Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
Val looked at the man who had intruded, uninvited, into her space, tried to tempt her with kittens, and now unintentionally demanded her care. A smile started to play around her mouth. You couldn’t make this up, she thought. He was exactly where Viking lay buried. Her eyes were wide, her breathing rapid, and she wept, silently, deeply for the wounds and the love. For herself, for Grace, for Graham who also meant well and had paid a price for trying to connect. It seemed the only place to be, connecting at the site of loss and injury, trying to meet on common ground.
Overview: November 2023
This month’s fiction is: On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
This month’s application posts are:
Cultural sensitivity: So much bigger than the words: Applications for practitioners
Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
I find I write these posts in a particular order each month. First the fiction, as that is my method of accessing the tacit knowing I am seeking to explore. Then, I apply that to being a practitioner, because first and foremost that is what I am. After that, I think about research that helps me tune into the more esoteric and philosophical bits of what I’m exploring. Then this. I think trying to make sense of how we are congruent, consistent, and relational in therapist education is the most complex post I write and the most complex set of ideas I have to navigate each month. No wonder I leave it to last and put it off!
Equally, the way we educate practitioners does need to grow out of, and remain connected to, our direct therapeutic practice and our research, as we need to draw on the embodied and embedded practices we have to enable our students to also be able to develop the skills to become excellent practitioners.
In the September post about therapist education, pondering on the core concept of Theraplay being guided by the adult and how this may integrate with the development of theory and practice around how we do that education, I said I love my students into being through a practice of abundance. This month, as I’ve been contemplating the bodily annihilation that comes from the most extreme forms of cultural insensitivity, feeling burdened by human beings destroying other human beings in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine (and those are just the sites of devastation that fill my news), I have kept asking myself, again and again, what does this mean in my practice as a therapist educator? Cultural insensitivity seems the antithesis of abundance. It is connected to the potential for trauma: too much, for too long, with no one to help you with it.
So as we orcas educate those who will come after us, what are we aiming for? Not at a surface level of trying to be mindful of the various identities that my students bring, but at the deeper level of thinking and formulating a pedagogy of therapist education, a model of enabling people to grow, learn, and develop, so they can go out and meet people on the ground where they are experiencing their injuries and pains of exclusion and Othering. Deep down, what does cultural sensitivity in therapist education mean when we are teaching people to function and provide a service that meets external professional standards and expectations – but those expectations have developed from a global north, white western, cis-, hetero- and neuro-normative world view?
Marks-Tarlow (2015) explores the seven assumptions that she held when she started her training as a clinical psychologist, and how her ongoing development in understanding clinical intuition and play has challenged each and every one of those assumptions. This takes me back to the story that Joe Biden referred to about his meeting with Golda Meir when he was a young senator. She talked about the secret weapon of Israelis, of having no place left to go.
And then I think about Viktor Frankl (2008) and his exploration of Man’s Search for Meaning. And then the fiction and what it was dredging out of my non-conscious, non-verbal, and deeply embodied knowing this month – leaving Graham on the ground, laying admits plants that look so lovely but harbour poison if not handled properly, where Viking is buried, with a broken ankle. No one coming to help him but Val, who is furious with him for bringing her kittens, and furious with herself for the stupid, insensitive, and unthought microaggressions her well-meaningness had inflicted on Grace, and the potential that had for derailing support they could offer to Joe and his children.
In my writing to explore the knowledge I have, it is when I have nowhere left to go that I have to engage with the knowledge that is being held tacitly. When I have nowhere left to go, I have to draw this embodied knowing to the realm of words. Then I can continue to explore my commitment to care and how to be a practitioner with that commitment, working with the threefold ideas of knowing/letting go, dependence/interdependence, and faithfulness that underpin tacit maternal knowing.
Cultural insensitivity, in all its forms, gets in the way of care and love because we are not tuned in to the person in front of us with all of their individual and cultural complexities. And maybe we should call a spade, a spade. The Othering of people, the prejudice of seeing them as less than you because they do not possess the same attributes as you, the ones that make you ‘normal’, does not sit with the declared intent of therapy to provide congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy.
We have to be prepared to actually be those core conditions in an active, life-long learning way. That means we have to go to the places where we are incongruent, where we are prejudiced and where our empathy fails because we don’t have the imagination to even see where we are Othering. And by we, I mean us as therapist educators. We have to go to emotional places where there is nowhere left to go, and then meet what comes to us with the same commitment to the core conditions and to tacit maternal knowing.
We find ourselves in a tricky place, wanting to help our students learn and at the same time needing to help them learn by modelling the place where love happens, the place where we have all our certainties stripped away, and we have no place left to go other than to the lived reality of there being a gap between the body and mind of the educator, and the body and mind of the student.
We can mean well in our endeavour to educate the next generation of practitioners, and we will get it wrong. We will be inept and ignorant because we can’t know what we don’t know. Our students will be inept, and we will need to challenge them. Sometimes our challenges of each other will be misplaced. Sometimes, neither of us will know the extent of our ineptitude when it comes to equality, diversity, and inclusion, but we need to enable people to learn to be aware of the mismatches and possibilities of their cultural insensitivity being in play, and then be curious about what may be going on. We have to teach our students to be comfortable with not knowing and ‘feeling wrong’ as a way to be sensitive to their own experiences of Othering, and then the experiences of the people they are working with and how they feel Othered.
Our students are going to take over from us, they will know more than us if we can enable that knowledge. The kittens are our future, we can’t let our limits and damaged insight hold them back. Our gift is to use the four dimensions of Theraplay – structure, nurture, engagement, and challenge – to frame our enabling of our students to grow beyond us. Our gift is to not pass on the prejudices and injuries that have infiltrated our internal working models and limit our lives. Our gift is to hear the challenges to us without defensiveness, and acknowledge where we need to change ourselves, as well as passing back to our students where their professional wisdom still needs to mature.
To do that we have to sit with the brokenness, the love and the injury, and non-defensively hear when we are crass and prejudiced. We have to model how to hear, listen, learn, and love our students into being far better than we could ever be, and ourselves into being better than we were before.