by Christi Baker, AMFT

KALEIDOSCOPE

The world’s state is pulling me to read more on transformative justice and abolition, as I need some new-to-me stories to draw from when sitting with patients.

What if… people told different stories about power, oppression, trauma, and repair within themselves? What if they reshaped stories across families, communities, systems, and societies? What if stories framed power and oppression as general concepts and forces colliding with race and other identities? How do these stories (and enactments) unfold in therapy? How can a therapist facilitate these stories and grapple with the contradictions around power and oppression that live within all of us in different ways?

I am a White, straight woman with diverse patients. Having worked decades in economic justice, I hold that the systems people move through, such as racialized capitalism, are traumatic for all, but much more so for people of color and other marginalized people. Trauma disrupts someone’s story of safety and power. It is impossible for me to separate psyches and systems in therapy. People are living with and inside of multiple personal and systemic stories from the past/present and near/far. That kaleidoscopic lens, both a lot to hold and appropriately complex, informs my curiosities and hopefully stories that get elicited in therapy.

With a patient of multiple marginalized identities, I have attempted to expand my evenly hovering attention within the therapy room with my patient’s intersectional identities, surrounding systems, and personal and cultural histories (and mine). Our identities have been alive in the room. I take my time building alliances with patients, moving at the speed of trust. Trauma and differing identities can slow the process. In acknowledgement of this patient’s survival of multiple traumas and our dissimilar social locations, we have spaciously and patiently built our relationship. From the start, I was curious about how power and oppression would be storied and enacted. What power could be shared? Admittedly, I struggle with the frame (power), always, and with him. My dilemma is how to hold the frame in ways that are trauma-informed/containing but not rigid/oppressive.

I consider that the world was largely not built for him to thrive and the impact of ongoing systemic trauma on him. As we began, I wondered what we could do to co-create a space that is different – one where he belonged. Together, we have looked at the kaleidoscope of his world, being with all the patterns that show up and trying to tell new stories about what we’re seeing. Instead of pathologizing, what have been his survival strategies in an oppressive world? Can we consider harm reduction for any of those strategies that are helping and harming at the same time?

Abolitionist Mariame Kaba says that “hope is a discipline” that needs to be cultivated regularly. It is easy for abolitionists, therapists, and patients to feel hopeless sometimes. My hope for this patient is that we massage some of his layers of scar tissue, making them less painful, more integrated, and reshaped into a beautiful story.