Decolonizing Therapy: A Movement – An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Mullan
Curt and Katie interview Dr. Jennifer Mullan about decolonizing therapy. We discuss what it means to decolonize therapy and the importance of doing so, as well as the challenges therapists face when they are looking to decolonize their practices and incorporate cultural and community healing. We also explore rage, the tendency to pathologize big emotions, and the impact of historical trauma.
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An Interview Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Psy.D.
Jennifer Mullan, Psy.D is a dynamic international speaker, professor, healer-spiritualist, scholar-activist and widely known as the “Rage Doctor.” Trained as a clinical psychologist; Dr. Jennifer Mullan birthed Decolonizing Therapy – a psychological evolution that weaves together political, ancestral, therapeutic and global well-being. Dr. Mullan is a major disruptor in the mental health industrial complex. Her work is an urgent call to dive to the root of global and generational trauma to unlock the wisdom of our sacred rage.
Decolonizing Therapy catalyzes a growing movement of practitioners who are unlearning colonial methods of psychology. They are co-creating a new liberatory model of mental health. Dr. Jennifer Mullan received ESSENCE Magazine’s 2020 Essential Hero Award in Mental Health, and was featured on The Today Show, Vox, Cosmopolitan, Allure, GQ, and the Calgary Journal, among many others. She currently lives in Northern NJ on land that was stewarded by the Leni Lenape people.
In this podcast episode, we look at what it means to decolonize therapy
Over time we’ve talked with innovators who are pushing back against the status quo and the medical model. We were so excited to dig more deeply into Decolonizing Therapy with Dr. Jennifer Mullan.
What does “decolonizing therapy” mean?
“Decolonizing therapy is a movement…It’s not something that we can do and learn in a course, learn in a semester. It isn’t something that we just pick up, get some credits for, and then provide services for. It is a whole shift in mind…in how we view the therapeutic container…A shift in how we view mental health.” – Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Psy.D
- Looking at accessibility to therapy and how lack of access impacts individuals
- Decolonizing therapy doesn’t work for everyone, especially folks in the global majority and/or who have the most need
- The way that therapy is practiced is not sufficiently addressing the mental health crisis
- Shifting therapy to include cultural healing practices, community healing and support
- Moving the “blame” for poor mental health away from the individual to the individual’s context
What can therapists do if they would like to decolonize their own therapy practice?
“[Decolonizing Therapy] is an invitation to get curious over and over again…To say, as much as I want to stick my head in the sand and do what I do, and do it well, and just keep doing what I do…[We need] to realize that part of the issue can stem with us, because we’ve been trained in these methods…And if we don’t lovingly get curious about how we’ve been trained, there is no room for possibility of change.” – Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Psy.D
- Make sure you are doing your own work and have support while working in the role of healer
- Identifying and accepting that all individuals have social, political and other frames that come in with them to the therapy room
- Unlearning and embracing new knowledge, being okay with not knowing
- Looking at historical trauma and colonization as core attachment wounds
- Understanding how historical events impact your clients (and yourself)
- Looking at how historical trauma is transmitted directly and indirectly
- Learn in community
- Rethink diagnosis
What can therapists get wrong when they are working to decolonize their therapy practice?
- Struggling to see where compliance can conflict with the needs of clients at times
- The impact of diagnosis on clients (especially behavioral diagnoses frequently given to Black and brown boys that often lead a child into the school to prison pipeline)
- Not understanding larger concepts around what is political and big questions like why are people poor?
- Deflecting questions from clients as being clinical material rather than understanding that clients are seeking a human connection
- Holding to firmly to rigid “rules” around attendance and coming on time, for example
How can therapists work with rage and other big emotions?
“If we’re not looking at how we pathologize big…emotion, then we won’t understand rage…or grief.” – Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Psy.D
- It’s important to recognize that we are not receiving sufficient education around rage
- It is important to understand what rage and what it is not
- Grief, shame, and trauma lead to rage
Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:
We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!
