527: A Decolonized Perspective On Attachment Theory with Linda Thai

0:00[SPEAKER_00]: Therapy Chat Podcasts Episode 527 This is the Therapy Chat Podcast with Laura Regan. [SPEAKER_00]: LCSWC. [SPEAKER_00]: The information shared in this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. [SPEAKER_00]: And now, here's your host, Laura Regan. [SPEAKER_00]: LCSWC. [SPEAKER_01]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan, and today I'm so thrilled to be bringing you a new conversation with my dear friend and respected colleague, Linda Tye.

0:54[SPEAKER_01]: You have heard Linda on Therapy Chat before. [SPEAKER_01]: She's a therapist, speaker, teacher, leader. [SPEAKER_01]: She's a very thought-provoking person. [SPEAKER_01]: And I love listening to her speak. [SPEAKER_01]: In our conversation today, we're talking about a decolonized perspective on attachment theory, and this is something that all of us, therapists and people who are curious about attachment theory can really ponder it's a very expansive perspective.

1:28[SPEAKER_01]: So let's get right into my conversation [SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Laura Ragan, and I'm so happy to be back together with my friend and very respected colleague, Linda Tye. [SPEAKER_01]: Linda, thank you so much for coming back to therapy chat today. [SPEAKER_01]: It is such a gift to be back here with you and with your listeners. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, thank you. [SPEAKER_01]: beautiful to my heart and that's what other people say about you as well.

2:14[SPEAKER_01]: The people that I talk to when they interact with your work, they're like, and that's her work, oh my gosh. [SPEAKER_01]: She's just like a warm hug. [SPEAKER_04]: That has been a lifetime of work to get to this point. [SPEAKER_04]: And you know what? [SPEAKER_04]: I think there can be no greater gift in life than to love each other and to be coming. [SPEAKER_04]: And there are so many people who've [SPEAKER_04]: And so I hope to pass that on through who I turn up to be in the world.

2:46[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, it's felt and and I feel appreciation for that right now and I know when we by the time we finish talking, I'll be probably just feeling giddy because that's how it always ends up. [SPEAKER_01]: So today we're going to be talking about something that I've wanted to ask you about on the podcast for. [SPEAKER_01]: a decolonized approach to attachment theory. [SPEAKER_01]: So, I really want to invite you. [SPEAKER_01]: We can have a really deep conversation about that.

3:28[SPEAKER_01]: But before we get into talking about that, fascinating topic in my opinion. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you just tell our listeners a little bit more about who you are, what you do. [SPEAKER_04]: Sure. [SPEAKER_04]: So on the phone with child refugee, I was born in Vietnam, and Rice in Australia, and as an adult, I became an immigrant into the United States into Alaska specifically. [SPEAKER_04]: and refugitude, displacement has actually been a theme that's woven its way through my life, as a result of that initial displacement.

4:03[SPEAKER_04]: And I often think of refugees as, look, homes cease to exist long before we actually left, and I was not home to go back to. [SPEAKER_04]: And so people who flee childhood trauma, or flee homes with their domestic violence, or flee homes with their addiction, or flee parts of the country that aren't supportive of their gender identity or sexual orientation are also refugees. [SPEAKER_04]: At home cease to exist long before you actually left and there's a home to go back to.

4:40[SPEAKER_04]: And we become refugees from a land called the Body. [SPEAKER_04]: And it was in Alaska that I actually got to do the work of reclaiming what it means to have a body and be in a body because living in interior Alaska, we're hunting, we're fishing, I'm using power tools, I'm measuring in feet and inches, like who does that? [SPEAKER_04]: When you have the exceptionally common sensical metric system to work off of. [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say, well, yeah, Americans, basically.

5:15[SPEAKER_03]: And so there was the measure twice cut once. [SPEAKER_04]: There was the check the weather before you go outside because you want to have the right clothes on and then you go outside with the right clothes on and you actually do that for a little while. [SPEAKER_04]: Close the home to make sure that you've got the right clothes on. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and then I'm shoveling gravel, I'm pushing wheelbarrows, I'm engaging with my body.

5:39[SPEAKER_04]: And that allowed me to develop a secure attachment relationship with my body. [SPEAKER_04]: I got to come home to my body. [SPEAKER_04]: I was no longer a refugee from a land called the body. [SPEAKER_04]: And this took [SPEAKER_04]: 10 years, though, took 10 years of addiction recovery and trauma recovery, required of that, just living in Alaska, and from there, I then taught meditation and yoga into addiction recovery, trauma recovery, then trained as a mental health clinician, as a social worker.

6:15[SPEAKER_04]: and before I went to graduate school, I knew I wanted to be a trauma therapist. [SPEAKER_04]: So I got all the trainings. [SPEAKER_04]: I'd read the body keeps a score in 2014, got it on the day, came out. [SPEAKER_04]: And the second, I mean, the first half helped me make sense of myself in my life. [SPEAKER_04]: And the second half of the book gave me a path forward, and so by the time I finished graduate school I was trained in IFS and brainstorming and since I noticed like a therapy and havent touched, and that meant that I could really hit the ground running.

