In this episode, we explore what it means to stay human in a time of collective trauma. We talk about messiness as a core part of being alive, how purity culture and rigid systems disconnect us from our bodies, and why agency, consent, and clear yeses and nos are essential forms of resistance. Together, we unpack how supremacy shapes therapy, relationships, and identity — especially through individualism, whiteness, and disembodiment — and imagine more liberating ways of practicing care, connection, and community. The conversation weaves personal reflection, cultural critique, and somatic wisdom, inviting listeners back into their bodies, their grief, and their shared humanity.

Subverting Supremacy Culture in our Practice: Part 2

Friday, January 30, 2026

2:00 PM  4:00 PM

VIRTUAL

https://www.shelterwoodcollective.com/events/subverting-supremacy-culture-in-our-practice-part-2

Working with people means navigating power, race, and trauma.

This workshop will help you notice supremacy culture in the room and resist it. Due to the way Christian nationalism works in the US we create space to engage Christian supremacy and its manifestations of racialized heteronormativity that affects all bodies — regardless of religious or non-religious status. You will learn embodied, relational tools to strengthen your practice and reduce harm. Danielle S. Rueb Castillejo (she/her), Psychotherapist, Activist, Community Organizer; Jenny McGrath (she/her), Psychotherapist Writer, Author, Body Movement Worker; Abby Wong-Heffter, (she/her), Psychotherapist Teacher, Attachment Specialist; Tamice Spencer-Helms, (she/they), Author, Theoactivist, Non-Profit Leader are collaborating to create a generative learning space for therapists, social workers, educators, organizers, spiritual leaders, healthcare providers, and community practitioners. Together we will work with the ways supremacy culture shows up somatically, relationally, and structurally in helping professions. We will examine how dissociation, fragmentation, and inherited oppression narratives shape our work, and develop practices to interrupt these patterns.

This workshop addresses diversity and cultural competence by:

Examining how supremacy culture impacts Black, Indigenous, and People of Color differently than white-bodied practitioners. Naming cultural, historical, and intergenerational forces that shape power dynamics in clinical and community settings. Offering embodied, relational, and trauma-informed tools to practitioners working across racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences. Developing the capacity to recognize and intervene in oppression harm while maintaining therapeutic integrity and accountability. Participants will engage in reflective dialogue, somatic exercises, case-based examples, and guided exploration of their own positionality. The intent is not perfection but deepening collective responsibility and expanding our capacity to resist supremacy culture inside our practice and in ourselves. The workshop is designed to meet the Washington Department of Health requirement for two hours of health equity continuing education (WAC 246-12-820).

The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy

By Teju Ravilochan, originally published by Esperanza Project

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-06-18/the-blackfoot-wisdom-that-inspired-maslows-hierarchy/

 

Danielle (00:05):

Be with you. Yeah. Well, it seems like from week to week, something drastically changes or some new trauma happens. It reminds me a lot of 2020.

Jenny  (00:15):

Yeah. Yeah, it really does. I do feel like the positive in that is that similar to 2020, it seems like people are really looking for points of connection with one another, and I feel like there was this lull on Zoom calls or trainings or things like that for a while. People were just burned out and now people are like, okay, where in the world can I connect with people that are similar to me? And sometimes that means neighbors, but sadly, I think a lot of times that means people in other states, a lot of people that can feel kind of siloed in where they are and how they're doing right now.

Danielle (00:56):

Yeah, I was just thinking about how even I have become resistant to zoom or kind of tired and fed up and then all of a sudden meeting online or texting or whatever feels safer. Okay. Again.

About? Just all the shit and then you go out in the real world and do I messed that up? I messed that up. I messed that up. I think that's part of it though, not living in perfection, being willing to be really messy. And how does that play out? How does that play out in our therapeutic practices?