Pre-order Dr. Jenn’s book: https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/book
Instagram: @decolonizingtherapy
Twitter: @drjennyjennm
YouTube:@decolonizingtherapy
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/decolonizingtherapy
Website: https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com
Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:
Therapy as a Political Act: An Interview with Dr. Travis Heath
Rage and Client Self-Harm: An Interview with Angela Caldwell, LMFT
Who we are:
Curt Widhalm, LMFT
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy, LMFT
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):
Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).
… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)
Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide where therapists live, breathe, and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm, and Katie Vernoy.
Curt Widhalm 0:15
Welcome back modern therapists, this is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm, with Katie Vernoy. And this is the podcast for therapists about the things that we do in our practice, the ways that we are as therapists in the real life outside of our therapy practices, if those are two separate things. And I’m really excited for this interview today. This has been somebody that we’ve been trying to book for quite a while. A lot of back and forth, very busy schedule. But a lot of our modern therapists have long been interested in the decolonize therapy movement. We are so excited to have Dr. Jenn Mullan coming and talking with us about her work, the work of this and the importance of it. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 0:59
Thank you, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Katie Vernoy 1:02
I have followed your work for I don’t know, years. And I think I don’t know if you remember this. But we reached out at one point and we weren’t ever able to line up to have you keynote at one of our conferences, and just never got there. So, I too am very, very excited about this interview. And so we’ll get started with a question we ask everybody when they come out to see us is Who are you? And what are you putting out into the world?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 1:26
Yeah, great question. Well, thank you for having me. And I’m glad that we finally landed together.
Katie Vernoy 1:30
Yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 1:32
So, who am I? I would say today, I am definitely feeling like the CEO and boss of DT with all this paperwork I have on my desk. I am trained as a Western clinical psychologists, I am a daughter, a sister, a cat mom, a partner, a scholar and an activist and an ancestral wound worker, I am an author. I’m an author too! What I do in this world and what I have been doing is I as I said, I’m trained as I purposely like to say Western clinical psychologist. Because that’s how I was trained. Even though I was in a predominantly Buddhist slash spiritual doctoral program. I will also say that I practiced direct service in residentials. And so I did that work for over 20 years, again, at University Counseling Center, residentials, hospitals, prisons, you name it, partial care outpatient units. And then I would say around the end of 2020, I left my university position because Decolonizing Therapy, this work, was starting to grow and grow and grow. And I wanted to provide more time and energy to it and take a risk because I wasn’t doing well following direction. You know, and I was deeply, deeply soul sad, burned out, physically sick. You know what I’m still repairing from that with adrenal fatigue. I just felt like there had to be another way. And I started to see that the world was starting to catch on to what I was putting down. My work in decolonizing therapy, lands at the intersections of the psychological or mental health, the political, the ancestral, and community collective.
Curt Widhalm 3:32
For people who aren’t already familiar with your work. Let’s start at the basics. What is Decolonize Therapy?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 3:40
Yeah, Decolonizing Therapy is a movement, right? It’s not something that we can do and learn in a course, learn in a semester. It isn’t something that we just pick up, get some credits for, and then provide services for. It is a whole shift in mind. It’s a shift in how we view the therapeutic container. It’s a view in how, it’s a shift in how we view mental health. Meaning that we’re looking at how there’s not enough access, right? And how that accessibility or lack of accessibility creates trauma, creates inflammation in the body, which leads, you know, vice versa, they feed each other, which leads to earlier death, particularly in people of the global majority of people are at or below poverty level, or living with any kind of chronic pain or disability. So Decolonizing Therapy is saying, hey, yes, therapy or psychotherapys are important. So much so important that the way that we’re currently doing it, we’re generalizing, right, but the way that we’re currently doing it doesn’t work for everybody. Right? And especially it doesn’t work for those, again, that are probably the most underserved and at most need. Whether we’re talking about students are first generation college students, whether we’re talking about queer identified folks, whether we’re talking about poor folks, right, disabled folks, usually those are the individuals that are getting interns, not that interns aren’t great, they don’t stay for very long, right. And they’re dropping into communities without always knowing them, or they’re receiving kind of subpar service. And this model of maybe once a week, hypothetically, for 45 minutes to an hour, A: doesn’t always serve the therapist. But it also doesn’t serve people for how mental health is expanding it like a virus, right? Like, the way that people’s poor mental health is, is just increasing in vast amounts. I don’t think it’s serving either way. And so Decolonizing Therapy, again, is a shift and how we view this. It’s a shift and like, hey, what else is possible? This is so crucial. We need this work. And how do we as providers stay alive and thrive while doing this? And how do we ensure that people are getting the kind of services and support they need to deal with an expanding, changing and more violating world. So, I frequently will tell people, part of this is like you’re not a problem. You’re having very normalized expressions of, you know, blank, blank, blank, like late stage capitalism, expressions of not having enough access, expressions of having to work three jobs and take care of family and kids and grieve, expressions of dealing with violence that we’re seeing everywhere across the globe, like, climate crisis, like how you’re feeling is probably a protective mechanism. Right? And so how do we help you with this? And how do we bring your culture into this? How do we bring your identity into this? And how do we keep you safe and connected and plugged into community?
