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The Social Therapy Group         The Social Therapy Group
106 S. Oxford St.                      119 W. 23rd St., Suite 902
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What’s Community Got to Do with It?

 

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This past week Chirlane McCray, the wife of NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, announced plans to initiate a comprehensive review on mental health issues in New York City. The focus would be on identifying the mental health needs of our communities as well as the disparities in therapeutic care that are available to people. These are very important issues. We welcome this invitation to support an in-depth conversation with all New Yorkers.

As the director of a community therapy center in Brooklyn for over thirty years, the Social Therapy Group has been committed to creating conversations in our local communities as well as our international community on a variety of issues regarding emotional growth and development. Our staff of committed social activists, mental health professionals and volunteers have spent many hours on street corners interviewing our communities about what they think would support the mental health of the people in their neighborhoods. I would like to share some of that with you in support of this new initiative.

As social therapists, along with other progressive therapists, we know that issues of mental health have everything to do with the social/cultural realities of how we live our lives together. How we feel is not in our heads. We think that community building is the collective, humanistic activity of creating something new together!

The questions that we have added to the ongoing dialogue on mental health are:

How do we create our mental health together?

Can building community impact our emotional well being? If so, how?

Here’s an excerpt of what people had to say about the role of community building and mental health when interviewed at Atlantic Antic, one of Brooklyn’s largest street fairs:

“Getting involved with something is so important. It combats gentrification. Reaching out to others and having a space where they can reach out to you. That would make us all feel better.”

“Community is the only context we have to learn from people other than ourselves and families. Building community is critical.”

“Diversity matters to me. I can learn how to be caring and go beyond myself as I am walking down the street.”

“Community allows us to have support systems in times of crisis and need. It breaks isolation and can produce healthier people.”

“Building community is building mental health. You feel more connected, less alone. You have more resources.”

“Building community combats stereotypes.”

“Getting involved in your community gives experience to the inexperienced, makes us feel helpful and increases our self esteem.”

“If you see things that aren’t right, you are more likely to feel you can do something about it if you build community.”

What questions would you like add to the call for dialogue on mental health?

Performing Our Lives Together

From Oct. 10-12 the East Side Institute and the All Stars Project hosted the Performing the World international conference for over 400 community activists, artists, educators, mental health professionals, mathematicians, business leaders, doctors, poets, clowns and many others. As a social therapist who has dedicated her life to creating environments that support emotional and social development, I was overjoyed! The conference very quickly became a celebratory experience for me. The diversity of people from 34 countries working to create a more humane world allowed everyone to play and perform a new way of living — of being together and of having interesting out-of-the-box (or perhaps even no-box) conversations from a variety of perspectives.

As a therapist, I sit for many hours a day. Being a former dancer and choreographer, I decided to go to all the movement workshops. It was fun. Participants in the conference had the wonderful growth opportunity to be serious, ridiculous, intellectually stimulated, politically inspired and moved by the work of our international colleagues.

I was very proud to lead a social therapy group at PTW and invite our visitors to observe. People were mesmerized by the collective creativity of how this wonderful and varied group (my ongoing Thursday night group of 25 years) creates their therapy together.

How do you do therapy in front of an audience? What role do the people outside the group play in our therapy play? Are they really observers? Are they participants? We discovered that the lines were blurred. As we always do in social therapy, we talked about what is happening in the room. The group played with how to be a group with people watching and listening to what they were saying. There were many twists and turns. The group members talked about their history as a group. Many of them are community activists. They were able to share the emotionality of the success of the conference and all that it has taken to build it.

For this session, they were joined by members of the Globotherapy group, our international online social therapy group led by my long- time colleague Barbara Silverman. A few of her patients were able to take part in this session in person. The group created a very moving conversation about its history. There have been many years of creating growth and development together. We were able to express the richness of what it means to be living our lives through hard times and joyful ones and learning and growing from our collective conversations. After all, that is what therapy is!