6:45[SPEAKER_04]: And I also got to do my own deep personal work through those modalities as well as through a Pesso Boyd and System Psych immortal, which is where you get to give yourself a secure attachment imprint through giving yourself ideal parents. [SPEAKER_04]: And so I've done all of this personal work along the way to becoming a somatic therapist and a trauma therapist who now leaves some works on the lands of the Deneyath, the Basque and People's, of the Middle Tannenau Valley where I work at the intersection of addiction and trauma.

7:20[SPEAKER_04]: at the confluence of the longitudinal impacts of mass historical trauma of colonization and where that then emerges across many generations. [SPEAKER_04]: And there's also many Americans, the United Statesians who moved to Alaska to get away from the United States to get away as far away as possible from their homes. [SPEAKER_04]: And so it feels like such a gift. [SPEAKER_04]: It feels like such a gift to have my life makes sense in hindsight in this way.

8:00[SPEAKER_04]: And yet, you know, traditional attachment theory and what I learned in graduate school of that trauma and what I read in the body case of school of that trauma was part of the story but wasn't the entire story. [SPEAKER_04]: And hence, give you rise to, uh, to, [SPEAKER_04]: to a body of work that weaves together the work of many other by-pock scholars and individuals or something, there's well-known amongst those of us who are part of collectivistic cultures, who are part of land-based cultures, where there's a more expansive conceptualization of what it means to be human and what it means to be securely attached.

8:49[SPEAKER_01]: You said a lot there, I did say a lot, you mentioned where you live and practice now as you practice where you live because I know you're traveling around a lot too. [SPEAKER_01]: addiction and intergenerational trauma. [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't want to seem too simplistic here, but I do think that there are a lot of people listening who may not really be very well aware of the peoples of Alaska that people who live there now and would you just say a little bit about that?

9:38[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's might seem strange, but even people in the United States Don't know a lot about that [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there are over 30 distinct tribes and nations here in Alaska. [SPEAKER_04]: I think one of the things that colonization does is that lumps an entire group of people together into a monolith. [SPEAKER_04]: You look at all the countries of Europe and a French person gets upset when you call them European. [UNKNOWN]: Right?

10:04[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And why is it that the huge land masses of Australia in the United States and Canada are considered like a monolith when it comes to the indigenous peoples of the place. [SPEAKER_04]: When there are hundreds, well over a thousand, very unique cultures and languages and traditions and ways of being. [SPEAKER_04]: And here in Alaska modernity colonization came to Alaska rather late compared to the rest of the world due to the harshness of the climate and the territories here, but that also means is that the current generation of elders went through boarding schools, went through residential schools, so it's not part of history, it's living history, it's alive, yeah.

10:58[SPEAKER_04]: And what that also means is that there's a legacy in a burden placed upon elders to pass on, cultural inheritance, and cultural wisdom while also contrasted or juxtaposed or deeply, [SPEAKER_04]: deeply anguished by the fact that they were extremely punished for practicing their culture and being who they are and speaking their languages. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Abused and basically tortured. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: In the boarding schools.

11:36[SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: And so when it comes to residential addiction treatment here in Alaska, I've worked in I spent the first 10 years in my career working in addiction recovery and addiction treatment, whether it was intensive outpatient, outpatient, residential or community-based addiction or recovery settings. [SPEAKER_04]: I saw over and over again that when it came to the Alaska Native community population individuals that our Western trauma treatment modalities, I just went [SPEAKER_04]: that just weren't working.

12:10[SPEAKER_04]: And you'd see the revolving door, but there wouldn't be questions of follow-ups, there wouldn't really be evaluation processes in terms of what worked. [SPEAKER_04]: And what I actually got to see was the more a board of myself and my own cultural identity into the space, the more my Alaska native clients are willing to turn up with aspects of their own cultural identity. [SPEAKER_04]: and a returning to culture and a reclamation of culture was actually in all the cases that I saw that I worked with personally, that actually worked adjacent to that reclamation of identity was part of the path to sobriety and it was a huge part of that path to sobriety.

12:52[SPEAKER_04]: And I look at, yeah, I look at modernity in the United States. [SPEAKER_04]: And we don't have emotional sobriety, like as a culture, as a collective. [SPEAKER_04]: And I feel that we've lost our way in many ways in terms of who we are and where we've come from and the anchoring of those cultural traditions. [SPEAKER_04]: And it's more than culture, right? [SPEAKER_04]: It's also about relationship to land, but I'll just pause and take a breath with you because I just noticed you took a big, deep breath in you.

13:29[SPEAKER_01]: Well, [SPEAKER_01]: thanks for the noticing my breath and you know I was I was really taking in what you were saying I was just really listening but also when you said we've lost our way I mean gosh that's a parent in many ways isn't it I mean you know micro and macro levels but the whole idea of [SPEAKER_01]: Americanism in this melting pot and whiteness is about racing culture, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, as you said, like the more than 1,000 different cultures become a group of other, and that's convenient.

14:19[SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, it's not just convenient. [SPEAKER_01]: It's an intentional process [SPEAKER_04]: A very sharp demonizing and a humanizing. [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's just like it's heavy. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it is. [SPEAKER_04]: It is. [SPEAKER_04]: There's a scholar by the name of Vanessa Andriyati, and she's written a book called Hospicing the Durnity. [SPEAKER_04]: And I was listening to one of her podcasts and in it she was talking about a visit to the Indigenous Elders of Central America and South America.