Katie Vernoy 6:59
Looking at some of your work over the years, it seems like this is really pushing back against diagnosis, or kind of situating the problem within the individual. It’s also saying that there’s other mechanisms for healing beyond individual talk therapy. And so, can you talk about kind of other modes of healing and how to address the actual problems, the circumstances, the environment, those types of things, as a therapist? Because it feels like when we’re set up as a therapist, we’re oftentimes set up with this one on one situation. What can we do?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 7:37
Yeah, great question. I would say that one of the first things we can do as therapists is be willing to acknowledge, sometimes it’s like a list. Sometimes it’s talking with other therapists, sometimes it’s support groups, sometimes it’s their own therapy, their own healing work, is make a list of the areas in which we’re feeling, we could use more education, right? Start really taking stock and inventory of the ways that A: what we’re doing, maybe it’s not sustainable anymore, or what we’re doing, it’s not sustainable to us, and maybe not sustainable for others. So this work is really holding us accountable lovingly for all the ways in which, you know, we’re trying to put like a kind of band aid on a gaping wound that a person is coming in with, right. And so we have polyvagal theory, we have CBT, we have psychodynamic theories, we can keep going on, internal family systems, parts work. All of this can be great, all of this can be utilized. But if we do not have a kind of social political frame, if we don’t have a cultural frame, right, and if we don’t have an understanding that people’s very identities are political, even when we don’t want them to be. I don’t want a political identity, but I have one. Right? So if therapists are not understanding that people are coming in with identities that already are politicized. And I’ll speak to that in just a second. That I believe A: we do a disservice to the therapeutic alliance to that container. But also the person is constantly holding something that they probably need to put down. Right? Which is like, can I talk about this? You know, where does this come in? Do they understand this part of me? I don’t want to offend them if they’re a different race than me or even if they’re the same race, maybe they don’t understand because of class, or they don’t understand because of such and such. So one of the first things I believe we can do is re-educate ourselves. And that involves also some unlearning. That involves being willing to say, I don’t know, and I don’t know about you, but in my program, I wasn’t really allowed. I was trained. I’ve been socialized. I talk about myself all the time in this learning. I was trained to know, to have answers. And if I didn’t know the answers, I better go figure them out and learn them and not come into rounds or supervision acting like I didn’t know. I better couch this in a way where I’m coming up with solutions constantly. I better not bring myself into the room. Much. I had better stick to what my theoretical orientation is, right? I’m air quotes here right, too. I had better there was all these sorts of rules and regulations. And so other things we can do is start questioning these things. Right? Does this still work? Does it work for me? Does it work for who I’m engaging with? Does it work based on their historical material that they’re coming in with? So part of Decolonizing Therapy is looking at historical trauma as a core attachment wound, right, looking at colonization as a core attachment wound, right. That it didn’t just start it. It’s part of it. But it didn’t start just with our childhood. It started for many of us, with perhaps being separated from our families are being taken away or being forced to migrate or institutions of genocide, slavery, war, right. So many, many of us have histories of being impacted by colonization. And so what therapists can start to do is A: look at their own histories of this. Do I have my people been harmed, have my people harmed? Right, and in a way that honors defensiveness. Because that’s normal when stuff is coming up. Right? We know this as therapists. We know this the therapist, right, so honor the defensiveness and honor that we don’t know everything. But starting with ourselves, not separating ourselves from this therapeutic container. Another thing that I think we can do is investigate, learn more about generational trauma, intergenerational trauma transmission, if we don’t already know. Understand that there’s direct and indirect direct methods in which it’s transmitted. Right. And again, we don’t have to know what biologists know. And I know epigenetics is constantly changing, but role modeling plays a role. Right? That somatic, there’s all these ways that information is transmitted from one to another. Another thing that therapists can do is get connected, right. Join a community organization, create a consultation or support group for other therapists that you know, or don’t know, that are working across different lines, boundaries, identities, cultures, right? Learn from each other, check in, take time to bring up quote, unquote, cases, right? Rethink diagnosis, and the ways that many of us feel bound to it, depending on how we charge or fee for service. And that’s real, we should get paid for what we do, because that’s how we survive. No one is saying don’t get paid for it. But also look at all the constraints around that. Right? And and also noticing it. So it’s it is an invitation to get curious over and over again. And it’s an invitation to say, As much as I want to stick my head in the sand and do what I do and do it well. And just keep doing what I do. The invitation is to realize that part of the issue can stem with us, because we’ve been trained in these methods, right? And if we don’t lovingly get curious about how we’ve been trained, there is no room for possibility of change.
