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Paul Guillory, Ph.D. - Guest
Paul Guillory is a psychologist, and Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Clinical Science Program, Psychology Department. He is a certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy therapist and certified EFT supervisor, and an EFT Trainer-in-Training. Paul is the author of the book, Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals, and is the former chairperson of the Northern California Community of Emotionally Focused Therapy. Paul was the psychological consultant to the Oakland Raiders professional football team and the National Football League for 14 years, has been a consultant to the Sacramento Kings professional basketball team, and is a selected provider for the National Basketball Players Association. He has also served as Director of the Center for Family Counseling in Oakland California for 10 years, and has been in private practice in Oakland, California for over 30 years. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (00:22)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be speaking with Paul Guillory, Ph.D., who is a psychologist and associate professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Clinical Science Program, psychology department. He's a certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) therapist, a certified EFT supervisor, and an EFT trainer in training. Paul is the author of the book Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals, and is the former chairperson of the Northern California Community of Emotionally Focused Therapy. Paul was a psychological consultant to the Oakland Raiders professional football team and the National Football League for 14 years. He has been a consultant to the Sacramento Kings professional basketball team and is a selected provider for the National Basketball Players Association. He has also served as the director of the Center for Family Counseling in Oakland for 10 years and has been in private practice in Oakland, California for over 30 years. Let's listen to the interview.
Hi Paul. Thanks for joining me today.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (01:36)
It's great to be here Keith and I'm looking forward to our discussion.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (01:40)
Yeah, definitely. So, Paul, I know a little bit about you. I'm part of the Northern California community for EFT Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. I'm a certified supervisor myself, and I've seen you a little bit on the discussion boards. We also have a colleague in common, Veronique Thompson, who spoke highly of you when I interviewed her for a podcast about the work she's doing in her program. I wanted to reach out since I know that you've also got a book that's coming out soon. I'd love to hear about your thought process and how your thinking has evolved throughout your career and led you to the work that you’re doing now.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (02:28)
Well, actually, the book is out. It was released on August 10th and I'm really happy about that. People are emailing their ideas and their opinions after receiving the book and reading it. I'm really, really excited about that now.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (02:56)
And the book's name is Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals?
Paul Guillory, PhD: (02:58)
That's correct, yeah. It's published by Routledge and it came out in August. So it came about after a discussion on our listserv with Sue Johnson. Partly it's trying to talk about, of course, doing couples therapy with African-American couples, but also, to see if we could by virtue of a book talking about EFT from a cultural, humility perspective, draw more African-American therapists or therapists who work with African-American clients to be interested in EFT. For me, that's a sort of a culmination of way back in 2006 when, Tracy and I, my wife went to Ottawa for an externship, and I had just gotten back from a John Gottman workshop up in Seattle, and he spoke so highly about Sue Johnson. I was surprised when I came back and my wife had just finished her book, and so it was on our coffee table and I said, oh, that's the person Gottman was talking about. We read it, we planned a trip to Ottawa which is east of here, and anytime we go east, Tracy's family's in Philadelphia. So we combine a workshop and a vacation or something like that, with a trip to the East Coast. At the time I was doing more sports psychology where I was working with the Oakland Raiders, track athletes, triathlon athletes, baseball players, and golfers – that kind of thing. So I was doing a combination of therapy as we usually do therapy with anyone with athletes, but also guided imagery, some self-help hypnosis, and so on. So when I went to Ottawa, I had read her book but had no clue about like how really Sue Johnson worked. You can't get the essence of EFT without sort of looking at someone really doing it. When I saw Sue Johnson's work, I knew right away I was watching a master therapist doing things that were so intriguing and I didn't have a concept of the EFT skills or interventions. But I heard her voice and I knew, oh, this lady is really, really good. I didn't know about things like validation, empathic reflections, risk, and so on, but I could see it and knew that I had much to learn. That's where my journey started. I became involved with a group here in the Bay Area, The Northern California Association of EFT Therapists, that had just started. I don't know if they even had the name at that point.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (06:35)
Probably not. Yeah.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (06:36)
So there was just a group of therapists wanting to meet and talk about this model that they had also recently discovered, you know, two or three years before me. So I started going to those meetings regularly but I was still involved in the work that I was involved in. EFT takes some concentrated learning. You really have to practice it. You have to get supervision and so on. So it started a journey of learning EFT from that point to now. Now, the book idea really came about after a discussion on our listserv. I was looking for an EFT trainer that was African American and as you know, trainers are the people who teach externships and core skills for entry-level learning of EFT.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (07:47)
Yeah, there's a level of certification that you need to have to provide those trainings themselves.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (07:54)
Under that are supervisors who supervise externships, but also people just interested in learning EFT. Perhaps after they've taken an externship or core skills and sometimes before they’ve taken them.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:14)
Definitely.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (08:16)
And then there's the certified level. So I was looking for – and thought – that there would be an African American trainer somewhere in the States and as it turns out, there wasn't. That was news to me. And also Keith, what I found out in that exploration is that I was really the only black supervisor that was certified and that there weren't very many black-certified therapists in EFT. That was a big discovery and I realized I didn't have a community of therapists that I might consult with, learn from, and engage with. Out of that, Sue Johnson wondered, “What could we do?” So I gave her a list of six things that we might try. One of those was a book about doing EFT with black couples. She agreed that it might be a good idea and she said, in the Sue Johnson way, “you should write that.”