The group grappled with some questions: How do you keep growing emotionally in a world that is unraveling? How do we make demands on each other to break out of the self absorption of our culture and to develop ourselves as givers?

Our international group members gave us what it means to them to have social therapeutic conversations that support ongoing exploration and discovery of how to live meaningful lives. They expressed their gratitude to the Thursday-night group for continuing the creation of a community therapy that has profoundly touched them.

Here’s what some of our participant observers had to say:

Audrey C., Brooklyn, USA – It was very generous and moving. I’m honored to be present. I see a lot of theatre on a regular basis. This was one of the most engaging pieces I have seen in a long time. I laughed and cried.

Vanessa de A., Michigan, USA – It was very touching for me to see some people I met two years ago at PTW sharing their valuable experience and building (many) possibilities for this growing environment. It makes me desire to get out of my bubble and be part of this. Someone said it was scary to be part of something beautiful/big like this, and I felt like that two years ago and I feel like that now.

Michael F., Georgia, USA – I felt very encouraged witnessing and being part of the group. Their vulnerability inspires me.

Alex S., South Africa – A privilege to be part of/observe. It really was a “performed conversation” — open, generous and “truthful.” I love the notion of being loving and demanding too, and that was certainly part of the way the group related.

 

Tine G., Copenhagen, Denmark – I experienced a group full of generosity, engagement, and listening.

Marilia P., Sao Paulo, Brazil – My experience and my feelings confirm my belief in group therapy and the possibility of helping one (and at the same time) all together.

Art A., Toronto, Canada – Experiencing the group-oriented intentional dialogue that is social therapy is an elevating and inherently growthful experience. I want more!

Dina K., Thessaloniki, Greece – It was an amazing experience to be in your group, to listen to your conversation and watch you create together. I like the way you listen and help each other and show your compassion to members’ difficulties.

William S., New Jersey, USA – It was enlightening, enlivening, energizing, emotional, everyday, extraordinary – thank you.

Mayra S., UK – It felt authentic and human. It made me question my own way of reacting to others in my everyday life. How can I live a more “real” and truthful life?

Monica V., New York, USA – It was an exciting and powerful experience. I appreciate your generosity and willingness to open the conversation to us, rather than reinforcing an old stereotype of therapy as private and personal. Today’s group revealed a new model that is open, vulnerable, generous and human – more ontological than psychological, asking, “Who can we be?”

Yun-Wen Ru (Yvonne), New York, USA – It was a very intimate group. The members built deep connections with each other.

Ya Ting C. (Lydia), Taipei, Taiwan – Thumbs up!

Hey, the Therapist Is Interrupting! (An up-close look at a social therapy group in action)

In my last post, I described the workshop “Therapy Interrupted: Performing Social Therapy” which I led recently with Pal Carlin at the Beyond the Therapeutic State conference in Norway.

Workshop participants asked what social therapy is like in practice—a reasonable question quite difficult to answer. I reach for words, phrases, concepts that describe or characterize what a group is doing and come up short. Embedded in the very language we use are traditional modernist conceptions of therapy (and life) that overdetermine how we see and understand what we do. For example, in most therapeutic approaches the individual is seen as the primary unit of growth. In social therapy our patient is the group. But what do I mean by “group?” Not a bunch of individuals, not a “thing” but the performance activity of diverse human beings coming together to create their mental health.

This is an important conceptual shift. We relate to people as fundamentally social because we are! As a social therapist I am working to organize and reorganize the relational life of the group—how they are talking, relating and performing with each other. It’s a performatory activity that brings to the forefront the capacity we have as human beings to be who we are and at the same time perform ahead of ourselves—be who we are not.

What we did at the conference was to invite participants to perform transcripts of actual social therapy groups from my practice at the Social Therapy Group in NYC:

The curtain opens. The lights come on.

A long time group member, Mary, begins: I am really happy. I am so glad to be here. I’ve been spending every weekend with a guy named Joe – a new boyfriend. We go the park, have fun making up stories and hang out. It’s so great.

