A Therapist Can't Say That Riva Stoudt

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: In a group of leftie social justice therapists, someone says that therapy is a profession founded by white men. Everyone else in the room nods along and acknowledges the white male hegemonic roots of the profession, then moves on to discuss other things. 

The problem with saying that white men founded therapy and is part of a white hegemonic legacy is that it just isn’t true.

If you go down a list of the founders and early theorists of therapy as theory, discipline, and practice, you’ll find that many of them were Jews. Even now, many of our theory heroes and celebrity therapists are Jewish.

And that’s not incidental or coincidental; it is consequential. Therapy is foundationally and elementally Jewish.

To dig into therapy’s Jewish roots, I invited writer and therapist hannah baer to join me. We also talk about therapy’s relationship to Jewish mysticism and esotericism and delve into the ways in which therapy follows the Jewish tradition of marking and understanding the past.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum. 

Listen to the full episode to hear:
The conflation of survival and accumulation of privilege that has happened in many Jewish families as they have been assimilated into whitenessHow the rejection of psychoanalytic therapy is tied to the drive for assimilation into white culture and the rejection of mysticismWhy it should be okay for therapists to accept that the magic that happens in the room can’t always be explained by science or reduced to an insurance noteThe Jewishness of verbalizing and analyzing trauma, and reinterpreting historic theoryThe radical promise of therapy to help people metabolize and contextualize their trauma so they don’t repeat it on othersThe American insistence on focusing on the now or the future at the expense of grappling with and understanding the pastThe impact of consumerism on how patients approach mental health treatmentLearn more about hannah baer:
trans girl suicide museumInstagram: @malefragility
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingThe Kiln SchoolInstagram: @atherapistcantsaythat
Resources:
Wikipedia: Who Is a Jew?Therapy Was Never SecularThe Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, Irvin YalomThe Case for God, Karen ArmstrongHannah ArendtBuilding a Life Worth Living, Marsha M. LinehanStanding Together

Since the last episode’s conversation with hannah baer about the Jewishness of therapy, I’ve been thinking a lot about lineage.

When I first decided to do an episode on the topic, I was primarily motivated by wanting a deep sense of admiration for the Jewish pioneers of the field. Their contributions, which, like any minority group, tend to get erased as they are absorbed into the dominant culture, are invaluable and deserve explicit recognition.

But our conversation and hannah’s original article also helped me connect to something more than claiming therapy’s Jewish roots and contributions to global culture.

The American myth of being self-made or self-determined tends to alienate us from our lineages, but we are part of them whether we consciously engage with them or not. The history and context of our field matter, even when those histories are messy, ugly, and problematic. Contending with therapy’s history opens a dialogue between ourselves and our forebears in ways that move the profession forward and bring us together in solidarity and kinship. And that is a project worth taking on.

Listen to the full episode to hear:
How the American fantasy of being self-made teaches us to ignore the lineages of our practiceThe importance of pushing back against ahistoricism and divorcing concepts from their contextHow we are in relationship with our lineages, whether we are conscious of it or notWhy critiquing and rejecting what you don’t like about the field’s lineage isn’t enoughHow acknowledging our lineage opens the door to deeper camaraderie and kinship
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingThe Kiln SchoolInstagram: @atherapistcantsaythat

Co-conspirator and friend of the podcast, Dr. K Hixson, returns to share some exciting news about a true labor of love.

We’ve joined up to create The Kiln, a comprehensive supervision and training program for pre-licensed therapists in Oregon. The Kiln will also offer continuing education to practicing clinicians.

This venture was born out of our mutual frustrations and concerns with the direction, trends, and tendencies in the current state of our field, and our deep dedication and commitment to our work.

Today, we’re going to get into why we are bringing an apprenticeship lens to postgraduate supervision, pushing back on current paradigms in trauma treatment, and how you can join our trainings or become part of our very first cohort.

Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why many grad schools and supervision programs fail to train great therapistsThe two fundamental philosophies that define our approach with The Kiln Why we teach exposure-based trauma therapies and push back on anti-exposure biasWhy therapists need to be able and willing to confront themselvesTrauma processing modalities that we are excited about working with and teaching
Learn more about The Kiln:
Website
Learn more about Dr. K Hixson:
Website
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingInstagram
Resources:
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Judith Lewis HermanBrain Talk: How Mind Mapping Brain Science Can Change Your Life & Everyone In It, David Schnarch

In the final episode of my last season, Therapists As Makers of Culture, I asked you to think about what kind of professional culture you want to leave behind for the next generation of therapists and clients. 

We have an opportunity, with a little luck and intention and skill, to change something important about the structures of how things have been. We have an opportunity to lay the foundations for a different, hopefully better, culture of therapy that we’d like to leave behind for whoever comes next.

I want to make a professional culture where we challenge ourselves and each other to stretch our capacities to hold complexity.

In this conversation with Silvana Espinoza Lau, we’re discussing some of those complexities.

We’re talking about how we determine and assess where we’re actually trying to go with clients when we embark on the journey of therapy with them, the importance of paying attention to all of the different and sometimes competing agendas that inform a client’s stated goals, and how we can use connection and curiosity as our guideposts.

