Therapist Confidential #006
00:00:00 Unknown: Welcome back everyone to the Therapist Confidential Podcast. I am very, very excited today to be speaking with a colleague, a friend, an inspiration, marcela polanco. we work together now at San Diego State University, but we've known each other for, geez, time flies over a decade or so. so there's, there's a nice relationship that precedes this conversation. And there's a lot I could talk to you about. A lot I could talk to you about. Some of the things I'm hoping we might cover today in our small little, you know, hour or so together. One is your relationship with therapy. whatever that word means, by the way, maybe we'll have to even try to figure out what does therapy mean, but I'd like to discuss that. I'd like to discuss decoloniality in your work. that word gets thrown around a lot too. And I have lots of questions about how that shows up in your work and how you find it useful. And then maybe some conversation about suicidality. I know you've written about that a lot recently and there's a couple of papers that I have read on that, written by you, that I don't say this lightly, really changed me. Not just changed how I thought about things, but Like changed me in some way after I metabolized them. So I really find it to be groundbreaking work. So that's some of what I hope we can talk about. But before we get into all of that, uh, Marcella, would you mind Telling the people a little bit about who you are, any other information that feels, important or near and dear to you? Yes. Yes, of course. Uh, but thank you first of all, for. Invited me into this conversation. I'm looking forward to it. it's crazy to think, about the different points that we have, connected throughout the last decade or so, and that now we end up. At San Diego State working together. so, okay, so I can situate myself from the borderlands and what that means. I'm thinking about the borderlands from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. And I think it's about existing in more than one place simultaneously. So I am a Colombian, uh, woman. I migrated to the US, twenty-five years ago. And in that experience of migration, then I have become many things, simultaneously and understanding what does it mean to exist in two social orders. so in the U.S. I, um, I have been racialized through these twenty-five years as a woman of color, as a Colombian immigrant, I, in the U.S., I enter into the profession of family therapy. so that's like the, the context of the therapy work that I do and, um, Spanglish speaker. so I, I speak my, Colombian Spanish, but then my, Immigrant English that came from my education in Colombia, but that has shaped in my immigration experience in the US. And so in Colombia, I am. Easily situated, which may surprise you or surprises folks in the US as a white person. In Colombia, I belong to the class of privilege and whiteness. What it means to be a white person in Colombia, which is very different from being a white person in the US, of course. And so in Colombia, I am within the profession of psychology. community psychology and uh, middle class, Spanish speaker from Bogota, which is where I, uh, was raised. So I speak, Espanol Rolo, which is the Spanish from specifically Bogota. And so my work is situated within these borderlands. So this encounter of Experiences, experiences of racialization, oppression and privilege and all of that is quite important because it has shaped the work that I now do in the US. And so, yeah, that to start. So we met a decade or so ago and we met around, well, first, you know, David Epstein introduced us, right? Folks know David Epstein, you know, because narrative therapy was something that, he helped along in the therapy world along with Michael White, right? Helped to initiate that work and at that time, narrative therapy was, really driving a lot of how you thought about your work. And, you know, I think over, and this happens to most good, clinicians or even just, it doesn't have to be clinicians, whatever it is that people do in the world, Often their work, evolves over time, right? And I know that for you, your work now is maybe in a different space than it was ten years or so ago when we met. And I'm wondering some of you can talk about The history of your therapeutic work and where it stands today and maybe how it got there. Yes, for sure. So I. So this is my work in English. If I think about my work in English is different than my work in Spanglish and in the borderland. So my narrative therapy and I think to this point still continues to be my framework of thinking therapy. In my immigrant English in the US. So, yeah, remember that we, I first met you at the conference in Adelaide, uh, many, many, many years ago. So I, it was when I did my doctorate in Nova Southeastern and around that time, Michael came to Florida to do some workshops. And I had not taken the classes of narrative yet, but I went to his workshop and I became completely hooked because he talked a little bit about the political aspects about practice. That I didn't even learn here in, in Colombia. Uh, but that spoke about, um, the politics That are inevitable when, uh, um, when you are raised in a context of civil war, you, you I don't know my experience, you could not ignore the politics of experience, right? When you live in the middle, you're, you're raised in the middle of a war. So when I am in the U.S., different context, sociopolitical context drastically, and then I find narrative therapy that provide, that even though it was introduced to me in English in a different language, The politics and the ethics of the practice really resonated for me and so I held like really strongly about narrative therapy and I was fortunate that I was in a program that. Uh, did focus on narrative therapy in our training in family therapy. So I, um, I really followed the work, uh, very rigorously. And so