Redefining Ethics | Therapists Unlearning Oppression, Together
Welcome to the Redefining Ethics podcast hosted by Reflecting on Justice. Come join us as we deep dive and learn from fellow therapists about what it means to live, practice, and redefine our ethics towards collective liberation. Let’s find our way, together. www.reflectingonjustice.com reflectingonjustice.substack.com
Mon, May 06, 2024
Your hope is enough, if it's not just yours.
Welcome back! Rounding out this series on hope, we’re going to be diving into the liberatory practice of joy. We’ve talked a lot about leaning into mourning, of letting ourselves wound so we can witness, and not turning away from discomfort. And while I think that’s crucial to continually resist what I call “cop out privilege” - aka the kind of privilege that lets you opt-out of difficult conversations because it doesn’t directly impact you, the kind of privilege that let’s you opt-out of difficult learning, of really looking at the impact of how you're living in a critical manner, and opting-out of the pain of redefining what you think you know by claiming neutrality - Liberatory practice is also all about joy. Because the point isn’t to suppress our experience of joy or peace when it shows up. Joy, peace, and happiness are actually really important aspects of liberatory practice, hope and dreaming. And it’s important for us to know that joy and mourning are not mutually exclusive; we can hold all of this at a tension with each other, as integrated with one another. So let’s chat a bit about how we can resist cop-out privilege while still allowing ourselves our full capacity for joy. Let’s first start off with questioning our understanding of happiness and the ideas we’ve been brought up to believe about happiness. I’m going to read an excerpt of Sara Ahmed’s critique on the definition of happiness in her book, Feminist Killjoy: “[As Feminist Killjoys] we might do something different with our happiness. Like refuse to let it be our end. The English word happiness comes from the word hap. meaning chance. The word happiness shares its hap with the word happenchance and haphazard. But happiness seems to have lost its hap. Becoming not what happens to you, but what you have to earn. We put the hap back into happiness, taking a chance on it. We could be happy to be queer without turning happiness into a project of becoming worthy or deserving of it.” “We might need to claim the freedom to be unhappy, in a world that assumes happiness as evidence of being good, or at least the freedom to remain profoundly ambivalent and unsure. Life is complex and fragile and messy, and so are we.” “We need to shatter the illusion that happiness is inclusion…We don’t tone it down, straighten ourselves out, try to be more like you so that we can get through to you. We spill over onto the streets, fierce and fabulous, our protests, parties. We spill over, we spill out.” So if happiness isn’t something we have to earn, if it isn’t something that tells us whether or not we’re good or moral, if it isn’t something that we have to hold on to at all costs, if it’s something that we can let happen to us, if we free ourselves from the idea that happiness is liberation or that happiness is earned and something we have to prioritize proactively getting, what does that open up for us? What does that open up for our liberatory pra
Tue, April 23, 2024
The Trap of Empathy; Turning Hope to Witness
Welcome back! I’m so stoked you’re here and hope that the last two reflection guides have supported you in thinking deeper about hope. Today, let’s add to that and chat about the trap of empathy and how we can instead, turn our hope in to witness. Sometimes the gap between hope and hopelessness, mourning and solidarity, grieving and collective liberation…it just seems too big. Sometimes we respond this vastness by numbing the pain, to turn away, to tell ourselves we can’t witness these atrocities and still be okay in our world, in our lives, in our relationships. But we are supposed to be in pain. We are not supposed to feel nothing in the face of violence. We are not supposed to cling on to quote unquote normal as if we have not been transformed by what we have witnessed. We are not supposed to go on unwounded and unfazed in our daily lives as if genocides are not happening around us, as if they were not happening in our names. Our discomfort is not a sacrifice, it is an ode to our ethics. Our ethics are not a sacrifice, because our hope and our dreaming can only exist through the roots of our ethics. There’s nothing to hope for if there’s nothing we’re willing to fight for. There’s no solidarity, if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed in witnessing the violence against another. There’s no dreaming if we don’t let ourselves see how the world needs to be changed. And sometimes, on our way to hope, solidarity, and collective liberation, we fall into the trap of empathy and this new word I learned from diasporic Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza, solipsism - that we can only see the world through our experience of it, that our experience of must be the most centered experience. I’m going to read an except from Sarah’s writing called The Work of the Witness which I will link in the email accompanying this audio so that we can fill this with more context: (remember to head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope if you’re not already on the list for the email!). Okay here we go: AS LONG AS PALESTINIANS ARE ALIVE to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has [observed], empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.” Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought
Fri, April 19, 2024
Liberatory Hope is not Hope, it's Dreaming
Hey! Welcome back! If you’ve been part of Reflecting on Justice for a while, you know I’m part of an abolitionist book club. Every month we discuss a book or articles or podcasts that explores the whys and how's of abolishing the systems that harm us. Of how we shift the world from punitive and carceral logic and move instead towards transformative justice, accountability and collective liberation. (And, I often write about and share these insights we conjure up at book club to our email community, so shameless plug to join our email list if you haven’t already!) Anyway, hope comes up a lot in these conversations we have at the abolitionist book club, whether or not we specifically name it as that, the undercurrent of our gathering is all about sustained hope. This sustained hope shows up when we talk about histories and legacies, when a participant shares how their work with folx on the death row is meaningful not because these folx were able to escape state-sanctioned murder, but that they experienced a community fighting for their humanity. Sustained hope shows up when we share and remember our first-hand accounts of resistance, of organizing, and how the outcomes of these acts of justice has now, magnificently, become life as usual. Sustained hope shows up when we share how much easier it is to talk about collective liberation at this point in time, like