That was somewhere between two years and a year and a half ago. I started writing and I renewed my interest in recording. At a certain point, after you get certified, you stop recording your own work although you're supervising the other therapists who are recording their work.So I started to record my work more. I asked a lot of therapists if they were interested in contributing through their own cases if they were working with African American couples. I actually got more no’s than I got yeses, but I did get three of our colleagues to agree: Denise Jones-Kazan here in the Bay Area, Yamonte Cooper in the LA area, and Ayanna Abrams in Atlanta. There are five clinical chapters in the book, all of them case studies. I have two and each one of those clinicians has one. At the end of each chapter, I interview Sue Johnson about the case. We talk about EFT and we talk about the case in the chapter and that's part of the book.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (11:27)
Well, that sounds great. So this kind of project came out of a hope to encourage other black clinicians who may want to be involved with or learn more about EFT, they may want to get further trained in EFT, and really even create a sub-community within the EFT community to be available for other clients and so on. As well as training other professionals and really creating space.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (12:00)
Yeah. I think instead of the idea of a listserv for clients and referrals, a lot of us have those referrals. Here's the thing that we didn't have – we went to an EFT training wherever it was in the world, or in the States, and it would be one or two of us at a workshop where there could be as large as 200 participants. So what would get shown in terms of EFT work would be white couples, white individuals, and so on. And if we were working with black clients, whatever we needed to do to translate that work that we saw and clinical ideas that were discussed, we would have to think on our own about how we might do that same thing, but maybe differently with a black couple or a black individual. So we always had to translate. So part of that search was so that we didn't have to translate. Maybe there was another group out there that we could just talk to and not translate. Part of the hope –and the challenge– I say in the book is to create training programs even in core skills or in externships where black people are presented but also discussed in a way beyond what we currently might see in EFT training. But I don't think EFT is unique in this way. Diana Fosha in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, has a tape that I have and it's about her model with a male client who is a Nigerian-born American. But it is not said anywhere on the tape.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (14:32)
So the focus is on being a man, but there's also this intersectionality between also being an African immigrant man.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (14:41)
The cultural element of his masculinity, if you will, or a cultural element of his emotional and interpersonal life.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (14:52)
Yeah.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (14:53)
She never once says anything about that and it goes to this idea that when founders of therapies are creating their models, they talk about the universality of their model – that it works. In EFT we talk about attachment and emotional experiences, and it's the idea that these things are universal and that there's some truth to that. Except the attachments are different around the world and the emphasis for us is in terms of looking at withdrawers and pursuers as particular kinds of positions people take when faced with distress. The model we use for that comes from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth who did the follow-up on Bowlby’s idea of attachment and put it into a strange situation model that confirmed the idea of attachment being important. The model there is that a baby cries, mom responds. The model was extended over time to be baby cries and daddy responds. We saw that fathers played a role in attachment bonds and babies could attach to moms and dads. But in West Africa, where many of the enslaved African people came from, baby cries and community response. And it was a tribal community that involved adolescents, older women, and so on. The baby still got responded to and still had a special connection to mom, but it was different because the community responded. They were largely farming communities, so mom had to work. Babies learned that it was the community that was more important than them, although their needs were taken care of.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (17:20)
They could get that responsiveness from multiple members of the community and still have that kind of secure attachment with others.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (17:27)
The attachment sometimes was a slightly different one without the sense of importance to the individual, but the importance to the collect, which is a different way that could play itself out in some therapy sessions. It's not that just West Africans have that collective view. It's actually a larger view in countries that we consider third world, or just not as modernized as Western. Ainsworth actually said this strange situation model needs more fieldwork in other communities. I did it here. But she always seemed to think that other people would pick that up and maybe do it slightly differently but still look at attachment. That's a separate sort of research question.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (18:36)
When Africans were brought here as enslaved people, they brought with them their culture and their customs. Even though there was a systematic disruption of that in terms of tribal communities being together, the Africans stayed together. There was no inter-chain interaction other than whatever group of whites were on enslavement camps. So there was diversity because they were brought from different tribal communities and there were diverse customs that came together. At a certain point, they realized that they were all Africans. There was no denying that. There was a community that was separated from the rest of American society and over time, African customs merged, right? These stories are not really told because Africans weren't writing stories. Those who could write weren't interested in the African stories. They were brought here as enslaved persons. They remained enslaved for centuries. What I tried to do in parts of my book is review enslavement narratives which are stories that were written by former enslaved people. Either they had escaped as Frederick Douglass had –and he wrote his story about his life. Embedded in his stories, as in others, were the attachment stories. Even though they were stories of breakups such as being sold off themselves or their parents or relatives being sold off, there were also stories of being taken care of, too. Either of intact families or families that were taken in. It seems the pattern there is that if you were sold off from one enslavement camp, you went to another enslavement camp, and then in that enslavement camp there were only Africans. So Africans both received and mourned those that they had lost, but it stayed within African communities. So attachment is there in these stories and it was interesting reading attachment stories. The myth has always been that through slavery, families were broken up, and that's true. These are losses that impact generations and cause cross-generational trauma which makes sense in terms of the history. What gets missed, I think, in that kingdom is that we adapt as human beings. We adapt in a number of different ways to survive –and to thrive– under the conditions we live. Some of those conditions remained the same but within that, Africans took care of Africans because that was the only care you were going to get. But in knowing that, people gave and they received.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (22:23)
Would this play into, and correct me if I'm wrong, that in many African American communities today, there are much stronger kinship networks than maybe in other ethnic groups in the United States.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (22:37)
I think what Nancy Boyd-Franklin and Elaine Pinderhughes wrote about in terms of kinship groups are these ways in which attachment has been passed down through generations. Pinderhughes talks about value systems and African Americans as diverse in that there are still these kinship systems, but it's a collective view of the world of taking care of each other. That’s one set of values, beliefs, and attachment orientations that still exist. She talked about other African Americans having more American values that are less collective. Then there is a third, which, she refers to as the victim system. I think of it as these street values you learn in poor African American communities. I think what gets missed in terms of African American diversity is that enslaved people were brought from different tribal communities. One, they had different customs and different orientations, and two, there were variations in enslavement camps. From being very big, having over 1500 enslaved people in one enslavement camp, to being very small, where there were maybe one or two on a small farm or household. They were all in between. The average size at a certain point was about 50. Now, we as attachment therapists or theorists think, “Oh, attachments are very different in a big enslavement tam. They’re impersonal and probably very harsh. The smaller groups of people would have to get along more with each other and allow for more attachment bonding even between enslaved persons and masters.” There are stories that you read in the enslavement narratives that reflect that so that's one variation. The other variation is that not all enslaved people arrived here at the same time. Some arrived as long as 400+ years ago. There were ships coming all the time. The last recorded ship that we know was written about by Zora Neale Hurston in a book called Barrakoon, where she's interviewing the guy who was thought to be the last enslaved person brought on an enslavement ship. He was only in slavery for about five years. He was brought here when he was 19 and he was freed with all the other enslaved people when he was 24. She was interviewing him when he was 85, talking about his experience. What's interesting here is that even at 85, and he’s been in the States now for most of his adult life, he still had an African point of view about attachment. With that view, him and his cohorts on that last ship founded a city that still exists in Alabama called Africatown. It was implementing the collective idea of attachment. He founded a town and I thought that was pretty amazing.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (26:49)
Yeah, that's very interesting.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (26:51)