Group member: This sounds terrific. How did you meet him?

Mary continues to tell the story of her weekends with Joe and mentions she met him online.

Group member: Wait a minute. Did you just say you’ve been seeing him for four months? And you haven’t said anything to us about this? Are you kidding? You’re not including us after all the disasters you’ve had in relationships?

Other group members express their disappointment in Mary for choosing not to share this new relationship with them.

Group member 2: I think this is great.

Group: We’ve been down this road before – how could you think this is great? Mary always gets into abusive situations. We’ve been working on this for years. I can’t believe she is doing this again. What’s so great about that? We know what’s going to happen. Why are you doing this Mary? This is self destructive. You are leaving us out.

I begin to wonder what the group is doing. They’re passionate about Mary and quite critical. They’re doing what culturally we are taught to do—make assumptions, explain and predict what will happen. My sense is that we have lost the performance of building the group. Do I want to say something? What could I say that would help? I am quiet.

Group member 2 (standing her ground): I‘m happy for Mary.

Group (directed to me, the therapist): Aren’t you concerned?

Therapist: I am concerned—about the group. Here’s my concern—How come you’re doing therapy tonight?

In asking this question I’m performing outside of regular therapeutic discourse. I’m a performer/director helping to create a new kind of therapy play. I offer a weird question to challenge how the group is organizing itself. I have interrupted their traditional notions of therapy.

Group: What? What are you talking about?

Therapist: How come you’re doing therapy tonight?

My question here is a provocation, a response to the group’s activity of searching for the cause, getting to the bottom of it all, finding the explanation that will help Mary see the light.

Therapist: I am simply asking you, the group, to look at how you’re organizing your therapy. Create poetry together. Say things that we don’t know how to say.

Group member: Here’s my poem. Let’s be happy for Mary.

Group member (crying): I am not sure why I’m getting so emotional here. Something feels really uncomfortable—and good—about this. We got so caught up in interpreting what Mary was saying and what it all means. It’s confusing. I think I like it. I’m not sure.

Lights dim. Curtain closes.

Maybe you’re feeling like Mary at this point. You’re not alone. The audience at the conference didn’t quite know what to do with all of this. It’s clearly a departure from the social constructionist position that the patient is the expert. It’s also a departure from psychodynamic approaches that the therapist is expert. In social therapy, there is no expert. The patient and the therapist are co-creators.

The approach shared here is not based on what people are saying but on how they’re saying it. We encourage people to create new ways of talking to each other that are not based on causality (“You are this way because”), interpretation (“I know what it all means”) and prediction (“This is what will happen”). Together we discover that creating conversations is an intimate activity that allows people to have a different experience of emotionality and a continuous challenge of what our conception of therapy is.

What’s your experience in reading this transcript? How does it challenge you?

I look forward to your responses.

Christine LaCerva

Therapy Interrupted (in Norway): Shifting the Gaze from the Self to the Group

 

 

 

 

 

 

On June 3^rd I landed in Norway to attend the conference, Beyond the Therapeutic State: Collaborative Practices for Individual and Social Change. There were 200 participants from 24 different countries. Where we came from varied. There were many well known academics from universities around the world, people who have struggled with schizophrenia and have been hurt by forced hospitalization and medication, and practitioners of a wide variety of therapeutic approaches. What we had in common was a commitment to creating alternative approaches to emotional growth.

Early at the conference I brought all of you into the dialogue – patients, colleagues, community members and helping professionals interested in social therapy. We were having a conversation about the harm done by the medical model of labeling and medication, and forced institutionalized treatment. I asked, “Where are the voices of our patients, our communities? Are we talking to them? What is it they have to say? Collaborative therapy needs to include all of our voices.” I met many practitioners who agreed and were eager to hear more. I talked about our work together and how our focus on social activism and building community are necessary activities for emotional growth and development.

