Beyond Western Psychology: Decolonizing Mental Health Through Testimony Therapy with Dr. Makungu Akinyela (313)

0:01Sue Marriott: A big part of colonialism and coloniality is this idea, as my grandmama said, there's a lot of black folk who believe that the white man's ice is always colder, right? That there's nothing that black people have to offer or have offered into the world that is significant. That's a part of the mental health problem. If you grow up in a world where you believe that black people have nothing significant to contribute to the world, there's nothing that black people have to offer you or to give you that is of significance. That's a huge mental health barrier, that ongoing sense of inferiority that it creates in the world, which is one of the things that when people come to us, again, when spaces are safe, we hear these things and we see these things.

0:46Sue Marriott: So it tells us what we can work on. But again, for those of us who are professionals, even for professionals, for therapists, it gets scary. The idea that I can look at my own ancestors and my own grandmothers and grandfathers take their customs and traditions, which are often ridiculed. The way we talk, the way we act, the way we sing. But I can take that and I can codify it and I can give it back to the people as a healing instrument. Welcome to Therapist Uncensored. Building on decades of professional experience, this podcast tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more in an honest way that's helpful in healing humans.

1:28Sue Marriott: Your session begins now with Dr. Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott.

1:39Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Hey everybody, welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. It is my delight and honor to bring you an incredible psychologist and scholar and activist, Dr. Makunga Ekiniela. He is based in Atlanta, as I said, as a psychologist, as associate professor of Georgia State. But he has spent the last 25 years developing an African-centric approach to healing that he describes as testimony therapy that I cannot wait to learn more about. Well, his new book is called Testimony Therapy, Decolonizing Mental Health for Black Therapists and Clients. And what I would say is, and white therapists and all of us that are impacted by colonialization and, you know, systematic racism, it's everywhere.

2:29Dr. Makungu Akinyela: So how about if we get started? Well, first of all, can you just describe yourself briefly beyond your bio so people can kind of get a feel for you?

2:37Sue Marriott: Thank you for inviting me on the podcast here. As you said, my name is Makungu Akinyele. I am a therapist, but I'm a whole lot more. I probably write in this part of my life. I'm trying to be a pretty good husband to my good friend and comrade Chingangji. We've been together for almost 50 years. I tried to be a pretty good dad. And now I'm trying to be a pretty good grandfather with five grandkids, you know, that we have to kind of travel over to get to all their events and things like that. And probably what defines me most is that for the last 50 years, from the time I was in high school, I was a social justice activist.

3:20Sue Marriott: And even though I'm in the third quarter of my life now, I still kind of feel like that 18-year-old that gets outraged when things aren't right and stands up.

3:30Dr. Makungu Akinyela: There's a lot, a lot to be outraged about, a lot of fists to be shaken. I was curious because you also came up within, so you've been aware of these issues your whole life, but you also went through kind of the Western educational system, particularly I'm thinking about therapy and models of mental health. Did you kind of know all along what was missing or what did you, you know, were you indoctrinated and then sort of woke up?

4:00Sue Marriott: I think from the time I started my training as a therapist, yes, I did. If you read the book, you know that I've got a whole section of my book about two of the shapers of my intellectual life, Frans Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois. I was pushed to read Frans Fanon, for instance, who is called the, basically the, he wrote the Bible of decolonial work and activity, but he was also a psychiatrist who was very committed to mental health work. And when I was a freshman in college, you know, one of the first things that people pushed into my hands as an activist was Fanon's last book, The Wretched of the Earth.

4:41Sue Marriott: And that kind of clicked the spark. I said, wow, you know, this kind of mental health thing and revolution. Wow. This is kind of cool. That's my 18 year old self. Even though, you know, Fanon was difficult reading back then, there was something that really stuck with me that I could give service to social justice, to fighting for people's freedom by also helping people find emotional and mental balance. That was kind of the spark. By the time I went back to graduate school and began studying to be a therapist, I was already a committed activist. I already had developed or was developing a worldview of the importance of culture and decolonized culture in people's lives.

5:29Sue Marriott: So I'm reading and then I was really blessed to be in a space where I found some amazing mentors who are my professors who helped me to sharpen those ideas. People like Antonia Darder, who was one of the students of Paolo Freire. And Antonia, who is still a great friend of mine, is a professor emeritus at the University in California. Barbara Richardson, who was a social worker, but who trained me in family therapy and gave me a real appreciation for what she back then called old fashioned social work. but also understood she recruited me into the program because she saw a black man walking down the hallways and got excited that a black man wanted to, was curious about coming back into school for mental health work.

6:23Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Well, I can see why she would. And just to set a little bit of context, too, for folks listening that aren't familiar with this need for revolution, which hopefully if you're a listener of our podcast, this will not be news to you. and also we maybe as a way to focus some of our conversation you know we talk a lot about attachment and relational neuroscience and those kinds of things and so again this will be familiar to most of you but when you think about your teachers of attachment they are going to be white western european men mostly even though we certainly have some great researchers in there that are women as well but the idea being that there's things left out everybody talks about attachment being universal, which on one level it is when you're just talking about the body and defenses, but on another level, basically it is white people studying white people, roughly, from a Western model that we have applied egregiously, is that the right word, I say to the scholar.

7:26Dr. Makungu Akinyela: So for the last probably year and a half, two years, I've been actively seeking out these outside voices that have been excluded or just looked over, but I think also intentionally excluded. So this conversation is sitting in a body of the importance of, because we don't know what we don't know. And so I'm just talking to right now to the white therapist. It's like, we just think that you're supposed to bring somebody in individually, talk to them, you know. So in sitting with you, I would love for you to help us understand what we're missing, what we're getting wrong, and what's being excluded.