What happens then is that if you don't see a lot of African-American couples, you start thinking about race as a demographic, black or African American, as opposed to thinking there's a lot of diversity in African Americans. Just because the person sitting a couple sitting across from you is black, we really don't know how all that diversity is played out historically to the couples sitting in front of you.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (27:29)
Yeah and they’re experiencing a microculture.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (26:32)
Yes the microculture within a culture. The more you're in a black community and live there, the more you would recognize diversity in attitudes and the sense of collectivity, spirituality, language, and all the variables that we might associate with diversity. Zora Neale Hurston discovered when she was interviewing this guy, at a certain point he corrected her with disgust that she didn't get the idea of his view of attachment. So I developed a questionnaire, Keith, that I try to give to couples. It's what we might do as a typical part of an EFT assessment. I ask them questions about attachment and then I ask them questions about their own culture and how strong that culture is with them. Then there's a series of questions about that, because I wanna know something about their racial identity which is, I think, beyond race that we can look at in terms of secure and insecure. We can look at it in terms of flexible and rigid and this gives us far more information. We can ask them too about their parents and what their views are about this to get a sense of the environment that they grew up in and the way they understand culture in their lives. I think that helps us even at the EFT level. I think it helps us in terms of how they define racial identity in a more dynamic way. But it gives us emotional handles to use when tracking the negative cycle, which is this view that couples get disconnected and there's a recurring pattern in their relationship that EFT refers to as the negative pattern, which is the process that could underline most of their arguments. We understand that in terms of withdrawer and pursuer.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (29:55)
I was gonna say that cycle and the way I think about it is oftentimes they're trying to either gain closeness or prevent distance. But in their negative cycle, it's doing it in a way that's pushing them farther apart. Usually what we know in EFT is underneath that there's this desire to be connected. But, sometimes that cycle ends up having the opposite effect.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (30:18)
I think that African American and white couples, Hispanic couples, Asian couples, and couples of all nationalities will differ in terms of their racial identity and their culture. I don't think we're paying enough attention to how cultural differences fuel discord and fuel disconnection. I think particularly for African Americans, we know that the literature suggests African Americans carry more stress in their body largely based on discrimination factors. That means their negative cycle, those moments of conflict or disconnection, are going to often be more intense because stress adds another level of tension. The stress is largely unprocessed because you don't think of yourself as walking around with more stress than the next person. But there are events that happen to African Americans. I call them racial-based distress events that on one end are microaggressions which are some minor level of disrespect or devaluation and on the extreme end is death. We've seen that on the newscast where someone's targeted. The thought is, “Oh my God, he's got a gun” he gets shot. When there’s no gun and it’s a guy with no record.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (32:18)
Yeah, the extensive racial trauma and the elevated conversation over the last year or so that's really looking at the systemic aspects of racism especially towards black people.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (32:34)
I think these things happen on day-to-day occurrences and that they have to be processed in therapy. Couples, whether they are black or interracial in some way, because of their racial identity can differ in terms of how they perceive race-based events and what to do about them and how you should feel about them.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (33:07)
That's interesting, actually. It makes me think about same-sex couples where one might be more out and the other less out in their relationship with others or work or so on and some of the difficulties that they might have. I imagine you're kind of saying that also each person within the couple may have their own different place they are in with their experience of race and their extensive racial identity and so on. That may even play out in the dynamics around their relationship to the world and race and how they both help or dismiss or support each other.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (33:42)
That's right and I think in both cases, whether we have same-sex couples or we're talking about same-sex African American couples, or it can be heterosexual couples, that have different views about racial identity, each of those groups need more support from each other than what we might think of as couples who don't have any of those things. So we talk about heterosexual white couples.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (34:25)
Yeah, more dominant culture or privilege.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (34:28)
All couples need support. All couples need to find a safe harbor and a safe haven with each other. But it's not as if the world is hostile to them, per se. That's not to say that it doesn't show up in their lives, but not in a systematic way. So I think our same-sex couples, depending on where they live and in their communities, can face hostility that heterosexual couples just don't. I think black couples in that same way, there is stress that they'll face and race-based events that they will face, and their safe harbor and safe haven have to be stronger because it has to buffer against that. So if they differ in terms of their views about these things and their diversity in that, that means that they're more vulnerable to the stress that they're going to face. Not likely to face, they will face. So one, there's a greater intensity and then there's that longing that gets unrecognized as a complaint. It's a complaint. The longing is there. The longing is stronger because the loneliness is stronger. The need for connection is stronger. So the complaint is larger. You think, “Oh yes, she's complaining because she loves me.” Well, yes. And she needs you and vice versa.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (36:16)
One of the aspects of EFT is that oftentimes, we're trying to make this connection but it may be coming out in less vulnerable ways but really behind it is this longing to connect and this wanting to be connected and thus, not feeling alone in the relationship. Because oftentimes, the most lonely you can feel is in a relationship with another.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (36:40)
If there's some race-based event that happens in the world, it can stay in your body and your partner's willingness to engage you with it prepares you for the next day if that happens to be something you experience at work or in the educational system. What the literature on discrimination suggests is that for African Americans it’s all over the social world of American life. Can they come home and talk about it? That becomes an additional stressor depending on how emotionally engaged, how accessible feelings are to the partner or each partner, and can they be responsive in a way that helps?
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (37:42)
Yeah, is that relationship a respite or somewhere that the person fuels up in connection? Or do they feel like they can't talk about that, and that's another thing they have to be alone with?
Paul Guillory, PhD: (37:56)
We know that being alone is dreadful and this goes back to writing the book and looking for an EFT trainer and finding that there were none in the US at the time. That becomes the place where EFT therapists who are black can find other people like them lonely in their clinical consultation lives. We know as supervisors and in our own process to become certified in EFT or to be good at our craft as a therapist, we need good therapeutic communities to consult with, to engage with, to learn from, to teach. That kind of environment enriches us as therapists just to be better.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (39:00)
Yeah that longing for that connection in the clinical community around working with African American black clients was underlined.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (39:08)
In the book I talk about this idea of cultural humility which has three elements. One, you learn something about the communities you're going to work in. So for me, I happen to work in the Bay Area. I'm a black psychologist, so a lot of black people seek me out. I can't, as a black psychologist, just think, “Well, I'm black, they're black. I know something about it.” I have to read about discrimination. I have to read about black psychology, black health, and black stress just to know some foundational learning about the clients that I work with. That's part one. The second part is working with a diverse group of African-American couples, families, and individuals so that I come to appreciate such diversity, At the same time I can find some continuum of racial identity that Elaine Pinderhughes talks about, or Nancy Boyd-Franklin talks about, or Kenneth Hardy talks about. It becomes not just book learning but also practical learning with a variety. The third element is coming to terms with that as an American, I grew up with the same ideas around racism as everybody else grows up around. I have to be in touch with how that frames my thinking or not. How this other element that I didn't mention, but I'll mention it, is that William Cross wrote a lot about racial identity. He was suggesting in one book that he really learned racial identity in the barbershop. It was the positive view and exciting view that he learned about African American culture. He's saying the barbershop is a place. Zora Neale Hurston, she only liked to use black dialect. I don't know if you remember maybe 10, 15 years ago, in the Bay Area there was all this bruhaha about Ebonics, about how black youth from the inner city talked. But Zora Neale Hurston loved that. She said it has a rhythm, it has a rhyme, it has a way of a language that was crafted in Africa and also from living in rural communities of the US. What she said in Barrakoon which was written in 1930 but was only published in 2018 because she insisted that they used the dialogue, was that she wanted this language to be part of history. So we've been criticized for that. But she loved it, she thought it had poetic rhythms to it and she weeded this out and recorded and she did other books on folk tales and so on. Now, Toni Morrison did something very similar, although she was writing for a broader audience in the US, but technically she was only writing. She said, “I had to force myself to have a black audience in mind. That I was writing for a black audience, and not for the larger.” Although she heralds in the larger audience for the way she tells stories, but it's in a loving way. So going back to Cross, he says, “I thought about racial identity in this wonderful way when I go back to my youth in barbershops.” It resonated with me so well because before I went to high school, my world just revolved around the African American community. Some of what I learned in high school is that people think about black people as being negative. It was an abrupt awareness that there could be in the white communities a negative view of African Americans. So there is this piece if you are in touch with this lovely side of the culture. Now, I propose in my book this idea that I get from Richard Lazarus. He's now deceased, but he was the imminent scholar in stress coping. He developed this idea of cognitive appraisal. He was also kind of a cognitive therapist.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (44:57)
