Season 6, Episode 17: Therapy and Healing around the Holidays w/Jenny and Danielle

Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, the church, and what are we seeing in reality right now? So Jenny and I dive in a little bit about therapy. The holidays, I would don't say the words collective liberation, but it feels like that's what we're really touching on and what does that mean in this day and age? What are we finding with one another? How are we seeking help? What does it look like and what about healing? What does that mean to us? This isn't like a tell all or the answer to all the problems. We don't have any secret knowledge. Jenny and I are just talking out some of the thoughts and feeling and talking through what does it mean for us as we engage one another, engage healing spaces, what do we want for ourselves? And I think we're still figuring that out. You're just going to hear us going back and forth talking and thank you for joining. 

Danielle (00:10):

Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, the church, and what are we seeing in reality right now? So Jenny and I dive in a little bit about therapy. The holidays, I would don't say the words collective liberation, but it feels like that's what we're really touching on and what does that mean in this day and age? What are we finding with one another? How are we seeking help? What does it look like and what about healing? What does that mean to us? This isn't like a tell all or the answer to all the problems. We don't have any secret knowledge. Jenny and I are just talking out some of the thoughts and feeling and talking through what does it mean for us as we engage one another, engage healing spaces, what do we want for ourselves? And I think we're still figuring that out. You're just going to hear us going back and forth talking and thank you for joining. Download, subscribe. So Jenny, we were just talking about therapy because we're therapists and all. And what were you saying about it?

Jenny (01:17):

I was saying that I'm actually pretty disillusioned with therapy and the therapy model as it stands currently and everything. I don't want to put it in the all bad bucket and say it's only bad because obviously I do it and I, I've done it myself. I am a therapist and I think there is a lot of benefit that can come from it, and I think it eventually meets this rub where it is so individualistic and it is one person usually talking to one person. And I don't think we are going to dismantle the collective systems that we need to dismantle if we are only doing individual therapy. I think we really need to reimagine what healing looks like in a collective space.

Danielle (02:15):

Yeah, I agree. And it's odd to talk about it both as therapists. You and I have done a lot of groups together. Has that been different? I know for me as I've reflected on groups. Yeah. I'll just say this before you answer that. As I've reflected on groups, when I first started and joined groups, it was really based on a model of there's an expert teacher, which I accepted willingly because I was used to a church or patriarchal format. There's expert teacher or teachers like plural. And then after that there's a group, and in your group there's an expert. And I viewed that person as a guru, a professional, of course, they were professional, they are professionals, but someone that might have insider knowledge about me or people in my group that would bring that to light and that knowledge alone would change me or being witnessed, which I think is important in a group setting would change me. But I think part of the linchpin was having that expert guide and now I don't know what I think about that.

(03:36):

I think I really appreciate the somatic experiencing model that would say my client's body is the wisest person in the room.

(03:46):

And so I have shifted over the years from a more directive model where I'm the wisest person in the room and I'm going to name these things and I'm going to call these things out in your story to how do I just hold a space for your body to do what your body knows how to do? And I really ascribe to the idea that trauma is not about an event. It's about not having a safe place to go in the midst of or after an event. And so I think we need safe enough places to let our bodies do what our bodies have really evolved to do. And I really trust that more and more that less is more, and actually the more that I get out of the way and my clients can metabolize what they need to, that actually I think centers their agency more. Because if I'm always needing to defer my story to someone else to see things, I'm never going to be able to come into my own and say, no, I actually maybe disagree with you, or I see that differently, or I'm okay not figuring that out or whatever it might be. I get to stay centered in my own agency. And I think a professional model disavow someone of their own agency and their own ability to live their story from the inside out

Danielle (05:19):

To live their story from the inside out. I think maybe I associate a lot of grief with that because as you talk about it, you talk about maybe seeking healing in this frame, going to school for this frame, and I'm not dismissing all of the good parts of that or the things that I discovered through those insights, but sometimes I think even years later I'm like, why didn't they stick? If I know that? Why didn't they stick? Or why do I still think about that and go through my own mental gymnastics to think what is actually healing? What does it have to look like if that thing didn't stick and I'm still thinking about it or feeling it, what does that say about me? What does that say about the therapy? I think for me, the lack of ongoing collective places to engage those kinds of feelings have allowed things to just bumble on or not really get lodged in me as an alternative truth. Does that make sense?

