dreaming of & towards liberated care
As a queer, disabled, and racialized therapist, my ethics and praxis of care is deeply informed and limited by my lived experience, social location, and vision for collective liberation. I hold the tensions of psychotherapy’s undeniable complicity in policing and oppression and psychotherapy’s potential as a container for building radical care. I’m especially curious about practices of refuge making, capacity building, generative discomfort, interdependence, and living questions in response to accelerated disability and death under fascism, settler colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism. Care, access, and healing must be collective responsibilities undertaken to transform the conditions that are sickening us all.
Anti-carceral and politicized therapy identifies and interrupts cycles of psychological, emotional, and relational harm that critically engages power, systems, and resourcing, including within the therapy space. We understand “symptoms” across mind, body, and spirit as clear expressions of unmet needs, appropriate responses to systemic and ecological crises, and wise protectors of humanity. We build towards advocating for and expanding possibilities for care and support beyond therapy, like with friends and family; peer support and community/cultural spaces; fictional, historical, and non-human connections; and movement comrades.
I refuse to replicate dynamics of coercion, surveillance, and policing. I offer support in the forms of co-regulation; reflective listening and questioning; solidarity from lived experience; collaborative problem-solving; creative practices; perspective shifts; mutual aid and advocacy; and relational skill-building.
Our struggles and our joys are connected. Together it becomes more possible to encounter new places of healing and possibility that we cannot reach alone.
offerings
My care work centers QTBIPOC, disabled, Mad, and neurodivergent struggles, needs, strengths, joys, and futures. I’m here for fellow politicized therapists and care workers, artists, psychiatric and therapy trauma survivors, and multiply marginalized community members.
✦ Ongoing grief support for fellow covid-cautious folks and disabled and chronically ill spoonies
✦ Neuro-affirming care that uplifts Mad, queer, and disabled wisdom
✦ Non-linear relational processing, resourcing, and support for fellow working-class QTBIPOC
✦ Co-regulation and grounding for those moving through major/multiple shifts and transitional times
✦ Capacity- and skill-building for embodiment, relational conflict, and struggle
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth… Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be… it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
Alice Walker