Jenny (01:50):

Yeah, totally. I've been thinking a lot about messiness lately and how we actually come into the world. I think reveling often in messiness for anyone that's tried to feed a young child or a toddler and they just have spaghetti in their hair and everything's everywhere. And then we work so hard to tell kids, don't be messy. Don't be messy. And I'm like, how much of this is this infusion of purity culture and this idea that things should be clean and tidy? That's really actually antithetical to the human experience, which is really messy and nuanced and complicated. But we've tried to force these really binary, rigid, clean systems or ways of relating so that when things inevitably become messy, it feels like relationships just snap, rather than having the fluidity to move through and navigate,

Danielle (02:57):

It becomes points of stop or I can't be in contact with you. And of course, there's situations where that is appropriate and there might be ways I can connect with this person in this way, but maybe not on social media for instance. That's a way that there's a number of people I don't connect with on social media intentionally, but am willing to connect with them offline. So yeah, so I think there's a number of ways to think about that. I think just in subverting supremacy, Abby and I talked a lot about consent and how also bringing your own agency and acknowledging your yeses and your nos and being forthcoming. Yeah, those are some of the things, but what are you and Tamis going to touch on?

Jenny (03:47):

I'd be curious to hear what you think inhibits somebody's agency and why? Because I thought that was so great. How much you talked about consent and if you were to talk about why you think that that is absent or missing or not as robust as it could be, what are your thoughts on that?

Danielle (04:06):

Well, sometimes I think we look in our society to people in power to kind of play out fantasies. So we look for them to keep checking in with us and it, it goes along with maybe just the way the country was formed. I talked a little bit about that this week. It was formed for white men in power, so there was obviously going to be hierarchical caste system down from there. And in each cast you're checking with the powerful person up. So I think we forget that that plays out in our day-to-day relationships too.

(04:44):

And I think it's a hard thing to acknowledge like, oh, I might have power as a professional in this realm, but I might enter this other realm where then I don't have power and I'm deferring to someone else. And in some ways those differences and those hierarchies serve what we're doing and they're good. And in other ways I think it inhibits us actually bringing our own agency. It's like a social conditioning against it, along with there's trauma and there's a lot of childhood sexual abuse in our country a lot. And it's odd that it gets pinned on immigrants when where's the pedophiles? We know where some of them are, but they're not being pursued. So I think all of these dynamics are at play. What do you think about that

Jenny (05:32):

When you talk? It makes me think about something I've just learned in the last couple years, which is like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which has been turned into this pyramid that says you need all of these things before you can be self-actualizing. What is actually interesting is that Mazo sort of misappropriated that way of thinking from the Blackfoot nation that he had been living and researching, and the Blackfoot people were saying and have been saying and do say that they believe we come into the world as self-actualized. And so the culture and the community is designed to help that sovereign being come into their full selves.

(06:20):

And so actually the way that the pyramid was created was sort of the antithesis of what the Blackfoot people were trying to communicate and how they were living. But unfortunately, white psychology said, well, we can't acknowledge that this was from indigenous people, so we're going to whitewash it. We're going to say that Maslow created it and it's going to be wrong, basically. And I'm just thinking about the shift of if we view people and water and plants and animals and planets as sovereign, as beings that have self-actualizing agency, then of course we're going to probably want to practice consent and honoring them. Whereas if we view the world and people as these extractive things and objects, we're going to feel entitled to take what we want or what we feel like we deserve.

Danielle (07:32):

I'm not surprised though that we've extracted that hierarchy of needs from somewhere because as I write about, I've been writing a lot as I think about moral injury and what's happened to our society and how trauma's become a weapon, like a tool of empire in white bodies to use them as machinery, as weapons. One of the things I've thought a lot about is just this idea that we're not bodies, we're just part of the machine.

(08:03):

So then it would make sense to make a form, here's your needs, get this shit done so you can keep moving.

Jenny (08:12):

Totally. We just started watching Pluribus last night. Do you know what this is?

(08:24):

Is this really interesting show where there's this virus that comes from outer space and it makes everyone in the world basically a hive mind. And so there's immediately no wars, no genocide, nothing bad is going on,

(08:43):

Nobody is thinking for themselves except for this one woman who for whatever reason was not infected with the virus.

(08:52):

And it's so interesting and it's kind of playing with this idea of she is this white woman from America that's like, well, we should be able to think for ourselves. And everyone else is like, but wars are gone. And it's really interesting. I don't know where the show's going to actually go, but it's playing with this idea of this capitalistic individuation. I'm my own self, so I should be able to do that. And I know this, it's this place of tension with I am a sovereign being and I am deeply interconnected to all other beings. And so what does agency look like with being responsible to the people I'm in relationship with, whether I know them or not,

Danielle (09:42):

What is agency? I think we honor other people by keeping short accounts. I don't think I've done a good job of that much in my life. I think it's more recent that I've done that. I think we honor other people by letting them know when we're actually find something joyful about what our encounter with them or pointing out something loving. And I think we honor our community when we make a clear yes or clear no or say I can't say yes or no. Why can I tell you yes or no at a later date when we speak for ourselves, I think we give into our community, we build a pattern of agency. And I think as therapists, I think sometimes we build the system where instead of promoting agency, we've taken it away.

