done to people in their capacity to make their own meaning and have a sense of themselves. People are robbed of the opportunity of adopting perspectives that are not coming from the lens of the dominant culture. You might already have heard of some examples of this in what is known as internalised oppression, the male gaze or the white gaze. (This is not to say resistance does not exist, it certainly does)

Another consequence of this injustice: differences in how people are heard, received and supported when naming their experiences. Who has the right to assert themselves (without being deemed a trouble-maker or overreacting) and be heard and supported as a result? Whose words & experience is put into question when speaking of the violence they endured? For example, how does society respond to women who speak up about harassment or black people speaking up about racism?

Generally, certain groups or communities are at a higher risk of this kind of Epistemic Injustice (Fricker, 2007), when they cannot express their perspectives or get support. This is important to consider because the same groups will be a higher risk of harm within therapeutic spaces.

Our Colonised Profession

I believe it is important to always have in mind that colonial mindset lies at the root of our profession. It was created within this system and carries its oppressive hierarchies at its core. It also benefits from this system and tends to be complicit in the categorisation of people, and the pathologising of difference.

Let’s face it, this profession has a specific origin. Theories and practices come from one social and cultural location: white European, mostly middle class. It is by people from this origin, working with patients from this origin, that most of the theories and practices we regard as foundational come. These ideas define things like: ‘healthy’ ways of being, a structure of the mind, a process of change, and ideal outcome or ideas of what mental good health looks like, what ‘healthy’ relationships look like, etc. They turn these ideas into universal truths, applicable to all regardless of background, culture, gender or neurotype.

And this is part of its oppressiveness. The existence of an unnamed, unmarked, universal or ideal human against whom the Others are compared, from a deficit perspective, and shown to be lacking in some ways.  Counsellors who claim to work “without identity labels” because “we are all human” are only uncritically reproducing this issue. The colonial violence of therapy is enacted against clients that are pathologised for their “difference” (or at least told there is a problem to work on) without being given the tools to understand and accept themselves truly, if they don’t fit the white, middle-class, neurotypical mold.

Coloniality in the profession also build barriers to change. At the time of my training, I did not have the knowledge nor the words to voice these problems, but I do believe it would have made very little difference to the context. People were not prepared to listen. One of the moments that I take as proof of this is the response I got when I challenged our tutor on her very limited, and quite frankly insulting teachings on “diversity and power”. I called out the lack of information on the impact of colonialism and racism and the whitewashed perspective we were given. The response was “I am a queer woman, I understand” (she was a white woman), and “are you saying I’m racist?”.

You might recognise the white fragility and move to innocence in those responses. This show that just as there is transferential baggage in any relationship, including therapeutic ones, raced and gendered colonial expectations, stereotypes and dynamics get enacted in therapeutic spaces. These reenactments of global historical relations of domination (that also live within us), can be expressed in different ways when we are with clients. Ways that have been discussed endlessly in literature and research: microaggressions (Sue et. al, 2007), ideological misattunment (Sheehi & Shehi, 2022), misrecognition, colonising processes (Chinnock & Minikin, 2015), gaslighting, denial, silencing…

This colonial baggage also shows up in the profession’s reticence to change and in all the ways barriers are built up to avoid challenges to the status quo. Some of them are rooted in psychic defences of whiteness and privilege, that can be adopted and expressed by anyone who is in a position of power and privilege. And as therapists, we all are in a position of power in our roles when working with clients or service users who come to us for support.

Counter-transferencial dynamics full of ambivalence and power within therapeutic relationships have also been discussed in research over the last few decades. Some examples are: White innocence and saviourism; expectations of power, and insecurities that may lead therapists to act in paternalistic and disempowering ways; emerging feelings of guilt and shame as act as blocks to certain topics in the work, etc. Just to name a few. And despite our trainings teaching us to use non-defensive curiosity in regards to counter-transference, many counsellors are ill-equipped to deal with it in regards to racism and colonialism.

Our role in this? Three invitations:

The first invitation I’m extending today is for us to witness the harm our profession is currently doing to clients and service users, and to rethink ourselves as professionals.

Not only by reflecting on what we’re doing or how we are doing it, but also, who does it serve? Where do our practices come from and for whom were they created? And how do we redirect this work in the service of those who have been repeatedly harmed and silenced? Not to liberate them (we are not saviours), but to walk alongside and support collective liberation, ours included.

