by Todd Rising, Psy.D.

Having watched a few home renovation shows with my architect husband over this past pandemic year, the metaphor of home renovation sticks with me as NCSPP's current President. While we continue to grow as an organization in various ways, we are also breaking ground.

Like a combo home inspection report and plan for renovation, NCSPP has recently received a DEI Assessment Report from our consulting partner organization, Early/Mid. Based on interviews with outgoing, current, and incoming board members and administration performed a few months ago, the report offers a reflection upon our organizational home from the perspectives of our different social positionalities and perspectives as well as from varying degrees of closeness and distance to sources of organizational power. Our blueprint also provides insights about our home’s inherent strengths as well as the opportunities we have to more deeply understand areas in need of examination and repair. And, importantly, it features our consultants’ recommendations for change and supplementary resources for education.

One of the most salient sections of the report, which we’ll focus our initial inquiry and thinking on, is titled Culture and, more specifically, considering the essential subtopic of psychological safety. Over the course of our upcoming Board meetings, we’ll explore what this term means to each of us and ask questions: what promotes psychological safety in working groups? For whom and on whose terms? What is the benefit? How do we encourage its development in the current culture of our Board? How do we translate our reflections and processes into shareable and tangible reference points and criteria for future iterations of NCSPP Boards and board members? And, perhaps even more importantly, how do we apply these criteria to the learning and social spaces that NCSPP creates within the multiplexed community?

As we continue to co-construct our organization we will try to understand what each of us as Board and committee members brings to the table with regard to an understanding and experience of “home”. As a White man who grew up in the late 70’s and 80’s singing “this land is made for you and me,” my sense of home was intended to be cast out to the far reaches of the continent, from sea to shining sea, and under the banner that yet waves. I lived in neighborhoods that more often than not reflect my own Whiteness. My sense of safety and home are amplified by police who are in perpetual disparity of who is served and protected. Meanwhile, I have compartmentalized (towards forgetting) the complex histories of racism and dis/placement inherent to local places like Alcatraz and Angel Island, and calmed the cognitive dissonance that hums within me when driving past the swanky strip mall on Shellmound Street, whose name unceremoniously communicates the area’s previous history as a site for native burial grounds. What does home mean in these immediate places for me and, well, not me? What histories of home have each of us internalized that unconsciously get perpetuated daily by our current infrastructure?

Who gets to define home? The one-year commemoration of George Floyd’s murder, the invasion of Breonna Taylor’s home where she was killed, as well as the 100^th year commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre, where Black-owned homes and businesses were bombed and burned and residents killed, have recently passed. Anti-AAPI epithets continue to be spat out towards human bodies and minds who are also violently pushed to “go back home”, including right here in San Francisco and the East Bay. My own sense of home and safety has been given to me without question, not fought for, not sought, and never displaced. And it is my responsibility to deeply know how I bring my culturally-anointed sense of safety and place to the table as President of NCSPP, as a clinician, as a human being in the world in relation to what “home” feels like and is to so many in my field. The home of psychoanalysis and its institutions must similarly analyze its own pillars and beams that lift up a particular sense of home and safety: largely built on selective language and ideas, more often accessed with exclusivity and not shared inclusively, and centered often on minds that have been safely housed in culturally-anointed “superior” institutions and academic settings.

As mentioned in the May edition of Impulse, NCSPP will be taking a year of reflective pause and offer only limited programming. We are instead dedicating our resources to the long overdue needs for change, growth, and the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of our organizational home. While this renovation project will require ongoing investment and intentionality for far longer than this upcoming academic year, the time to do so is now, yesterday, and tomorrow, ad infinitum. In large part, this will entail mourning the White melancholic wish for preservation of familiar architectural features and forms structuring a home that is not always safe for all inhabitants. Instead, we must move forward to restructure with the expertise of our consultants’ guidance while dedicating our efforts to co-creating an alive and dynamically welcoming home as a continual work in progress.

There will be dust and detritus. There will be revelations of issues that have for too long been buried under the floor or hidden in the walls. And there will be differences in aesthetics, methods, tools, and stories of home among our crafters. Establishing protocols for safety that allow for both trust and courage, however, will be needed at first. Then we will continue to develop our tools, blueprint in hand, in both discovering and creating a dynamic and inclusive home for us and our community.