ironically, the following narrative therapy Led me to a place of sort of leaving narrative therapy to discover something else, right? When you think about the importance of local knowledge, when you think about the importance of language, when you think about the social political context, Given that I come from a different socio-political context, a different language, and a different local knowledge, for me it makes sense that then narrative therapy invited me to explore Other knowledges, other context, uh, to understand therapy. But of course I did not do that work myself. I would have not been able to do that myself. And it was in my collaboration with. David Epstone that he facilitated in like thousands of emails of conversations. For a few years, uh, where he asked these very, uh, poignant questions that led me to start questioning, right? Am I... Really developing this faithfulness to Michael White, or am I really learning about what narrative therapy means, which is not like abiding to the faithfulness of the author. Uh, but really engaging in the, in the ideas. And so the ideas invited me to question the ideas themselves. And that questioning meant. Exploring other local knowledges, other languages, other uh, sociopolitical context. And so More specifically, I did my dissertation in the translation of narrative therapy into Spanish, and so that obviously I had to come back to Colombia. Linguistically, culturally, geographically to understand what does it mean now to think about narrative therapy in Spanish? Which, of course, thinking about narrative narrative therapy in Spanish means leaving narrative therapy a little bit on the side. And that's where I started encountering decoloniality, which is one of the most prominent movements that are today in Latin America. So. When entering, crossing, um, the border into, uh, epistemically, um, then yes, so narrative therapy stands alongside In English, in the context in which it belongs in English. Other discoveries that I'm still in the process of understanding and exploring that I'm framing now within the colonial framework, specifically in Latin America, because there, as you said, It's a word that exists in many different places and is located in different geographies, bodies, histories. So I specifically talking about Latin America and my history in Colombia. Yeah, I'd love to dig more into decoloniality as you understand it. I mean, it seems like in United States, after George Floyd's murder, you know, there was a lot of uprising in energy and Some of that found its way, maybe even a lot of it into academia and the therapy world. And, you know, I would hear people say like, we're decolonizing syllabi, which was Interesting. I don't know if, can syllabi be decolonized? I'm not sure. But the way that that was looking was like, well, we're going to make sure we have authors in the syllabus who aren't white. It was, you know, or who are from different geographic locations than, um, United States or Western Europe or whatever it might be. Right. And while I think that's, um, I think that's a noble direction. I didn't necessarily see that as as an act necessarily of decoloniality right and and so um, as you said decoloniality I guess can be defined in different ways at different spaces in time with different people you know there's. Words can mean very different things in different contexts, but I'm, I'm interested in particular how you make sense of this word decoloniality and how it makes its way into your practice. Yes, so. So I am situating the work, uh, maybe I'm, I want to connect this with three groups that I have had the opportunity to be in connection, um, with and it's. One group in South America of decolonial feminists. That is called Glefas. Um, another group, uh, that comes from, uh, these are folks that are also like myself and then migration experience. So they. Bring their work from Latin America, but they are located in universities in Europe and the US. Uh, and so these folks are, um, do a, a training in the Netherlands. And another group, uh, that also does some, uh, trainings in Barcelona, uh, that also come from More, ah, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Caribbean. So it's through three groups that I have studied and explored decoloniality. Ah, so. It's, um, it's super important to think about the geopolitics of knowledge and what that means, uh, I've come to understand is situating knowledge and the bodies where the knowledge is generated. The geographies, right? So for, um, somebody with, um, my skin, for somebody in the borderlands, uh, as a South American migrating into the U.S., Those conditions lead necessarily to think particularly that if somebody in Africa or if it's somebody in Europe or if it's right, so. So the importance of situating the work in Latin America or Abya Yala Uh, is not necessarily just the, where the, the books were published, but really the, the, the places, the land where these ideas are thought. It's quite different than decolonization in Australia or Canada or in India, post-colonialism and all of that. Uh, and uh, another thing that I want to say about that is that this is work that, uh, which is a little bit different than post-coloniality. It comes, it doesn't come from academia. It comes from, uh, lived experience of indigenous communities of, uh, black communities. From criollos or myself, mestizas, mestizas, mestizas, enduring the experience of um, coloniality Within the history of the colonization of the Americas. So that already shapes the way in which that work takes form that now, because of people like myself, we're bringing this work into academia. We're bringing this work into different, different areas, but it didn't come from there. So it doesn't abide to the rigor of discipline. Or the rigor of research. So it's not evidence-based. It's not profession-oriented. So it, that also, then it saves a different characteristic. So