Yeah I think the basic ID acronym of looking at biology and context as well as thoughts and emotions.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (45:06)
He was not so much concerned with what goes on inside the individual other than their appraisal of a situation, because he was really a stress researcher. But he did not like the idea of these measures for stress. He liked –consistent with EFT– when we look inside and we look at the way people put it together and then what they do. He thought coping was really more important than stress itself. So I came from that. From that though, it was like, it wasn't just coping to cope. He was interested in adaptation and how we as human beings adapt to the environments we live in. I thought about that in terms of African Americans and I thought yes, we adapt. We had to learn the emotional cues of white people because that represented danger. Paying attention to emotions was critical to life and death.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:17)
Being attuned.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (46:19)
Being attuned and it was less attuned to yourself. You have to be attuned to them because they represent life or death.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:28)
It makes me think of children growing up in trauma. Even in the same culture, they have to become hypervigilant to be able to read the potential of danger or person of abuse.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (46:43)
Yeah and W.E.B Du Bois talks about this dual consciousness. I take that to also mean that we weren't always around white people, as I was referencing earlier, but when we did, we had to become consciously alert for survival. I think that created a degree of emotional intelligence.
Because that lasted over 400 years when we add Jim Crow, which basically were laws that black people had to follow and they could be held to consequences for, but there was no corollary to that. White people did not have to be held accountable for whatever they did to African Americans. I'm suggesting that over time, emotional intelligence developed around that. This is contrary to the idea of generational trauma in the sense that it's generational wisdom, generational emotional intelligence, and this alert cue that there's danger. Action had to be taken. But go ahead. You had a question.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (48:03)
I’m just thinking as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male therapist. We were talking about our shared colleague, Veronique, and I was just talking with her about some of these aspects of working with culture in couples. I think what you're talking about is so important because even if some people think “I'm not working with a black couple, so this isn't relevant to me,” as you're talking about cultural humility and looking at these aspects, especially for myself as a person of privilege, where part of privilege is being blind to this. Oftentimes when I engage in trainings, readings, and conversations around culture, I'm always reminded of my privilege and the things that don't even occur to me. Despite the work I do, trying to be cognisant of each interaction is so important not only for this community and the African American or black community but also for black therapists and therapists of other cultures to be able to see what this experience is. I'm even thinking of a book I read in grad school on the Mung culture, which again, I'm not doing therapy with the Mung culture, but it really helped me think about my own culture, my client's culture, and my relationship to those cultures. Just as I'm thinking about your work, I too end up having a lot of folks in my practice who are of the same culture as mine. I also have some diversity, but I was talking with Veronique yesterday and she said “Yeah, all my clients that are in my practice are black.” They are coming to a black therapist, especially since you and I are in private practice and people are choosing who they're going to. It's important for folks who are working with black culture as well as those who aren't because this aspect of consciousness culture and how that plays out in a couple's attachment is present on so many levels, particularly in the lens of African American black couples.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (50:23)
What you just talked about in terms of who you work with, who you are, and so on is a really good thing. In my book, I have a piece in each of the clinical chapters on a therapist's reflections because this would be good for all of us as therapists. Some people call it locating yourself and being able to do that with your clients throughout the therapy, not in one summary. When we start to relate to them in some way in terms of whatever the particular thing a couple is focused on –if it’s withdrawing and we know we are a withdrawer– you give a little bit of who you are, relating to that. This affirms our mutual humanity and also describes a way forward for our couples. I talk about that in terms of our own cultural humility. I know we're running out of time, but one last thing. If our trainings and our clinical discussions are more infused with diversity, it makes us all realize how much diversity is there among our couples and potentially the lenses we're not using. We assume these lenses apply to two white cis females, a male, or even two males who are the same in terms of their cultural background. We just make assumptions because people look a particular way and we don't realize that human beings are not the sum of their gender orientation or where they were born. Yet we always include that as part of the big categories at the beginning of our work. We’re missing something very important and culture is one of those.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (52:51)
One of the big aspects of both EFT and therapy generally is empathy. Being able to use that in EFT, we call that the empathic conjecture where we're putting ourselves in our client's experience and trying to imagine what they might be feeling and using that as part of our reflections. Again, the cultural aspect of drawing on our own experience to relate and empathize, oftentimes I talk about being curious when I'm teaching or training because sometimes we think maybe they should be doing this or feeling this or so on, but that's not happening. Rather than pushing that forward, that's a moment to step back and be curious because there's something there to understand.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (53:35)
Now you've sparked one more point. I think African Americans are primed not to be empathetic toward each other. Therapists, white or black, are primed not to be empathetic to African Americans. That's the other byproduct of 400 years of a lot of propaganda about who African Americans are. The whole defining of race as we use now was based on the idea of not being empathetic. So we have to reflect on that when we're not feeling empathy for our black clients or our interracial clients. We've been primed as Americans not to be empathetic to each other. That's a basic ingredient to effective therapy,
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (54:33)
It’s that intergenerational dehumanization in plain.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (54:38)
To treat people badly, you have to not be empathetic toward them. That has spanned 400 years. Of course, I'm talking about broad concepts for sure. Not everybody's affected the same way, we're not all the same and there are variations in these things. But we have to begin to talk about it this way so we can all be better therapists.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:11)
Definitely. Hey, Paul, thank you so much for this discussion. This was really great and I'm looking forward to reading the book. The last time I checked, it hadn't been out yet, so I'm glad that it's out now. I really appreciate the work that you're doing and putting yourself out there and when it's not there, deciding you’ll be the person that writes the book and lead the community.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (55:35)
Thank you, Keith. This has been a delight. I'm sorry it took so long for us to set this up.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:40)
No problem. Glad we got it.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (55:42)
Really appreciate it.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:43)
Okay. Take care.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:47)
Thank you for joining us. If you're wanting to use this podcast or continuing education credits, please go to our website at therapyonthecuttingedge.com. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for The Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing in-person and remote therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area. IAP provides training for licensed clinicians through our in-person and online programs, as well as our treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults. For more information, go to SFIAP.com or call 415-617-5932. Also, we really appreciate the feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of therapy, and think clinicians should know about it, send us an email or call us. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to help in creating lasting changes for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be speaking with Paul Guillory, Ph.D., who is a psychologist and associate professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Clinical Science Program, psychology department. He's a certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) therapist, a certified EFT supervisor, and an EFT trainer in training. Paul is the author of the book Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals, and is the former chairperson of the Northern California Community of Emotionally Focused Therapy. Paul was a psychological consultant to the Oakland Raiders professional football team and the National Football League for 14 years. He has been a consultant to the Sacramento Kings professional basketball team and is a selected provider for the National Basketball Players Association. He has also served as the director of the Center for Family Counseling in Oakland for 10 years and has been in private practice in Oakland, California for over 30 years. Let's listen to the interview.