Jenny (10:35):

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think I was just having a conversation with a supervisee about this recently. I who has heard a lot of people say, you shouldn't give your clients psychoeducation. You shouldn't give them these moments of information. And I was like, well, how gatekeeping is that? And they were having a hard time with, I've heard this, but this doesn't actually feel right. And I do think a lot of times this therapist, it's like this idea that I'm the professional, and so I'm going to keep all of this information siloed from you where I think it's ethical responsibility if we have information that would help things make more sense for our clients to educate them. And I often tell my clients in our first session, my job is to work myself out of a job. And unfortunately, I think that there's a lot in a lot of people in the therapy world who think it's their job to be someone's therapist forever. And I think I'm like, how do we start with, again, believing in someone's agency and ability to self-actualize and we just get to sort of steward that process and then let them go do whatever they're going to do.

Danielle (11:54):

I think that also speaks to can therapy change? I think the model I learned in graduate school has revolved a lot around childhood trauma, which is good. So glad I've been able to grow and learn some of those skills that might help me engage someone. I also think there's aspects I think of our society that are just missing in general, that feel necessary in a therapeutic relationship like coaching or talking from your own personal experience, being clear about it, but also saying like, Hey, in these years this has happened. I'm not prescribing this for you, but this is another experience. I think on one hand in grad school, you're invited to tell your story and know your story and deal with counter transference and transference and try to disseminate that in some sort of a blank way. That's not possible. We're coming in with our entire identity front and center. Yeah, those are just thoughts I have.

Jenny (12:59):

Yeah, I think that's so good. And it makes me think about what whiteness does to people, and I think a lot of times it puts on this cloak or this veneer of not our fullest truest selves. And I don't even think that white people are often conscious that that's what we're doing. I remember I am in this group where we're practicing what does it look like to be in our bodies in cross-racial experiences? And there's a black woman in my cohort that said, do you ever feel separate from your whiteness? Can you ever get a little bit of space from your whiteness? And I was like, honestly, I don't feel like I can. I feel like I'm like Jim Carrey in the mask, where the more I try to pull it off, the more it snaps back and it's like this crustacean that has encapsulated us. And so how do we break through with our humanity, with our messiness to these constraints that whiteness has put on us?

(14:20):

Oh, tomorrow. Oh my gosh. So I'm going to do a little bit of a timeline of Jenny's timeline, my emotional support timeline. I told Tamis, I was like, I can get rid of this if you don't think it's important, but I will tell you these are my emotional support timelines. And they were like, no, you can talk about 'em. So I'm just doing two slides on the timeline. I have dozens of slides as Danielle, but I'm just going to do two really looking at post civil rights movement through the early two thousands and what purity culture and Christian nationalism did to continue. What I'm talking about is the trope of white womanhood and how disembodied that is from this visceral self and organism that is our body. And to me is going to talk about essentially how hatred and fear and disgust of the black queer body is this projection of those feelings of fear, of shame, of guilt, of all of those things that are ugly or disavowed within the system of Christian nationalism, that it gets projected and put on to black bodies. And so how do we then engage the impact of our bodies from these systems in our different gendered and sexual and racial locations and socioeconomic locations and a million other intersectional ways? As you and Abby talked about the power flower and how many different parts of our identity are touched by systems of oppression and power

(16:11):

And how when we learn to move beyond binary and really make space for our own anger, our own fear, our own disgust, our own fill in the blank, then we are less likely to enable systems that project that on to other bodies. That's what we're going to be talking about, and I'm so excited.

Danielle (16:32):

Just that, just that NBD, how do you think about being in your body then on a screen? There's been a lot of debate about it after the pandemic. How do you think about that? Talking about something that's so intimate on a screen? How are you thinking about it?

Jenny (16:52):

Totally. I mean, we are on a screen, but we're never not in our bodies. And so I do think that there is something that is different about being in a room with other bodies. And I'm not going to pretend I know anything about energy or the relational field, but I know that I have had somatic work done on the screen where literally my practitioner will be like, okay, I'm touching your kidney right now and I will feel a hand on my kidney. And it's so wild. That probably sounds so bizarre, and I get it. It sounds bizarre to me too, but I've experienced that time and space really are relative, I think. And so there is something that we can still do in our shared relational space even if we're not in the same physical space.