in that sense, There is not one, I mean, if I, I've read the different folks that from some of the groups that I mentioned and everybody's has their own perspective about it of what, what does it mean? They contradict themselves, but they don't fight against themselves about who has the true original definition of there's not that knowledge competency that capitalism. Shapes in universities and all of that. And, um, it is situated as an alternative or as an option. So I really appreciate that because it doesn't belong to one author. Like, I usually locate narrative therapy, Michael White and David Epstein. Right. It doesn't exist in decoloniality, right? Yes, there's one person that developed a certain context, uh, as a, uh, concept that has been key, Aníbal Quijano. Coloniality, but it doesn't belong to one person or one author. Um, it is an alternative and it's an option thinking about decoloniality that does not depend on decoloniality to do decolonial work. So narrative therapy, for example, depends on narrative therapy to be able to do narrative therapy. So you need to, or any other theory in therapy, right? You need EFT or solution focus. It depends on itself to promote that work. If you do narrative therapy or solution focus or EFT, you depend from that knowledge to be able to practice. So decoloniality does not depend on itself. It doesn't require itself to do decolonial work. Um, so that as surrendering epistemic dependency for me was super exciting because it makes me think about Therapy doesn't need the framework of therapy to generate therapeutic experiences. And in that sense, I have found the word healing A little bit more attuned to thinking about therapy. So if I think about healing, I mean, there are multiplicity experiences of healing that does not need of a therapeutic encounter. Therapy, client, therapy assessments, right? All of that is not required in order for you to have experiences of healing. Um, okay, so in all of that that I have uh, described to you, I have not said yet what is decoloniality, so as I understand it in the multiplicity of Uh, ways in which people write and think and talk and give workshops about it. So I understand, uh, I understand it to be a project that is interested. In understanding how power works. And that power specifically, which the French philosophers. I'm sorry, I can't help to be. To bring all of these philosophers and blah, blah, blah. Just delete all of that. That's very boring. Bring them in. So I, when I, when I trained in therapy, I understood power from French philosophy, Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault for dummies. I was one of the dummies that I have learned about Michel Foucault. And so Foucault understands power in a particular way because Michel Foucault was European and experiences blah, blah, blah. So anti-coloniality when thinking about power, thinking about the history of Abya Yala, um, of course power takes a different form. So the way in which the power is called is coloniality. It's a system of power that has shaped the modern world in which we live. So if we want to address the modern world in which we live, We have to address the power that is, uh, the colonial power that is often hidden. It has to be kept hidden. Right, because otherwise the modern world that we're living in would not survive, right, if it, if it shows, um. So yeah, and this, uh, so this system of power, um, is understood to be, uh, like this structure that, um, is sustained in the, um, Interconnection or interdependency of, I could say, four main factors, which is, as we know, capitalism or the control Uh, the desire of control for the economy, an economy that we leave now as capitalism, the desire of the control of knowledge. You know, so the, the research, evidence base, what constitutes that's knowledge and what is not knowledge. Uh, the control for authority. Who, um, is situated as people who has the ability to shape universities and, uh, therapy and who publishes and authority. And, uh, of course, the other one is the control of subjectivity or personhood or people, which is race, gender, and all of these sort of things. So the interdependency of these four things. Is what sustains this violent power that modernity, um, and the way in which modernity shapes the world. And this is because I think when I, when I also learned, um, Therapy understood that modernity was part of the enlightenment and all of that history, but decolonial folks situate modernity, the beginning of modernity in the conquest of the Americas. And it's not a, it's not a movement. It's, it's a. Um, or it's not a historical moment, but is, uh, the way in which modern power, coloniality, started to evolve. Of course, this is philosophy because I love to read philosophy and, um, And I think, well, that's what, what opened for me when I did a PhD in therapy, I became quite interested to understand the philosophical foundations of what makes therapy. So that's became my way of thinking. So when I think when I now connecting these to to therapy, when I think about therapy, if I think about therapy from the perspective of race and gender, from the perspective of authority, when the perspective of the control of knowledge and from the perspective of capitalism. My response was like, fuck. Like, what are we doing, you know? Because I could connect therapy as one of the systems That is sustained and sustains this colonial power. And, um, so the decolonial project is something very different than The control of knowledge, developing now a new model of practice, a new evidence base, a new research is rather how do you delink, which is a key term, how do you delink. Uh, or, or cut ties of the dependency of these structures in order to think and exist differently. Uh, so it's, it's not only your, your therapeutic. Like what happens in the therapy room is decoloniality and then you go somewhere else and it's something