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[Speaker 2] Welcome back to season two of Black Healing Remix, the podcast. This year we are featuring conversations, really, really powerful conversations. They have been held throughout the year with some of our favorite healers, advocates, and friends of BEAM.

So now sit back, relax, and enjoy. Hello, everybody. I'm Natalie Patterson.

I'm the director of training and programs here at BEAM. You have just tuned in to a fantastic episode of Black Healing Remix, the podcast. I'm very hyped today because this episode is a long time in the making.

I would argue it's more than a year in the making because I fell in love with our next guest through our founder, Yolo Akili Robinson, who called me one day and was like, girl, have you read this book? And I was like, what book? What are you talking about?

He's like, decolonizing therapy. Have you read this? Because this should legitimately be the companion to our Black mental health healing justice training.

And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, boom, boom, he's making all the correlations. And I was like, ooh, this is lit.

Who is this? What's going on? And we had the opportunity to kind of bring you in and co-conspire for some programming that we did last year.

We met, I immediately fell in love and was like, oh, she is all the things they say she is, and then some. As a facilitator, it is very rare that people are holding space and I'm like, oh, I could be off the clock. Usually I'm like, OK, did we say this and did we do this and whatever.

And so I am delighted to welcome to the pod Dr. Jennifer Mullen. I want to read your bio because it's a lot of stuff in here. Y'all go to the website.

[Speaker 1] You don't have to read it.

[Speaker 2] There are some listeners I know who might be like, oh, who Dr. Jen? What's up with her? So I want y'all to know who you're about to listen to so you can put some respect on her name.

Dr. Jennifer Mullen is an author of the nationally best selling book, Decolonizing Therapy, Oppression, Historical Trauma and Politicizing Your Practice. She is a dynamic and highly sought after international speaker, as well as an organizational consultant, teacher, course creator, community builder and decolonized mental health movement starter. Those things, those are the highlights.

And there are so many details and so much thoughtfulness. For those of you who have read the book, I know that you know she has put in all the work for this book, the detail, the layers, the research, it's all there. And so Dr. Jen, as I lovingly call you, welcome to Black Healing Remix, the podcast. Thank you.

[Speaker 1] It is such an honor. It is honor. I am such a fan of you, of being of YOLO and the integrity behind y'all's work and just being able to kick it with you when we've had my little parlay in the LA area.

Yeah, so thank you. Thank you for having me. And I'm so grateful to connect with your community.

[Speaker 2] Yeah, so grateful to have you here. We know that they're so, so busy because we'd be sending you emails and we'd be like, girl, we'll see what you know, you know, she travels, she's doing this, we'll see what we can get with her. But I do want to kind of take it back to last April, when you came to LA, we did a conversation, you hosted a conversation that we called Loving and Healing Our Rage Decolonizing Therapy.

It was a really beautiful experience for folks. It was a small, we wanted to do an intimate kind of experience with your work. We know that you do high profile big things a lot.

[Speaker 1] Not the preference, not the preference.

[Speaker 2] Not the preference, but the bag. Um, but we really wanted to give our community an opportunity to to be an intimate community with you. We recognize that our healers are so sacred and very often, you know, a best selling author, you don't get to spend two, three hours with, you know, in a space with 20 other people.

That's a kind of rare experience. And so we wanted to, to offer that to our community. And so can you kind of share some of your reflections on that day, kind of what you were thinking about when you were conceptualizing what that was, and also the first time you were working with us in this capacity?

[Speaker 1] Yeah, yeah. Well, number one, thank y'all. You made it so easy.

Like everything, I think I was, me and my team were over, what is the word? When you're like over worrying and on top of everything, because no shade, but that's usually what we're used to, like needing to like detail all the details of the details, if you know what I mean. But you all were not just detail oriented, honey, but also very gracious and very present.

And I'd love that the expectation wasn't just like, oh, there you go. Bye. We'll see you in two hours.

That yourself and YOLO were truly, and your team, like intertwined in community, listening, learning, engaging, providing, sharing, teaching. And it really, you know, it was real. You know, you were about it.

You know what I mean? You were about it. And in terms of the concept, I think sometimes people think that the rage stuff and decolonizing therapy are two separate things.

And the reality is that rage, it's like comes out of it. It's a branch, right? It's really essential, first and foremost.

Yes, people need support, right? Black folks need support. We all require support.

And the reality is that oftentimes our family, our loved ones, cannot and should not be the holder of so much shit, right? You know, and sometimes we need a very distant, caring, present, holding container of someone that can hold majority of our identities. I say majority, because it's not all, some people ain't gonna hold it all, right?