8:00Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Maybe using an attachment lens if that's comfortable to you, but not necessarily. Yeah. How would you start?

8:07Sue Marriott: Well, I think the most important thing is that a psychology of liberation or a psychology of oppression, we say that Fanon was kind of developed the psychology of oppression, assumes what Fanon called sociogenesis of all mental health problems. In other words, unlike particularly if I'm second generation family therapist trained, right? Coming to school in the 80s. And even back then, we were still very much influenced by psychoanalysis. And the idea that all mental health problems starts somewhere in the brain, that it's internal state psychology. And I'm talking like this because I know that you've got therapists who listen in.

8:53Sue Marriott: So I know y 'all know what I'm talking about, right? But that all these mental health problems begin in the brain. What Fanon argued and other psychology of oppression therapists would argue is that even when that's true, and it's not always true, but even when that's true, how that mental health problem looks is shaped by the social context that it's in. So what Fanon calls the sociogenesis. And when the social context of a person's life is dominated by social, political, economic and cultural exploitation, which is what colonization is. Right. When the very nature of your life is shaped by efforts to convince you that there's something not quite up to snuff about your existence as compared to the existence of people who are in power, then that even shapes the way the mental health problem looks.

9:57Sue Marriott: That doesn't deny that sometimes, yes, there are distortions in the brain that make thinking difficult, that shift the way we think. But it's exploded by the social cultural context of that. We say 2000, 3000 years ago, what we today call schizophrenia looked like prophecy. It looked like shamanism and it worked quite well as prophecy and shamanism. You know, when people heard voices. Right. And they ascribe those voices to the gods, you know, or to God. Right. And they worked and lived with those voices. But because of the social context today. And so what that means for us is that when I talk about testimony therapy, the question that I have to ask myself and that I have to assume is, how are these problems that people are coming to me with shaped by their social, political, cultural context?

10:56Sue Marriott: Right. How does what in the book I call the fact of their blackness when I'm dealing with black people, how does the fact of their blackness modify how they walk and live in the world when they're constantly being aware of their blackness in every situation, even when it's not loudly spoken? I don't know if that makes sense or not.

11:18Dr. Makungu Akinyela: I think it makes total sense. And I think part of the argument is that there's harm done when you are not aware of these forces that are continuing to shape the experience of any marginalized person. And so by focusing on the individual can amplify the pathology so that, again, no matter your race, if you begin to incorporate a social context. And you talk about this idea of double consciousness. I know that I think that you started you didn't refer to it before, but I think it was Du Bois, right?

11:51Sue Marriott: Du Bois. It sets Du Bois' idea of double consciousness.

11:54Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Yeah. Why don't you speak a little bit to that? Because I found that really powerful.

11:58Sue Marriott: Yeah. Well, W.E.B. Du Bois, as I said, he and Frantz Fanon are kind of my theoretical muses. Du Bois was probably one of the most brilliant minds of both the 19th and the 20th century. He wrote his first book in 1903. He died in 1964, and he was one of the founders of the NAACP. He was one of the founders of the modern movement for Pan-Africanism and the unification of Africa. And Du Bois in 1903, as a young man, about 24, 25 years old, wrote a book called The Souls of Black Folk. And in that book, he describes the experience of blackness, of being a black person living in America at that time in the early 19th century.

12:48Sue Marriott: And he says it's like having two warring souls, a Negro soul and what he calls an American soul, a white soul, and both contending for dominance within one what he calls one black body. and what that double consciousness, he says, is that experience. And if you haven't gone through it, it would be hard to understand. But being a black person, but looking into the mirror and wishing that your hair was just a little bit straighter, wishing that your nose was just a little bit more narrow, that your lips didn't quite poke out so far. And also believing on some level, like my grandmama used to make a joke, the white man's ice is always colder.

13:32Dr. Makungu Akinyela: I read that. I read that. I was going to ask you about that. Yep.

13:35Sue Marriott: And so Du Bois describes that experience of constantly walking around in that way where you've got these two senses. It doesn't mean that we hate ourselves for being black, but sometimes we find ourselves agreeing with racism and white supremacy about the innate inferiority of ourselves. That's that battle that goes on in the mind and the brain. And that feeling of double consciousness, having two minds at one time, I call it walking in the fact of your blackness, consciously aware of your blackness and having that at the always at the back of your mind when we're in public spaces. And so what is it like to live a life like that?

14:19Sue Marriott: When I speak to black audiences, to my classes at the university or to just the people in the street, black people inherently understand immediately that experience when you describe double consciousness. So it's something that exists and people bring it into the therapy room. They may not talk about it, but it shapes the way relationships are built or not built. Right. The way you think about your relationships with the other. I say in the book that because of that double consciousness and another term that's used from Fanon, Fanon talks that calls it the zone of non-being. Because of that, it becomes even difficult for colonized people to even have normal I-thou relationships.

15:08Sue Marriott: Right. If you ever took philosophy. Right. There's the I and the thou. It's that relationship between human beings. There's me and there's the other who I recognize as someone who is equal to me. But because of double consciousness, people walk around constantly and there's always a third factor in between every relationship. So consequently, you'll often hear just normal conversations, black people describing or talking to each other. And they'll talk about another person and say, well, you know, that guy, he's dark skinned it, but he's kind of cute. You hear that part? You know, he's skinned, but he's kind of cute.