else. Um, no, it's, it's a different logic, right? Uh, so yeah, so I think that's where the, the place that I am right now when rethinking, um, resensing, uh, de-sensing, de-thinking, uh, therapy. Understanding, not that therapy is bad or is wrong or it has to be deleted or anti-therapy, not at all, but situating it in the place where it belongs. It belongs to a history, to a tradition, to a group of people, Europeans, English, evidence-based. It belongs to that world. But if it belongs to that world, which is not mine, Then now the, the, the, um, universe open to the exploration of other universes. Uh, to now discover what does it mean to heal that is not dependent on that system of action. This is a word we both share in describing our work, which is healing. We've talked about this before. And so I'll ask you this very directly. Take it where you want to take it. Yeah. Would you say that on May 2nd, 2025 that you, you still practice therapy? Do you practice therapy or do you practice healing? Do you practice both or something different altogether? I do, I, I, I practice therapy, yes. And why I practice therapy? Because I am in the U.S. I have a license and I have to sustain that license that give me some Uh, responsibilities. That if I don't subscribe to those responsibilities, Oh no, I get deported. I'm just kidding. I get deported in many different ways. So I, um, so I do practice therapy because I am embedded in that structure of therapy. So I acknowledge that I do that. Um, I don't, I was just having a recent conversation with Macungu as well. And I was, I don't, um, um, situate myself as a healer. I can say a little bit more about that after if it's relevant. I am interested in healing experiences. Uh, in all aspects of life, not only in a, in a therapy room. So I'm interested in experience of healing. Uh, so, um, because in the structure in which I operate, It's, it's called therapy in the capitalist Eurocentric, um, heteronormativity, white Way in which therapy I understand therapy to be so yes I am I am in that part and also because the the folks that I work with are looking for therapy and they they. Come from that framework that I just receive right even though but but I think that I have I have not. I have stopped being obedient. On what. Um, of those ideas of what is to have a good therapeutic conversation. So I have, uh, lost concern For, um, therapeutic questions or therapeutic encounters or, uh, therapy frameworks, um. Narrative, for example, this it's a I haven't engaged with the narrative framework studying or reading in quite a little bit, right? Um, and so ironically and paradoxically, it is in conversations with people within that structure of therapy that I'm interested in paying attention about. Okay, if I'm not thinking about these therapeutic questions that I want to ask, how else can I exist in this moment with this person? And what, how, ah, what can I identify that is guiding my participation and relationship with this person when I am not only attuning to Um, the therapy knowledge that I fortunately already, um, finished paying the student loans. Yeah. So if people were watching your practice, which you still identify as a therapy practice of some sort, but if they, if they were watching you practice, what would they actually see in the room? Yeah, I, uh, so I, I, I, I. Okay, I will answer this in two ways. One is I don't know. The reason why I don't know, because I am no longer a therapist that is interested in the sophistication of the practice of therapy, which is Like research, right? You do your transcripts. You look at your videos. You try to discern from this. Okay. This is a therapeutic question. This was an important moment. I'm going to write an article about it so I can reflect about, and that's how the therapeutic. Knowledge is built. You have to reflect about what is making your therapy therapeutic so that you publish it and you profit from it and you teach other people about it. And that's the, the evidence-based logic, right? And I was like this step of engaging in that practice because I did have that question in my transition between narrative therapy and decoloniality that I actually, one of the, the folks that in our program. At San Diego State and I, I asked them, why don't we do Why don't we transcribe, right? We've been studying decoloniality, but let's find out what does it mean in our practice. So, yeah, the whole thing. Let's da-da-da, the transcripts, and then we come up with a little da-da-da, steps or framework or whatever. Fortunately, it never worked out. So I have never done that experiment. And for that reason, I don't have an answer about how that because I'm not concerned in the process of doing therapy about therapy. So I don't really have answers for, you know, what is my structure of therapy and whatever that requires reflection and thinking and going to relax. So that is one side of the answer. The other side of the, of the answer that I've also, because, uh, I don't know if I mentioned that I, uh, work also as Faculty member in the MFT programs at the state and so I work with folks who are learning how to do therapy and I facilitate the courses. And so a couple of times when folks that are in the courses that I facilitate have witnessed when I sit down and have this conversation that we're calling therapy are quite disappointed. Uh, when after they finish, uh, watching the session because they don't see me doing anything different than I do in direct interactions or in class or. You know, like they had the expectation, okay, now I'm in the therapy room and I'm gonna do these therapeutic magic things. So when people watch me in a therapy, so my answer would be based on, um. What they have shared when people would watch me doing therapy is how they watch me Living life and talking to people in any context, right, um, or in class or having a cup of tea or, you know, yeah, I think