… 13:44
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Curt Widhalm 13:45
One of the questions that we ask is kind of a learning thing. And this is a self reflection and self growth kind of thing for us as well. But what do you see therapists getting wrong as they’re trying to do this? Not in a shaming way, but as a like, alright, what are the things that we should be aware of like, Alright, if we’re going out, we’re trying to politicize our practices. We’re trying to do this decolonization work. Where do you see like, oh, not not quite like that.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 14:15
How about I start with myself because I find that that, what’s the word, kind of brings down the armor a little bit? Because I understand that what I’m saying is, it brings up our hackles a little bit right. Is that the word? Hackles?
Curt Widhalm 14:30
Well it also is super congruent with what you were just talking about, like we’ve done a model this, too. So…
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 14:34
Yeah. And so one of the first things I can think, of oh my goodness, right, are ethics. I know, Ooooh, right? Ethics board may we all you know, we all bow down. And let me tell you, there was so much harm sometimes. A question that I asked therapists when I’m when I’m doing consulting or any workshops or anything, one of the first questions is Who are you ethical to? Right? And I had to start asking myself that question, am I more in alignment? And I’m, am I engaging more with what the ethics boards want in my state? Or in my, you know, the country? Or am I more ethical to the people that I’m serving? Right? Because I don’t think those are always in the same breath, and the same line, in the same lineage, right? So a lot of times, I was asked to diagnose someone in certain ways, right? In order to get paid or in order for the family to have more services. Then what would happen is that that diagnosis would follow a child. So for example, behavioral diagnosis, like conduct disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, right? The thought is that there’s so behavioral, and normally we’re seeing and statistically, we’re seeing black and brown poor children, often highly diagnosed with these very behavioral diagnoses. And we would be told, you know, be careful with conduct disorder. Because if you’re diagnosing them with this, we know that they’re going to become antisocial, right? We know that they’re going to be at higher incidence rate to get antisocial. We also know for black and brown youth in particular, particularly male identified, but in general, that they that’s also more highly correlated to the school to prison pipeline. Right. And to kind of having that diagnosis, follow them, whether it’s in IEP meetings, and depending on where you are in the world or the country, like the meetings that children have when they are quote unquote, misbehaving, right, with the school or what have you. So I would find that allowing myself, even though I knew on a gut level that it was inappropriate, and that these were definitely trauma that we were seeing in this youth, but giving them these behavioral diagnoses, and letting myself fall, kind of like not hold a boundary with my supervisors that No, I’m not giving them this diagnosis, or this isn’t going to work. And they would say, especially in hospital settings, Oh, we need to this many children in order to get our services or big nonprofits, right. So it’s sometimes allowing ourselves to do what is against our better judgment, even though we do see these symptoms, right. Yeah, yeah, these these expressions are happening in the youth. However, these are all trauma, these this is all trauma, this falls under trauma. Another thing is strengths and needs assessments, right? Is the person involved if you’re doing a strengths and needs assessment, again, depending if you’re working community mental health, I had to do these all the time as a psychologist, as a therapist, right, right. I I had to do an intake triage, and I have 15 minutes with a person and then I have to decide their fate, so to speak, right within 45 minutes. And so an invitation is to look at the ways in which A: are they being involved in their strengths and needs assessment? Are we are we looking at community as strength? Are we you know, are we just looking at the psychological in a silo? Or the you know, the emotional in a silo? Are we deciding whether or not someone goes home? Or stays? Are we separating children from families? These are all things that I’ve done. I remember working in a prison and deciding, as a first year student, whether or not someone that has been locked up for a certain amount of time, got to stay or go.