15:46Sue Marriott: The third person now has walked into our relationship. And that third person is whiteness, which says that I'm judging this person based upon their relationship to whiteness. Oh, you know that girl, you know, she's light skinned, but she kind of stupid, you know. And so there's always that third person that's there. And these are everyday conversations that come up not just between black people, but between other brown people. Right. Because colonialism, white supremacy has shaped the way we even understand ourselves in terms of our color, our skin tone. And so consequently, it creates conditions even within communities, within the black community.

16:27Sue Marriott: We talk about colorism. It's the internalized racism where we even judge ourselves based on color. So what does that mean for me as a therapist? If a very fair skinned black person walks into my room, I need to be thinking, how is my relationship with this person being shaped by that? If a person who is darker than me comes into the room and is having conversations with me, I need to be thinking, how is colorism shaping the way we understand each other, the way we're talking to each other? I think, again, in the book, I give the example of sitting in a session with a supervisee who was a young woman who was very dark skinned and having to have conversations about, well, what does that mean for her as she's relating to people who come into the therapy room to talk to her?

17:14Sue Marriott: These are issues that, you know, which moves beyond cultural humility, right? It's understanding the impact of colonization, which results in what in the book I call coloniality, which is the emotional mental impact of colonization. It's not just the reality of economic, social, and political oppression, but that has emotional and mental impact on people's lives. People are made to feel inferior because of just everyday activities and lived experiences in their lives.

17:50Dr. Makungu Akinyela: The drip and the flood. Yeah, I appreciate the internalization of the oppressor and that that becomes some part of the battle of selfhood. And you also in the book had an example, I think it was your first case example of Clarissa talking about, it's just another example of this, where she's attributing, she hates black men, she said. But you point out that, well, actually, there's gender dynamics. There's all these systematic dynamics that get reduced to race. Mm hmm.

18:21Sue Marriott: And again, that's the impact of coloniality, where she had a series of experiences in her life that I would say were shaped by the reality of patriarchy, shaped by sexism. But she understood those experiences as being about the blackness of those men who harmed her in her life. Right. As if men from all kinds of societies don't do harmful things to women in their lives because of the same things, because of patriarchy, because of sexism. But for her, it was the blackness of those men that defined the harm. And so for her is I hate black men. And again, these are things that we very would we would commonly hear if we've got a safe space in our therapy rooms, conversations coming from colonized people where their experiences are racialized.

19:16Sue Marriott: And so it's quite common to hear black men who define all of their dating problems to the blackness of the women they were dating. And so that becomes the reason that they choose to date white women or to date anybody other than a black woman, because their experiences have been reduced to racial problems. And this is the message of coloniality, that the problem is your blackness. Now, of course, the disorienting part of that is if you're a Black person who sees that Black people are the problem, what does that say about you?

19:50Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Totally. You've always got to answer that question. I'm also just thinking in terms of the, yeah, again, the internalization of it. And there's this invisibility that it's so pervasive. When you earlier were talking about the I-thou relationship. when you're struggling and the other person isn't recognizing you as a thou, then that's part of what's being internalized. Like if you don't exist, so if a white person can't see you, then that gets embedded as well.

20:22Sue Marriott: And that's Fanon's zone of non-being. Fanon says that there's this zone of non-being where colonized people know that we exist. We're basically just footnotes to the history of the colonizer. We're footnotes. We're no different than furniture. Right. The woman who wrote the book Out of Africa, I forget her name, but she was, you know, very, very famous. Fosse.

20:45Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Yeah.

20:47Sue Marriott: You know, and of course, they made that great movie a few years ago, Out of Africa. But they took out all those parts. She basically describes the black people around her in Africa as basically the same as she's describing the goats and dogs. And we see that in a lot of so-called travel literature about Africa, where people are basically referred to as just kind of part of the setting. And of course, the explorer or the adventurer, their life is centered as if it's normal for them to be there. And all those other human beings are just, if we look at, you know, if you go today and look at a magazine to take a trip to Africa, the first thing you're going to see are pictures of lions, giraffes, buffalo.

21:30Sue Marriott: You're never going to see the people who are there. And so what colonialism does is it does not recognize the colonizer as human. In one chapter of the book, I say that helps us understand the why of why a police officer can sit on a black man's neck for nine minutes straight, smiling as people plead for that man's life. And we wonder, well, how could you do that? That would explain why we can see children being bombed and hurt and harmed. And nobody, it's just a thing, you know, it's about that. Because if colonized people are not seen as human, now, that's the political reality. What's the mental health and the emotional reality?

22:14Sue Marriott: When you kind of know that that's the truth, you know that for the most part, you are not recognized or seen.

22:21Dr. Makungu Akinyela: If somebody could knee on your neck and have that happen publicly and have nothing happen.

22:27Sue Marriott: Yeah, absolutely. And what does it mean when you walk around, even if that's not the upfront thought in your mind, somewhere in the back of your mind, you know, every black person knows somewhere in the back of their mind, if they're driving on a dark street and some blue lights pop up, that their life is about that close. Now, that doesn't mean they say it out loud, but they realize that there's a difference in those blue lights popping up for them and the blue lights popping up for somebody else. And so be quiet because you realize that you're not quite seen as human. And so your life does not necessarily value or have as much meaning as the other person.