15:00[SPEAKER_04]: And she asked them, do you consider yourselves to be collectivistic or individualistic? [SPEAKER_04]: And she described what each of those words mean and these Indigenous Elders then started talking with an amongst each other. [SPEAKER_04]: And then the tender end to her and as they said, we don't consider ourselves either. [SPEAKER_04]: And she looks at them and they described how they considered themselves. [SPEAKER_04]: And what they said was that individualism and collectivism are both notions that are anthropocentric, meaning that they center humans.

15:38[SPEAKER_04]: And they center humans at the center of the web of creation and of life itself. [SPEAKER_04]: and they describe how they saw themselves, and Dr. Andrea de Gave the phrase, the tabellistic. [SPEAKER_04]: They consider themselves to be a tabellistic, part of a larger, metaboyom and microbiome, right there, the part of a larger web, [SPEAKER_04]: that is metabolistic meaning that within the cycles of creation and maintenance and destruction and decay is for country that gives rise to new growth and so that metabolism nature is a for-kind system within which always provided.

16:33[SPEAKER_04]: And there is no waste. [SPEAKER_04]: We barely [SPEAKER_04]: We create so much waste, we create so much pain when you don't take care of your pain, you become a pain for someone else, when you take care of your grief, you cause grief for others, when you don't take care of your own waste, then you need other people to take care of yours or to become the vessels for your shadow. [SPEAKER_01]: I did not think you were going to say shadow.

17:03[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm picking up what you're putting now. [SPEAKER_01]: Feel so true what you're saying and feel so true. [SPEAKER_01]: I just, you know, and I want to pause even though I'm hanging on your every word. [SPEAKER_01]: I want to pause again just to give people a chance to like, [SPEAKER_01]: Sit with what they just heard because I mean, this is like, you know, like it's not that it's it's not only that there's a heaviness to the [SPEAKER_01]: time and space that we're in and what we've made that is happening now in other words, modernity, but also it's just like conceptually dense and also so counter to a western way of thinking what you shared about metabolizing and the web of creation and it's like [SPEAKER_01]: I love that when you send a dissenter, it, they're perspective.

18:19[SPEAKER_01]: The indigenous elders that were being interviewed, they're perspective on, are we individualistic or collectivists as like, we're just part of this whole, we're not the middle of it. [SPEAKER_01]: We're not, it's not revolving around us. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And so all land-based cultures are by necessity collectivistic, but not all collectivistic cultures are land-based. [SPEAKER_04]: And there are some cultures that have more individualistic traits who are also land-based, and others that end, they also have the collectivistic traits like [SPEAKER_04]: So there's a dynamic polarity rather than polarisation because we're this polarisation, that's an indication of trauma.

19:17[SPEAKER_04]: And so the dynamic polarities that can exist within a system that is deeply metabolistic, where there is no waste and the waste creates a funcundity of you. [SPEAKER_04]: You know, the most precond place is the forest floor that humuslayer of decay is where the precondity is. [SPEAKER_01]: I know the word, and I know what you're talking about with the forest floor, but I know I may not be the only one who's like, what do we need to know about the precondity because it feels important?

19:59[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like such a word that we don't normally. [SPEAKER_01]: Talk about, um, yes. [SPEAKER_01]: Will you expand upon the efficacy for a moment and then maybe you'll, they may be some, this sense of she's here. [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no. [SPEAKER_03]: Yes. [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, okay. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: All right. [SPEAKER_04]: Voice, warm, cold, and of all creation. [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, yeah, there is so much dynamic potential that is there if we can, if we can be patient enough to allow that which needs to decay to decay and rest and then from that emptiness springs you life.

20:54[SPEAKER_04]: that void, the void of, it's the paradox, and yet it's also the dynamic polarity, the void and the emptiness of, of, of forcundity. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that forcundity contains both this void and this emptiness, it's the container, it's the [SPEAKER_01]: So that idea of the decay process [SPEAKER_01]: is not something to be disgusted by or it's an important part of the cycle. [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, we in the Western very death of verse.

21:43[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, and we're very oriented towards maintenance and consumption. [SPEAKER_04]: And not only are we death of us and death of us, and death of us, who are also grief of us. [SPEAKER_04]: And feelings for us, and yet grief is the great metabolizer. [SPEAKER_04]: You know, when someone actually begins to feel their feelings in real time, particularly the emotion of grief. [SPEAKER_04]: If they're able to let their grief be moved through, expressed, and witnessed in real time, I'm writing their discharge summary.

22:14[SPEAKER_04]: like in my head because grief is the great metabolizer grief is a and our chemical process that creates fuel, nourishment and sustenance for future growth. [SPEAKER_04]: Grief expands integrative capacity within an organism, within a person, yeah, it expands your integrative capacity when it comes to a person's ability to metabolize life. [SPEAKER_04]: And we become stuck in our grief because we don't have the cultural containers and processes by which to move our grief through.

22:57[SPEAKER_04]: And if anything moving the grief through is this container where things can actually settle and land and decompose. [SPEAKER_04]: It's part of the rhythms and the cycles of the seasons of life and human development over the course of a lifespan as we change jobs and change partners and reconcile the person that we were with the person who we are now with the person we'd like to become. [SPEAKER_04]: As we reconcile with the harms that we've caused ourselves, the harms we've caused others, [SPEAKER_04]: the world that we will born into that we deeply, deeply knew that our birthright was something else.