I spoke with Sheila McNamee, a leading social constructionist, about the importance of community organizing. Sheila asked me to talk about our community work. I explained how the STG is part of a movement of social activism, of community building – the All Stars Project, social therapy as a non-diagnostic therapy, our therapists going out on the street corner asking people, “Does our community need therapy? What does our community think about diagnostics?”

In his opening remarks, Ken Gergen, a leading post modernist and the primary organizer of the conference, spoke out passionately against the therapeutic state. He spoke about the damage done by the medical model and psychiatry’s need to label, predict and control human beings. Ken talked about the need to come together as progressives in mental health to create new ways of helping people with emotional difficulties. He asked “Can we come together to do something about the oppression of diagnostics and forced medication?”

A wonderful session was led by Carina Håkansson, a compassionate practitioner who has created the Family Care Foundation in Sweden. She works with people who have serious emotional difficulties and places them with families on neighboring farms. In a documentary about her work made by Brian Mackler, it is vividly clear that what is required to help people grow is compassion not drugs or diagnostics. The notable absence of pathologizing the client and people’s ongoing growth is stunning. One farmer notes that relationships with the farm animals can be helpful to people. He heard voices himself at one point in his life and being on the farm with family helped him get better. Carina and her staff have outstanding success in transforming the lives of people with schizophrenia and other emotional difficulties.

On the second day of the conference, I led a workshop with Pal Carlin, a family therapist in Oslo who trained in social therapy at the East Side Institute a number of years ago. I was his supervisor. Pal and I designed an asystematic exploration of the human capacity to perform and its implications for emotional growth and development. We called our session Therapy Interrupted: Performing Social Therapy.

Why “therapy interrupted?” We talked with people about how social therapy interrupts our fascination with the self and helps us shift our gaze to the group. It stops us from digging deep into our patients’ psyches in favor of helping them create new ensemble performances. It disturbs our patients’ notion that therapy is all about them and introduces them to the other. It challenges the model of traditional psychology in favor of exploring, creating and playing with subjectivity as social relational and cultural activity.

In the session, we showed a section of a dialogue between Ken Gergen, a leading post modernist and Fred Newman, the founder of social therapy, about the importance of performance – how it doesn’t so much matter what we are talking about but how we are talking! Participants then performed Ken and Fred’s conversation.

We invited the participants to perform transcripts of actual social therapy groups from my practice at the Social Therapy Group in NYC. They had many reactions to our work. Some were interested, enthusiastic and curious. Others were critical and concerned about how the therapist challenges the patients’ conceptual framework of what therapy is! More on this in my next blog.

The conference ended with Ken Gergen asking people to take more responsibility for what is happening in the world. He spoke passionately on the need to build a movement. He urged us to keep the dialogue going.

I want to do that with all of you.

First, by inviting you to our upcoming local, national and international community event sponsored by the East Side Institute, Performing the World from Oct 10^th – Oct 12^th. Educators, social activists, mental health professionals and artists will be coming together to share and showcase their work, build community, and create something new using the developmental power of performance. Do join us.

Second, I’d like to begin a new conversation with you. As many of you know the history of social therapy lives in the activity of community building and social activism as essential to creating the conditions needed for emotional growth. Social therapy is a community therapy. Building community makes it work!

How do you see the relationship between community building and our capacity to grow emotionally?

Do you think it is important? If so, tell us about your experiences.

I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for coming to Norway! More to follow…

Christine LaCerva

 

 

Social Therapy Goes to Norway!

I‘m very excited to let you know that I will be presenting at the upcoming conference Beyond the Therapeutic State: Collaborative Practices for Individual and Social Change in Drammen, Norway this summer. Sponsored by the Taos Institute, the conference will bring together practitioners, scholars and progressives in the field of mental health to produce a lively dialogue and share our creativity and desire to create a better world.