Jenny (06:34):

Yeah. But one of the things I wonder is healing a lie? I have yet to meet someone I know that I get to know really well and I go, yeah, this person is healed regardless of the amount of money they've spent in therapy, the types of body work they've done. What if we were all just more honest about the fact that we're all messy and imperfect and beautiful and everything in between and we stopped trying to chase this imagined reality of healing that I don't actually think exists?

(07:30):

Well, I think I've said it before on here. I used to think it was somewhere I was going to get to where I wouldn't feel X, y, Z. So maybe it meant I got to a space where on the holidays I often feel sad. I have my whole life and I feel sad this year. So does that mean somehow the work that I've put in to understand that sadness, that I'm not healed because I still feel sadness? And I think at the beginning I felt like if I'm still feeling sadness, if there are triggers that come around the holidays, then that means that I'm not healed or I haven't done enough work or there's something wrong with me for needing more support. So now I'm wondering if healing more, and I think we talked about this a little bit before too, is more the growing awareness. How does it increase connection versus create isolation for me when I feel sad? That's one example I think of. What about you?

Jenny (08:31):

I think about the last time I went to Uganda and there's so much complexity with my role in Uganda as a white woman that was stepping into a context to bring healing. And my final time in Uganda, I was co-facilitating a workshop for Ugandan psychotherapists and I had these big pieces of parchment paper around the room with different questions because I thought that they would be able to be more honest if it was anonymous. And so one of the pieces of paper said, what would you want westerners to know who were coming to Uganda to do healing work? And it was basically 100% learn what healing means to us.

(09:26):

Bring your own ideas of healing, stop, try, stop basically. And for whatever reason, that time was actually able to really hear that and go, I'd actually have no place trying to bring my form of healing and implement that. You all have your own form of healing. And one of the things that they also said on that trip was for you, healing is about the individual. For us, healing is about reintegrating that person into the community. And that might mean that they still have trauma and they still have these issues, but if they are accepted and welcomed in, then the community gets to support them through that. It's not about bringing this person out and fixing them over here and then plucking them back. It's how does the community care for bodies that have been injured? And I think about how I broke my foot in dance class when I was 14 and I had to have reconstructive surgery and my foot and my ankle and my knee and my hip and my whole body have never been the same. I will never go back to a pre broken foot body. So why would we emotionally, psychologically, spiritually be any different? And I think some of it comes from this Christian cosmology of Eden that we're just keep trying to find ourselves back in Eden. And this is something I feel like I've learned from our dear friend, Rebecca Wheeler Walston, which is like, no, we're not going back to Eden. How do we then live in this post perfect pre-injury world that is messy and unhealed, but also how can we find meaning and connection in that?

(11:28):

That was a lot of thoughts, but that's kind of what comes up for me.

Danielle (11:31):

Oh man, there's a couple of things you said and I was like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think you said healing is how do we as a community integrate people who have experienced trauma into our spaces? I think if you think back to Freud, it's plucking people out and then he reintroduced trauma and abuse them in the process. But somehow despite those things, he got to be an expert. I mean, so if you wonder how we got to Donald Trump, if you wonder how we get to all these leaders in our country getting to rape, abuse, sexually assault people, and then still maintain their leader position of power, even in our healing realm, we based a lot of our western ideologies on someone that was abusive and we're okay with that. Let's read them, let's learn from them. Okay, so that's one thing.

(12:32):

And Freud, he did not reintegrate these people back into the community. In fact, their process took them further away. So I often think about that too with therapy. I dunno, I think I told you this, Jenny, that sometimes I feel like people are trying their therapeutic learning out on me just in the community. Wax a boundary on you or I'll tell you no, and I'm just like, wait, what have you been learning? Or what have you been growing in and why aren't we having a conversation in the moment versus holding onto something and creating these spinoffs? But I do think that part of it is that healing hasn't been a way of how to reconnect with your community despite their own imperfections and maybe even places of harm. It's been like, how do you get away from that? And then they're like, give your family. Who's your chosen family? That's so hard. Does that actually work?