23:53[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And this world that has such [SPEAKER_04]: Disecual Librium of Free Source Allocation and such Disecual Librium of Power. [SPEAKER_04]: There's so much grief in that, as well as sacred outrage. [SPEAKER_04]: And yet if our grief isn't held then our sacred outrage ricochets back and forth between entitled rage and impotent rage, righteous rage and helpless rage. [SPEAKER_04]: And we're then looking to attachment theory to help us deal with the anxieties with which we've moved through the world, as well as trauma theory, yeah, you're what we currently recognise as traumatic.

24:40[SPEAKER_04]: And it's not enough. [SPEAKER_04]: because some of us need conceptual landscapes to help us make sense of ourselves in the world. [SPEAKER_04]: And that makes sense because where there's existential confusion, it's also an indication that there has been existential dread and horror, and terror, and annihilation energy. [SPEAKER_04]: And I know it has said a whole lot of [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, the last sentence I just didn't I heard it but I didn't I couldn't take it all in So I don't know if I just like was deep in thought or went out of my body one of the other oh Laura I'm just gonna belt right now because a pot of me is feeling rather joyful and having this [SPEAKER_03]: I need to.

25:55[SPEAKER_03]: It's like stuck right here. [SPEAKER_04]: Little bouncing. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: So existential confusion. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think when you when you mention the existential [SPEAKER_01]: I got lost. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Whenever a person has experienced terror, horror, or annihilation energy, whether it's their own or intergenerational or transgenerational ancestral, or out in the collective field. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

26:28[SPEAKER_04]: Right. [SPEAKER_04]: There is so much horror happening in the world. [SPEAKER_04]: We're getting by carousel exposed to horror and terror. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: We really, really, really are. [SPEAKER_04]: There is so much annihilation energy. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And that implosion explosion internally. [SPEAKER_04]: That happens. [SPEAKER_04]: That acute shock trauma that accompanies terror and horror and annihilation energy.

27:01[SPEAKER_04]: Alysets, a deep existential wound of betrayal and deep confusion. [SPEAKER_04]: thought I signed up for something else. [SPEAKER_04]: What is this? [SPEAKER_04]: What is going on? [SPEAKER_04]: Like something to the core of me feels like it's splitting apart because I can't possibly contain witness participating collude in, sit by and do nothing while simultaneously being overwhelmed and shut down in the face of what's happening in the world.

27:38[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, without feeling a deep sense of existential confusion. [SPEAKER_04]: hence the need for some sort of conceptual roadmap. [SPEAKER_04]: Hence the need for someone to say, hey, there's a more expansive conceptualisation of secure attachment that's possible and available for us. [SPEAKER_04]: And this is in no way to denigrate or reduce or minimize what attachment theorists have given to us. [SPEAKER_04]: It's just that. [SPEAKER_04]: the authenticity with which we look at someone's childhood environment and their parent child relationships and how they then move into this, like through the world, is becoming reductionistics through the four attachments to us, and has become reductionistics through the [SPEAKER_04]: and it also colludes with and participates in parent-blaming, mother-blaming, specifically, within our patriarchal cisgender, cis-sexist, ableist, white supremacist, society.

29:07[SPEAKER_01]: is really just not the way. [SPEAKER_04]: No, and I actually go as it further to say that here in the United States, parents and young families are on purpose under resource, on purpose under resource. [SPEAKER_04]: It's a terrible setup. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and until we begin to look at the macro environment and the longitudinal environment where I think the letters up against the right wall, but it's not quite the entirety of the conversation.

29:46[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and I remember, is it okay if I share the story of how I had my moment of attachment theory and everything? [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, it was 2020, it was during the pandemic and I attended the Boston Trauma Conference online and I got to hear one of the greats in the attachment world speak and it was Carlin Lines Ruth, who has a lab, she was sharing her study based on thousands of hours of footage. [SPEAKER_04]: And she tracked mother child diets back there back then as toddlers and they did the strange situation test with the mother leaves and the therapist stays with the infant and then the mother returns right and we see what the infant does.

30:38[SPEAKER_04]: And she then also did a lot of other video footage of tracking and coding parent-infant relational dynamics. [SPEAKER_04]: And then she tracked these diets, particularly the babies, long to chewedly, prospectively over time. [SPEAKER_04]: And she saw that for some of them as teenagers in their late teens, it was suicidality, addiction, dissociativeness, institutionalization. [SPEAKER_04]: And then she went backwards. [SPEAKER_04]: She was like, oh, this is what happened to you in your late teenage years.

31:12[SPEAKER_04]: That's what happened earlier on. [SPEAKER_04]: And she looked at those videos. [SPEAKER_04]: She looked at the coding. [SPEAKER_04]: And she saw that the biggest contributing factor [SPEAKER_04]: to what we would call borderline personality disorder symptoms or rather borderline personality adaptations for an infant that is put into an impossible situation. [SPEAKER_04]: The biggest contributing factor to that was early maternal withdrawal.

31:42[SPEAKER_04]: and she showed a video that she had to play like a few times slow down because none of us caught it the first time around. [SPEAKER_04]: It's the mother returns to the room and the infant crawls towards the mother and the infant gets within a certain proximity and the mother takes a half step back infant collapses. [SPEAKER_04]: It was that quick. [SPEAKER_04]: It was like in certain proximity, half a step back collapse. [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.