23:05Sue Marriott: And once again, that's the political reality. What is the emotional mental health reality when you're walking around with those thoughts? Now, there's some people who would say, well, the problem is you've got those thoughts. The problem is that those thoughts in themselves are unrealistic. Back in the 70s, there were thousands of black men being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. They even developed a name for it, defensive psychosis. I may be slightly off on the name or the term there. But the idea was that you had all these black men, particularly coming back from the war in Vietnam and whatnot, who were saying that white people were out to get them.

23:46Sue Marriott: And they said, obviously, there must be something wrong with these people to believe that there's a problem. Now, we won't talk about the fact that this is at the middle of the time when Dr. King had just been killed. Malcolm X had just been killed. There were urban rebellions all over the United States. There were cases of police attacking people all over. People were living in poverty. Jim Crow was just still hanging on by a thread. Right. But when these black men complained and said that they had this feeling that there was a that white people had a problem with them. Protest psychosis. This is what it was called.

24:23Sue Marriott: They were labeled as having a protest psychosis. Right. Which is today we would call paranoid schizophrenia. And so even the mental health institution itself organizes itself right to basically gaslight us when we try to speak our experience. So the whole point of testimony therapy is this. What if we can create a safe place where people can feel comfortable to speak their reality and their truth, to have it validated, but also to seek ways of finding some emotional and mental balance that's culturally authentic and specific to what the oppressed person's need is, if that makes sense.

25:07Dr. Makungu Akinyela: It makes total sense. And one of the things I really enjoyed about the book, so part of what I think about kinship and the difference, again, if I just go back to attachment for a minute, going from the dyad to community and communal, and even thinking in terms of what is your resources to help you have a secure base if you think of ancestors. When we got on, is that an ancestor on your wall behind you?

25:33Sue Marriott: Yes, that's my latest ancestor. That's my mom who passed away about a little over a year ago. And then, you know, I've got the rest of my ancestors over here to my left.

25:45Dr. Makungu Akinyela: So it's really cultivating this much wider base for security. So, yeah, say anything else about ancestors and attachment figures over time?

25:54Sue Marriott: The question of ancestorship, I believe, is very important to Black people in our culture. In terms of, we see it in naming patterns. We see it in terms of how people understand, you know, if you pay attention, you'll hear that usually when there are problems, there's lots of conversations about ancestors amongst black people. That becomes important, but it also speaks to the sense of the meaning of identity. I think within the context of black people's culture, one of the reasons that I trained as a family therapist was because of systems theory. And because it saw the idea that the so-called client is not just the individual, but it's the system, which relates very well with my idea of from an African centered perspective, who the person is.

26:42Sue Marriott: Now, we know that from a European perspective and in Western psychology, that the idea of the individual is at the very foundation of Western psychology. Right. Beginning with Descartes. I think, therefore, I am. We learned that in Philosophy 101, right? The reason I know I exist is because I have thoughts in my head which inform me of my existence. And particularly when I was going through training as a therapist, the ultimate goal that we had with working with people in therapy, even with families, was helping people with what? Healthy individuation. Was helping people set healthy boundaries.

27:21Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Yeah, you go from dependency to independence. Absolutely.

27:25Sue Marriott: That was our goal, right? That's how most of us, particularly coming up in the 70s, the 80s, were trained. On the other hand, what I ask with testimony therapy is, wow, what if there's another cultural way of understanding the person? And absolutely there is because I grew up with that other cultural understanding, right? The antecedent to Descartes' I think, therefore I am, would be the African concept of what's called in Zulu and also from South Africa, Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Gamuntu and Gabantu. A person is a person because of people, which is a radically different idea than Descartes' I think, therefore I am.

28:11Sue Marriott: I know I exist because I see myself in your eyes. What that suggests that the person from an African centered perspective doesn't exist inside each of our heads as voices, but exists in the relationship between the I and the thou. That's where the person exists. And again, if you pay close attention to conversations, to ways of being, to style amongst black people, not only in the Americas, but I believe throughout the world, even the way we speak, we speak in terms of us and we. We speak in terms of the importance of what are we going to do. Now, colonialism has meant that sometimes that gets distorted and it's played out in unhealthy ways.

29:04Sue Marriott: But to understand that what that means from an African-centered mental health perspective, the ultimate aim of our work is not to help people individuate and set up these strict boundaries of individualism, but to help people have healthy, balanced relationship with their community. It's a communitarian approach where we're trying to help people find healthy balance in relationship because that's where we feel most human and most is ourselves in that cultural context.

29:50Dr. Makungu Akinyela: I get asked a lot about mental health resources. And honestly, access is often the biggest barrier people face, whether it's related to transportation, cost, or even the cultural stigmas of seeking help. So I want to tell you about something that removes a lot of those barriers, and that's Talkspace. Talkspace is a highly rated online therapy platform, and it does it really well. You get matched with a licensed therapist or psychiatrist within 48 hours. You can access both on the same platform, and you can do sessions from home. You can even text your therapist between appointments, and what's important, it is a licensed therapist responding to you, not an AI.

30:29Dr. Makungu Akinyela: I do a lot of my own individual and couples work online, and I find it generally extremely powerful. People are immediately comfortable in their own space. I love working with couples, for example, as they sit with each other in their own home. And then after the session, they don't have to immediately separate and go their own ways from the office. They can be together and absorb what we've gone through. Talkspace provides therapy for individuals, couples, LGBTQIA plus folks, veterans, teens. They partner with research to make it evidence-based. So Talkspace makes getting the help you need easy, accessible, and affordable.

31:11Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Plus, most insured members have$0 copay. So as a listener of this podcast, you get$80 off your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. That's S-P-A-C-E-8-O to match with a licensed therapist today. So go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. All right, let's jump back in.