(17:48):

I do think that for some bodies, that actually creates a little bit more safety where I can be with you, but I'm not with you. And so I know I can slam my computer shut, I can walk out of the room, I can do whatever I need to do, whether I actually do that or not. I think there sometimes can be a little bit of mobility that being on the screen gives us that our bodies might not feel if we are in a shared physical space together. And so I think there's value and there's difference to both. What about you?

Danielle (18:25):

Well, I used it a lot because I started working during the pandemic. So it was a lifeline to get clients and to work with clients. I have to remind myself to slow down a lot when I'm on the screen. I think it's easier to be more talkative or say more, et cetera, et cetera. So I think pacing, sometimes I take breaks to breathe. I used to have self-hate for that or self-criticism or the super ego SmackDown get body slammed. But no, I mean, I try to be down to earth who I would prefer to be and not to be different on screen. I don't know that that's a strategy, but it's the way I'm thinking about it.

Jenny (19:20):

As someone who has co-lead therapy spaces with you in person, I can say, I really appreciate your, and these things that feel unrushed and you just in the moment for me, a lot of times I'm like, oh yeah, we're just here. We don't have to rush to what's next. I think that's been such a really powerful thing I've gleaned from co-facilitating and holding space with you.

Danielle (19:51):

Oh, that's a sweet thing to say. So when you think about subverting supremacy in our practices, us as therapists or just in the world we are in, what's an area that you find yourself stuck in often if you're willing to share?

Jenny (20:12):

I think for me and a lot of the clients that I work with, it is that place of individualism. And this is, I think again, the therapy model is you come in, you talk about your story, talk about your family of origin, talk about your current relationships, and it becomes so insular. And there is of course things that we can talk about in our relationships, in our family, in our story. And it's not like those things happen in a, and I think it does a disservice, and especially for white female clients, I think it enables a real sense of agency when it's like, I'm going through the hardest thing that anyone's ever gone through. And it's like, open your eyes. Look at what the world is going through you, and we and us are so much more capable than white womanhood would want you to assume that you are. And so I think that a lot of times for white women, for a lot of my work is growing their capacity to feel their agency because I think that white patriarchal Christian capitalistic supremacy only progresses so long as white women perform being these damsels that need rescue and need help. And if we really truly owned our self-actualizing power, it would really topple the system, I believe.

Danielle (21:53):

Yeah, I mean, you see the shaking of the system with Renee, Nicole Goode. People don't know what to do with her. Of course, some people want to make her all bad, or the contortions they do to try to manipulate that video to say what they wanted to say. But the rattling for people that I've heard everywhere around her death and her murder, I think she was murdered in defense of her neighbors. And that's both terror inducing. And it's also like, wow, she believed in that she died for something she actually believed in.

Jenny (22:54):

Yeah. And I were talking about this as well in that of course we don't know, but I don't know that things would've played out the same way they played out if she wasn't clearly with a female partner. And I do think that heteronormativity had a part to play in that she was already subverting what she should be doing as a white woman by being with another woman. And I think that that is a really important conversation as well as where is queerness playing into these systems of oppression and these binary heteronormative systems. And this is my own theory with Renee, Nicole. Good. And with Alex, there is something about their final words where Nicole says, I'm not mad at you. And Alex says, are you okay? And my theory is that that is actually the moment where something snapped for these ice agents because they had their own projection on what these race traders were, and they probably dehumanized them. And so in this moment of their humanity intersecting with the projection that these agents had, I think that induced violence, not that they caused it or it was their

(24:33):

But I think that when our dehumanizing projections of people are interrupted with their humanity, we have a choice where we go, wait, you are not what I thought you were. Or we double down on the dehumanization. And I think that these were two examples of that collision of humanity and projection, and then the doubling down of violence and dehumanization

(25:07):

Yeah. It makes me think of, have you seen the sound of music?

(25:13):

So the young girl, she has this boyfriend that turns into a Nazi. There's this interaction towards the end of the film where he sees the family. He has this moment facing the dad, and he hasn't yet called in the other Nazis. And the dad says to him, you'll never be one of them.

