Binary Creatures

I have wondered what the nature of this earth is as an essential unique entity in the galaxy. What is its essential nature, its purpose, and its symbolic self-expression? What is the dynamic of its very nature that plays out through all things, and all time? Of course, this is the kind of question that cannot ever be fully known. Especially as a human being that is still striving to inhabit a truly relational ontology in which my interrelatedness does not occur consciously, but is instead enacted unconsciously, as an integrated reality.

What I have been able to gather in a rudimentary way, through observing inner and outer landscapes, is that Earth presents binaries, dualities, and polarities. There is night and day with the fast orbit around the sun and moon, all living beings operate in a rhythm of expansion and contraction, there are literal poles which hold the globe onto a delicate axis. These opposites seem to manifest into matter and psychological material in all spaces and cross-culturally. Although, how it may be understood and interacted with is certainly with diversity across the human world. Perhaps Earth shows us what is, so that we can dream into what could be, or perhaps is just outside our view. A co-creation toward something new that is alive in the possibility. An emergence of a non-dualistic phenomena and interbeingness. In this way, Earth needs us, and our participation in this joining toward a shared becoming.

I have been shedding many models lately and seem to be in yet another disentanglement. My way of thinking and engaging with the concept of non-duality may have been leading me back to the familiar because I am unconsciously driven by striving for something different with the hope of making something new. It is a kind of disassociation from reality and a fragmentation of self. I sense that this linear way of looking at connection and transmutation would lead most of us back into the tension of opposites. Although my practices intend to establish inner balance, I am now wondering if my efforting towards non-duality consciousness leads me back into an endless tethering to duality. This way of interacting with non-duality I believe is described well by Marita Deleany as “one sidedness” and “caused by the overreliance on the extraverted thinking function” (2009, p. 79).

If it is as Delaney says that “we are essential binary creatures destined to live internally and externally at the same time” and with Mary-Louise von Franz noting that “we must relate to the inner and outer world simultaneously”, then there is no way to fragment from one world in seeking the possibility of the other. This attempted bypass is a familiar process to many of us located and living in the global north and in westernized culture. No doubt an impression from imperial capitalism and the severing from ancestral ways. Reassociation to the reality of the inner and outer occurring at once, requires us to be willing to be impacted. More than that, it may ask of us a sacrifice.

Delany describes the relationship of hunter and animal hunted for sustenance as requiring a sacrifice on both human and more than human beings (2009, p. 79). This ritual of offering something sacred to the sacred is common indigenous knowledge and a core system in many indigenous cosmologies. Sacrifice in this way gives way to relationship and the possibility of balance. Coloniality maintained by capitalism gives permission to avoid the sacrifice in the pursuit of materiality and possession. A larger significance of this severing of the relationship is that human beings act without awareness of their acts of destruction and therefore do not register the consequences.

In reckoning with the human pathology of disconnection, from ourselves and the Earth, from climate destruction and disastrous imbalances, we may need to move out of dissociation and toward a sacrifice of the familiar and comfortable. As I slowly wake up from my dissociation, I notice grief which is both mine own and that of the non-human world. Inviting this into embodied experience and knowing, creates an opportunity for inhabiting interconnection. Practices need to support the entry into the internal landscape through the reality that we already exist in an inter-related world, and non-symbolically. However, the process of awakening to relationship can be painful, and the dethawing of dissociation reveals unhealed and unacknowledged wounding. We must have the courage to feel this, without moving back into the consciousness split. A reoccurrence which the colonial matrix thrives upon. As Delany says, “the work required of human consciousness is in part a continual attempt to integrate our dissociated parts” (2009, p. 82). The Earth is waiting to be known and for the knowing to be awakened from within us. In times when this dream is not visible in conscious realities because we are out of balance and have split ourselves into two, we can seek the collective unconscious and the ancestral practices that open portals into new modes of being.