Katie Vernoy 18:27
Wow.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 18:27
I don’t feel that that’s something that I should have been in charge of. Right? I didn’t have an analysis. No one ever asked me if I understood why are people poor? No one ever asked me if I understood what was my definition of racism, right, and how that’s playing out in prison systems. None of this was ever assessed for Dr. Jen. But I got to make all these decisions about people, right, without ever, quote unquote, assessing. Air quotes here, whether or not I was equipped to make these decisions, and whether I had an analysis, right? Whether or not I understood poverty, whether or not I understood whether or not I understood that pronouns are political. Right? That whether or not someone has clean running water is political, whether they have to work three jobs, and pick up their kids after session is all political. Right. And so when I say something is political, we’re not talking about Democrat and Republican. Right, but we’re talking about rather, access, who has it, who’s included and who’s not. So these are things I see people doing and within the therapeutic relationship, things that I’ve done, and continue to do and those were all things that I’ve done. And things that I did in a therapeutic container was also tried to dilute myself. Project back when someone asked me a direct question that was actually super appropriate. You know, here they are telling me all their traumatic material, trusting me to do EMDR work with them, trusting me to hold this information, although it could be life or death for them, if their partner, if their community finds out for some people, and they would ask me a very simple non threatening question. And at the beginning of my work, I thought it was appropriate to constantly put it back on them. That they were just projecting, that they were evading, that they were avoiding, right, that they didn’t want to work on their stuff. That they were coming late, or 15 minutes late, I would reschedule it, because that’s what I was taught to do. Even though maybe they were taking a bus or they had to pick up a child or, or they were just crying on their way here, and they couldn’t get out the door. And they were dealing with major anxiety. Right. So these are all things that I did, that I have come to forgive myself for. But I felt shame because I didn’t want to really do them or felt off or didn’t feel right, or didn’t feel in alignment or answering Yeah, these are my astrological signs, why? Maybe that would have brought us a little bit closer, right? Right? Is it harming me to share that, right? Like, I’m not taking 20 minutes away, and maybe five minutes, allowing some rapport to be established. And maybe then figuring out why this is so important for the person. Yeah, and I’m gonna stop talking. But I want to give a really beautiful example of also, when I started doing the work on myself, in this way, started looking at my own history, and started looking at those places and spaces where I was a bit more defensive. Right and where I was so steeped in a very Eurocentric traditional therapy, talk therapy in particular. um, I had a new individual come in at the university, we had a 90 something student waitlist and only three therapists. And I was doing tons it Yeah, I was doing tons of group work, because the students needed it. And tons of holding space for like rage groups, even though we weren’t calling it that. Right, I was co facilitating the LGBT support group, teaching two classes, running a peer education group, doing grants for that, and seeing couples and individuals and handling crisis, one job, right, working 50-60 hours at a University Counseling Center. And I started realizing that not only was it unattainable, that I was starting to not enjoy what I did, right. And I could barely pay my massive student loan bills, not that I can now. But I was really sick a lot, every Friday doing acupuncture therapy, this, that just