Hi Paul. Thanks for joining me today.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (01:36)
It's great to be here Keith and I'm looking forward to our discussion.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (01:40)
Yeah, definitely. So, Paul, I know a little bit about you. I'm part of the Northern California community for EFT Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. I'm a certified supervisor myself, and I've seen you a little bit on the discussion boards. We also have a colleague in common, Veronique Thompson, who spoke highly of you when I interviewed her for a podcast about the work she's doing in her program. I wanted to reach out since I know that you've also got a book that's coming out soon. I'd love to hear about your thought process and how your thinking has evolved throughout your career and led you to the work that you’re doing now.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (02:28)
Well, actually, the book is out. It was released on August 10th and I'm really happy about that. People are emailing their ideas and their opinions after receiving the book and reading it. I'm really, really excited about that now.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (02:56)
And the book's name is Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals?
Paul Guillory, PhD: (02:58)
That's correct, yeah. It's published by Routledge and it came out in August. So it came about after a discussion on our listserv with Sue Johnson. Partly it's trying to talk about, of course, doing couples therapy with African-American couples, but also, to see if we could by virtue of a book talking about EFT from a cultural, humility perspective, draw more African-American therapists or therapists who work with African-American clients to be interested in EFT. For me, that's a sort of a culmination of way back in 2006 when, Tracy and I, my wife went to Ottawa for an externship, and I had just gotten back from a John Gottman workshop up in Seattle, and he spoke so highly about Sue Johnson. I was surprised when I came back and my wife had just finished her book, and so it was on our coffee table and I said, oh, that's the person Gottman was talking about. We read it, we planned a trip to Ottawa which is east of here, and anytime we go east, Tracy's family's in Philadelphia. So we combine a workshop and a vacation or something like that, with a trip to the East Coast. At the time I was doing more sports psychology where I was working with the Oakland Raiders, track athletes, triathlon athletes, baseball players, and golfers – that kind of thing. So I was doing a combination of therapy as we usually do therapy with anyone with athletes, but also guided imagery, some self-help hypnosis, and so on. So when I went to Ottawa, I had read her book but had no clue about like how really Sue Johnson worked. You can't get the essence of EFT without sort of looking at someone really doing it. When I saw Sue Johnson's work, I knew right away I was watching a master therapist doing things that were so intriguing and I didn't have a concept of the EFT skills or interventions. But I heard her voice and I knew, oh, this lady is really, really good. I didn't know about things like validation, empathic reflections, risk, and so on, but I could see it and knew that I had much to learn. That's where my journey started. I became involved with a group here in the Bay Area, The Northern California Association of EFT Therapists, that had just started. I don't know if they even had the name at that point.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (06:35)
Probably not. Yeah.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (06:36)
So there was just a group of therapists wanting to meet and talk about this model that they had also recently discovered, you know, two or three years before me. So I started going to those meetings regularly but I was still involved in the work that I was involved in. EFT takes some concentrated learning. You really have to practice it. You have to get supervision and so on. So it started a journey of learning EFT from that point to now. Now, the book idea really came about after a discussion on our listserv. I was looking for an EFT trainer that was African American and as you know, trainers are the people who teach externships and core skills for entry-level learning of EFT.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (07:47)
Yeah, there's a level of certification that you need to have to provide those trainings themselves.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (07:54)
Under that are supervisors who supervise externships, but also people just interested in learning EFT. Perhaps after they've taken an externship or core skills and sometimes before they’ve taken them.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:14)
Definitely.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (08:16)
And then there's the certified level. So I was looking for – and thought – that there would be an African American trainer somewhere in the States and as it turns out, there wasn't. That was news to me. And also Keith, what I found out in that exploration is that I was really the only black supervisor that was certified and that there weren't very many black-certified therapists in EFT. That was a big discovery and I realized I didn't have a community of therapists that I might consult with, learn from, and engage with. Out of that, Sue Johnson wondered, “What could we do?” So I gave her a list of six things that we might try. One of those was a book about doing EFT with black couples. She agreed that it might be a good idea and she said, in the Sue Johnson way, “you should write that.”