so. This is not a very helpful answer for me. Anyway. I don't know that I was looking for a helpful or unhelpful answer, to be honest. I was looking for your answer and uh, I find it to be fascinating actually. Um, so if I'm hearing you right, there's, there's not really a separation. Yeah. Between how you would interact in quote unquote therapy, right? And how you would act in the world, which In an interesting way, not that I want you to define something that you don't wish to define in sort of classical Eurocentric research sorts of ways. But in a way you are identifying then something that does exist in your approach, which is that you kind of are you and you're not engaging in any kind of prescribed practice in a quote unquote therapeutic encounter, yeah? Yes, completely, and I remember you and I had a recent conversation also within a different context, uh, talking a little bit about your work. We're talking a little bit about your history and the the history of your communities and your relationship with your parents is what influence a little bit the work that you do right that is. And we were saying, like, if this is not about now training people how to be Travis Heath in order to do that kind of work, because the work is shaped by Who we, who we become, our histories, our communities, our languages, our contexts. And so that is not prescriptive. It's something that you and I have been in conversations. Um, and so that becomes very difficult for, for the concept of therapy. Because when we think about, which is some of the conversations that I'm interested in, in In training, when folks, um, work in, in agencies that are dependent on, uh, grants, right? So we think about grants, uh, grant driven therapy. Well, money, dream, and therapy. Depends of a structure of therapy that can be bought, that can be assessed, that can be measured, that an insurance company can determine and verify or the grant or the fund, whatever, can verify that you're really doing the work that you're saying. So this kind of work starts already delinking from capitalism because it's not measurable and it's not outcome oriented. So there's not a concrete object that can be bought. Uh, so it started to shift a little bit about, um, or, or making a connection first of how capitalism shapes knowledge. What are the requirements that we need to abide to? Uh, yes, I have a license and I have certain parts that I have to abide to. Uh, but then I can delete. Myself from that and that makes a huge difference. So I don't charge for therapy and that makes a significant difference in for folks and for myself and therefore for the conversations that we can have. I'm not saying that and saying that it's because of my circumstances that my job can pay my debt. I don't need to become rich to pay all my debt, so I don't charge for therapy, but I'm not suggesting that. Decoloniality and healing does not need money. Yes, it can be done with money. It can be done with an economy, but not a capitalist economy necessarily. Okay, I'm going somewhere else, but I'll stop there. You're going somewhere interesting. I'm taking all these notes and could go a lot of different directions. One thing you said that's of interest to me is you're talking about You know, students would watch you do quote-unquote therapy, right? And they might feel disappointed or it's almost like you were supposed to become another person or you were supposed to speak a different way, you were supposed to do something different and then You didn't do that. And they, they sort of, what's going on? And, and this made me wonder, Marcella, um, What, what are, what sort of challenges and also joys and complexities are you running up against right now and training students in an MFT program? Yes, yes, yes, yes. It does require. It has been fundamental for me to develop a working relationship. As, I mean, we are relationally oriented as family therapists, narrative therapists, and so that's not surprising to say. Um, so, uh, I think that developing a trusting relationship that all everybody here can contribute to our learning. It's very important because of what I offer. Can you hear my dog barking in the back? I cannot. I think the Zoom filter is doing its job. I can see your dog barking, but I can't hear them. Okay, good. Yes, and I say that is because what I deliver is not what people expect. Because, of course, people are like, okay, I'm going to be sitting with this person. Teach me what am I going to say? What am I going to do? Because you have a responsibility to provide a service. They need the prescription, whatever that talking is like there. I mean, there's no prescription. But so it is uh, so there's frustration and that frustration is very important to bring into the conversation because that frustration speaks to their ideas about what is therapy. And so, uh, it's a very important entrance to exploring, um, What are their ideas about therapy and situated in the context where that idea comes from? You know, the dominant spores about therapy looks like waves. But then there is the exploration about what is healing within the context of their own history. So I think that when I, even though I teach like theories, yeah, I used to teach the class on theories, it always comes down to who is the person that is sitting in that encounter exploring. Who is that person? What guy is that person in the conversation? Ancestry, languages, connections. That for me is the, the most critical aspects of shaping. The person that is gonna be in conversation with others is who is that person. And it's, I know that is conceptualized as the self of a therapist, but it's not a self therapist because it's first not a self. Because we don't ascribe to the idea of self, neither therapist. And it's not one person, right? So it's starting to explore Um, the collective that they embodied in that moment, uh, and how that guides there. And so