Jenny (13:42):

Yeah, it makes me think of this meme I saw that was so brutal that said, I treat my trauma. Trump treats tariffs, implementing boundaries arbitrarily that hurt everyone. And I've, we've talked a lot about this and I think it is a very white idea to be like, no, that's my boundary. You can't do that. No, that's my boundary. No, that's my boundary. No, that's my boundary. And it's like, are you actually healing or are you just isolating yourself from everything that makes you uncomfortable or triggered or frustrated and hear me? I do think there is a time and a place and a role for boundaries and everything in capitalism. I think it gets bastardized and turned into something that only reproduces whiteness and privilege and isolation and individuation individualism because capitalism needs those things. And so how do we hold the boundaries, have the time and a place and a purpose, and how do we work to grow relation with people that might not feel good all the time?

(15:02):

And I'm not talking about putting ourselves in positions of harm, but what about positions of discomfort and positions of being frustrated and triggered and parts of the human emotion? Because I agree with what you shared about, I thought healing was like, I'm not going to feel these things, but who decided that and who said those are unhealed emotions? What if those are just part of the human experience and healing is actually growing our capacity to feel all of it, to feel the sadness that you're feeling over the holidays, to feel my frustration when I'm around certain people and to know that that gets to be okay and there gets to be space for that.

Danielle (15:49):

I mean, it goes without saying, but in our capitalistic system, and in a way it's a benefit for us not to have a sad feeling is you can still go to work and be productive. It's a benefit for us not to have a depressed feeling. It's a benefit for us to be like, well, you hurt me. I can cut you off and I can keep on moving. The goal isn't healing. And my husband often says this about our medical care system. It's just how do we get you back out the door if anybody's ever been to the ER or you've ever been ill or you need something? I think of even recently, I think, I don't dunno if I told you this, but I got a letter in the mail, I've been taking thyroid medicine, which I need, and they're like, no, you can't take that thyroid medicine.

(16:34):

It's not covered anymore. Well, who decided that according it's Republicans in the big beautiful bill, it's beautiful for them to give permission to insurance companies, not to pay for my thyroid medicine when actually I think of you and I out here in community trying to work with folks and help folks actually participate in our world and live a life maybe they love, that's not perfect, but so how are you going to take away my thyroid medicine as I'm not special though, and you're not special to a system. So I think it is beneficial for healing to be like, how do you do this thing by yourself and get better by yourself, impact the least amount of people as possible with your bad feelings. Bad feelings. Yeah. That's kind of how I think of it when you talked about that.

(17:50):

So if our job is this and we know we're in this quote system and we imagine more collective community care, I know you're touring the country, you're seeing a lot of different things. What are you seeing when you meet with people? Are you connect with people? Are there any themes or what are you noticing?

Jenny (18:09):

Yeah, Sean and I joked, not joked before we moved into the van that this was our We Hate America tour and we were very jaded and we had a lot of stereotypes and we were talking at one point with our friend from the south and talking shit about the south and our friend was like, have you even ever been to the south? And we were like, no. And Rick Steves has this phrase that says it's hard to hate up close. And the last two years have really been a disruption in our stereotypes, in our fears, in our assumptions about entire groups of people or entire places that the theme has really felt like people are really trying their best to make the world a more beautiful place all over in a million different ways. And I think there are as many ways to bring life and beauty and resistance into the world as there are bodies on the planet.

(19:21):

And one of my mentors would say anti-racism about something you do. It's about a consciousness and how you are aware of the world. And that has been tricky for me as a recovering white savior who's like, no, okay, what do I do? How do I do the right thing? And I think I've been exposed to more and more people being aware whether that awareness is the whole globe or the nation or even just their neighbors and what does it mean to go drop off food for their neighbor or different ways in which people are showing up for each other. And sometimes I think that if we're only ever taught, which is often the case in therapy to focus on the trauma or the difficult parts, I think we're missing another part of reality, which is the beauty and the goodness and the somatic experiencing language would be the trauma vortex or your counter vortex.