to pull myself together, realizing I was not alone. And that predominantly a lot of us that were having a little bit more of a social justice lens, if you want to call it that, understood that we were also being deeply exploited, maybe not by a boss by systems and structures. And where this was no longer attainable. And this young person comes in. And they’re like, so I know I’m on a waitlist. I’m changing some information here. Right. But generally this is I know, I’m on a waitlist. I know you’re in high demand. And I’m like, am I? I didn’t know this. I mean, I didn’t know I didn’t I had no idea. But I think I started becoming more real. And bringing in some of what I did externally into this work. And I think that became quote, unquote, demand, right, the authenticity that I brought in. But I have some questions, because I don’t know if we’re in alignment. And I was like, Whoa, yeah. And I really, you know, there’s old me: it was excuse you, what, what is this about? This person, old, you know, talk therapy Jen was like, but as I really sat with this, I thought, No, this is a educated young person whose hands are shaking a bit, who’s nervous, but is actually asking for what they need, because what they’re sharing is so specific, and can be pathologized so deeply. You know, and they proceeded to say, what is your take on this? What is your take on that? What’s your take on da-da-da? Right, like, literally 20 minutes? And I answered, really honestly. And I would ask back, how is this relevant for you? Or you know, some version of that? And they would answer back and we were in dialogue, right? And they were like, I’d like to know, your rising, your sun sign, and your moon sign. I was like, Okay, how’s this relevant? That’s a lot of information. That’s personal information for me, you know, and there’s times I’m like, I’m not comfortable answering this. They said, No problem. Thank you for saying that. We continue to have a dialogue of honesty, and I’m treating them as a whole person. They’re treating me as a whole person. And then finally, and I think here is where this was most important to them. What is your take on people that hear voices, right or that hear or see things? And I said, Well, I don’t find an issue with that, I actually find that there could be some spiritual connections that that person is or, you know, ancestral connections. But my biggest concerns are whether or not the voices are telling them to harm themselves or anyone else. That’s my biggest concern. And if we’re Guchi, they’re great, we’re good there, then then I don’t I don’t see a problem, as long as it’s not impacting the person’s job, health, relationships, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And they were crying, when they were like, thank you so much, you don’t know how many therapists I met with that, you know, wouldn’t even say I’m not comfortable answering this. Thank you for that honest reflection at the end. And my grandmother talks to me all the time. And sometimes I want her to stop talking. And sometimes, I want her to tell me, and she, I never want to harm others. And if I want to harm myself, that’s because of what I’m going through in my life. And that’s part of why I’m here. And I know that not every client can have that dialogue. But damn, was that amazing, right? And she wasn’t the only one. There were so many other young adults coming in, not exactly quite so clear and articulate, but with very similar things like, hey, starting to talk about hip hop for 20 minutes, or country music, which I’m not into, but I was like, Okay, I’m willing to learn. They’re like how here’s how this lyrics sociate to what I’m feeling. And when I stopped seeing things as like, avoiding or manipulative. When I stopped over projecting it, or kind of taking some of psychodynamic theory out of context, I was able to bring a whole level of enjoyment and self care to myself and the other. Sorry if that was a little long, but I wanted to be as specific as possible.