bilingualism, that's some of the things that I'm super interested. Uh, it's key in that when we start making comparison between what do you, how do you think therapy in English and how do you think about being in conversation and healing conversations in your non-English language? And so the grandmothers starts to show up, the grandfather, the grandfathers or other other folks. The community becomes visible. Because the community in English are the authors, the text, the researchers in therapy. And in the non-English, then a whole world of people start to show up and shape, uh, their work. When thinking about suicidality, it's talking about death, right? Um, how do we, uh, relate to conceptions of death and dying and, um, Good living and good dying and all of this, it's the same, right? In English, suicidality, evidence-based. But in their non-English languages, there are other Um, ideas and relationships and philosophies, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, yes. Okay, you're transitioning into an area I'd like to talk some about, and that is your understanding of suicide. There are a couple of articles that I want to direct people to. Uh, one is the title is an autopsy of the coloniality of suicide. Modern T's completed genocide. That's, uh, 2021. And then the more recent one, 2024, Suicide and the Coloniality of the Senses, Time and Being, The Aesthetics of Death Desires. These two articles are like no articles I had ever read on the topic of suicide. I had found like, for example, Vicki Reynolds had talked some about suicide in interesting ways. Um, so I had encountered some articles that departed from sort of the standard, uh, psychologized and psychiatric ways of thinking about suicide. But these went even further in the sense that They really, um, well, it makes sense when you were just talking about decoloniality, to be honest, because it's sort of de-linked, to use the word you've been using, My sense of what I had been taught suicide to be and how we should approach it and how we should quote unquote treat it, right? It took it into other realms, into other worlds. Both of these articles really did. You don't necessarily have to talk about the articles per se. If you want to, please do. But I just wanted to make sure people heard those in case they want to read this after our conversation. But I'm wondering if you can talk some of one, how did you come into having this interest in suicide? And two, if you could talk about how you make sense of suicide from a lens of coloniality and decoloniality. Yeah, so okay I just want to acknowledge so the autopsy of suicide article was authored with Tisha X, who is a graduate from our program. And in that, uh, article, um, she talks about her own story of suicidality. So it was a collaboration where her story was centered to that article. So. That was an important, it was not an article, but it came from a conversation with Tisha about her own experiences of thinking about life and death and the mental health system. So the other article I also want to acknowledge, it was co-author with Anthony Pham, who is currently a student in our program and He has lots of experience in, uh, working in, um, the hotlines. Um, so it was also centered on his experiences in that role. And so what, uh, first got me into this work was, um, Another colleague, um, Tirza Shelton, when I was seen in Texas, um, Tirza was doing, uh, work in the Air Force, interestingly enough, and so... In a research class, we collaborated in a suicide research on folks that were in the Air Force that were Enduring experiences of suicidality and analyzing the system of the military and all of that hardcore Stuff. Um, so through, and then around that time I was also working at a school, this is in Texas, uh, elementary school. And a lot of the, um, referrals were about suicide, like, uh, teachers were trained on how to refer, refer folks to Therapy when they could identify their drawings or something, uh, arose concern. So we had an incredible amount. So it became, uh, so it, it started as a. Therapy or academic concern. Um, that was like the entrance, right? I, I, I'm not speaking as a person who has the lived experience of, uh, suicide. And I, through that work, I became connected to the critical suicidology, uh, network, uh, which, uh, now it's called, uh, critical suicide studies. And so it's interesting. There are folks that are, and some of their work is centering Foucault. It started a little bit of the analysis of Foucault. To critiquing about the modern perspectives and quantitative research of suicide and broadening that concept of suicide to to question. Um, the criminalization, the psychiatrization, the moralization of suicide. And I became really quite fascinated. Folks in narrative therapy were also connected to that network. And so the work that I have been exploring is understanding that the critical suicidology work is embedded still in a European tradition. So from a decolonial perspective, I wanted to delink myself from Eurocentric-based conceptualizations of suicide to explore how suicide is conceptualized otherwise. And interestingly enough, I then enter into exploring, um, because at the time I was collaborating with, uh, indigenous folks in Peru. And I was asking how they conceptualize suicide in their communities and nobody could provide any, like, suicide, what do you mean? That's, no, it doesn't exist, the word doesn't exist, nothing. Uh, it was, it was interesting to explore to find nothing. And so now during this, uh, during my sabbatical, I ended up in the Amazons here in Colombia. And so I learned about, and so I just wrote about this article in Spanish, the first time that I write in Spanish, it's been quite exciting. There is a small town in the Amazons in the Colombian side of the Amazon that has started, um, identify within the last ten years that they start finding their relatives of community members