That was somewhere between two years and a year and a half ago. I started writing and I renewed my interest in recording. At a certain point, after you get certified, you stop recording your own work although you're supervising the other therapists who are recording their work.So I started to record my work more. I asked a lot of therapists if they were interested in contributing through their own cases if they were working with African American couples. I actually got more no’s than I got yeses, but I did get three of our colleagues to agree: Denise Jones-Kazan here in the Bay Area, Yamonte Cooper in the LA area, and Ayanna Abrams in Atlanta. There are five clinical chapters in the book, all of them case studies. I have two and each one of those clinicians has one. At the end of each chapter, I interview Sue Johnson about the case. We talk about EFT and we talk about the case in the chapter and that's part of the book.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (11:27)
Well, that sounds great. So this kind of project came out of a hope to encourage other black clinicians who may want to be involved with or learn more about EFT, they may want to get further trained in EFT, and really even create a sub-community within the EFT community to be available for other clients and so on. As well as training other professionals and really creating space.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (12:00)
Yeah. I think instead of the idea of a listserv for clients and referrals, a lot of us have those referrals. Here's the thing that we didn't have – we went to an EFT training wherever it was in the world, or in the States, and it would be one or two of us at a workshop where there could be as large as 200 participants. So what would get shown in terms of EFT work would be white couples, white individuals, and so on. And if we were working with black clients, whatever we needed to do to translate that work that we saw and clinical ideas that were discussed, we would have to think on our own about how we might do that same thing, but maybe differently with a black couple or a black individual. So we always had to translate. So part of that search was so that we didn't have to translate. Maybe there was another group out there that we could just talk to and not translate. Part of the hope –and the challenge– I say in the book is to create training programs even in core skills or in externships where black people are presented but also discussed in a way beyond what we currently might see in EFT training. But I don't think EFT is unique in this way. Diana Fosha in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, has a tape that I have and it's about her model with a male client who is a Nigerian-born American. But it is not said anywhere on the tape.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (14:32)
So the focus is on being a man, but there's also this intersectionality between also being an African immigrant man.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (14:41)
The cultural element of his masculinity, if you will, or a cultural element of his emotional and interpersonal life.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (14:52)
Yeah.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (14:53)
She never once says anything about that and it goes to this idea that when founders of therapies are creating their models, they talk about the universality of their model – that it works. In EFT we talk about attachment and emotional experiences, and it's the idea that these things are universal and that there's some truth to that. Except the attachments are different around the world and the emphasis for us is in terms of looking at withdrawers and pursuers as particular kinds of positions people take when faced with distress. The model we use for that comes from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth who did the follow-up on Bowlby’s idea of attachment and put it into a strange situation model that confirmed the idea of attachment being important. The model there is that a baby cries, mom responds. The model was extended over time to be baby cries and daddy responds. We saw that fathers played a role in attachment bonds and babies could attach to moms and dads. But in West Africa, where many of the enslaved African people came from, baby cries and community response. And it was a tribal community that involved adolescents, older women, and so on. The baby still got responded to and still had a special connection to mom, but it was different because the community responded. They were largely farming communities, so mom had to work. Babies learned that it was the community that was more important than them, although their needs were taken care of.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (17:20)
They could get that responsiveness from multiple members of the community and still have that kind of secure attachment with others.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (17:27)
The attachment sometimes was a slightly different one without the sense of importance to the individual, but the importance to the collect, which is a different way that could play itself out in some therapy sessions. It's not that just West Africans have that collective view. It's actually a larger view in countries that we consider third world, or just not as modernized as Western. Ainsworth actually said this strange situation model needs more fieldwork in other communities. I did it here. But she always seemed to think that other people would pick that up and maybe do it slightly differently but still look at attachment. That's a separate sort of research question.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (18:36)
When Africans were brought here as enslaved people, they brought with them their culture and their customs. Even though there was a systematic disruption of that in terms of tribal communities being together, the Africans stayed together. There was no inter-chain interaction other than whatever group of whites were on enslavement camps. So there was diversity because they were brought from different tribal communities and there were diverse customs that came together. At a certain point, they realized that they were all Africans. There was no denying that. There was a community that was separated from the rest of American society and over time, African customs merged, right? These stories are not really told because Africans weren't writing stories. Those who could write weren't interested in the African stories. They were brought here as enslaved persons. They remained enslaved for centuries. What I tried to do in parts of my book is review enslavement narratives which are stories that were written by former enslaved people. Either they had escaped as Frederick Douglass had –and he wrote his story about his life. Embedded in his stories, as in others, were the attachment stories. Even though they were stories of breakups such as being sold off themselves or their parents or relatives being sold off, there were also stories of being taken care of, too. Either of intact families or families that were taken in. It seems the pattern there is that if you were sold off from one enslavement camp, you went to another enslavement camp, and then in that enslavement camp there were only Africans. So Africans both received and mourned those that they had lost, but it stayed within African communities. So attachment is there in these stories and it was interesting reading attachment stories. The myth has always been that through slavery, families were broken up, and that's true. These are losses that impact generations and cause cross-generational trauma which makes sense in terms of the history. What gets missed, I think, in that kingdom is that we adapt as human beings. We adapt in a number of different ways to survive –and to thrive– under the conditions we live. Some of those conditions remained the same but within that, Africans took care of Africans because that was the only care you were going to get. But in knowing that, people gave and they received.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (22:23)
Would this play into, and correct me if I'm wrong, that in many African American communities today, there are much stronger kinship networks than maybe in other ethnic groups in the United States.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (22:37)
I think what Nancy Boyd-Franklin and Elaine Pinderhughes wrote about in terms of kinship groups are these ways in which attachment has been passed down through generations. Pinderhughes talks about value systems and African Americans as diverse in that there are still these kinship systems, but it's a collective view of the world of taking care of each other. That’s one set of values, beliefs, and attachment orientations that still exist. She talked about other African Americans having more American values that are less collective. Then there is a third, which, she refers to as the victim system. I think of it as these street values you learn in poor African American communities. I think what gets missed in terms of African American diversity is that enslaved people were brought from different tribal communities. One, they had different customs and different orientations, and two, there were variations in enslavement camps. From being very big, having over 1500 enslaved people in one enslavement camp, to being very small, where there were maybe one or two on a small farm or household. They were all in between. The average size at a certain point was about 50. Now, we as attachment therapists or theorists think, “Oh, attachments are very different in a big enslavement tam. They’re impersonal and probably very harsh. The smaller groups of people would have to get along more with each other and allow for more attachment bonding even between enslaved persons and masters.” There are stories that you read in the enslavement narratives that reflect that so that's one variation. The other variation is that not all enslaved people arrived here at the same time. Some arrived as long as 400+ years ago. There were ships coming all the time. The last recorded ship that we know was written about by Zora Neale Hurston in a book called Barrakoon, where she's interviewing the guy who was thought to be the last enslaved person brought on an enslavement ship. He was only in slavery for about five years. He was brought here when he was 19 and he was freed with all the other enslaved people when he was 24. She was interviewing him when he was 85, talking about his experience. What's interesting here is that even at 85, and he’s been in the States now for most of his adult life, he still had an African point of view about attachment. With that view, him and his cohorts on that last ship founded a city that still exists in Alabama called Africatown. It was implementing the collective idea of attachment. He founded a town and I thought that was pretty amazing.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (26:49)