Getting Lost Along the Edges: A Pathway Toward Unlearning

In my dream of returning to school, I imagined incubating and receiving support in my drive to dismantle western applied psychology and its methodologies. In my fifteen years as a social worker, I yearned to bring awareness and upliftment to my fellow social work, counseling, and psychologist peers, who like me, are struggling with enacting true liberatory practices with our clients, and with the communities we live in and serve. I visualized exposing racist and capitalistic roots, and the ways psychology performs coloniality as its administrators fall into collusion and even complicity. I also wanted to find the threads of a way out after witnessing even the attempts with good intent seem to do little more than virtue signaling and end up benefiting still those with the most assumed power and privilege.

Even with many years of critical self-reflection, and with increasing my awareness of the spaces where my idealism meets my ego, I still have so many blind spots. I worried retrospectively that with a pathway in academia I was still feeding my urges and conditioning to fight systems from within, keeping me “on the battlefield” as my dear friend and mentor Jax Black, PhD., would often say to me. In watching a recent dialogue hosted by the Othering & Belonging Institute, What if Justice is Getting in the Way, Bayo Akomolafe points out a major problem with the movement. The pursuit of justice as Akomolafe sees it, keeps us in the struggle and can never lead to freedom saying, “struggle leads to repetition. Struggle leads to the proliferation of the familiar”. This is exactly the kind of Zen koan I needed to help reveal the contradictions in my mind and bring me closer to a heart of understanding.

My mindset in returning to school has been to locate a solution from within the problem. This orientation comes from both my social work training and my upbringing that had me scanning the horizon like a superhero, vigilant to signs of what could wrong so I could predict and control the future. I had begun to imagine over the past few years a peer-to-peer model for mental health care that decentralizes the therapist. A space that understands trauma as a social problem first, and a way to reduce the isolating effects on mental health and trauma in the global north- an epidemic. Logically, this model also looked to address the growing issue of access to care. I even woke up to an October moon at the hour of its fullness hearing the calling of this passion. Yet, I have not been able to assemble so much as an outline. In fact, thankfully, this program has been a process of disassembling this idea, and more importantly at this junction, the very notion of a model. Certainly, this has also been a part of engaging in critical self-reflexivity and as part of deprograming, essential to decolonial work.

I identify as someone who thinks in models, and I love tracking patterns. I find fulfillment in demystification and systematizing. Yet, for me the models I build always end up feeling and being confining and even inviting enviable redundancy, like the self-determination of an ouroboros. I often wondered if I my constant dissatisfaction with the projects and models I have constructed meant I am only good at starting things or need to resolve a much deeper imbalance with more self-acceptance. However, I think this program has helped me to avoid an empty epistemological crisis.

An early learning in this program which exposed a major blind spot is the problem with research models and the academy as producer of knowledge. I was shocked that as someone who preaches individualized care and whole system health, I was operating in contradictions and walking the dark path of universality and truth seeking. Underneath my dream was an impulse to find the one way or the right way, which would be absolutely irrelevant to any community psychology endeavor. Replication and universality are spokes that keep the wheel of imperialism, globalization and coloniality in motion. The quest for the right way is also the compass I was given by my father who in his unhealed trauma as a refugee in the US, passed on to me this paternalistic, individualistic, and hegemonic strategy of survival.

In this frame, maps orient one in relationship to north, with most two-dimensional colonial cartography dissociates kinesthetic curiosity and knowing. (Foster, 2010). These navigation systems do not direct the viewer toward self-location. In this way, the wild interconnected beingness is directed into curated grids and forms. And the gaze is oriented outward first, looking for answers. I am vulnerable to these models of knowing coming from two generations of Displaced Persons (DPs) - war refugees without a home, desperate to belong somewhere but locating themselves internally in the borderland. 