I’ll be co-presenting social therapy along with Paul Carlin, a longtime colleague, graduate of the East Side Institute’s clinical training program, and Norwegian clinical psychologist. Our workshop, entitled “Therapy Interrupted: Performing Social Therapy,” will explore a practice of emotional development that “interrupts” the passivity and victimization of the “therapeutic state,” and emphasizes creativity rather than explanation or interpretation in working with families and children.

Kenneth Gergen, another longtime friend of social therapy, will keynote the conference with a presentation entitled “A Relational Recovery from the Rage to Order,” which will take a hard look at issues raised by the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association (DSM-5), including the over-diagnosing and over-medicating of adults and children. You might want to check out a 1999 article entitled “Diagnosis: The  Human Cost of the Rage to Order,” written by Ken Gergen and social therapy creator Fred Newman. It appears in Lois Holzman’s book, Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind (Routledge).

Thanks, everybody, for all your support as social therapy travels the world — with all of you behind it. Development and creativity for everyone!!

Christine LaCerva

“What Is Mental Health?” — An Update

Last month, I told you about an international online conversation started by the Social Therapy Group called What Is Mental Health? Since this was our first experience with a dialogue like this, we had no idea if anyone would sign on. Well they did!! A diverse group of people in the US and abroad participated, and as we’d hoped they went outside the parameters of only mental health professionals talking to each other. We had 130 posts from people all over the world — patients, community members, colleagues, mothers, fathers, teachers, psychiatrists and teens weighed in what was important to them about mental health. Our moderators were from New York, Atlanta and Philadelphia, a few of the cities where there are social therapy centers.

Here are some highlights:

From George: I am bipolar and have recently been labeled “schizo affective.” To me that’s all diagnoses are, just labels that put me in a box for others to pass quick, biased judgment on based on what they have heard or read of others with the same diagnosis.

I have fought extremely hard to battle against the symptoms of both diagnoses to stay well. It’s been a long battle with a lot of learning curves. Unfortunately, those suffering the illness have to go through the full blown range of sufferings — be it the medicated suffering or the suffering of the illness itself while on medication or off medication.

From Ethel: For those struggling with a mental illness, it’s bad enough to deal with normal everyday living. I believe the worst part of “normal everyday living” is having to deal with people who judge you, think your illness is just “something in your head,” something you just “have to deal with” — or worse, force you to fit into a pattern of behaviors. If someone says, “I’m dealing with a mental illness,” it somehow seems less important than “I’m dealing with cancer,” “I’m dealing with diabetes” or “I’m dealing with high cholesterol.” As a society, we seem to forgive or sympathize with those who have cancer, but we don’t seem to do the same for someone with a mental illness. Why do you think that’s the case? 

From the moderator, Hugh Polk, MD: Dear George and Ethel:

Thank you for your honest comments. I’m a psychiatrist practicing a non-diagnostic group therapy called social therapy. We work hard in our groups to explore and challenge how we are all socialized in our culture to label things, including people. I work with a man who calls himself depressed and has always believed that he has “Major Depressive Illness.” I asked him how he knows he has that illness? How did he learn to talk that way about himself?” The group has joined me in exploring how he was told this story early in his life — in his family, in school, etc. The group says to him, “We don’t see you that way — we experience you here as being very open, courageous in sharing how you think, and very giving to other people in pushing them to not label themselves. You stay away from us when you insist that you’re mentally ill. Yes, you have problems, as we all do — but stop labeling yourself. How come it’s so hard for you to hear what we’re saying?” We’ve discovered that he and all of us come to believe those psychiatric labels and stories. They have the weight of science behind them, even if that science is deeply flawed. Thank you for joining us in changing this culture of labeling by participating in this conversation. It’s great to meet you both.

A full version of the conversation will be posted on the website DxSummit.org, an ongoing initiative to promote a global forum for professional dialogue about human approaches to the issue of diagnostics, by the end of March. Please visit the site this spring to read and share the conversation with others.

Christine LaCerva

What is Mental Health?