32:07[SPEAKER_04]: And then mother goes to pick up the infant, puts the infant down, it emits the bunch of toys and gives the infant toys with which to soothe himself herself themselves. [SPEAKER_04]: And I sat there and I felt into my body this early maternal withdrawal and trying to sense for it in my own body because I had some really big struggles as in my late 10 years and throughout on 20s. [SPEAKER_04]: And as I felt into my body, the first memory that emerged was being three years old, maybe the younger than that.

32:49[SPEAKER_04]: My sister was newborn-ish. [SPEAKER_04]: My parents were sitting, we were always my parents, we're sitting in a little apartment, a little flat, in Schumat Australia, we'd just been resettled to Australia, and these really well-meaning people were coming over to give us clothes and food. [SPEAKER_04]: And they would walk into the apartment, see us there and then take half a step back. [SPEAKER_04]: And then they put the clothing down or the food down, and then they take another half step back, I guess, waiting for something, waiting for a response, waiting for us to pick up the food, waiting for something.

33:30[SPEAKER_04]: But I just had, visibly, my body was like, people taking a half a step back from us. [SPEAKER_04]: And it made me think, what happens to good enough attachment? [SPEAKER_04]: when you are given pervasive messages and messaging and actions of insecurity, threat, or danger towards your body or bodies that look like your body. [SPEAKER_04]: It may be think about the Vietnam veterans returning from Vietnam, who were jeed and booed and spat on.

34:06[SPEAKER_04]: An ostracized and vilified and shamed and humiliated, [SPEAKER_04]: by their own peoples, it made me think about the ways in which my black and brown friends have internalized harmful toxic. [SPEAKER_04]: messages of messaging about people who look like them, who are symbolic representations and extensions of themselves, through the media, through the news that is biased. [SPEAKER_04]: in a very extreme way. [SPEAKER_04]: What happens to your good enough relationship with your parents who are doing the best that they could under the circumstances that they had that given another cultural system, a different society, that your sense of self in the world would be different.

35:14[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and then it was a few years after that that I came into the work of Dr. Rizma Minicum and Dr. Kenneth Hardy, who were two black mental health clinicians, who spoke debtfully into racialized trauma, and they're working with them, and we sense through [SPEAKER_04]: to the fullness of what it meant to be me, right to be a daughter of the confluence of the mighty mecon river and the South China Sea. [SPEAKER_03]: What it means to be a daughter of rice patties and fragrant rice and what it means to be a daughter of peoples.

36:13[SPEAKER_03]: who know how to take care of each other, and of the lead, through song, its story, and ritual, and movement practices, and animistic technologies, a peoples who have elders, where all the [SPEAKER_04]: The peoples who have an expansive conceptualization of our place in the world. [SPEAKER_04]: We have, we have, we had, I'm still tethered to it. [SPEAKER_04]: We have a cosmology that gives us our right place. [SPEAKER_04]: through secure attachment to ancestors to nature, to culture, to bodies, the communal body, the more than human body, and secure attachment to time.

37:18[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, to a cosmology that gives us a place, and it's interesting because in peso-boyd and [SPEAKER_04]: The place is actually the first foundational human need, a place in the womb, a place in someone's body who has a place on this land, who has a place amongst the peoples in a community and a place amongst the peoples in a lineage. [SPEAKER_04]: And then after we come out of the womb, we have a place in our parents' arms, and we have [SPEAKER_04]: and our feelings have a place, because our parents welcome all parts of us, hopefully, and this then expands into our circle of security, that I can explore and play and be mischievous.

38:21[SPEAKER_04]: I have a place and modernity is the product of displacing others [SPEAKER_04]: and the need for hierarchies, the need for a place. [SPEAKER_04]: The need for status is the need for a place. [SPEAKER_04]: The need for significance and importance. [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, modernity sells us. [SPEAKER_04]: Importance and significance. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this shouldn't be aspirational to be important, though. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, exactly. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, you say more about that idea of modernity as the product of the displacement of people.

39:13[SPEAKER_04]: So, Europeans displaced each other before they went around the world, displacing indigenous people's genociding, indigenous people's genociding, the keen of the land, the trees and [SPEAKER_04]: In the birds, the United States used to be covered in wild parrots. [SPEAKER_04]: Cove it. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they were, they were, I did not know that. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, they were excerpts of the early explorers who would, who would look at their time pieces and say that eight-hole minutes had passed because the wild parrots had covered the sun for eight-hole minutes in their traversing across the landscape.

40:06[SPEAKER_04]: That many. [SPEAKER_04]: that became extinct to five due to bounties, due to the need to erase parents because they would eat the crops that colonize the settlers or bring you with them, and the genocide of the North American Bison. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: At one point, one purchase of bison skeletons at an auction purchase, six million bison skeletons. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, what happens to our expansive conceptualization of secure attachment?

40:53[SPEAKER_04]: What it means to be a part of this web of life. [SPEAKER_04]: when our keen become genocide and this happened in Europe first. [SPEAKER_04]: This happened in Europe first. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Did you like that the great potato famine? [SPEAKER_04]: Some. [SPEAKER_01]: What did you learn was the cause of the great potato famine in Ireland? [SPEAKER_01]: I got a pretty low quality education in elementary school, but I have learned now that the English exported all of the food of Ireland to England and the Irish were left [SPEAKER_01]: That was what caused the great migration of Irish people into the US and other places.

