Therapist Spotlight Part 2: Colette Brown

I’m just going to dive into it.  Last week we were talking about race as it comes up in the therapy room, often in the very first session.  You mentioned, more specifically, the need to respond to how clients are feeling.

I think it's very important in that first session to really validate what clients are feeling.  Because, especially with clients of color, there is such a stigma toward psychotherapy.  For a lot of my clients, psychotherapy is not something that's spoken about with their friends and family, and so I'm very aware of the potential that this is a stigmatizing experience. 

Could you speak more to this issue of stigma and its consequences?

Oftentimes, I find that my clients' emotional distress is trivialized or minimized by the people in their lives.  And that kind of psychological or emotional gaslighting is really dangerous.  It tells people to swallow what they're feeling, to push it down and ignore it.  And obviously it heightens a person's feeling that they are aberrant or defective in some way.  And so I think it's really important when people enter their first session with me that they know that I don't think there's any way they should be beyond how they want to be. And how they're feeling now is how they're feeling now.  And if that's not how they want to be feeling, then let's work toward that.  But there is no right way to feel.  

There is no right way to be.  And if there is, you're the only person who can determine what that is. 

You mentioned, too, that our clients are often negotiating various systems and narratives, wittingly and unwittingly, integrating them or pushing against them.  And yet, too often these days, it seems race and class are pitted against one another in the public discourse.  What do you make of that?

Right now I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and she's theorizing that race is actually a caste system.  That’s a more effective formulation because it drills down into some of the economic causes for the creation of this racialized caste system we've inherited.  I think about it like this: we have this neoliberal obsession with productivity and output...in our country and in our world, because so much of our global market was developed in a system that was based on economic exploitation.  It's based on how much product you can pull out of a person.  And so these concepts, race and class, are absolutely married to each other. 

When I think about race, I think about how race was built because it was a really convenient socioeconomic tool to push productivity by disempowering the laborer.  We have forgotten that economic exploitation was at the core of the concept of race. You can try to pull race out of class, but I find it hard to do.

The million dollar question: how do you bring that into the therapy room?

I think that some of what I see—and it’s such a pernicious thing—is this imposter syndrome.  It's very much tied to people's assessment of their professional personas, or their notions of achievement.  A client might lament, "Oh, I'm not living up to the standard of z, y, or z!"  And so much of that feeling and complaint is based on the idea that there are some people who are 'better and more productive' than they are, so the client is basing their self-esteem upon a certain model.  

And I think that imposter syndrome is something you see a lot with women and with people of color, and I think that its foundation is in that exploitative, economic model where there are some people who are "better," and there are some people who are supposed to be "work horses."  And it takes a little bit of time; not all clients want to go there.  I do have one client who is actively willing to go there, and it is blowing up a lot of her paradigms.  It's gorgeous to see.

Yes, and that's a tension in the therapeutic work.  You're making me think of the image of the 'red pill' from The Matrix.  The red pill as a demystifying agent, as a catalyst for critical consciousness.  Unfortunately, it’s been co-opted by the alt-right as a metaphor for their version of political consciousness.  But it's a tension in the therapy room, whether we talk about 'treating symptoms' or changing systems.  So, what are we doing here: are we serving up the blue pills or red pills today? 

Red pills. [laughter]  Yea, I'm a little sad about the fate of ‘blue pill’ and ‘red pill’ because I do think it's a fantastic analogy.  But, you know, we can always co-opt it back [laughter].

You spoke last week as well about stories. Now that we're back on the topic of stories, any favorite books or films?

I have a huge soft spot for fantasy. N.K. Jemisin is an African-American sci-fi author, and she loves writing these big sprawling novels.  And she wrote a series called The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms about a race of gods that fell to Earth and have somehow been diminished.  And the novels are about them reclaiming their power as gods, and the story is told alongside these racial and national conflicts.  It's very fun stuff.

And then, of course, my friend Chris Spivey just wrote a horror-based RPG (role-playing game) guidebook, Harlem Unbound, which is set in the Harlem Renaissance.

Wow.

Yes, and the illustrations are all very much in the style of Aaron Copland. I'm getting goosebumps thinking about it, because years ago when Chris was writing it, I was one of the people who play-tested it.  And it's just been this labor of love, and he's finally come out with his second edition, and it's just gorgeous! 

Speaking of gorgeous, you’ve described your vision of therapy as a kind of call-and-response between therapist and client.  You also invoked the image of the griote.  The griote as the community storyteller….You have such a deep affection for stories, reading them and teaching them.  Living them, of course.  And recognizing how others are living them too.  And so, coming full circle here, stories seem to have brought you deep into your role as therapist.

Yes, I like narrative therapy. It has great potential for helping clients figure out their personal stories, which, in turn, can lend such meaning and purpose to their lives.  So I absolutely love stories.  If my clients are able to craft a narrative about who they are and what their experiences have meant—if they gain insight and new understanding of their motivations, emotions, and lives—then I think I’ve done ok.

Oftentimes, when we're in the midst of all this emotional chaos, it can be very difficult to isolate a narrative.  As people, we are generally averse to chaos. We push back instinctively against it. We try to bring order where there seems to be none.  

And I understand how, on the one hand, there are clients who tell stories, maybe the same stories. Those narratives can hold them in place, and it’s not always a good place.  But I think after a while, when people start releasing the narratives that freeze them—that confine them—they start retelling stories about their lives in ways that are empowering and enriching.  If someone can say that they know what they are feeling, when they are feeling it, and why they felt it in the first place, then things are probably going well. Then I think they'll do ok. [laughter]