(25:36):

And that was the moment that he snapped. And he called in the other guards. And I think it's making a point that there's something in these moments of humanity, calling to humanity is a really pivotal moment of are you going to let yourself be a human or are you going to double down in your allegiance to the systems of oppression? And so I think that what we're trying to invite with subverting supremacy is when we come to those moments, how do we choose humanity? How do we choose empathy? How do we choose kindness? And wait, I had this all wrong rather than a doubling down of violence. I don't know. Those are my thoughts. What do you think? Well,

Danielle (26:27):

I hadn't thought about that, but I do know that moment in sound of music, and that feels true to me, or it feels like, where do you belong? A question of where do you belong? And in the case of Alex and Nicole, I mean, in some sense the agents already knew they didn't belong with them, but to change this. But on the other hand, it feels like, yeah, maybe it is true. It just set off those alarm bells or just said like, oh, they're not one of us. Something like that.

(27:19):

It's a pretty intense thought. Yeah. My friend that's a pastor there in Minneapolis put out a video with Jen Hatmaker yesterday, and I watched the Instagram live of it this morning, and she talked about how she came home from the protest, and there were men all over her yard, in the neighbor's yard with machine guns. And she said they were trying to block her in, and they came up to her car and they had taken a picture of her license plate, and they're like, roll down your window. And she's like, why? And they're like, I gave you an order. She's like, but why? And then they took a picture of her face and they're like, now you have us in your database. And she's like, I'm not rolling down my window. Because when the last person did that, you shot him in the face

(28:03):

And she said they got out of their car and parked. And the neighbor who, I dunno why they were harassing her neighbor, she described him as a white male, but he was standing there and he was yelling at them to leave. And she said, at this time, there was like 50 neighbors out, like 50 people out on the street. And the ice van stopped, ran back, tackled him, slammed his face into the ice, beat him up, and then threw him in the back of the car and then dropped him off at the hospital or released him or something. And he had to go get wound care. And I guess just thinking about that, just the mere presence of white people that don't fit. I wonder if it's just the mere presence.

Jenny (28:59):

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think part of it is exposing the illusion of whiteness and this counterfeit collaboration that is supposed to mean based on melanin, that if you have this lack of melanin, this is how you're supposed to perform. And I'm really grateful that we have people with less melanin going, no, I would not that we want to die, but if my choice is to die or to give up my soul, I don't want to give up my soul.

(29:50):

I feel my heart pounding. It's scary. And I think there's also grief in the people I love that are choosing to not have a soul right now, to not allow space for their soul that are choosing to go into numbness and to bearing their head in the sand and to saying, we just need to have law and order. And I believe that they were made for so much more than that.

(30:46):

It is painful. I mean, it doesn't go

(30:55):

No, no. I've been watching a lot of sad movies lately because they helped me cry. One of the things that I loved when I was in Uganda was there was people who were professional whalers

(31:12):

They would be hired to come into funerals or ceremonies and just wail and grieve and move the group into a collective catharsis. And I really think our bodies need catharsis right now because there's so much we're taking in. There's so much we're moving through. And I think this is part of the system of white Christian supremacy, is that it has removed us from cultural practices of making guttural sounds together, of riving together, of dancing and shaking and screaming, and these things that I think our bodies really need individually and collectively. What are you doing in your body that feels even like 2% supportive with what we're navigating?

Danielle (32:08):

I don't know. I honestly, I've had a bad week or bad couple weeks, but I think I try to eat food that I know will taste good. That seems really silly, but I'm not eating anything I don't like.

(32:27):

That. Yeah, that's one thing. Yesterday I had a chance to go work out at 12 like I do every day, and I just noticed I was too fatigued, and so I just canceled. I called it in and ate lunch with someone and just, I didn't talk much, but they had a lot to say. So that was fine with me, hung out with someone. So I think, I don't know, I guess it was a hitting two needs for me, human face-to-face connection and also just actual food that tastes good to me.

(33:09):

Yeah. Well, so you're going to put that Maslow resource need in the chat or in the comments. Are you going to send it to me so I can put it in the

(33:21):

And then if people want to sign up for tomorrow and listen to you and Tamis, is that still a possibility?

Jenny (33:26):

It is, yeah. They can sign up, I think, until it's starting. So I don't know for sure. You should sign up for today, just by today, just in case. Yeah, I'll send you that link too.

 

 

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.