Yeah, that's very interesting.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (26:51)
What happens then is that if you don't see a lot of African-American couples, you start thinking about race as a demographic, black or African American, as opposed to thinking there's a lot of diversity in African Americans. Just because the person sitting a couple sitting across from you is black, we really don't know how all that diversity is played out historically to the couples sitting in front of you.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (27:29)
Yeah and they’re experiencing a microculture.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (26:32)
Yes the microculture within a culture. The more you're in a black community and live there, the more you would recognize diversity in attitudes and the sense of collectivity, spirituality, language, and all the variables that we might associate with diversity. Zora Neale Hurston discovered when she was interviewing this guy, at a certain point he corrected her with disgust that she didn't get the idea of his view of attachment. So I developed a questionnaire, Keith, that I try to give to couples. It's what we might do as a typical part of an EFT assessment. I ask them questions about attachment and then I ask them questions about their own culture and how strong that culture is with them. Then there's a series of questions about that, because I wanna know something about their racial identity which is, I think, beyond race that we can look at in terms of secure and insecure. We can look at it in terms of flexible and rigid and this gives us far more information. We can ask them too about their parents and what their views are about this to get a sense of the environment that they grew up in and the way they understand culture in their lives. I think that helps us even at the EFT level. I think it helps us in terms of how they define racial identity in a more dynamic way. But it gives us emotional handles to use when tracking the negative cycle, which is this view that couples get disconnected and there's a recurring pattern in their relationship that EFT refers to as the negative pattern, which is the process that could underline most of their arguments. We understand that in terms of withdrawer and pursuer.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (29:55)
I was gonna say that cycle and the way I think about it is oftentimes they're trying to either gain closeness or prevent distance. But in their negative cycle, it's doing it in a way that's pushing them farther apart. Usually what we know in EFT is underneath that there's this desire to be connected. But, sometimes that cycle ends up having the opposite effect.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (30:18)
I think that African American and white couples, Hispanic couples, Asian couples, and couples of all nationalities will differ in terms of their racial identity and their culture. I don't think we're paying enough attention to how cultural differences fuel discord and fuel disconnection. I think particularly for African Americans, we know that the literature suggests African Americans carry more stress in their body largely based on discrimination factors. That means their negative cycle, those moments of conflict or disconnection, are going to often be more intense because stress adds another level of tension. The stress is largely unprocessed because you don't think of yourself as walking around with more stress than the next person. But there are events that happen to African Americans. I call them racial-based distress events that on one end are microaggressions which are some minor level of disrespect or devaluation and on the extreme end is death. We've seen that on the newscast where someone's targeted. The thought is, “Oh my God, he's got a gun” he gets shot. When there’s no gun and it’s a guy with no record.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (32:18)
Yeah, the extensive racial trauma and the elevated conversation over the last year or so that's really looking at the systemic aspects of racism especially towards black people.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (32:34)
I think these things happen on day-to-day occurrences and that they have to be processed in therapy. Couples, whether they are black or interracial in some way, because of their racial identity can differ in terms of how they perceive race-based events and what to do about them and how you should feel about them.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (33:07)
That's interesting, actually. It makes me think about same-sex couples where one might be more out and the other less out in their relationship with others or work or so on and some of the difficulties that they might have. I imagine you're kind of saying that also each person within the couple may have their own different place they are in with their experience of race and their extensive racial identity and so on. That may even play out in the dynamics around their relationship to the world and race and how they both help or dismiss or support each other.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (33:42)
That's right and I think in both cases, whether we have same-sex couples or we're talking about same-sex African American couples, or it can be heterosexual couples, that have different views about racial identity, each of those groups need more support from each other than what we might think of as couples who don't have any of those things. So we talk about heterosexual white couples.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (34:25)
Yeah, more dominant culture or privilege.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (34:28)
All couples need support. All couples need to find a safe harbor and a safe haven with each other. But it's not as if the world is hostile to them, per se. That's not to say that it doesn't show up in their lives, but not in a systematic way. So I think our same-sex couples, depending on where they live and in their communities, can face hostility that heterosexual couples just don't. I think black couples in that same way, there is stress that they'll face and race-based events that they will face, and their safe harbor and safe haven have to be stronger because it has to buffer against that. So if they differ in terms of their views about these things and their diversity in that, that means that they're more vulnerable to the stress that they're going to face. Not likely to face, they will face. So one, there's a greater intensity and then there's that longing that gets unrecognized as a complaint. It's a complaint. The longing is there. The longing is stronger because the loneliness is stronger. The need for connection is stronger. So the complaint is larger. You think, “Oh yes, she's complaining because she loves me.” Well, yes. And she needs you and vice versa.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (36:16)
One of the aspects of EFT is that oftentimes, we're trying to make this connection but it may be coming out in less vulnerable ways but really behind it is this longing to connect and this wanting to be connected and thus, not feeling alone in the relationship. Because oftentimes, the most lonely you can feel is in a relationship with another.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (36:40)
If there's some race-based event that happens in the world, it can stay in your body and your partner's willingness to engage you with it prepares you for the next day if that happens to be something you experience at work or in the educational system. What the literature on discrimination suggests is that for African Americans it’s all over the social world of American life. Can they come home and talk about it? That becomes an additional stressor depending on how emotionally engaged, how accessible feelings are to the partner or each partner, and can they be responsive in a way that helps?
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (37:42)
Yeah, is that relationship a respite or somewhere that the person fuels up in connection? Or do they feel like they can't talk about that, and that's another thing they have to be alone with?
Paul Guillory, PhD: (37:56)
We know that being alone is dreadful and this goes back to writing the book and looking for an EFT trainer and finding that there were none in the US at the time. That becomes the place where EFT therapists who are black can find other people like them lonely in their clinical consultation lives. We know as supervisors and in our own process to become certified in EFT or to be good at our craft as a therapist, we need good therapeutic communities to consult with, to engage with, to learn from, to teach. That kind of environment enriches us as therapists just to be better.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (39:00)
Yeah that longing for that connection in the clinical community around working with African American black clients was underlined.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (39:08)