42:05[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure. [SPEAKER_01]: I know that like a little. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, in Australia. [SPEAKER_01]: As an Irish, you know, person of Irish ancestry, that's a nighty. [SPEAKER_04]: Well, Australia is also full of a lot of Irish people, and in elementary school in Australia, I learned that there are Irish and Australia because of the great potato blight. [SPEAKER_04]: That cause for the great potato famine, and I remember at the time when he did all they eat was potatoes?

42:43[SPEAKER_01]: It does make it sound like that, doesn't it? [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it does, but that was the story I was told. [SPEAKER_04]: And so it was only as an adult that I learned that it was being English would have colonized Ireland. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Because they had salmon and they had all kinds of food. [SPEAKER_01]: But just to say like the idea of Irish people only eating potatoes is also like a smear on Irish people, too.

43:15[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I mean not by you, [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of interesting that the story, and this is often the case, reinforces this stereotype or, you know, diminishes the people to something kind of weird and foreign. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: On purpose. [SPEAKER_04]: Of course. [SPEAKER_04]: On purpose. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And thank you for naming that. [SPEAKER_04]: Because part of the Irish stereotype in Australia growing up is like, you know, it was a great potato, it was a potato blight, all that had was potatoes and that Irish people are flaming mad and drunk all the time.

43:57[SPEAKER_04]: All right, and no one explained that that was here too. [SPEAKER_04]: That's here too. [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, but no one explained that that's the after the long-ditudinal aftermath of on purpose genocide through starvation and Yeah, and the denial of food. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just a perfect example, and there are millions of others, of course, of how [SPEAKER_01]: The victim is made to be the problem. [SPEAKER_01]: And whatever happened at them, they caused it.

44:37[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, they caused their own demise, and that is Darwinism in action. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and the Darwinism is then used to reinforce racial stereotypes. [SPEAKER_04]: Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And when we demonize the people, they're erasure, seems natural. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a good excuse to genocide them. [SPEAKER_04]: Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes? [SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, and it's not just the peoples, it's the entirety of the peoples, the way of being, the way of loving, the way of praying, the way of tending to the earth, the way of singing, the stories that they tell, the wisdom of their, their culture that has been passed on through generations, through relationships, through deep observation, through deeper [SPEAKER_04]: not just at the feet of elders, but at the feet of plants.

45:45[SPEAKER_04]: Yet at the feet of the sun rise and the sun set, and the way that the insect simply shifts throughout the day, throughout the month, throughout the year. [SPEAKER_04]: Right, this secure attachment to time is beyond the clock and beyond hustle culture. [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, clocks were used to measure time and then to measure productivity, which, and then we have a culture where productivity could self-worth and then I'm hustling against time.

46:16[SPEAKER_04]: And our time clocks used to be based on something very different. [SPEAKER_04]: The return of the salmon, the return of the caribou, [SPEAKER_04]: the rice and the other, the rice and the rice and the rice and the orange sun that only comes at a certain time of the year um yeah feels like in our bones we know this yes [SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: And also with this can come a lot of grief for what we have lost for what was taken, that shouldn't have been taken, and what was given, that shouldn't have been given, and what we gave away in order to survive.

47:07[SPEAKER_04]: And yet, this deep kinship with ancestors. [SPEAKER_04]: that conceptualization again, right? [SPEAKER_04]: It's more than our human ancestors. [SPEAKER_04]: We have ancestors of more than human kin who coexisted alongside our human ancestors, who pre-existed our human ancestors. [SPEAKER_04]: And we have ancestors who are more than our bloodline ancestors, we have professional ancestors and spiritual ancestors and professional and activist ancestors.

47:48[SPEAKER_04]: He strengthened wisdom we can draw upon. [SPEAKER_04]: We have ancestors seen and unseen. [SPEAKER_04]: Once we're aware of ones who are waiting for us to meet them and greet them and welcome them. [SPEAKER_04]: and this gear attached to a night show. [SPEAKER_04]: And sisters, they share with us how to take care of ourselves and the world around us. [SPEAKER_04]: And they do this through words and also through showing, through being, little sister songs and stories and art and music.

48:37[SPEAKER_04]: and secure a touch with culture, language food, your gut biome is subtly worth looking into, right? [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: You know when you were saying about more than human ancestors, I did think about the [SPEAKER_01]: have been around in the soil, always, you know? [SPEAKER_01]: And we're literally relying upon those bacteria in our gut biome to exist. [SPEAKER_01]: We literally can't live without them. [SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

49:29[SPEAKER_04]: I, here in Alaska, I make Karabufar and Moosfar and wild duck far, right? [SPEAKER_04]: It's, I call it Eastmix for a neck and, and for Moosfar is womb juice, it's womb juice. [SPEAKER_04]: It's what my mother nourished herself upon while I was inside of her, and it's what her mother nourished herself upon while I was inside of my mother inside of her, right? [SPEAKER_04]: And this gut biome knows what soul food is, what womb juices.

50:16[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: My partner said something really interesting to me once he looked at me and he said oh, you know most Americans and he's a white American he said most Americans each to get the feeling of fullness. [SPEAKER_04]: But how about we attune our bodies to eat so that we actually get the trace elements of micro nutrients and macro nutrients that our body actually needs. [SPEAKER_04]: And I also want to name that food can be a sensitive issue for many folks who may be listening.