Majority of our identities and majority of the that we bring, especially as like other space holders, healers, trailblazers, we're holding a lot and we're balancing a lot. And yes, we need often that therapist, healer, helper, space holder, coach, to be able to co-create something with us and remind us that we're safe.

[Speaker 2] And I love what you're talking about with this idea of like everyone needs support. And I think sometimes in our communities, support is like, because you ain't got it together, right? It's seen as a negative thing.

And I love that, you know, part of our work at BEAM, I know part of your work is really, you know, taking away this idea that like help is because you're broken, right? As opposed to the most healthy among us, right? The people with the most capacity are the people who've actually understood that why would you do it all?

Why should you have to do it all? And we recognize that under white supremacy, we've been trained to think that we have to be hyper productive at all times. Any sign of I can't do it all means you're weak and therefore disposable.

Which that's the lie, right? That's the lie. And so we get to rewrite these stories to say, no, actually, the reason that a lot of folks have thrived so well in terms of like whiteness, is because they have a lot of support, right?

They've had many and they've had many of these kind of resources, a la slavery, right? To support their efforts. And therefore they have been extraordinarily successful in that mission, right?

Versus kind of what has been implied for us, which is if we need help, something is wrong with us. And I would argue that when we are most resourced, we have the opportunity to be the most brilliant, the most thriving, the most well. And so I love that you're making that distinction of like, we get that help if we want it.

And that also we don't have to be on the floor. We don't have to be in the worst of times to seek support and then receive that and thinking about, and sometimes it's not our immediate circle that is going to provide, that is going to provide that best support for us, right?

[Speaker 1] No. And so therapy can be a beautiful tool. And as somebody that was providing therapy for 20 something years directly, whether residentials, hospitals, partial care units, university counseling centers, right?

Like on the front line while mobilizing, sometimes people would be having panic attacks or lots of anxiety or suddenly being out of their body. I would like contribute in that way when I was a little bit younger in movement and my knees were a little bit better. But the reality is, and doing all of that and working with community and parents, foster parents, you name it, the realization and the education that I received from community was also that there were a few things that our education and our fields didn't quite get, right?

And that it was really also essential for me because I was becoming very unwell. And it wasn't just burnout, which I then perceive as like something that happened, that something's wrong with me. Like I'm not self caring enough and that's why I'm burned out.

Or that's how people that love me would say it, like, oh, you need to take care of yourself more. Girl, you need to go get a massage. You need to, I would do all of that.

And then every Friday I was like Humpty Dumpty that needed to be put back together again. And I was not alone in that process. And oftentimes what happens is because you were talking about that history of slavery, right?

And access and history. And I'm going to bring this all together for a second. So just rock with me for one moment.

So what I noticed in particular with Black women and femmes is that there's this expectation that we're going to continue to go above and beyond, right? That we're going to continue to mother or mother, right? Everybody else and ourselves last.

I was even raised like that with my mom serving everyone and us being like, when are you going to sit down? When are you going to sit down and eat? When are you going to sit, ma, ma, ma, I got it.

Let me, to this day. And she's 76. And the realization is like, oh, I can see her anxiety growing.

We talk about me and her all the time. I can see her anxiety growing as she gets older. I can see, and I'm like, this is, my grandmother was also like this, right?

I feel guilt if I have a little too much space or a little too much room, even if I am mentally, emotionally, energetically exhausted from mothering and holding repressed emotions that other people are not even conscious that they're laying on my lap, on my desk, on my virtual. Yeah. And so I say this to say that there is some intergenerational patterning around who gets care, as you know, who gets care, who is worthy, truly of care.

Cause we could say, get care, take care of yourself. But then when we take a few days off in a certain nine to five job, it's like, oh, did you take off last week? Did you?

Well, are you sure that you, yeah, right. But do you have enough days? So I remember that working at the university and being paid for one thing and yet doing 15, literally, literally, literally.

And even in my own business now, I catch myself doing 15, small business, right? Very tiny. And we're doing our little best.

And I'm like, wait, I'm doing 15 things again. That's why I'm resentful, overwhelmed, feeling tired, sleeping, but not resting. You know what I mean?

I could take, I could have eight, nine hours sleep, but I haven't rested during that sleep.

[Speaker 2] Yeah. Cause you over here planning curriculum. You over here.

Oh, I got to book this. I got to do. Yeah.