31:46Dr. Makungu Akinyela: You're beginning now to speak to the testimony part, which is the, like, what actually happens in the session or the importance of orality and co-construction. Yes.

31:57Sue Marriott: Testimony therapy, I say, is a part of because I've been a part for years now of the narrative therapy community, little in. Right. I was first introduced to the narrative therapy community actually back in the 20th century, the late 1990s, where I met Stephen Madigan from Canada. and we hit it off really well. And he invited me to Canada. And then from there, I was invited to show some of my ideas in Australia with Michael White at the Dulwich Center. And since that time, we've been really fast allies and colleagues from the Dulwich Center, from folks in Toronto and and Canada with Stephen. And it began the dialogue to help me sharpen my ideas.

32:49Sue Marriott: And so testimony therapy is a storytelling therapy. So therefore, it's a narrative therapy. I agree with Michael White and other narrative therapists that we human beings share the meaning of our lives and the stories that we tell about each other. The big question that I ask, and this is the cultural question is, is there a difference between the way Westerners tell stories and the way colonized people, Africans in this sense, and other colonized people tell stories? Does the story look different and mean something different in our cultural context? When Michael White and David Epstein wrote their first papers and books on narrative therapy, particularly Michael focused on the idea that the metaphor for narrative therapy was the text.

33:38Sue Marriott: He says the therapist is like the reader and the person who comes for help is like the text that they're reading. There's all kinds of other literary metaphors within narrative therapy for folks who are familiar with narrative, right? We turn over a new leaf. We reauthor our lives.

33:54Dr. Makungu Akinyela: You know, we work to update the story.

33:56Sue Marriott: There you go. How do we help people tell the stories of their lives?

34:00Dr. Makungu Akinyela: To rewrite it for themselves.

34:02Sue Marriott: And find the contradictions to what narrative therapy calls the thin telling of the story. That's our work. What if you come from a culture which is not defined by literacy and where those metaphors don't necessarily work, but you still tell stories? We Africans, right, whether in the Americas or the rest of the African diaspora, we ground ourselves in orality. OK, in academics these days is called orature. You know, in other words, one of the things we know is that orality, oral traditions are just as significant to understanding and documenting things as literacy is. Right. Sometimes even more so.

34:52Sue Marriott: To say that we are grounded in orality more than literacy does not mean that we don't read. It means that orality shapes the way we think, the way we experience the stories that we tell. So, for instance, for those people who are really into literature, if you think about some of the great black writers like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin. Their stories are, yes, in writing and on paper, but they're grounded in the rich orality and storytelling ways of the black community. And those storytelling ways are important because they're not individualized with black storytelling. And this is where the term testimony comes in.

35:36Sue Marriott: There's the storyteller and there's the witness. Both of those are very important to how that story gets told. And the witness gives what we call there's a call and response. Amen. There you go. And it's the returning. It's in that call and response of the storytelling that the story gets constructed. That becomes really important in terms of understanding, you know, how people who tell stories orally, how they construct the story. Right. Oftentimes, unlike in a book, an orally told story is not linear. It might take a couple of circles around the corner before it gets to a point. You know, and if we can help people shape and tell their stories, understanding those ideas of a reality, it becomes important.

36:30Sue Marriott: And the idea that it's socially constructed. In other words, the story is not just one person's story. It's a shared story.

36:38Dr. Makungu Akinyela: And it's not linear. It's not a beginning, middle, end.

36:40Sue Marriott: Exactly. But that means also for me, the work of doing therapy is ritualistic work. It's a ritual that we engage in with people. It's also even if there's only one person in the room, it's communitarian work, which means that it's relational. Right. We bring our ancestors in. So looking at the shame that you're feeling right now as you tell me this story. Who in your family would tell you straight up that that's BS, that you have nothing to be ashamed of? Who in your family would would tell me some stories about the amazing things that you have done in your life that would contradict what you're telling me now?

37:25Sue Marriott: Bring those other family members in, bring those ancestors in to also tell the story. Well, I don't know who would who would tell that. OK, if you did know, who do you think would whose voice would show up? What would happen if you just listened quietly for a few seconds? What voice do you think would show up right now? To invite those people into the room so that even with an individual, it's not an individual conversation. It's assuming that there's a community.

37:54Dr. Makungu Akinyela: And you're not just talking about their family of origin or even their grandparents. When you talk about ancestors, ancestors can be anybody, anything, right, in relationship.

38:06Sue Marriott: If I'm asking, you know, about a family, I have to be careful. You know, what was it like growing up in your family? Or sometimes I have to say, what was it like growing up in your household? Because, again, just in the context of black culture, what was it like growing up in your family? Well, there was my grandmama and there was my granddaddy. And, you know, there's all those people that we're going to talk about. Because family doesn't necessarily mean the same thing from a non-Western context, which is the language that we learned. Right. Even as I was being trained as a family therapist, it was really to be a therapist for what the nuclear family.

38:44Sue Marriott: But I have to know that family is much broader than that. And it both in space and in time, as you said, it's it's not just the living. It's also those who came before us whose wisdom can be brought in to understand the experiences that a person is going through. Does that make sense?

39:02Dr. Makungu Akinyela: It really does. And I'll tell you something that was in the book that helped me get some of this. Like I can hear the call and response. Like I understand that and the rhythm and the beat. But when you use the example of President Obama's speech, I think, would you mind sharing that again if it's on top of mind? Because I thought it was such a great, helpful way of explaining what you mean.