50:54[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, yeah, you know culture. [SPEAKER_04]: Culture is the glue of the ancient technology of how to be in relationship with each other and with the world around us. [SPEAKER_04]: and rituals which mark rights of passage which mark the passage of a human over the course of a lifespan within a village setting rituals comprise of songs, story, movement, and silence. [SPEAKER_04]: And we have lost our rituals. [SPEAKER_04]: We celebrate the day that did at Walmart.

51:48[SPEAKER_04]: Right, like that's where we get our guy, the dead stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: Probably starting in September, too. [SPEAKER_03]: With that, the relationship to the dead. [SPEAKER_04]: And potting with the dead. [SPEAKER_01]: The extractive culture where we can commodify just the cute part or the cool part as someone decides it to be. [SPEAKER_01]: of deeply meaningful cultural right or ritual, which is so violent. [SPEAKER_04]: And we become hollowed out and more shallow in the process.

52:33[SPEAKER_04]: And it's hard because some of us don't know what we didn't get. [SPEAKER_04]: and also for some of us, our our own cultures of harm thus, or our parents of harm thus, and we've completed our parents with their culture, and are able to distinguish between the two. [SPEAKER_04]: You're for a long time as an example, for a long time, I've got away from Vietnamese culture, because no one ever told me that every single Vietnamese adult I knew was traumatized.

53:01[SPEAKER_04]: And so I can flate a trauma with culture. [SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense. [SPEAKER_01]: Who would tell you, because most of the dramatized people aren't aware of being dramatized? [SPEAKER_04]: No. [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And so it took me some time to come to re-claim culture and work through the work through a lot in that process of reclamation. [SPEAKER_04]: to work through internalized white supremacy, to work through adjacency and proximity to whiteness and to mowness and to status and to importance, to work through internalized shame around my food smelling bad, internalized shame and humiliation around bullying.

53:52[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Right. [SPEAKER_04]: And so this this two can be fraught and it's worth it. [SPEAKER_04]: Right. [SPEAKER_04]: To find your people with whom you can move through whatever emerges in your process of reclamation. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And not all of it will grock with you and that's okay. [SPEAKER_03]: not your thing, but I looked up Vietnamese heavy metal and I was really amazed. [SPEAKER_04]: Oh yeah, there are some awesome battle hymns of Vietnamese victory over the invading Mongol armies.

54:41[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm. [SPEAKER_03]: All right. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And I got to learn some more of my own history, and it was through a tribute. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, through song, through song. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Not in the way that we think of it in like folk folk lore, you know, being transmitted through song, but nevertheless, it's a cultural [SPEAKER_01]: Transmission? [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, and so here's the thing with with in generational trauma and with master historical trauma and with master historical collective trauma, right?

55:14[SPEAKER_04]: What happens is with that displacement, as well as with the vilification demonization, shaming of our foods, our languages, our cultural practices, [SPEAKER_04]: whiteness, yeah, can then take its, take its grip and take its fork, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So, that's definitely calling, blend in here. [SPEAKER_01]: We're all the same. [SPEAKER_01]: It's okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Come and trick or trade. [SPEAKER_01]: Blend. [SPEAKER_01]: We're very blend.

55:54[SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry about it. [SPEAKER_01]: Come trick or treat. [SPEAKER_03]: Don't trick or treat and then let's see. [SPEAKER_03]: We talked about time really briefly earlier and then a secure attachment relationship to bodies, to my body, to the communal body. [SPEAKER_04]: Right, which is secure attachment to play, to pleasure, to rest, which then puts work in its right place. [SPEAKER_04]: And yet so many of us needed to objectify our own bodies and reduce our bodies to being objects of service factors of capital for production in order to produce profit for ourselves or for someone else and so there is much reclamation in play and rest and pleasure.

56:52[SPEAKER_04]: is much reclamation in connecting to our sensorialness and walking through a forest and rubbing leaves and moss against our faces and to feel the temperature and the witness. [SPEAKER_04]: to smell, but because of the quantity, this is not the quantity of the way juice smells when into mingled with forest pine and moss, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: your system like your body. [SPEAKER_01]: It knows what Linda's talking about. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you don't live near a forest.

57:52[SPEAKER_04]: No, but Anne, we each have an equal in ecology. [SPEAKER_04]: Look, okay, there is a land somewhere that misses you. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there is a land somewhere that misses you. [SPEAKER_04]: that might be inklings or urgings or tuggings at the edges of your awareness, or maybe it's front and center you know. [SPEAKER_04]: You know, to go on a pilgrimage at some point, and it doesn't have to make any sense. [SPEAKER_04]: And yet there's a deep, deep, deep, deep nourishment and nurturance when we engage in reclaiming the fullness of what it means to be human, because then we know our place and then we can engage in a skillful relationship and a right relationship with this web of life.

58:48[SPEAKER_04]: And it's one of those foundational fundamental truths that we're inextricably inescapably intertwined, whether we like it or not. [SPEAKER_04]: And we cannot escape the consequences of our actions or each other's actions. [SPEAKER_05]: Yep. [SPEAKER_04]: And we need to learn to metabolize, to our demise, [SPEAKER_04]: to be responsible. [SPEAKER_04]: We are so immature and it's okay. [SPEAKER_04]: And it's not okay. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

59:26[SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Is it? [SPEAKER_01]: You used a word that I can't recall or phrase, it's not polarity, dynamic polarities. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're just scribing and you have beautiful language to describe something that's so visceral and very hard to grasp, so incredibly grateful to you for when [SPEAKER_01]: but your ability to translate what's in there, in a way that makes sense to understand and give some comfort.