I want to invite you to join an international online conversation started by the Social Therapy Group called What Is Mental Health? It’s part of the National Dialogue on Mental Health started last summer in response to the shootings at Sandy Hook and the increasing violence across this country, and it’s one of several conversations taking place in the Civic Commons Initiative, Creating Community Solutions, in partnership with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the Department of Health and Human Services.

As an independent mental health institution with affiliates throughout the US and abroad, we think these dialogues are crucial. We all have experienced the media reporting on Adam Lanzer, the horrifying number of killings that have followed, the increased bullying that has resulted in suicides, and the ever-increasing number of adults and children taking psychotropic medications in response to exponentially growing diagnoses of depression, anxiety disorders and attention deficit disorders.

So what is mental health? What produces the devastating and increasing amount of mental illness in this country? And is naming and defining what’s happening enough?

Recently a piece on the New York Times “Opinionator” blog, How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, raises a bigger, upsetting picture of American inequality, class division, and the ongoing, ever-deepening impact of poverty on our mental health.

The editorial points out how the cost of inequality touches all of us, that it has an emotional impact, and is destabilizing and socially invasive. The authors posit that there are relationships between our financial wellbeing or lack of it and psychiatric conditions. Inequality, they assert, intensifies status anxiety. The actual economic conditions of our lives foster feelings of superiority or inferiority. Psychologically speaking, this creates emotional turmoil which results in the disproportionate spread of depression in areas of the country where economic inequality is the greatest.

Most interesting to me was the finding that schizophrenia, often understood as chemical imbalances in the brain, was three times as common in societies that had greater inequality. Other studies showed that the financial and psychological tension of living in increasing social hierarchies can contribute to bipolar and other personality disorders.

As I said, this is terribly disturbing — though not altogether surprising — information. As a social therapist, the question I ask is: How can we work together to create the conditions for mental health, free from over-determining diagnosing and overmedication of our children? And, most importantly, how can we spread the word of innovative, collaborative therapies that help people build communities in which we can create  mental health together.

What are your thoughts? Here’s how you can join the conversation:

First, click here to register on the website.

1. When you arrive on the page, scroll down below Conversation Starter, and in the What do you think? box, click on Register.
2. In response to Our Guiding Principles, check the box by I’m on board….
3. Choose to continue the conversation as an individual or organization by clicking Continue in the appropriate box.
4. The next page asks you to say a little about yourself and for your zip code.
5. Register by clicking on Connect on Facebook or Register with an email address.
6. If registering via email, the next page asks you for profile information and to create a password. After completing all the fields, select Continue.
7. You will receive a confirmation of your registration by email.
8. Go to your email and confirm your registration by clicking on the link.

Then, click here to go back to the ”What is Mental Health” page and enter the conversation.

Talking About Trauma – Our International Colleagues Speak Out

by Christine LaCerva

To broaden our community conversation about trauma, I reached out to international colleagues of the Social Therapy Group and the East Side Institute (ESI), our education, training and research center. I asked them to speak about trauma in their countries, and how they use their creativity and passion to go beyond victimization and powerlessness.

Miguel E. Cortés Vazquez lives in Juarez, Mexico, near the US/Mexican border. As a doctoral student in experimental psychology at Washington State University, Miguel became deeply aware of his minority status and of how psychology’s core assumptions could not be addressed within the framework of cognitive psychology. He studied critical psychology, socio-historical psychology, liberation psychology and Paulo Freire’s and systemic family therapy. Miguel is a graduate of the International Class of the ESI, where he trained in the methodology of social therapy.

In the past three years in my city I’ve experienced the following: armed robbery, a bomb attack seven blocks from my house, the kidnapping of my best friend, the disappearance of a young woman at the NGO where I work, the murder of a young hip-hop artist, a dismembered head dropped two blocks from my house, a robbery at the Fred Newman Centre where I practice social therapy, and several robberies of my car. This sounds traumatic, but I’ve been lucky. Many families have suffered tragedy in our city due to all the drug related violence, murders of women, and obscene corruption. In this environment most people at one point or another feel traumatized — either they have suffered violence, or someone close to them has. There is plenty of helplessness, of not trusting that conditions will improve, and the feeling that at any moment something tragic might happen to you or people close to you.