39:27Sue Marriott: Well, the main story is if people remember the DNC. And again, the point that we're talking about is the power of NOMO. Nomo. In the book, we talk about orality in the African context. We say there's an idea that we call Nomo. Nomo is the creative power of the spoken word, that words are not just words. Words have significance and they shape our reality. I say, you know, as kind of an old leftist, I'm not a gung ho President Obama fan. You know, I'm sorry for those people out there who really like President Obama, you know, but he is a master. of the Black oral tradition. In the book, I ask people to remember his speech at the DNC, at the National Conference.

40:13Sue Marriott: And he gets up and he begins talking about number 47. And he describes him coming down the so-called golden stair. And he talks about how he gets really caught up on the size of things. And as President Obama is explaining this, he kind of uses a hand to just articulate what he's talking about. And he talks about how he's, and then he uses his other hand to kind of talk about, he talks about how he's really caught up on the size of things. And about that time, President Obama takes both of his hands and he kind of sets them a few inches apart and glances down at them as if he's looking at something being measured.

40:59Sue Marriott: And then he kind of shortens the space between his hands and the whole audience just cracks up. Why? Because through the ritual of NOMO, the creative power of the spoken word, what President Obama has done is he's drawn people into a communal experience and he has gotten them to agree that how ridiculous it is that this man is so caught up in the size of his penis, right? Without saying those words at all, without saying anything, but in black linguistics, we say that he was what we call signifying. It's signification. Without saying things, you say things. Without giving meaning, the meaning becomes self-evident.

41:46Sue Marriott: It's because the communication is not just through the words we speak that orality is not just in words. It's also in our body. It's in our body. It's in the rhythm and the beat of the speech that we make is in the tones that we set. I would say that if you're really trying to understand the culture of people who are grounded in orality, you have to understand that storytelling is about more than just the words that you might hear. It's about all those things together.

42:15Dr. Makungu Akinyela: It makes me think of Maya Angelou. It's not just the words, it's the beat. It's the pacing. And like you said, one of the things that was so powerful about your example there is that he was talking about crowd size and he exaggerates crowd size. And then that's when he squeezes his hands together. Like first you're thinking the crowds aren't quite as big as he thinks. And then, yeah, then you fill it in with this other image. But it was more of like that there's a pointing towards or a circularity or that had he come out angry and just talking more linear, making his points in a court of law, you know, that it would have been much, much less powerful.

42:53Dr. Makungu Akinyela: And so you're amplifying like, yeah. So if we keep grounding this, then let's go back to in-session and testimony therapy. What are also just a couple more of the differences from just your straight Western ideology?

43:07Sue Marriott: I think, you know, understanding the nature of personhood that becomes important, the importance of community as our goal of balanced community is the goal that we're seeking out. Understanding, I think, even some of the questions. I talk about using problematizing questions, using bridging questions, which helps us set up the rhythm and the beat of a conversation. And I think to that, probably both of those ideas are grounded in what I call the self of the therapist. I know a lot of people have probably heard that term, you know, the therapist's use of self. For me, that's a very serious thing in that, and when I'm working with young therapists, the importance of being self-aware.

43:54Sue Marriott: In the book, I think I talk about supposedly in ancient Kemet Egypt, when you would go into the temples over the top of it, there's a saying that says, man, know thyself. The importance of knowing yourself. So I talk about the importance for us as testimony therapists of being very self-aware, asking ourselves questions like questions about our own sense of gender, our own sense of class, our own sense of our sexuality, our own understanding of our family relationships, right? Asking ourselves those kinds of questions and then being aware of our own bodies, for instance, because once again, in oral tradition, conversation is not just about the words.

44:39Sue Marriott: I want you to think about if you're really a person who's really into the oral tradition and oral ways of storytelling, and you come into a space where a person just kind of sits quietly and talks to you in this way, and they keep this totally blank face, which might look very professional. But it also means, again, understanding that these are skills that we're developing as therapists, therapist dealing with the therapist use of self. I use my body as a, as an instrument in the work, which means that I need to be aware of things like what do my facial expressions look like, right? And can I use those facial expressions?

45:18Sue Marriott: Does that also mediate the rhythm and the beat of the conversation? How is my body used to, how do I attend to a person so that they know that, wow, this person is really tuned in here. This person is interested, right? Sometimes how How do I express my understanding and experience of a person's emotional place or emotional state? Right. Is it OK for me to sometimes say, wow, that sounds really sad to me. I'm wondering if it sounds that way to you. Understanding that I'm using my own emotional messages, signals. I teach young therapists, which I think a lot of young therapists are constantly censoring themselves because they keep trying to go back to the cognitive behavioral workbook.

46:03Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Right. And we're scared of getting it wrong.

46:05Sue Marriott: Right. And so, you know, some thought, some crazy thought comes up in your head. Right. But oftentimes those thoughts can be a part of that might be an indicator. Wow. Where things are. Wow. You know, as you're listening to that story and you get a sense of fearfulness. Right. Finding ways to ask the question so that that can be brought out. Wow. wow, you know, as you were talking, it just felt really scary to me as you were telling that story, but you were smiling. Was it just in my head or was that scary to you when you were going through that? Or was it as funny as that smile says? Can you tell me that?

46:46Sue Marriott: Right. Understanding, wow, I had this thought of scariness. Wow. Can I say that? Yeah. You can ask that question, right? But paying attention to yourself becomes an important thing.