In the last few years, I’ve been inspired by Liberation Psychology’s principles as a means to address these issues. A movement emerging in Latin America in the 70s, Liberation Psychology focuses on the social and historical context, rejecting universalism and the illusion of impartiality of mainstream psychology. Its goal is to understand distress of oppressed communities through a structural lens, as normal reactions to abnormal and violent conditions. It seeks to address it by changing oppressive systems, instead of alleviating individual symptoms.

From a Liberation Psychology lens, Psychology that ignores the impact of the context on mental health becomes an accomplice to social injustices and psychological harm. We might then consider that part of our role, as witnesses of social harm, is to apply what we see in our work. This might mean considering the impact of oppression and the socio-historical context as much as interpersonal relationships on our clients’ wellbeing, challenging psychology’s individualisation of issues. Making links between individual distress and social context to help people make sense of their experience from their own perspectives is part of the healing process.

The second invitation is to deeply work on ourselves.

Locating oneself socially in relation to our client’s position, and in relation to the broader historical colonial-capitalist context. This helps us identify potential misattunments, power differentials and transferential dynamics present in the therapeutic relationship. It can also alert us to sources for our own challenges: shame, guilt, anger, grief, or saviourism that may influence our work as therapists. We need to manage our own baggage, as flawed individuals who have been socialised for the most part in a colonial oppressive society. And its hard work, and its challenging and scary, and painful. But it is possible, I promise you.

Equally, as I said above, our positionality as mental health professionals needs to be examined. And for that I like to use the following set of questions.

About knowledge: What is our relationship with knowledge? Theories? How do we feel when challenging our assumptions: in our practices, the origins of our theories/modalities, etc.? How do we react when we think about being open to practicing differently? For example, being open to ‘different needs’ (in relationship building, boundaries, expectations and outcomes)?

How to we manage feelings of being lost, threatened, uncomfortable or vulnerable in the room? When familiar theories and practices need to go out the window because they were not meant for the person in front of us: where to we find grounding when we can’t ground ourselves in that familiar knowledge?

About power: How do we feel when we think about our power, the power we hold as therapists? About the power we hold in the therapeutic relationship? What is our relationship to it? And to our potential to harm clients?

I do believe as therapists we hold responsibility to be constantly reflecting on all these questions. We owe to our clients to be working on our own liberation as humans and as practitioners. How is our psyche colonised? Unpicking our own relationship with whiteness and the colonial system (personally and professionally) by being honest with the ways in which we are invested in it.

Finally, I want to invite all of us to think of all of this in connection to other struggles.

All of the violence I am writing about here, the epistemic violence, emotional, psychological violence, has the same origins than material and physical violence. Colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, a system established and developed over the past 500 years that dehumanises entire groups and creates hierarchies to sustain and justify exploitation, theft, and resource accumulation by the few. The psychological harm of this system also serves the purpose of keeping people distressed, vulnerable and unable to respond or to organise for collective justice and liberation.

I see all this as part of the colonial spectrum of violence… from subtle psychological harm like microaggressions, to reproduction of systems of exploitation, all the way to extreme physical violence like murder, torture, and genocide. This is not disconnected from what is happening to people in Palestine, in Congo and Sudan.

It is also connected to the violent, extractive and exploitative conditions that pushed that little boy out of the safety of a home to beg on the streets of Lima. As I said, the day of our encounter opened a hole in my chest. That hole still exists because nothing has changed since then. And the reality of global injustice still pierces through me and provides fuel to the fire that burns in my belly. Does it do the same for you?

If it does, I am also inviting us to see anti-colonialism and liberation movements as being connected to our work. They exist out there and also in us (and in our profession). The struggles do not happen one after the other but all at the same time. For that we need to challenge the system and we need to challenge ourselves, work together and support each other in this work. My sincere wish is for there to be more spaces available to come together and explore these questions in depth, be vulnerable with each other and support each other in this work.

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References

Chinnock, K. & Minikin, K. (2015) Multiple Contemporaneous Games in Psychotherapy: Psychodynamic and Political Perspectives. Transactional Analysis Journal, 45(2), pp141-152

Fricker, M (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Quijano, A. (2000) Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South. 1(3). Pp 533-580.

Sheehi, L. & Sheehi, S. (2022) Psychoanalysis Under Occupation. New York: Routledge.

Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62, 271-286.

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