You stay working in your sleep.

[Speaker 1] Down to our, down to people we love. Like, oh, I didn't get back to that text. Oh, they asked me for a resource.

Shit. What is our son going to do? Right.

Like just having these moments that we're not just mothering. I don't have my own biological children. Right.

And so I might not just mother in that way, but I'm mother collectively. And I had one thing I want to say in bringing in this rage is that I started realizing that my rage was like resurrecting itself, like teenage rage. And the rage that I experienced in my own household is one whole other thing.

Right. But as I got older enough to learn, oh, if I show it this way, I'm going to get arrested or killed. Or if I do this, I'm going to get knocked out.

Right. Like, you know, like the hood way of growing up and dealing. However, what happens when there's institutional racism?

What happens when there's this like sexist ass, cis-gendered white shit? I'm about to curse.

[Speaker 2] Yeah.

[Speaker 1] What happens when there's like this sexist, cis-gendered, racist ass, crumply white shit where you're just like, what just happened? Like, are you feeling in your body the macroaggression, but your words and your brain weren't ready for it?

[Speaker 2] Because you were just living. Yes. You were just living.

I mean, I literally had this experience this week of like multiple older white people enacting these aggressive, but also like out of nowhere kind of behaviors that I was just like, I've lived in this neighborhood for so many years and suddenly you're so bold, just suddenly, that you're flipping me off at a gas station because you don't like that I parked at a pump to get gas at a gas station. So I was like, I'm confused. What you mad about?

Like, I came to a place to get gas. So what is the problem exactly? Right.

And so like, I totally feel you about this. Like, and what do we do with that? Where do, where does that, that's one of the things that I've always sat heavy in my spirit of when these kind of, you know, and some people call them microaggressions and I'm like, but they hella aggressive.

So I don't know if micro is the right word, but these very aggressive instances, right. That also are often very invisible to a lot of people, right. They happen in this covert kind of specific manipulative way where all of these feelings are now dumped into your spirit, into your body, into your being.

And then you have a meeting to go to or drive your car or go pick up your kid or whatever, but you know, in your spirit, oh, this really awful, mean spirited thing just happened to me. And then, and then the other person, they just go on with their life, being hateful or whatever, you know, I don't know what the racist, hateful people do. But I assume they just go right back to their little racist, hateful life.

And they just la la la la, right. They go on. But now the person who that was thrown onto has to figure out a mechanism and a process on top of everything else, because we got to pay bills and taxes.

We got to do all the other things we supposed to be doing. And now there's this additional piece that kind of flew out of nowhere or seemingly out of nowhere, right. But it has all these historic strings, right.

There was a blueprint set in motion hundreds of years ago for this occurrence to be possible, right. And so I just think about what that does on a psychological level. I think about people who are under resourced who don't have access to go to yoga and, you know, do they Pilates and go to the kickboxing class and you know, whatever, you know, there's all these things we could be going to the float lab or whatever.

There's so many modalities we can be experiencing. But we also have to have access to those modalities. We also have to have the education to know, oh, this is a thing I could be doing for myself.

Well, all of that takes time and energy. And so when I think about a person who is, you know, financially insecure, is food insecure, is living in a violent neighborhood, has experienced, you know, some kind of violence. How is that what they're supposed to be able to do?

[Speaker 1] Right?

[Speaker 2] How is that a reasonable kind of societal response? Oh, well, you just got to take care of yourself better. Exactly.

[Speaker 1] And that I truly believe that that is one, not the only places, right? Because we can be a critical lover of things. I just want to say that, right?

So that is one of the places where I feel traditional, unconscious, very Western therapy drops the ball, right? Where it doesn't pick it back up either all the time. And there are some great therapists that do it.

Always an exception. But as a whole and how we're educated, we're not educated to understand race-based traumatic stress. Maybe now students are like, excuse me, can we talk about this?

Right? We're not educated to talk about queer blended families. We're not educated to talk about how do people, how do therapists, how do helpers, how do folks like you were saying that are unhoused and are dealing with food insecurity and are worried about how they're going to get their next check or whether SNAP benefits are going to be removed or whether or not their section eight is going to keep happening or whether dot, dot, dot, dot, right?

Cause I know that I'm not so many checks away from it either.

[Speaker 2] There's a difference between- Switch a couple details and all of us are in a different category.

[Speaker 1] Exactly. We ain't so far. And some of my besties still are.

Some of the people I grew up with and family members. And so that immediate sense of, well, right. How do we metabolize this?