hang a tree or their houses. So they don't call it suicide, researchers on the news, everybody calls it suicide, but they don't call it suicide because suicide does not exist in their language. So they call it the, the, um, how do you call what people hang with, uh, hang themselves with like a cord? No, it's not. Or a rope. A rope. So they call it the rope epidemic. That's how they call it. We, we started, uh, suffering from like a rope epidemic, um, instead of calling suicide. So I'm thinking about how do you understand suicide when In their language, suicide doesn't exist. When they don't conceptualize the body as the individual body, that notion of a body, they don't have A language for the body as we know it, like the anatomic and physiological body does not exist. And, um, when they conceptualize life and death in a very different way. In from without the language, without the body, and without life and death, as we know it in Western thinking, then How can you conceptualize suicide when those three components do not exist? Suicide depends on anatomy and physiological body. It depends on the notion of life and death. Or the biological dead. And it depends on the word suicide. So if that doesn't exist in the community, then there's something else. And so I became quite interested then in learning about the cosmology of the communities, the Tikunas. In, in Amazons. And so I, that's the exploration of decoloniality, right? It's like, okay, I want to learn about the experiences of these communities. Um, I have to delink myself from suicidology to understand their lived experiences. And the, the most, uh, shocking thing is that suicide If I violently call it suicide, stopped. They stopped it and they don't have psychiatrists, they don't have therapists, they don't have medication, they don't have None of that shit because it's a. Small town in the middle of the jungle that, I mean, to get there, you, you can only be by boat and there's electricity only and like, I mean, there's no Western influence and, uh, they control the. Rope epidemic. How they did it with their ancestral knowledges, calling on their spirits, Um, capturing the spirit that was, um, bringing death, uh, bad death because it's not death. They were not preventing death because they honor death. Um, with medicinal plants. I mean, so there is a whole world of experiences about healing that do not depend on psychotherapy or therapies to facilitate transformation. So that for me was like a radical example of What decolonial projects um, could be about. So okay, now translating this into the capitalist Eurocentric context in which we practice therapy. Still, how do we then start thinking about conceptualizing the body differently? How do we think about language differently? That it's not only English driven, the knowledges that we have that are English driven. The ideas of self, the ideas of individual, the ideas of change, the ideas of problems, um, that it means living life and dying death. Differently. It's not a new method. It's really changing. Uh, the, the, the sensing and the thinking of living. Anyway, what was the question? I don't remember the question, but the answer was way better than any question could have brought about. It's interesting, Marcel, as I listened to you tell that story. I started to get the sense of like, and you tell me if I'm misunderstanding this, it was like, Oh, this is kind of how your work looks, what you were just describing. And it's not a manual. I don't even know how you teach such a thing, but, but there's, um, Some of what I'm, uh, metabolizing from what you said is like, there's a deep, uh, desire to understand, uh, local knowledges, right? There's a, um, There's a commitment to raising up that knowledge and not trying to. Come with prescriptions that would, uh, fix whatever the issue is, psychiatric, psychological prescriptions, but rather just a deep sort of understanding and almost a, um, honoring of the way that These people in this context come about dealing with and define and come up with ways of traversing these particular challenges. I don't know if that captures it. I'm trying to put words to something that may be. Might be psychologized and colonial in themselves, but just trying to put language to understanding the process you just described. Yes, yes, for sure. Yes, yes, yes. And so, of course, I'm talking about, um. Right, communities like uh, indigenous communities, the tikunas, I'm sorry, the indigenized communities, they're not indigenous, they're tikunas, they're indigenous in the nation state, in the census, blah, blah, blah. Colonization, residualization. So the Tikunas, uh, is, is their work. But so that work has been influential, right? We learned from that work. We honor the work that they are doing. Um, we are changed and transformed and moved by that work, uh, that can help us to then, uh, Create, uh, no, create is not the word, but engage in the word differently because create it doesn't, we don't need new developments. That's the Eurocentrism. The latest new developments that are published in the last five years is the only knowledge that counts. And so, but it really shapes in the way in which we start thinking and understanding now in the communities in which we live. So I, it just is coming to mind, uh, for example, the work of Uh, Candia Mosley, uh, who also graduated from our program, you, you know, you know. Yes. Yeah. And so Candia introduced me to bilingualism from the perspectives of black speak, ebonics, a black talk. And um, I was talking a little bit and there's a little chapter that she co-authored with Eureka as well from our program. In how when Candia would come to class, she would shift her way of speaking to accommodate the white structure. The white structure, um, I'm talking about the university. I'm not talking about like only being white people in the room. Maybe the majority were people of color, but