1:00:30[SPEAKER_01]: There's like a way of looking at what's going on and then there's a way of staying humane. [SPEAKER_01]: within this time that we're living in? [SPEAKER_04]: I think there's a call for us to come home, to find home, to find our place, and the word human. [SPEAKER_04]: is derived from that hum that hum, that hum, HUM, which also has similar proximity to the words humility and humiliation. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's to be small to know our place amongst the vastness of [SPEAKER_04]: Right, humiliation is to make someone small.

1:01:32[SPEAKER_04]: Humility is to know your insignificance in such a way that there's an expansiveness. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And human also that hum is that humus layer, [SPEAKER_04]: But for Candlea, right at the top of the surface, that's hot with decay, composting. [SPEAKER_04]: And so may we learn how to compost? [SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, it's an invitation. [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_05]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Hmm. [SPEAKER_01]: There are so many people listening who are maybe they didn't know about you before or maybe they did, but they want to learn more from you as they hear everything you share in our conversation today.

1:02:49[SPEAKER_04]: the missing pieces of attachment theory, a decolonized approach. [SPEAKER_04]: And it's six weeks. [SPEAKER_04]: We do a little bit every week based on each of these portals of expanded reclamation of what it means to be fully human. [SPEAKER_04]: The first week is the frame, the setup. [SPEAKER_04]: And I break it down in bits and pieces, there are practices. [SPEAKER_04]: There's pods that we can get you connected to if you're someone who wants to be connected.

1:03:23[SPEAKER_04]: We focus closer to you, we'll poke folks who hold similar identities to you. [SPEAKER_04]: Um, and we're all, you know, and it's an expensive group because there are folks in the group who've foot with their secure attachment template and it's great, but and something more is needed like they're aware that there's something more. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And this active reclamation, it can be reparative and it can also create nourishment and sustenance.

1:03:57[SPEAKER_04]: So that we can, [SPEAKER_04]: so that we can work towards the changes that we would love to see for ourselves and for this planet, and in order to do the law whole work of liberation into species liberation. [SPEAKER_04]: This requires us to reckon with the relentlessness of compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, burnout, and we need more nourishment and more sustenance and more community. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes, we do. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is a way that not only can people learn together from you, [SPEAKER_01]: but then make a learn how to take these practices and go out and use them in their lives beyond the course and create more of this community and nourishment and sustenance.

1:05:09[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's only the third time that I've taught this course. [SPEAKER_04]: And I am always delighted and astounded when I get able some people sharing with me how they've applied these practices into their lives and what has she for them? [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, at the very individual level, at the family level, at the community level, yeah, it's beautiful. [SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got so much into everything you create, and it comes through into such a beautiful, [SPEAKER_01]: program or presentation or whatever it turns out to be.

1:05:51[SPEAKER_01]: So I know that people will benefit from your course and they can find it on your website. [SPEAKER_01]: So you have one coming up that starts in June [SPEAKER_01]: After summer 2026, they can go to your website and find what else you're doing and maybe next time you offer this. [SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_01]: You could also purchase recordings for that course. [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, great. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: And I mean, the process of getting it say approved.

1:06:32[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to be even better. [SPEAKER_03]: Uh-huh. [SPEAKER_03]: So you can get a head start on the next round as CAs with a cooler start on June 25. [SPEAKER_01]: And you only have to show up for a short period of time, every six. [SPEAKER_01]: for six weeks. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you turn up live. [SPEAKER_04]: You feel in the, you know, I have sees work. [SPEAKER_04]: And with the recordings, you can also get a working-to-get sees for the recordings.

1:07:03[SPEAKER_04]: However, in BCC Councils cannot get sees for watching recordings currently. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: Hmm. [SPEAKER_04]: I learned something new a few weeks ago. [SPEAKER_04]: Hmm. [SPEAKER_01]: That's a small drive-back, but... Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Just coming to 10 live. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's benefits to learning even if you can't use the CEs for Recredentialing and I'm also, I don't know, but I think based on the years I've known you, you tend to price your offerings at a very fair rate.

1:07:48[SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: We've had to bump them up a bit because the mental health continuing education industrial complex is challenging to navigate. [SPEAKER_04]: So for these we've had to bump up the pricing and also very generous with BIPOC discounts, with discounts for folks who are in situations where [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know, I went all the way to care about that. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, and I also have a poor country pricing list too.

1:08:25[SPEAKER_04]: So if you leave in Egypt, then there's a different price for you. [SPEAKER_04]: OK. Yeah, and so it's just a recognized and do my small part in the ways that I can in regards to the disequilibrium of resource allocations in this world. [SPEAKER_04]: Beautiful. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, then, [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for everything you do, and for being my guest here on Therapy Chat and for sharing your beautiful wisdom with our listeners and with me, yes, I'll go.

1:09:07[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat with your host, Laura Reagan, LCSWC. [SPEAKER_00]: For more information, please visit Therapy ChatPodcast.com.