And I don't think that metabolize was really a word that was used in any of my programming, not in my master's counseling and community agencies program at NYU, not in my doctorate and something that was more spiritual. There was always this processing. What's the treatment plan?

How are we processing? Be neutral, provide these techniques, go. Right?

And in all of that, there is still my beliefs, my actions, how I was raised. Right? Any conscious or unconscious biases I might be having towards a person or people sitting in front of me, right?

Cause we all have it. Oh, I pull myself up by the bootstrap, right? That unconscious socialized programming, right?

And with that, what about any rage they're feeling? Grief, deep anxiety. I truly believe, and I've said this before, that rage is healthy, right?

And that's part of what we talked about back in April, that rage is not something to be buried or rooted out or extracted or smothered or quieted. That rage loves an audience, right?

[Speaker 2] I love that.

[Speaker 1] Rage loves an audience. And if we don't give her, him, them that rage, right? Like a rage child and our ancestral rage, if we don't give it a space and a place to be loud and talk it shit and talking your shit can be soft.

It could be through journaling. There's a lot of ways to talk your shit, but if we don't get it out in some way, it will come out in the most inopportune time or when our buttons are most pushed or when our closest loved ones are asking for something a little too much that we just can't give or when, right, our boss puts another thing on our desk, metaphorically, technologically, however you want to call it, where someone cuts us off and the next thing you know, either we black out, right? Many of us have gone there. I used to be a blackout person and then afterwards like, oh my gosh, I could have just been really bad or wow, I just disrespected someone I really love.

This is going to take a lot of repair. Damn. And then the shame, the shame.

[Speaker 2] Now you have rage and shame and a mistake. You got a lot of stuff to clean up now when you didn't have capacity for it in the beginning, which is why you was avoiding it. So it's like, boop, now we really in a problem.

[Speaker 1] Now we're really in a problem. And then there's my internalizers and some of us go back and forth between the externalizing of the rage and the snapping and the irritability. It's just like a personality thing, an environmental thing, a little bit of an intergenerational thing, right?

Like how we're raised in our environment. But a lot of us too have learned to survive and cope by biting our tongue. How many times have we said that?

[Speaker 2] I'm just, you know, Or that becomes, you know, you, you know, I think about myself and like, as a young person, I was like, I was going to give you this mouth. Okay. I was going to say the thing.

And then I know nobody saw that coming. Right. And then as I got older, I got the feedback, oh, that's going to get you in trouble.

You going to talk that shit to somebody and this going to escalate to a place you don't. So then I was like, okay, well, what's my other strategies? Right.

So then I evolved into being a pick and choose. So then I would punish with silence. Okay.

Well, I'm just not going to say anything. And I'm going to just look at you and you're going to feel stupid. And that's, that's going to be the interaction.

Right. Still going to bully, you know, still this like mean girl spirit in that of like, but this is my control mechanism. Oh, I was talking too much.

So now I'm not going to say anything. Right. Go to these extremes.

And thank goodness. Now as a, at this big old age, I have found the middle, right. There are times when I really don't have nothing to contribute because it seems like you're committed to where you're standing.

And so you're not actually trying to have a conversation. You're trying to just tell me some things that's not a conversation. Right.

And so like, you know, I think it is finding that sweet spot, but that's years of therapy. That's being an artist, being a poet, being a business woman, all these things, like all of these things contributed to me finding what the middle and what the balance is for me. And I think for so many people, if you are having, um, you know, a highly, highly impacted and marginalized experience all the time where you get the reprieve to have the space to pick how you want to show up in the world, that is a gift and a luxury to go, let me sit and ponder my experience.

[Speaker 1] I'm going to put my notebook or my notes that, you know, and what you're saying is so real. And I'm feeling such a twinning energy here because I, I can agree with the punishing, with silence and the withdrawing. And I just want to throw out there that another way I started noticing myself, harming myself was also just holding, like, like holding my, my, my, like bringing it in.

And little did I know then I was having more anxiety. And so when I was working at a university counseling center, in particular, I would see a lot of young black Brown women, right? Like starting to get a lot of panic and anxiety attacks.

And when, then I would ask at some point when we were able to get it, you know, together, sometimes their professors would be like, they're asking for you. They're in the middle of class, in the back, in the corner, come on in. And I would, you know, like, can you get everybody else out?

Can we give them a little bit of space? Can they get some air? But after a while, then we'd be like, okay, so where's the anger or the rage in you?

And they'd be like, no, where is it? Where is it? Because I knew it was somewhere.