46:57Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Can I offer an example that might add to this? I think from my experience, there's a group that I have that's on Zoom. And it's mostly white, but not entirely. But there's a particular person that when she comes on, she's black. And she goes, I have to sit up straight. And I have to get real serious. And I feel like my mama would be real happy with how I'm behaving right now. Because all of a sudden, I'm with all these white people who are so serious. And then having to learn, that's not a criticism. That's actually her bringing herself in. And it's actually really, really important. And it's been a wonderful learning experience about like, yeah, what is this uptight European, Western?

47:36Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Like we have to look really smart and compete with each other and stuff versus this being together. Does that kind of capture some of what you mean by the physicality?

47:46Sue Marriott: Absolutely. Because once again, orality is not just words. It's our bodies. And again, when you're in safe spaces, it's quite common to hear black people who come to us for support and help talk about past experiences. Yeah, I tried this white therapist, but right. They never said anything to me or all they did was sat there or, you know. And again, there's there's a balance to this for young therapists. This does not mean that we lose control of ourselves and that we make ourselves the center of the conversation. There's still a skill here that when we talk about testimony therapy, right, there's a skill here.

48:27Sue Marriott: But again, this goes back to at the heart of the work that I've been doing over the last years. What Western psychology has done for over a century has dipped into the well of Western culture, mythology, folklore and codified it. When we think about some of the most revered dead white men from Freud to Adler to all those others, what is Freud's basic idea of the personality, the ego and the superego? What's it grounded in? It's grounded in Western folklore, Greek mythology. Right. He's taken those ideas and codified it. What I say is that we colonized people can listen to the voices of our grandparents, our ancestors, those traditions that they had.

49:21Sue Marriott: we can understand the natural way of being in the world that our people had. And then we, with also our understanding of mental health and that work, we can codify those cultural traditions so that we can then use them as tools in our healing work, if that makes any sense. You know, one of the things that when people come to me around questions of anxiety, what are some of the things we know about anxiety? Anxiety can be helped with things like rhythm. you know, with body motion, right? Humming, things like that. Now, I can go to some white guy's book and deal with that. But also, I can remember growing up and my grandmama would sit on a porch and she'd do what in Southern black tradition is called moaning.

50:06Sue Marriott: And my grandmother would sit for hours in a rocking chair and hum very slow. And I guarantee you, she got to a very zen state in that humming, right? Now, this is something that I'm familiar with that I know. How do I combine that? I know that body vibration, the importance of that to calming, the importance of the rhythm and setting that up, the importance of sound in the inner ear, the humming. My grandmama called it moaning, but wow, can we use that? And can we talk about it in that context because guess what? There's other folks who remember their grandmamas doing that. Now, that's a culturally familiar thing that has validity and we can talk about it.

50:52Sue Marriott: And also, we say we have somewhere we can dip into our own cultural historical context to find sources for our healing. That becomes very important too because a big part of colonialism and coloniality is this idea, as my grandmama said, there's a lot of black folk who believe that the white man's ice is always colder, right? That there's nothing that black people have to offer or have offered into the world that is significant. That's a part of the mental health problem. If you grow up in a world where you believe that black people have nothing significant to contribute to the world, there's nothing that black people have to offer you or to give you that is of significance.

51:34Sue Marriott: That's a huge mental health barrier, that ongoing sense of inferiority that it creates in the world, which is one of the things that when people come to us again, when spaces are safe, we hear these things and we see these things. So it tells us what we can work on. But again, for those of us who are professionals, even for professionals, for therapists, it gets scary. The idea that I can look at my own ancestors and my own grandmothers and grandfathers take their customs and traditions, which are often ridiculed. The way we talk, the way we act, the way we sing. But I can take that and I can codify it and I can give it back to the people as a healing instrument.

52:18Dr. Makungu Akinyela: instrument does that make sense it makes perfect sense and it is beautiful i mean again it's it's like i feel so grateful to for your generosity to teach us these things because they're missing and we don't know that they're missing you know what i mean we don't know and i think that that example that you gave of your grandma that that might be an example of using yourself as therapist and and storytelling right it's a you're telling a story and teaching through this story and while you were telling it, by the way, for those who can't see him, he was rocking and he had his hand on his chest and I started rocking.

52:52Dr. Makungu Akinyela: And so we were doing this co-regulation, which testimony therapy, talk about co-regulation, right? Like we're taking care of the person who's vulnerable, who's speaking up. So all of that is really incredible. Another thing that, just another point I want to bring out that I found helpful as a therapist and have been working really hard on is this notion of de-centering, like I'm not the expert. And especially in groups and things like that, right, that we work to develop authority to create safety, to create a container. And I think in terms of lenses, like I have a systems lens on, with a systems lens on, I can see it this way.

53:29Dr. Makungu Akinyela: With a developmental lens on, I can see it this way. I haven't worked out all of it yet, but it's easier when I do it that way. And from a system lens standpoint, It's extremely important for me to not shrink myself, but to make myself more even so that it's collaborative. And as a matter of fact, or maybe even where I'm in a learning perspective and that doesn't take away my authority, that it actually adds safety in the room. Does that feel like the right direction?

53:57Sue Marriott: Yeah, I think, you know, taking what I call a not knowing stance becomes very important. And again, in traditional Western psychology, of course, you know, not just just Western, but, you know, it's influenced by capitalism and all these other things. There's the importance of us being on top. Right. We've got to be the experts. Right. We've even got a little book that tells us every possible problem that a person can have. And the only way we can get paid is if we make reference to that book.