… 26:31
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Katie Vernoy 26:32
When you’re, when you’re talking about this, it becomes very clear that some of this work is becoming very clear on who you are, how you fit into the world, what role you play, and how that all fits into the intersection, the interaction between you and your client and all the things, right. And I think that’s really hard early on. I think a lot of times we stick with these very rigid structures, because we’re just learning or because we’re in this space of trying to protect ourselves when we don’t know what to do. And to that end, I think you talked about these rage groups. And I feel like, we get really scared of whether it’s voices or rage or big things, and oftentimes either just don’t work with it, or work with it really bad, really badly. And so, to me, and I know that one of your titles is also The Rage Doctor, how do you recommend whether it’s newer clinicians or clinicians that haven’t fully stepped into this being able to sit with such big things like rage, like voices, like these things, that we’re not necessarily trained on, things that feel very overwhelming, require a lot of us? How do you how do you recommend we do that?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 27:46
Yeah. If I, I want to speak to that, and at the same time, to comment because what you mentioned, yeah, so if I can, like not doing it well, because we’re like new to things. And I think that is so true. And part of the Decolonizing Therapy work is to hold our training institutions accountable for subpar, half-ass education sometimes. Right? Yeah, that’s part of this is accountability, and the accountability towards ourselves that we also get comfortable. And sometimes, sometimes stuck, or, and sometimes thinking that the norm because this is a norm, this makes it right. When if our clients are suffering from how we’re engaging, where they continue to say they’re not getting enough, or they’re still in crisis the way that so many of us are seeing across our practices, across the globe. Like not just you and I right, but across the globe. We’re seeing a different intervention and need for emotional mental health. And this massive movement towards like, looking at historical trauma. Right. And so yeah, I just wanted to say that, that that is why I think that my work around rage is interesting people more, because yeah, we just don’t deal with it. And again, I’m gonna go back to it. We don’t many of us don’t deal with it and within ourselves. And we certainly then cannot deal with it when others are talking about it, even if they’re not saying I’m enraged, we might see it in their agitation, and they’re pressured to talk. We might so if we’re not looking at how we pathologize right, any big emotion, again, all part of decolonizing we’re not looking at how we pathologize big ass emotion, then we won’t understand rage. Right? Because or grief that is big and messy and pounding of chest or I can’t get out of bed or even I dare say dramatic, right? Where it’s calling and drawing in everybody and it’s like, feels a little excessive to us, right, as clinicians when we start picking that, that thread that energy out. So I would dare say that the first thing is understanding what rage is and what it isn’t. Right? It isn’t, it doesn’t give anyone permission to harm someone else. It doesn’t give anyone permission to, you know, just be completely and utterly violent. Right? And it doesn’t give us permission, either as a society to write off people who are learning to do better. Because I think all of us has harmed somebody in our lives, even intentional or not, could be our best friend. It could be our partner, right? It could be an animal, even if it’s not on purpose. There’s a lot of us that have harmed and continue to harm. We just may see our harm on a lessened level. But who are we to judge? Right, that level of impact to someone else it’s about impact, not intent. Right. And so with rage, I like to remind people that it’s a normal human emotion and rather more than an emotion, it is a nervous system protective response. Right. It is part of fight-flight-freeze. You know, it is an even fawning, you know, and I often like to remind people, how I define rage, or especially sacred rage, it’s the love-child of shame, of trauma, including historical ancestral trauma, and grief that’s suffocated or disenfranchised. Right? So grief, shame, trauma is a cocktail for rage. I firmly believe that grief is always there. Some of us can access our grief states easier, although that’s not the right word for it, you know, it’s just in our constitution or personality, or how we cope. And some of us can go more to a rage state with more ease, and that might look like irritability, agitation, picking with people, being more prone to speak up for things that we don’t agree with. Right? And these are protective responses, right? And rage is there to let us know that a boundary has been crossed. That doesn’t mean that how we say it is always ideal. That doesn’t mean how we do it is always ideal. But it does mean that something in us is saying whoa, hard stop, timeout. This is not effing okay. And your body mind and or spirit, I don’t know, is trying to find a way to let us know that something cannot continue that something is not safe. Now, again, we know as therapists, alright, that safe could look physical, it could mean emotional, it could mean something that we’re not consciously aware of. Right? It can be a color that activates us that reminds us of a color from when we were abused as a child. And working with children and adolescents for many years, I saw that all the time. That their rage state would be activated to look like an explosion, right? A rage explosion off of a smell, off of a song, off of a scent. And we know that the more highly traumatized someone is, the more unconscious that symptom or expression or respons is, right, the more primal the more visceral it is. And so I believe that when you know rage and grief work, it’s a whole chapter of the book, because I believe they’re like a rage, grief axis, like they kind of all are both already always there. And when I work with someone who is deeply, deeply sad, or in despair, or what we call depression, I kind of want them to get agitated, right, they start coming out of that cave, right when they’re, I don’t know why I’m so annoyed. And I’m like, wonderful. Like, bring it out.