that was a white structure. But then when she would go home, she was shifting to her. Black speak and so. That that is a radical example about how we lose. And ancestral, we lose our languages, we lose our communities, we lose the people that guide us, um. When we enter into the therapy structure. So if, and this is why I'm interested also in the program that we have been discussing, thinking about Ebonics as bilingualism. If you do therapy in Ebonics, if I do therapy in Spanglish, if you do therapy, the sensibility, the way of thinking, the people that aren't necessarily are different folks, right? And those folks do not speak manualized or evidence-based or outcome-oriented. So, which is what you just highlighted, and this is not prescriptive. Um, so. How training people to enter in a therapeutic, uh, conversation without a prescription, it's really hard because the context in itself call for expertise. Right when you I mean I go to the doctor and I'm like I am I am depending to the expertise of the. The medical doctor that is right so. How do you respond to that and how, um, so when talking before about how do you train folks is training folks to trust. Their, their spirits, their ancestors, their languages. Um, I experienced that when I started talking about Spanish, because as you know, Spanish is humiliated. It's, uh, Like people are ashamed, uh, of Spanglish. People are taught in, in their, in their households that Spanglish is wrong, is the corruption of English. So when I say we're gonna think about therapy in Spanish, you're like, okay, this instructor is putting at, raised my reputation, my professional development, because you're teaching me something that is looked down upon. But then that there's a shift there, right, when when elevating knowledges, languages, ways of thinking and sensing the spiritualities. In aspects that guide people in a therapeutic conversation alongside the manuals of the prescriptions, right? Yeah, there's room for everything. So it's not that the manuals of descriptions need to be burned down and forgotten. We need them to survive in this capitalist Eurocentric racist system that our livelihood depends on. Uh, we need a salary. We need a mortgage or a car payment or whatever. Time. Oh, time. I, I have, I have one more question I want to ask you. So if, you know, there were students listening to what you were saying right now, other people who are training Folks that are going to be clinicians and, uh, they've heard you talking about all of this for the last hour. I mean, I love what you just said about training people to trust their language, their knowledge, their ancestors. Uh, I could imagine myself as a student knowing nothing about this. I still know very little about this, right? But, um, knowing nothing about it and going, gosh, this agrees with my sensibilities. This makes sense to me. What, where do I go? How do I, how do I get more of this? What are the next steps? Like, what advice would you give to folks who might be hearing this and want to pursue this work further? Wow. So identify in your communities the people that are the story carriers. For some reason in grandmothers and grandparents are very popular folks in people's lives. Because when I'm in class and people do projects exploring their communities. Grandparents and grandmothers, grandparents are, are, uh, come. So go to the folks in your, uh, yeah, people in your family who are like the. The term in Spanish are sabedores. Okay, so the English term, are they knowledged in their communities? Sit down with them and learn about how they understand life, how to understand healing. How they end up suffering, but don't talk to them as if you're doing research, right? Talk to them, um, as how you are linked to these knowledges. How, uh, how with a curiosity about where do I come from? I think that's why I now I'm actually here in Columbia in Bogota having this conversation with you. I migrated twenty-five years, but these questions have brought me back to, to whom and to why do I owe my existence? And what is there? Because I was raised, as I said, as a white person, even though I come, both my parents from, yes, the, the, um, Conquistadores, there's one specific uh, Spanish person that was one of the conquistadores, um, but both sides of my family come from indigen- from indigenized Communities that I have no fucking idea about, right? No, I know nothing whatsoever. And so the community that I was with this morning is from the side of my mother. To understand where are the worldviews and the ideas, the thoughts that, uh, languages, uh, um, yeah, that I come from and how that. Shapes in the way that I live and I'm in community with other folks. And then also that will guide my practice, the way in which I sense, I listen, I pay attention to, I engage in conversation with people, I understand. Oppression, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, that's where I would go. I thought you were gonna say to like some academic source, Marcello, or to read some, some, you don't have, you're not selling a manual or something we can talk, a decolonial manual, no? Which is ironic because I spend my life reading those texts. I read a lot of those things. I read a lot of that philosophy, whatever, but it's reading that philosophy that I've learned the value of not reading that philosophy only. Yes, I, I value text and dah, dah, dah. Now I read the coloniality in many different ways. Uh, so yes, so diversity of epistemic diversity. That's a lovely note to end on. I appreciate this hour with you, Marcela, coming from Bogota and having this, uh, conversation, the wonders of, uh, Modern technology, I guess that we can have this conversation together. I, I so appreciate your time and, uh, your energy, your passion, your wisdom. Thank you so much. Thank you, Travis. Really, really appreciate it. I love the conversation. Thank you for the opportunity.