Silvana Espinoza Lau (she/her/ella), is a healer and settler in unceded Kalapuya land of the Champinefu band. She holds several privileged and marginalized identities that inform the way she supports people. Experiencing an oppressive system, that at times told her she did not belong, has given her enough empathy to support people who have felt othered, unseen, underserved, and underrepresented.

She loves to support individuals who feel as the representatives of their culture, or who feel in between cultures. She especially likes to support BIPoC, a population that has been largely underserved and asked to adjust to Western norms.

Even though she believes in anti-oppression, decolonization, and liberation, her hope is to move towards dismantling and recreating therapy as centering the people who have been forced to exist at the margins due to our current oppressive systems.

Listen to the full episode to hear:
The complex set of factors that impact how therapists approach goal-setting before a client even gets in the room, from education to pressure from insurance companiesWhy we need to acknowledge the biases and agendas we bring to our practice, and the wider context of cultural agendas that impact our clientsWhy measured progress is not the same as real healing, especially within oppressive systemsHow to lean into curiosity and connection when working with clients with differing identities
Learn more about Silvana Espinoza Lau:
 Seventh Self Consulting@ecolonizeyourpractice on Instagram
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingInstagram
Resources:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the conversation I shared with you in episode 2.1 with Silvana Espinoza Lau about therapeutic goal setting.

And what I’ve realized is that when you set out to look at the topic of setting goals in therapy in anything more than a superficial light, you relatively quickly start running into the question of what therapy is.

Why, in order to examine the topic of therapeutic goals deeply and honestly, do we first have to reckon with the question of what therapy is?

The existence of therapeutic goals implies something important about therapy: Therapy is a goal-directed activity.

We aren’t just passing the time. Therapy is supposed to accomplish something. The intention is to get somewhere different than where you started, no matter how granular or broad your goals may be. If you don’t, it didn’t work.

So what is it that we are setting out to achieve? What’s the overarching goal that we all share in the goal-directed activity of therapy, regardless of the diverse theories and delivery systems we subscribe to?

What is the big goal of therapy?

Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why the concept of improving mental health raises more questions than it answersWhat differentiates therapy from other activities intended to mitigate human sufferingThe real impact of goal-setting in therapyWhat therapy has in common with game theory and play
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingInstagram
Resources:
EPISODE 16: Marketing With IntegrityDeep Play, Diane Ackerman

If you’ve been in this field for even a couple of hours or so, you have almost certainly had someone try to impress upon you the importance of self-care. 

Not usually in the context of your self being valued for its own sake, but self-care that enables you to show up effectively for your clients.

On the face of it, there’s not much to disagree with there. Yes, when we are adequately cared for, we are better equipped to show up and care for our clients.

And yet, we’ve been taught that our self-care, and by extension our need for care, should be invisible to our clients. 

The tenet that if we are doing self-care right, it will be invisible, can contribute to the sense we often have that critical elements that comprise our humanity are a secret that we must keep away from our clients.

The belief that exposure to our fallibility will harm our clients is so interwoven into the substrate of this field that we rarely think to ask the question, what are the harms we are doing by hiding our fallibility? What opportunities for connection with our clients are being lost when we perform what today’s guests describe as a “constructed state of perpetual well-being?”

Onyx Fujii (they/them) is queer, non-binary, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, mixed-race clinical social worker in private practice in Philadephia (on unceded Lenni-Lenape land). Healing justice is at the core of their multidisciplinary practice where they offer trauma-informed, anti-oppressive psychotherapy, clinical supervision, and cultural humility facilitation and consultation; focusing on the intersections of gender, sexual orientation, race, chronic illness, and disability. In 2021, they became a co-founder and co-director of the Kintsugi Therapist Collective, a virtual community of care workers dedicated to embodied and liberatory visions of care. Their professional practices and writing center on the significance of identity, trauma, (in)visibility, and connection. They are committed to sustaining a social justice-orientated business that aims to empower and liberate through compassion and understanding.

Asher Pandjiris (they/they) believes that everyone deserves to be supported in dealing with their own legacies of trauma and psychic suffering so that we can more easefully navigate this neoliberal/capitalist/deeply racist, transphobic and ableist heteropatriarchy that is traumatic for everyone, especially folks who are highly sensitive and/or navigate multisystemic oppression. The programs and workshops they offer are aimed at supporting folks in these challenges. They love hosting the Living in this Queer Body podcast and facilitating programs on topics that they feel deeply passionate about. 

Listen to the full episode to hear:
How performing professionalism and well-being contributes to burnout, especially for marginalized and chronically ill therapistsHow acknowledging their physical and mental needs has actually created points of connection for Onyx and their clientsWhy Asher allows themself to “fail” their clients by showing up imperfectlyHow honesty and transparency can actually improve the reparative client-therapist relationshipWhy therapists may be uniquely expected not to need the same kinds of care as their clientsLearn more about Onyx Fujii and Asher Pandjiris and Kintsugi Therapist Collective:
Kintsugi Therapist CollectiveInstagram: @kintsugitherapistcollective 
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Into the Woods CounselingInstagram
Resources:
We Need Not Be Fine: A manifesto for mental healthcare workers who can’t go on like this