Curt Widhalm 33:48
You do have a book coming out. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 33:53
Yeah. It’s been three years in the coming man like I I’m just like, please be emancipated already. Come out. You know, it’s November 7. It’s nothing big. It’s my life’s work. Right? Seriously, like I was, it brought up so much out of me. And this is what I wish I had when I was a young therapist. I started out saying My dear fellow colonised therapist, because, you know, it’s a letter to all of us. It’s a love letter, and it’s a call to action that we need to do it differently. That the way this world is in the level of death, and the level of violence that it is our job to now no more be like good people, good boys and girls good you know, individuals just stay silent and stay in our one to one. But it’s a call to action for us to say what else is possible. Right and so yeah, it’s in three parts. And it’s, you know, the roots, the trunk and the leaves much like a tree and the roots goes gets into the history. I talk about everything from like diagnostic enslavement, to the history of diagnosis, to histories of psychology and therapies and diagnoses that have been harmful; from homophobia to drapetomania and on. And we talk about what on earth colonization has to do with mental health. I spent a lot of time correlating it and connecting it for people. And then the second part talks about generational trauma, historical trauma, indigenous medicines, right, and things that have been co-opted by mental health and not acknowledged down to rage and grief. And then the last part is sort of like the action, like, what do we do? Where do we start? And right off the bat, we’re talking about energetic boundaries, which I don’t think is usually talked about in a lot of our programs. And for some of us, it’s not important. And for some of us who are neurodivergent, highly sensitive, like myself, having it so much earlier would have saved me so much pain, mentally, emotionally, physically. And then I talk about politicizing your practice. And that’s what we can do, because we can’t really like decolonize a system of therapy kind of tongue in cheek, but we can start looking at how to make what we are doing more accessible, healthier for us. We can start looking at the ways that we can involve peer support, community support, we can involve other individuals that know things that our clients need that we don’t know. It’s okay to not know, you know, and I’m always constantly providing affirmations. And there’s discussion questions, there’s some case examples. So my hope… and a glossary. So yeah, as well as like medicine, my my dear friend, Dr. Jackie Wilkins, is an herbalist and naturopath and she kind of talks about some herbs and things that are just suggestions to help with rage and grief, you know, as well. So there’s it’s sort of like a revolution in, I would say mental health, is what I would say can be called, or that’s my hope. And my hope is those that are feeling any resistance around it, to get curious, to open up, to look at what we don’t know and look at what where the world is going. You can pick up the book anywhere you can pick up books. The more that folks decide to preorder, even if it’s the day before, right, it allows for people to know that you want to hear from this. And especially from authors of color, you know, because there’s so much there.
Katie Vernoy 37:44
I’m gonna go preorder it right now. This is amazing.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 37:47
Thanks.
Katie Vernoy 37:47
That book sounds so interesting.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 37:49
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Curt Widhalm 37:51
And where can people follow you, find more about you?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan 37:57
Instagram @decolonizingtherapy, or at our website decolonizing therapy or Dr. Jennifer Mullan, they both go to the same place. We also try to provide really equitable ranges of low cost different types of courses and classes again, that I wish I had it could be for therapists or people that receive are interested in mental health. Everything from sacred rage, sacred boundaries, sacred grief. Learning to work with this, understand this, five rage disguises on there, I learned from my teacher, Ruth King, who I think is like the queen of talking about rage and their book healing rage. Down to these energetic series that we’ve been doing energetics of exhaustion, energetics of the parent wound is coming up. So I invite people to engage with it, you know, and engage with understanding that we are talking about a movement, not about a checklist of courses. What else can I tell you? You can also find me on Twitter or Facebook again, all around decolonizing therapy. Yeah.
Katie Vernoy 38:59
Thank you.
Curt Widhalm 39:00
We will include links to that in our show notes. You can find those over at mtsgpodcast.com. And follow us on our social media, join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapists Group to continue this discussion and we are so thankful for having you here today. And until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Dr. Jennifer Mullan.
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