(20:28):

And I think we can condition ourselves to look at one or focus on one. And so while I'm hesitant to say everything is love and light, I don't think that's true. And I don't think everything is doom and gloom either. And so I think I'm very grateful to be able to be in places where talking to people from Asheville who experienced the insane flooding last year talking about how they don't even know would just drop off a cooler of spring water every morning for them to flush their toilets and just this person is anonymous. They'll never get praise or gratitude. It was just like, this is my community. This is one thing I can do is bring coolers of water. And so I think it's just being able to hear and tell those stories of community gives us more of an imagination for how we can continue to be there for community.

Danielle (21:38):

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I like that you had this idea that you were willing to challenge it or this bias or this at the beginning just talking about it that you're willing to challenge.

Jenny (21:59):

Yeah, we said I think I know two things about every state, and they're probably both wrong. And that's been true. There's so much we don't know until we get out and experience it.

Danielle (22:14):

I think that's also symptom of, I think even here, I know people, but I don't know them. And often even just going someplace feeling like, oh, I don't have the time for that, or I can't do that, and the barriers, maybe my own exhaustion is true. I have that exhaustion or someone else has that exhaustion. But even the times I've avoided saying hi to someone or the times I've avoided small connections, I just think a lot, and maybe what is tiring is that the therapeutic model has reinforced isolation without having this other. You're talking about the counter vortex when we talk about healing is done in community, healing is done by witnessing, and somehow the assumption is that the therapist can be all of that witnessing and healing and community, and you're paying us and we're there and we're able to offer insight and we've studied and we have a professional job and we're not enough.

(23:33):

I often find myself in a state of madness and I can't do everything and I can speak to what I've chosen to do recently, but how do I function as a therapist in a system? I want people to feel less anxious. I want to be there, offer insights around depression or pay attention to their body with them. All of these really good, there aren't bad. They're good things. But yet when I walk out my door, if kids are hungry, that burden also affects my clients. So how do I not somehow become involved as an active member of my community as a therapist? And I think that's frustrated me the most about the therapy world. If we see the way the system is hurting people, how is our professional, it seems like almost an elite profession sometimes where we're not dug in the community. It's such a complicated mix. I don't know. What are you hearing me say? Yeah,

Jenny (24:40):

Yeah. I'm thinking about, I recently read this really beautiful book by Susan Rao called Liberated to the Bone, and Susan is a craniosacral therapist, so different than talk therapy, but in it, there was a chapter talking about just equity in even what we're charging. Very, very, very, very few people can afford 160 plus dollars a week

(25:13):

Extra just to go to therapy. And so who gets the privileges? Who gets the benefits from the therapy? And yet how do we look at how those privileges in themselves come at the expense of humanity and what is and what privileged bodies miss out on because of the social location of privilege? And yeah, I think it's a symptom that we even need therapy that we don't have communities where we can go to and say, Hey, this thing happened. It was really hard. Can we talk about it? And that is devastating. And so for me it's this both. And I do think we live in a world right now where therapy is necessary and I feel very privileged and grateful to be a therapist. I love my clients, I love the work I get to do. And I say this with many of my new clients.

(26:22):

My job is to work myself out of a job. And my hope is that eventually, eventually I want you to be able to recreate what we're growing here outside of here. And I do mean that individually. And I also mean that collectively, how do I work towards a world where maybe therapy isn't even necessary? And I don't know that that will ever actually happen, but if that gets to be my orientation, how does that shift how I challenge clients, how I invite them to bring what they're bringing to me to their community? And have you tried talking to that person about that? Have you tried? And so that it doesn't just become only ever this echo chamber, but maybe it's an incubator for a while, and then they get to grow their muscles of confrontation or vulnerability or the things that they've been practicing in therapy. Outside of therapy.

Danielle (27:29):

And I know I'm always amazed, but I do consistently meet people in different professions and different life circumstances. If you just sit down and listen, they offer a lot of wisdom filled words or just sometimes it feels like a balm to me. To hear how someone is navigating a tough situation may not even relate to mine at all, but just how they're thinking about suffering or how they're thinking about pain or how they're thinking about feeling sad. I don't always agree with it. It's not always something I would do. But also hearing a different way of doing things feels kind of reverberates in me, feels refreshing. So I think those conversations, it's not about finding a total agreement with someone or saying that you have to navigate things the same. I think it is about I finding ways where you can hear someone and hearing someone that's different isn't a threat to the way you want to think about the world.