something in the air has shifted…however slowly, but shifted nonetheless And it is at this abolitionist book club where I first pieced together the realization that liberatory hope is actually not hope, but a dreaming. Let me explain : I have never really been a subscriber of conventional hope. I always thought conventional hope was a risky gamble that would make me a fool if it didn’t turn out or put me in a place where I had to wait and be a passive recipient. That hope would always put me at risk of disappointment, of not being able to lean into the safety of the snarky, “I knew it” or “I told you so”. Because a hope that is predicated on the possibility of an outcome is vulnerable. In order for hope as a feeling to exist, there has to be part of me that believes it can become a reality. Dreaming on the other hand, requires no such possibility. Dreaming is to think up something that doesn’t yet exist, something that by definition is outside the requirement of what can be considered a rational possibility. And ironically, I think it is in this particular irrationality, that we can find the resilience that hope needs to continue its survival. It’s the belief that everything is impossible till it becomes possible. That it doesn’t have to be possible within the context of current reality, for it to be the answer. And is that not what liberatory practice is? The recognition that we are living in the imagination of colonial violence, of racial capitalism, of extraction and exploitation; and recognizing that we coul
Wed, April 17, 2024
You + Hope
Welcome! Thank you so much for tuning in to our work, an Expose on Hope: a Reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless . I’m Abby, my pronouns are (she/her) and I’m a cis-queer, straight-sized, neurodivergent, working-turned-middle-class first gen settler from Hong Kong currently occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples and spent most of my life occupying the Annishnabeg, Ojibwe and Missisauga of the Credit territories colonially known as so-called Toronto. And this is reflecting on justice, a wealth redistribution-based educational community for therapists to unlearn systemic oppression, together. Our relationship to these lands dictates our commitment to addressing the ongoing impacts of colonization in our work and in our lives, and is why we created reflecting on justice to do this deep work together in community. I invite you to take this moment to reflect on your relationship with these lands and what it means for you to be here. I will absolutely have a different relationship than you do, and I’d be so curious to find out what has sparked for you as you do this work. If you’re not sure of the Indigeneity of the land you’re occupying, please visit www.native-land.ca to find out. Alright so let’s start with some context before we do our deep dive into hope: It seems like in every conversation, in every class I teach, in every lecture I watch, there are questions about how we sustain hope and how we move through hopelessness. Questions about how we stay in this work when the problem feels too big, too reinforced, too powerful. Questions about how we save ourselves from despair and keep ourselves from drowning amidst all the ways our systems are causing us suffering, amidst all the ways our systems are privileging us at the expense of others. And those questions hold so much weight - this work is hard , and hopelessness is one of the primary tactics deployed to keep us from our revolutionary power. This makes having a fully processed response to hopelessness foundational to living our ethics when our ethics are inconvenient, when they are painful, and when opting out would just be so much easier. Because understanding systemic oppression is not hard, saying you are an anti-oppressive therapist is not hard, saying your values are in kindness and compassion, and even in liberatory practice is not hard… It’s when you’re challenged to question what you think you know and how you live your life, when you’re called to live your ethics in a way that doesn’t come naturally, when liberatory practice requires you to leave something on the table, or when you’ve been doing this for years and years and years and you get hi
Fri, March 31, 2023
Centering Consent and Dignity in Advocacy with Yassie | Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
Find Yassie at pssdcanada.ca , pssdnetwork.org , willowleafcounselling.ca Want more justice-oriented conversation and insights? Sign up for our Unlearn with Us newsletter at www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
Sat, February 25, 2023
Engaging in the Messiness and Community as Justice Work with Bhupie Dulay | Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
Find Bhupie at www.prospectcounselling.ca or www.bhupiedulay.ca Follow Prospect on instagram! @prospectcounselling Want more justice-oriented conversation and insights? Follow us on instagram at @reflectingonjustice Or sign up for our Unlearn with Us newsletter at www.reflectingonjustice.com/newsletter Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
Wed, November 30, 2022
Back to Basics as Justice Work with Xu Wang | Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
In this episode, we talk centering knowing and truth as joy, racialized queerness, shame, and going back to basics. Find Xu at artfeelscounselling.com Want more Reflecting on Justice? Go to www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free Intro to Justice-Oriented Practice Guide. Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
Fri, October 14, 2022
Finding Your Voice + Authenticity as Justice Work with Ravin Aulak | Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
Find Ravin at @therapy.afterhours / @ravinaulakcounselling or https://www.ravinaulak.com/ Want more Reflecting on Justice? Sign up for our free justice checklist at www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
Wed, August 24, 2022
Reclaiming Spaces to Exist as Justice Work with Theresa Thomas | Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
In this episode, we talk with Theresa about reclaiming spaces for folx to exist, including yourself, as justice-work; realization as radicalization; as well as the power of rest, community, and environment. Find Theresa at inpowercounselling.com . Want more Reflecting on Justice? Check out www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free intro to justice-oriented practice guide. Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
Sun, July 24, 2022
About the Humans: Behind the Redefining Ethics Podcast | Reflecting on Justice
Our first ever podcast! Let's start questioning colonially developed "professional" ethics. Join us as we launch our Redefining Ethics podcast through setting intentions, energy exchanges, and personal stories of unlearning systemic oppression. Want more Reflecting on Justice? Check out www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free intro to justice-oriented practice guide. Get full access to reflecting on justice at reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe
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