The intergenerational voices that value action and doing, along with my value identity as model creator, problem solver and even savior, keep me in the well of the wheel, fighting against motion while in fixed suspension. Being driven to be of value to society, and even in service is another conundrum for me, as it always seems to repress any possibility of wildness and encodes my body as commodity. Industrialization and the colonial matrix require of us to locate ourselves in self-value such that we enviably recreate internal and external suffering. We then buy the latest gadget or compass to help find our way or learn about our purpose in a yoga retreat on self-discovery, “reinforcing a neoliberal construction of selfhood” (Godrej, 2017). In discussing the development and nature of the human soul, Bill Plotkin points to the consequences of the loss of rites of passage in the global north, as “arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth" and “wild imagination” (p. 202). This identity loss also serves the research machine and the university which steers inquiry in the direction of cure, capture, arrival, and discovery.

Jesica Siham Fernández in Toward an Ethical Reflective Practice of a Theory in the Flesh, gives guidance for moving away from damage research and disaster capitalism to “heart-centered work [that] requires critical awareness of the Self”. Fernández explains the ethical imperative to integrate Moraga’s Theory in the Flesh:

 Centering the self involves an ethical reflective practice of how manifestations of pain, anger, love, and hope are felt, experienced, and processed through the body –and consequently the heart (feelings), hand (actions) and head (thoughts). Reflecting upon and discerning one’s embodied emotional state, and the subjectivities associated with it, is conceptualized as theory in the flesh. (Fernández, 2018, p. 224)

A clear example of applying heart-centered work and how solutions can be generated without the necessity of models comes from the Students Informing Now (S.I.N.), a student group at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). The authors bring awareness to the reality that “research rarely shows us how to construct a new frame or a counternarrative that can successfully challenge and transform dominant media frames” and the importance of those counternarratives emerging as a self-expression of the community:

This is because living counternarratives those that take shape in the real world cannot be constructed and sustained only by scholars working in theory, but rather in practice by grassroots action and collectives of people whose work is driven primarily by lived experience and necessity. S.I.N. members did not sit down one day and say, "We need a counternarrative, let's build one." Instead, S.I.N.'s counternarrative emerged organically from the necessity to survive, heal, and claim their humanity”. (Dominguez, 2009, p. 440)

This wealth spring seems to emerge spontaneously as community self-expression is free from the unnatural forces of erasure, suppression, and contamination from the disembodied researcher.

Akomolafe says, “we have become so found that we are incarcerated in our maps” and invites us into the scared as an invitation to become lost (Othering and Belonging Institute, 2023). Stepping into a practice of becoming lost, brings me to important discomfort, vulnerability, and the possibility of liberation. Engaging in the practice of releasing myself from the construct to know, I begin to see with embodied eyes. The spaces I inhabit reveal constellations and I am seeing that I am known by the world around me. The whole world reaches toward me, and networks of connection reveal themselves.

Panola Mountain, Georgia

On a wobbly walk through the woods this weekend I came across a signpost that told the story of Edges. It goes on to describe edges in the natural world as “created where two different habitats meet” and “can increase habitat diversity and quality”. I turned my attention to the space between the lake and the meadow and noticed that then everything looked differently as “patterns arise naturally when our eye follows an edge” (Sewall, 1999, p. 143). I felt then accompanied in letting go of the struggle to be somewhere. The pattern in the edge said to me, there is no right way.

Cervantes-Soon describes the borderlands and its inhabitants as presenters of solutions or challengers of the intellectual where “these sacred spaces, which are often organic sources of knowledge, offer a potential way to nurture a critical cultural intuition” (2014, p. 110). One way to rediscover these scared spaces within and without is to look for the fault lines or breaks. The “shift is lingering in the breaks”, says Akomolafe about transformative change beyond the struggle (Othering and Belonging Institute, 2023). It is the break in the repetition, a break in the familiar. In the margins of the map, the boundary, border and periphery is where I am locating the organic emergence of my dream and my place in the decolonial turn.

Deconstructing the Utopia: Is the Global North Ready for Acompañamiento?

I would like to begin this exploration on the challenges for the adoption of Liberation Psychology in the global north with my own positionality, so that I can be in active and honest relation to this discussion. As my body and activities are located in the global north, it feels in alignment with principles of community psychology to engage in a critical reflexive practice inquiry, as a starting point to attempting understanding. This praxis also supports an entry point into this topic that is sincere and has the possibility for transformation.