Jenny (28:42):

As you say that, it makes me think about art. And something Sean often says is that artists are interpreters and their interpreting a human experience in a way that maybe is very, very specific, but in their specificity it gets to highlight something universal. And I think more and more I see the value in using art to talk about the reality of being unhealed. And that in itself maybe gets to move us closer towards whatever it is that we're moving closer towards or even it just allows us to be more fully present with what is. And maybe part of the issue is this idea that we're going to move towards something rather than how do we just keep practicing being with the current moment more honestly, more authentically?

Danielle (29:51):

I like my kids' art, honestly. I like to see what they interpret. I have a daughter who makes political art and I love it. I'll be like, what do you think about this? And she'll draw something. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Recently she drew a picture of the nativity, and I didn't really understand it at first, but then she told me it was like glass, broken glass and half of Mary's face was like a Palestinian, and the other half was Mexican, and Joseph was split too. And then the Roman soldiers looking for them were split between ice vests and Roman soldiers. And Herod had the face part of Trump, part of an ancient king. I was like, damn, that's amazing. It was cool. I should send it to you.

(30:41):

Yeah, I was, whoa. I was like, whoa. And then another picture, she drew had Donald Trump invading the nativity scene and holding a gun, and the man drew was empty and Joseph and Mary were running down the road. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It is just interesting to me how she can tell the truth through art. Very, if you met this child of mine, she's very calm, very quiet, very kind, laid back, very sweet. But she has all these powerful emotions and interpretations, and I love hearing my kids play music. I love music. I love live music. Yeah. What about you? What kind of art do you enjoy?

Jenny (31:28):

I love dance. I love movement. I think there's so many things that when I don't have words for just letting my body move or watching other bodies move, it lets me settle something in me that I'm not trying to find words for. I can actually know that there's much more to being human than our little language center of our brain. I really love movies and cinema. I really love a lot of Polish films that are very artistic and speak to power in really beautiful ways. I just recently watched Hamnet in the theater and it was so beautiful. I just sobbed the entire time. Have you seen it?

(32:27):

I won't say anything about it other than I just find it to be, it was one of the most, what I would say is artistic films I've seen in a long time, and it was really, really moving and touching.

Danielle (32:43):

Well, what do you recommend for folks? Or what do you think about when you're thinking through the holiday season and all the complications of it?

Jenny (32:57):

I think my hope is that there gets to be more room for humanity. And at least what I've seen is a lot of times people making it through the holidays usually means I'm not going to get angry. I'm not going to get frustrated. I'm not going to get sad or I'm not going to show those things. And again, I'm like, well, who decided that we shouldn't be showing our emotions to people? And what if actually we get to create a little bit more space for what we're feeling? And that might be really disruptive to systems where we are not supposed to feel or think differently. And so I like this idea of 5%. What if you got to show up 5% more authentically? Maybe you say one sentence you wouldn't have said last year, or maybe you make one facial expression that wouldn't have been okay, or different things like that. How can you let yourself play in a little bit more mobility in your body and in your relational base? That would be my hope for folks. And yeah.

Jenny (34:26):

What would you want to tell people as they're entering into holiday season? Or maybe they feel like they're already just in the thick of the holidays?

Danielle (34:35):

I would say that more than likely, 90% of the people you see that you're rubbing shoulders with that aren't talking to you even are probably feeling some kind of way right now. And probably having some kind of emotional experience that's hard to make sense of. And so I know as we talk people, you might be like, I don't have that community. I don't have that. I don't have that. And I think that's true. I think a lot of us don't have it. So I think we talked about last week just taking one inch or one centimeter step towards connecting with someone else can feel really big. But I think it can also hold us back if we feel like, oh, we didn't do the whole thing at once. So I would say if people can tolerate even just one tiny inch towards connection or a tiny bit more honesty, when someone you notice is how you are and you're like, yeah, I feel kind of shitty. Or I had this amazing thing happen and I'm still sad. You don't have to go into details, but I wonder what it's like just to introduce a tiny a sentence, more of honesty into the conversation.

Jenny (35:51):

I like that. A sentence more of honesty.

Danielle (35:54):

Yeah. Thanks Jenny. I love being with you.

Jenny (35:57):

Thank you, friend. Same. Love you.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.