It is so hard not to relate to this environment as a victim. But along with the helplessness and rage, people are building, getting together, creating organizations, doing community work in response to all that is wrong with our society, our authorities and our government. Creating conditions for change is, in my opinion, a collective therapeutic activity that focuses — like the group psychotherapy we practice — on development and not problem solving. We are contributing to our community through education and therapeutics, building hope with others, building the conditions to create a more humane city.

Elena Boukouvala lives in the United Kingdom. She has a masters in drama and movement therapy from the University of London and has worked as a psychotherapist and drama therapist in a wide variety of settings, including LOGOS Rehabilitation Centre for people with history of addictions in Thessaloniki, Greece. She is currently a playworker with young people at Westminster Society for People with Learning Disabilities. She also co-facilitates a project supporting people who work with children with autism in a Saharan refugee camp.

Recently I returned for a year to my home country, Greece, to find my family and my community traumatized by the financial crisis. I chose to be with this trauma silently — not performing for a while the role of the therapist, but looking at the poverty, the increased criminality, and the suicides from the window of a chicken shop. Taking the bus to work, I met people, heard their stories and became curious about them. I talked with them. Not only to hear their voices or speak mine but to have a dialogue.

I see people experiencing trauma in Greece when a father comes home without enough money to feed his children because his working hours were cut and his loans were not. When the hospitals are filled with beds in the corridors and the doctor says “I’m sorry, I’m too stressed to give you a prescription — I have been responsible for the whole department because of the strikes.” When a woman in her 20s folds her dreams to travel around the world in the pockets of a waitress apron in order to support her family, since her mother had a stroke from the stress. When there are three people sitting on one street holding the same sign: “I am hungry.”

I see people becoming creators of their realities in Greece when the father comes home with less money and with a song — it’s the first time in a long time that he can spend time with his children. When the doctor looks down the corridor to see women in white gowns talking to each other, laughing and sharing memories, and one of them says to him, “These words heal me more than your meds.” When a person living on the street shares his story on a TV documentary: “I am a painter, I used to have an art studio and a house and now I live on a bench. I miss having a bath; I still like to draw.”

My experience of poverty in Greece reminds me of what can have value without cost: community, art and language. It has taught me that life is not just to be lived, but to be created, and that sometimes the most and the least that I can do is to initiate a dialogue.

I met Tova Buksbaum as a fellow presenter at the “Psychology and the Other” Conference at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a progressive and humanitarian psychologist.

I am a member of two activist groups in Israel: Psychoactive – Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, and the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum for Reconciliation and Peace. I live and work in a small town in Galilee.

As do most psychologists, for a long time I believed that we should not mix therapy and politics. But after a long journey seeking to integrate my professional and my activist identities, and to learn from my patients, I have changed my beliefs and practice.

My challenge — as a Jewish therapist with my Palestinian patients — is to contend with the trauma and the stories, feelings and thoughts derived from it, while remaining aware of the fact that I am a member of the collective that bears responsibility for the trauma and continues to inflict injustice upon them.

Arab patients come to therapy with the same suffering and complaints as do Jewish patients. They never seek therapy for their suffering from discrimination as members of a minority group. But I make an effort to let them know that there is room in our therapeutic dialogue for all that stems from their collective, family or individual trauma.

As a therapist, I am aware of the importance of giving space to such patients’ traumatic stories, pain and feelings of humiliation. I see therapy as a place that enables them to testify before a human being — and I imagine that many of you realize the importance of doing so for traumatized people who have suffered evil at the hands of other human beings.

But I’m not a neutral listener. I’m not only their therapist. We are not only therapist and patient — each of us is a representative of our collective and we necessarily bring this status into our discussion.