I will also attempt to humbly apply what Chela Sandoval (2000) calls “oppositional consciousness” (p. 54) with the hope that this encounter with the question expands the capacity to, “search for and reflect upon the polarizations, distances, gaps, or marginalization both in the world and in ourselves”. Considering a primary challenge for the global north is with actualized relationality, this is also my attempt at learning from the inside out. Only with constant negotiation between the oppositional forces of relational dynamics that are constructed in the familiar power structures of oppressor and oppressed, something new can emerge from the cracks. This allowing for the monstruous as Deleuze would say, and the disharmonious, may be the only way that Liberation Psychology can take footing in the global north. For the global north, accompaniment must be an act of something entirely new, so it does not recreate the familiar.

I am a first generation American, and my parents are both refugees from Lithuania. They were granted asylum in the United States and Canada in the 50s as war refugees and had no other relations on the continent. As a white female and able bodied American, I have all the privileges, and yet my differences are hidden in plain sight. This has been a source of unnamed pain and curiosity my whole life. The performance of being an American has revealed clues of my ancestry as well as my intergenerational trauma. As one generation removed from a country who only regained their independence from their occupiers in 1990 after 100 years of physical, cultural, and spiritual removal, erasure, and occupation, I have a primed nervous system toward enlistment in the problematic dualism of the oppressor and oppressed.

As part of a speedy acculturation directed by my father, my ancestral communal frameworks were regenerated as strategies of rugged individualism. This will not be unfamiliar to those who are thrust into navigating the imperialist capitalist matrix in the United States. The visceral impact I have lived with could best be described as a sense of surround sound isolation, which after learning about my family history I ascribed to land separation. It had not fully occurred to me until reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed in undergraduate school, that isolation is also a dedicated device to keep the wheel of coloniality turning.

Isolation has been a topic of interest for me professionally as well, and as a social worker trained in feminist anti-oppressive psychodynamic psychotherapy. I initiated my higher education an interest of understanding the power dynamics in the helper/helped relationship. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to disentangle from the roots of the tradition of psychology and social work in its complicity in the coloniality machine. Social Work’s deal with the devil for so-called legitimacy has rendered its foundational dedication to social justice a specialization. Returning to school in Community Psychology has been my best effort to seek support in coming to terms with my collusion as a psychotherapist with the problematic drives of social work and psychology, as well as seeking a way of working that is more in line with liberational psychology.

In my observations of psychological practice in many environments in the US, the social is split or fragmented from the psyche. This underlying framework produces care models that struggle to truly address the conditions of wounding or offer whole system wellness and are misaligned with liberatory psychology values. The treatment of trauma is a good example of this. The many innovations in treatment of traumatization continues to supplant the social inside the psyche as something to be resolved by the self, and in isolation. This in turn makes it very difficult for the survivor to reach for community and can feel like they are searching for the connection in the dark. These models inevitably generate more illness, as the psyche searches for the social or as Akomolafe puts it, “the healing has become the sickness” (Re-Visions Day Conference, 2022).

Isolation is in service to the maintenance of illusion of separateness, which keeps us from organizing effectively toward a liberatory psychology. The resulting internalization of social ills, especially by individuals and communities in the margins, generates a cycle in which psychology in the global north pathologizes these groups for responding to oppression. This becomes a sizable barrier to wellbeing. Can psychology in the global north be decolonized? Is it amenable to a liberation psychology project? If how psychology is being offered in the US “contributes to alienation or maintaining control of the people, what is psychology for?” (Harris, 1990, pp. 266).

Liberation psychology as Martín-Baró conceived of it, would have psychology be an “instrument of change” (Watkins and Shulman, 2008, p. 34). However, the global north may have some issues with linking mattering with responsibility. Some theorists point to the field of psychoanalysis as departing from its roots in the social realm and in service to those most marginalized with the displacement and exterminations of Jews (Gatz, p. 976). This being another territory of generational passage of trauma that has found its way into a modern-day system, in which the binaries and violence play out in the version of psychology that many in the global north exercise.