54:26Dr. Makungu Akinyela: This codified book. Yeah.

54:28Sue Marriott: Yeah. That tells us, you know, the importance of our expertise. I teach a class at the university on African-American pedagogy, critical pedagogy. And back in the 1940s and 50s, there was a movement called the Citizenship Schools, where black people who wanted to register to vote were taught to read, to write. Because in those days, there were all these rules that if you're black, you can't register unless you can read the Georgia Constitution, for instance, and interpret it verbatim in front of the registrar. Right. And so, right. We're going to get somebody to teach us how to read and to think about these things.

55:10Sue Marriott: But one of the teachers of one of those citizenship schools, there's a story that she tells that for me becomes very important. She comes to the first day of class. You've got all these black people who've been working all day. They've been working in fields. They've been working in factories. They've been working in white people's houses, cleaning up. And they're coming there at eight o 'clock at night or so to learn how to read so that they can go register to vote. And she comes with them and she says, they say I'm your teacher. But I'm going to teach you some things and you're going to teach me some things and we're going to learn together.

55:46Sue Marriott: That's that's take the decent attitude. That's the attitude that I believe that we as therapists have to come that even though people are coming to us for help, I assume that there's always something that people are bringing me. They are, first of all, experts in their own life, right? They are the experts in their life. I know the stuff I know. I know a little bit and I know a few things that I can teach, but they are bringing me the knowledge of their lives, the expertise in their own lives. And it's important for me to allow them to give me the direction about what they should be doing, what they need to heal, what they see as the possibilities in their lives.

56:26Sue Marriott: taking that not knowing stance becomes really important. It's an important aspect of not creating or reproducing the problems that colonialism has created for us already, where, you know, we seek to dominate people and not really to free people. A part of that citizenship school was the purpose of education was to give people the experience of freedom. And that's what I want in the therapy room. I want people to come into a therapy room or a therapy situation and to have the experience of Ubuntu, a relationship of equality, one-to-one, right, which takes the colonizer out of the relationship and allows us to have healthy relationships moving towards communitarian balance with each other, if that makes sense.

57:19Dr. Makungu Akinyela: It makes total sense. And it's such a process to unlearn these things. And I think your book is going to be a really important staple for everybody. It needs to be in your library. This is a good book to read as a study group because it's dense and exciting and it's got your 18-year-old fire in it, by the way. I think what I have come to know of you. I appreciate that, yes. That much, if I can guess that at least. But it does. And it's exciting. It's an exciting read. Is there anything that you would like to leave our audience with?

57:59Sue Marriott: Yeah, I think one of the questions that I asked, well, I think the last chapter of the book is called A Hundred Flowers Blooming. And that's important because even though I'm hoping that people won't think this, I don't want people walking away thinking that this is some kind of a one shot in the dark. I'm the only person talking about this. The reality is there are people from colonized and formerly colonized communities all over the world who are doing work like this. And in that last chapter, I interview several of those people from Australia, from Africa, who are from South America, who are doing similar work in their own cultural context, creating ways, traditions of healing, which makes sense and focus on decolonizing their people and not just helping the individual to gain mental health.

58:58Sue Marriott: but helping to build stronger communities to fight for their freedom, giving people the experience of freedom. So that becomes really important that people understand that that testimony therapy is one of the flowers in the hundred flowers blooming all over the world of anti-colonial and decolonizing mental health work that people are putting in. And that at the heart of that idea is for us to constantly ask the question, what is our contribution as mental health workers to social justice? I've got a whole chapter committed to the whole question of reparations. And what does reparations mean in the context of mental health work?

59:39Sue Marriott: Right. What does it look like when you're wedding your mental health healing work to true social justice and balance? So those would be some of the things that I would hope people would think about too.

59:51Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Yeah, I think that's really good that there's hope. And that's one of the things you talk about in testimony therapy is important to cultivate that hope. And you have pages of questions to ask yourself, to come to know yourself more deeply. And so that, again, some of it is just to begin to even open up and see these things. and for those seeing it to begin to really help our clients see that these systems that they're embedded in that can be part of it. So it's really, really, really rich and helpful. And I love ending on the hope that we don't have to know all this yet and white therapists don't have to become black therapists, but that there's a lot we can do.

1:00:31Dr. Makungu Akinyela: We're part of the problem. And even just by beginning to open this up. That's, it's very rich. It's, I like the, it's non-linear. It's, you know, we're in a labyrinth a little bit, but as long as we're moving and everybody doing their little chain. And if everybody's, lots of people are doing it, like all the flowers, that there's a lot of hope in that. So I appreciate that so much. And I appreciate your generosity. Again, you know, I think anytime that a person of color will come and teach, It's like there's already been so much labor put on you that there's a specific gratitude about that for sure.

1:01:08Dr. Makungu Akinyela: And for those of you that are still listening, it means that you have found value in this podcast. And we hope that you share it with other folks that you think could benefit or could be interested. And to leave us a rating and review, there's 10 years of conversations like this for free that are in our archive. And we would like to help other people find it and continue to expand these models.

1:01:29Sue Marriott: Thank you so much, Sue. I really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation.

1:01:35Dr. Makungu Akinyela: Yes, thank you. And I appreciate the opportunity to be able to help other people hear you. It's a real pleasure and honor of mine. All right, you guys, thanks for listening, and we will see you around the bin.

1:01:51Sue Marriott: Therapist Uncensored is hosted by Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott. This podcast is edited by Jack Anderson.

1:02:00Thank you.