[Speaker 2] Yeah. And somewhere physically. Where is it?

[Speaker 1] Yes. Yeah. Can we breathe into that?

Can we just even acknowledge it for five seconds? Then 10 seconds, then 15 seconds. And I remembered this one young woman looking up wide-eyed, you know, still in this freeze panic, right?

Nervous system is deeply shut down. She's barely breathing, telling her I'm putting my hand on your, again, putting my hand on your back to help you breathe. I want you to breathe with me.

On the count of five, you're going to breathe in. And I'm like, gently going through. And when I asked the rage question, like, where it is housed in your body, she looked up at me and I'll never forget this.

And she's just like, you think I have, do you think I have the fucking time to think about where the fuck it is in my body? I'm trying to breathe. I'm trying to survive.

And then afterwards, two weeks later, we laughed at it. And I said, don't apologize. That was some real shit, right?

Like, don't, don't fucking apologize for that. And she was like, but Dr. Jen, I guess the feeling in the moment was that panic attack wasn't just about the math problem that I didn't get or that I failed the quiz or whatever. It was also about all the other little things that I have no control over.

And so going back to your point, right? Who, who has the privilege? What do we have control over?

Imagine folks right now that are living quote unquote, and I say quote unquote, because so much of the land that is now United States of America is Mexico, but that's okay. Um, this undocumented.

[Speaker 2] The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico where I live. Anyway, that's what I'm talking about.

[Speaker 1] Okay.

[Speaker 2] Don't get me hot on the podcast.

[Speaker 1] I'm talking about, right, right. Speaking of rage, um, the audacity, but like, even what if you're undocumented, right? And you're, and you're also thinking about your children.

If you're caring for a loved one, I've been talking to the ladies that give me my manicures. We have conversations, you know, I even find myself passing along information and flyers saying, Hey, maybe not for you, but maybe you have friends, amigos. Yeah.

Maybe, you know, like, and I'm like, here's the lawyer number to her, you know, Dr. Jen and I write it down. Right. And so there's lots of ways.

I have my mom doing that now and she lives in Texas. Right. And like, she's like, Oh, they're a gardener.

I'm like a gardener. Who would you guard? Like, you know, I'm like, you don't have money for a gardener.

She's like, Oh, he does like eight of our houses for this much money. And this is the first time in my life, my parents have a house. They couldn't afford a house up North.

Right. So, you know, and it's just fascinating to watch this dynamic and think about, yeah, mom, I know that you're struggling in these ways, but who else is really struggling right now? And how do we need to show up?

So even if my mom can show up at 76 and pass out flyers, not that that's the end all be all, but even if mom is passing out flyers and using what she can to communicate with communities, what else is possible for us? And I find personally and with other folks that when we are feeling completely out of control and there's a fuck show of a world and all these forms of white supremacy and colonial capitalism popping off and everyone is feeling like I need a therapist 24 seven, right. And I need peer support and I need that giving not in a giving to avoid my stuff, but being part of a community, a collective, a place, a space where you're also your medicine, your wisdom can be in service, your gift, your shine, whatever you do that's easy for you can be in service to someone else where it ain't easy for them.

You know? And I find that right now as my new and tiny as that might sound, that has always been one of the pieces of feedback that I would give folks about rage. Like, Hey, that's great that you're starting.

If you're normally depressed, depressed, or feeling really sad feelings, you're a little bit irritated. Yes. We're starting to go the other way.

We're starting to move towards it's coming back online. And if you're normally super pissed off wanting to fuck everybody else up and you're starting to feel moments of sadness. Yes.

That means you're letting some of that wall fall out and see what is under there, you know? And if we can do that and be there and give these slices to each other and give a little bit of that medicine to each other in the midst of Holly crisis, then whatever kind of policies, words, and terms they It means nothing when we truly have people power and community, right?

[Speaker 2] Hello everyone. My name is Joelle Doucette and I am BEAM's associate director of training and programs today. I am so excited to introduce you to our get help now page available on our website being dot community.

This page provides a comprehensive list of hotlines and resources for support, especially if you are someone, you know, is experiencing mental health distress at this time, you'll find information on mobile crisis units, as well as resources for navigating new mental health diagnosis. Many of the resources we list are community based and not connected to the police. So for more details, please visit us at beam dot community.

Take care of y'all. You know, I was in community with us. I believe he's a psychotherapist.

His name is Elliot Connie, and he was talking about this idea of when it all feels like it's falling.

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