Liberation psychologist, Jesica Siham Fernadez suggests that “the role of psychologist, whose values align with liberation psychology, is to disturb and unsettle Western Eurocentric psychologies to forbid the discipline from becoming complacent and complicit in the perpetuation of oppressions (2020, p. 97). If we take up this invitation from Fernadez, it will mean a paradigm shift for psychology in the global north, and the responsibly to upset the status quo at the cost of one’s power and privilege, perhaps evening making some of us obsolete in our professional existence as we know it. It may also require us to see the realities of the social and the psyche already existing as an interbeing. There is no need to produce knowledge or models of creation that mechanically construct linkages. This is because it already is alive and the knowledge keepers can be easily found in the borderlands as Cervantes-Soon points to (2014, p. 110). This disharmony may just inspire a wealth spring where community self-expression is free from the unnatural forces of erasure, suppression, and contamination from the disembodied researcher or psychologist/social worker. Further, liberating myself/ourselves from the impulse to heal and fix wounds, may give way to the organic emergence and possibility of accompaniment.

Another space to unsettle and to create the possibility for liberation psychology is with America’s ideologies of utopia. This fantasy landscape is “reinforcing the cosmovision of the master” (Akomolafe, 2022) and stays in circulation through sentimentality. Participants in the global north will need to find the dream in the local, regional and the community, and resist the temptation of universality and replication.

As the recipient of intergenerational transmission of coloniality from Britain, the US continues to perform it onto the rest of the world both consciously and unconsciously and now has become the model of power (Maldonado-Torres, p. 244). The US in its virile adolescence has surpassed its “father” by exercising covert global colonization repackaged as a shadow democracy. The cycle of violence and resource extraction in the name of Progress has happened in South America in the 50s, 60s and early 70s and the Middle East in the 80s and 90s and continues in a multitude of forms today.

America’s unresolved trauma has become a repetition compulsion (Freud, 1914) which enacts the power binaries that becomes the limbs of coloniality. Maldonado-Torres in Coloniality of Being demonstrates in this way that “coloniality survives colonialism” (p. 243). While it is difficult at this angle to see how efforts of liberation psychology in the global north could become anything but a reproduction and perpetuation of coloniality and an unscalable wall for liberation psychology, perhaps in the deconstruction of the utopia we can listen and hear the dreams of people.

Martín-Baró’s (1994) work was foundational to the formation of liberation psychology. A foundational thought presented by Martín-Baró’s is realismo-critico, which explains that a “theory should not define social problems” and instead needs to be informed by the circumstances that people live within. Cervantes-Soon describes the borderlands and its inhabitants as presenters of solutions or challengers of the intellectual where “these sacred spaces, which are often organic sources of knowledge, offer a potential way to nurture a critical cultural intuition” (2014, p. 110). This speaks the flow of knowledge production and the spaces in which a liberatory practice of psychology may be possible. The visibilizing of local knowledge and sourcing networks has the potential of creating essential regional pivots.

With this, Participatory Action Research (PAR) can be an interesting praxis of liberation psychology as it insists on mutuality over individualism and illuminates the community as the source of knowledge. PAR done right, is as impactful to the researcher, psychologist, or social worker as it is for the community, opening a pathway toward true relationality. PAR is also intended to be activated locality, and create in the researcher a stakeholder, which could possibly be a tool of resistance or perhaps inoculation against polarizations. Fernadez says, “we are acompanantes en el andar, companions in this walk; we build the road by walking alongside each other, learning though every mistake and wrong turn, and how we can rise, revise, and root ourselves in the integrity and dignity of our mutual companionship, coexistence, and acompanimento” (pp.107-198). This mutualism, to use a biological term understood by the more than human world, is an inherit drive that cannot be destroyed. We only need to find it in the cracks.