In the book I talk about this idea of cultural humility which has three elements. One, you learn something about the communities you're going to work in. So for me, I happen to work in the Bay Area. I'm a black psychologist, so a lot of black people seek me out. I can't, as a black psychologist, just think, “Well, I'm black, they're black. I know something about it.” I have to read about discrimination. I have to read about black psychology, black health, and black stress just to know some foundational learning about the clients that I work with. That's part one. The second part is working with a diverse group of African-American couples, families, and individuals so that I come to appreciate such diversity, At the same time I can find some continuum of racial identity that Elaine Pinderhughes talks about, or Nancy Boyd-Franklin talks about, or Kenneth Hardy talks about. It becomes not just book learning but also practical learning with a variety. The third element is coming to terms with that as an American, I grew up with the same ideas around racism as everybody else grows up around. I have to be in touch with how that frames my thinking or not. How this other element that I didn't mention, but I'll mention it, is that William Cross wrote a lot about racial identity. He was suggesting in one book that he really learned racial identity in the barbershop. It was the positive view and exciting view that he learned about African American culture. He's saying the barbershop is a place. Zora Neale Hurston, she only liked to use black dialect. I don't know if you remember maybe 10, 15 years ago, in the Bay Area there was all this bruhaha about Ebonics, about how black youth from the inner city talked. But Zora Neale Hurston loved that. She said it has a rhythm, it has a rhyme, it has a way of a language that was crafted in Africa and also from living in rural communities of the US. What she said in Barrakoon which was written in 1930 but was only published in 2018 because she insisted that they used the dialogue, was that she wanted this language to be part of history. So we've been criticized for that. But she loved it, she thought it had poetic rhythms to it and she weeded this out and recorded and she did other books on folk tales and so on. Now, Toni Morrison did something very similar, although she was writing for a broader audience in the US, but technically she was only writing. She said, “I had to force myself to have a black audience in mind. That I was writing for a black audience, and not for the larger.” Although she heralds in the larger audience for the way she tells stories, but it's in a loving way. So going back to Cross, he says, “I thought about racial identity in this wonderful way when I go back to my youth in barbershops.” It resonated with me so well because before I went to high school, my world just revolved around the African American community. Some of what I learned in high school is that people think about black people as being negative. It was an abrupt awareness that there could be in the white communities a negative view of African Americans. So there is this piece if you are in touch with this lovely side of the culture. Now, I propose in my book this idea that I get from Richard Lazarus. He's now deceased, but he was the imminent scholar in stress coping. He developed this idea of cognitive appraisal. He was also kind of a cognitive therapist.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (44:57)
Yeah I think the basic ID acronym of looking at biology and context as well as thoughts and emotions.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (45:06)
He was not so much concerned with what goes on inside the individual other than their appraisal of a situation, because he was really a stress researcher. But he did not like the idea of these measures for stress. He liked –consistent with EFT– when we look inside and we look at the way people put it together and then what they do. He thought coping was really more important than stress itself. So I came from that. From that though, it was like, it wasn't just coping to cope. He was interested in adaptation and how we as human beings adapt to the environments we live in. I thought about that in terms of African Americans and I thought yes, we adapt. We had to learn the emotional cues of white people because that represented danger. Paying attention to emotions was critical to life and death.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:17)
Being attuned.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (46:19)
Being attuned and it was less attuned to yourself. You have to be attuned to them because they represent life or death.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:28)
It makes me think of children growing up in trauma. Even in the same culture, they have to become hypervigilant to be able to read the potential of danger or person of abuse.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (46:43)
Yeah and W.E.B Du Bois talks about this dual consciousness. I take that to also mean that we weren't always around white people, as I was referencing earlier, but when we did, we had to become consciously alert for survival. I think that created a degree of emotional intelligence.
Because that lasted over 400 years when we add Jim Crow, which basically were laws that black people had to follow and they could be held to consequences for, but there was no corollary to that. White people did not have to be held accountable for whatever they did to African Americans. I'm suggesting that over time, emotional intelligence developed around that. This is contrary to the idea of generational trauma in the sense that it's generational wisdom, generational emotional intelligence, and this alert cue that there's danger. Action had to be taken. But go ahead. You had a question.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (48:03)
I’m just thinking as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male therapist. We were talking about our shared colleague, Veronique, and I was just talking with her about some of these aspects of working with culture in couples. I think what you're talking about is so important because even if some people think “I'm not working with a black couple, so this isn't relevant to me,” as you're talking about cultural humility and looking at these aspects, especially for myself as a person of privilege, where part of privilege is being blind to this. Oftentimes when I engage in trainings, readings, and conversations around culture, I'm always reminded of my privilege and the things that don't even occur to me. Despite the work I do, trying to be cognisant of each interaction is so important not only for this community and the African American or black community but also for black therapists and therapists of other cultures to be able to see what this experience is. I'm even thinking of a book I read in grad school on the Mung culture, which again, I'm not doing therapy with the Mung culture, but it really helped me think about my own culture, my client's culture, and my relationship to those cultures. Just as I'm thinking about your work, I too end up having a lot of folks in my practice who are of the same culture as mine. I also have some diversity, but I was talking with Veronique yesterday and she said “Yeah, all my clients that are in my practice are black.” They are coming to a black therapist, especially since you and I are in private practice and people are choosing who they're going to. It's important for folks who are working with black culture as well as those who aren't because this aspect of consciousness culture and how that plays out in a couple's attachment is present on so many levels, particularly in the lens of African American black couples.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (50:23)
What you just talked about in terms of who you work with, who you are, and so on is a really good thing. In my book, I have a piece in each of the clinical chapters on a therapist's reflections because this would be good for all of us as therapists. Some people call it locating yourself and being able to do that with your clients throughout the therapy, not in one summary. When we start to relate to them in some way in terms of whatever the particular thing a couple is focused on –if it’s withdrawing and we know we are a withdrawer– you give a little bit of who you are, relating to that. This affirms our mutual humanity and also describes a way forward for our couples. I talk about that in terms of our own cultural humility. I know we're running out of time, but one last thing. If our trainings and our clinical discussions are more infused with diversity, it makes us all realize how much diversity is there among our couples and potentially the lenses we're not using. We assume these lenses apply to two white cis females, a male, or even two males who are the same in terms of their cultural background. We just make assumptions because people look a particular way and we don't realize that human beings are not the sum of their gender orientation or where they were born. Yet we always include that as part of the big categories at the beginning of our work. We’re missing something very important and culture is one of those.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (52:51)
One of the big aspects of both EFT and therapy generally is empathy. Being able to use that in EFT, we call that the empathic conjecture where we're putting ourselves in our client's experience and trying to imagine what they might be feeling and using that as part of our reflections. Again, the cultural aspect of drawing on our own experience to relate and empathize, oftentimes I talk about being curious when I'm teaching or training because sometimes we think maybe they should be doing this or feeling this or so on, but that's not happening. Rather than pushing that forward, that's a moment to step back and be curious because there's something there to understand.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (53:35)
Now you've sparked one more point. I think African Americans are primed not to be empathetic toward each other. Therapists, white or black, are primed not to be empathetic to African Americans. That's the other byproduct of 400 years of a lot of propaganda about who African Americans are. The whole defining of race as we use now was based on the idea of not being empathetic. So we have to reflect on that when we're not feeling empathy for our black clients or our interracial clients. We've been primed as Americans not to be empathetic to each other. That's a basic ingredient to effective therapy,
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (54:33)
It’s that intergenerational dehumanization in plain.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (54:38)
To treat people badly, you have to not be empathetic toward them. That has spanned 400 years. Of course, I'm talking about broad concepts for sure. Not everybody's affected the same way, we're not all the same and there are variations in these things. But we have to begin to talk about it this way so we can all be better therapists.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:11)
Definitely. Hey, Paul, thank you so much for this discussion. This was really great and I'm looking forward to reading the book. The last time I checked, it hadn't been out yet, so I'm glad that it's out now. I really appreciate the work that you're doing and putting yourself out there and when it's not there, deciding you’ll be the person that writes the book and lead the community.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (55:35)
Thank you, Keith. This has been a delight. I'm sorry it took so long for us to set this up.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:40)
No problem. Glad we got it.
Paul Guillory, PhD: (55:42)
Really appreciate it.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:43)
Okay. Take care.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (55:47)
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