by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT 

This month at Impulse we are thinking about power structures that are implicitly, silently embedded in dominant discourses. In Potential Space, Rebekah Tinker talks about this in the context of patriarchy, where highlighting the female voice and form in the name of feminism may still be performed within a context of male dominance when the historical context is left unexamined. I’ve also been thinking about these questions around race, immigration, and culture both in my clinical work and personal life.

***Spoiler Alert: The following paragraphs contain descriptions of the movie Everything Everywhere, All At Once, so read at your own discretion. 

I recently saw Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which is a film about the relationship between Chinese American daughters and their immigrant mothers. Joy, the daughter, has internalized her mother to establish a sense of self, but as a result her self-structure is compromised by the tyranny of her mother. Her mother is self-involved, focused on appearances, homophobic (Joy is queer), and intrusively hypercritical, especially of Joy’s body. Oh, the fat shaming. In her wish for freedom, she wants to kill off the internalized mother, but that also necessitates killing off herself. Matricide is suicide. But then she also needs a mother to have a self, which is why she is also looking for her mother. It’s all very Freudian, if you ask me. 

Nothing seemed to be left on the cutting room floor after late night brainstorming sessions, where you can almost hear the bong bubbling in the background. The movie is overstuffed with absurdist elements like over-the-top fight scenes, googly eyes, hot dog hands, and Matrix references. The frenetic pacing gives you a visceral sense of everything that gets in the way of genuine emotional connection, including the pesky reappearances of intergenerational trauma, differences in levels of acculturation, mundane things in life like laundry and taxes, and language barriers. There is a longing to be seen, to be known, and to be loved and accepted in the mess of it all. 

As I work through these mother wounds with my patients as a therapist, I wonder if I’m really being a “good enough mother” who provides a corrective experience or if I’m just being a good enough White mother. The scary part is that I don’t know any other way of being a therapist than to do what I was taught in my training and what feels right to me based on my own subjective experiences, which, as someone who grew up in America, is imbued with values that reflect the dominant culture of Whiteness. Proximity to Whiteness is like a swaddle that provides some sense of security, a way to escape from my own mother wounds, but is also limiting and suffocating.

Through therapy, our patients learn to become aware of their internal conflict in order to do something different from what they were used to doing based on the survival strategies they developed through their early relationships. If therapy is representative of a new culture and way of seeing the world, what culture does therapy assimilate the patient into? What dynamics are we unintentionally replicating as a result of the values that are implicitly dominant in therapy?