One can ask: is it worthwhile to bring all this complexity into the therapy? Is it therapeutic in fact?

I believe that our complex discourse grants patients an empowering and productive experience: most feel relieved to talk about these issues with a Jew and to receive acknowledgment of their thoughts and feelings — it is something they are not used to. I believe that the opportunity I give to my Palestinian patients to talk to me about their trauma — in the presence of my Jewish identity — helps to heal some of the schisms they experience in their life — between Arab and Jew, between “doer” and “done to,” between aggressor and victim.

Therapy likewise gives me an opportunity to recognize my racist and aggressive tendencies and confronts me with the challenge of acknowledging and facing up to those parts of me. Therapy doesn’t change the reality — but I believe that in the process I have described here we create a reality where reconciliation and peace are possible.

I hope you are inspired by the creativity and humanity of these activists, and please share your responses to their compelling voices.

Happy New Year, everyone!

How We Talk About Trauma Matters

by Christine LaCerva

A few weeks ago I hosted a community event on trauma at the Social Therapy Group’s Conversation with Practitioners series. A friend of mine, a psychologist and longtime political activist who hadn’t been able to attend, asked me why I had chosen this topic. “Doesn’t the field of psychology relate to people who have been traumatized around their victimization and powerlessness?” she asked. “I thought social therapy wasn’t into that. What were you thinking?”

It’s an important question. Yes — victimization and powerlessness are often the focus of how we think and talk about trauma. I’m a social therapist and a community activist. How could I not talk about it? As a social therapist my work is to create environments for developmental conversations that go beyond traditional categories of human experience.  I am interested in our collective capacity as human beings to discover new ways to see, new methodologies that have the potential to transform an uncertain, increasingly destabilized and traumatized world. So it seemed right to have this conversation in the context of community-building, to look together at the impact of trauma on our emotionality and subjectivity, and explore how we as a community can go further in responding to it.

I told my friend that I wanted the opportunity to talk with our community in Brooklyn about the host of assumptions and biases in how we think about trauma. For example, in descriptions of therapy with people who have been traumatized the words “power” and “creativity” hardly ever appear.  In my opinion, they’re part of the cure!

I invited three passionate practitioners who work directly in the field, who care about what is going on in the world, and are continuing to grow and shape what they are doing in helping people who have experienced trauma. Judith Sloan, who’s on the faculty of NYU, Gallatin division, is a multi-talented performing artist who works with immigrant youth. Asha Tarry is the executive director and president of The Collective Advocates for Social Change and Development, an advocacy group working against the domestic sex slave trade. Liz Creel is a psychotherapist who has worked with first responders from 9/11 and veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The three of them spoke openly about their work and the impact it has had on them as practitioners. They talked about their struggles, their creativity, their own vulnerabilities and their passion as community activists who have something to say that goes beyond victimization and powerlessness. Collectively we created a conversation about the role that power, human creativity and community building plays in reorganizing how we see trauma and how we can collectively create possibility.

The question that shaped our dialogue was: “How do we need to organize our conversation about very painful, difficult human experiences of trauma in order to go beyond the feelings of helplessness and victimization that trauma can produce?”

Here’s a short video clip from my introduction to the event:

Talking about trauma and the enduring pain of repeated hurtful events can overwhelm us, impede our ability to cope, and — most importantly — it can cripple our capacity to be powerful and make use of the creative impulse we all have. The language we use can obscure the fact that, as humans, we have the capacity to go beyond ourselves, to build with the garbage of the world. And that is very, very dangerous — we live in a world of uncertainty and instability, we watch the evening news and worry about children being abducted, the ravaging effects of ongoing poverty in an unimaginable world that is in crisis.  Trauma isn’t just happening to certain individuals — it is increasingly part of all of our lives.

Here’s the video of the full event:

In my next post I’ll share with you what some of our international colleagues are saying about trauma, power and creativity.

Join our conversation here. Let us know what you think.