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Zenobai Morrill, Ph.D. - Guest
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. is a critical-liberation psychologist and psychology professor at William James College. She received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Boston and completed her pre- and post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine and at Yale Health, Mental Health & Counseling, respectively. Inspired by her personal and professional experiences with the mental health system, Zenobia emphasizes the power in psychological frameworks as the stories we use to understand ourselves, and the risks presented when these frameworks cannot capture the complex existential, sociocultural, familial, physiological, and tacit dimensions of humanity. Her work centers on the belief that psychological healing must account for these broader meaning systems and political structures that shape individual experience. Her research and clinical interests include psychotherapy process, global mental health, qualitative methodology, theory and philosophy, and critical and liberation psychologies. A recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, Dr. Morrill’s work and Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy model have been recognized and presented internationally. |
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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. |
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:24):
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances 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. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally focused couples therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma;
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:26):
And our center for ADHD and oppositional and Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches. In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:19):
Today I’ll be speaking with Dr. Zenobia Morrill, who is a critical-liberation psychologist and psychology professor at William James College. She received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Boston and completed her pre- and post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine and at Yale Health, Mental Health & Counseling, respectively. Inspired by her personal and professional experiences with the mental health system, Zenobia emphasizes the power in psychological frameworks as the stories we use to understand ourselves, and the risks presented when these frameworks cannot capture the complex existential, sociocultural, familial, physiological, and tacit dimensions of humanity. Her work centers on the belief that psychological healing must account for these broader meaning systems and political structures that shape individual experience. Her research and clinical interests include psychotherapy process, global mental health, qualitative methodology, theory and philosophy, and critical and liberation psychologies. A recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, Dr. Morrill’s work and Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy model have been recognized and presented internationally.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:31):
Let’s listen to the interview
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:33):
Hi, welcome.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (03:35):
Hi. Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:37):
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. So I have learned a little bit about the work that you're doing and the involvement with liberation Psychotherapy from a colleague that is on a board of mine of the Association of Family Therapist, Northern California that was you know, talking about this approach and maybe we're gonna reach out to have somebody speak on it. And I got really interested and, and read a little bit about some of the work you're doing and, and wanted to learn more about, about the work and the approach. But first, I always like to start off and find out from folks, you know how'd you get doing what you're doing? What's kind of the evolution of your thinking? How did you get to this work?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (04:17):
Sure. Well, well, first thank you for this question. I think it invites a kind of storytelling and honestly I'd say that's what drew me into psychology, where stories. I grew up in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC and I remember thinking to myself when I was in high school that the one thing I could really see myself never growing tired of is working with people and-- with their stories. And I've learned that people can always surprise you that there's something humbling about realizing you never get to the point where you've just heard it all. So I didn't ever really want clean answers because that didn't feel, I guess, honest, and I didn't really believe my curiosity would ever be fully gratified, and that was compelling to me. I think I just wanted, and, you know, think teenager existential angst and all, I think I just wanted to have the courage to face up to the idea that we humans are existing without really knowing why or what for.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (05:23):
And I was recognizing that there was no real consensus or clear verdict that we can collectively agree upon anyways about what we are to do with our lives. And so what a dilemma--right? And I was feeling that I didn't want a career where I avoided this elephant in the room, so to speak. And what did seem very real is that we have each other. We aren't alone in figuring this out. We can share our stories and we can form them and be formed by them. So I sought out to be a psychotherapist because I imagined it was about accompanying someone and confronting these existential truths and in their journey and sort of figuring out together how to be. And so today it's sort of evolved where psychotherapy feels like my wheelhouse. I'm an early career psychologist. I teach clinical theory and practice courses in the doctoral program at William James College.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (06:23):
I researched psychotherapy process and I practice psychotherapy all here in the greater Boston area. But yeah, my story with psychology, it's kind of been one of heartbreak, and this is, I think, relevant to liberation psychology, which I'm sure we'll speak more about, but it makes me think about testimonium or the way storytelling in liberation. Psychology is both a method and a moral act, and it links the individual to the social. So it bridges what seems like isolated pain to its historical relational contexts. And my first exposure to psychology was because my family was in a lot of pain, and sure, this meant that I had my first experience in therapy as a patient, but I also experienced the institution of psychotherapy and psychology-- its theories, its frameworks, its methods and practices. So I saw sort of firsthand how the diagnose-problem treat-with-prescribed-solution.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (07:33):
Approach that tends to be so dominant in the field totally missed the mark. It actually took all of the ways that our pain in my family, how it was connected to each other, and how we were taking place in a broader story of my mother's immigration from Pakistan, my dad's departure from the world he knew having grown up in a conservative cattle ranch in the western US, and the ways that the two of them sort of came together to try to form some new better possibility for their lives. So they had us, but I think they found that the constraints of their lives, the social part that bridges their individual pain, what they'd tried to sort of run away from haunted them. And when psychology took all of that suffering out of context, and not only missed the truth of their experience, but it sort of did violence to their stories, to our, our situation. Yeah. rather than helping us address kind of those complicated realities of pain and what's at the root of it, and ideally even open up new possibilities for, I guess being in the world, it sort of stultified them. It reduced the problem to maybe superficial biogenetic or behavioral abnormalities at the root..
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (08:58):
It wasn't taking into account the context and the various, you know, kind of systemic aspects both in the family as well as culturally and historically.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (09:11):
Yeah, I would say so. And I think by locating a problem, kind of one static or singular problem in a person, which diagnosis or other sort of categories tend to do in western psychology, I guess mainstream global psychology even it sort of forecloses on a more complicated picture as well as other possible options for how we could be or relate or understand ourselves.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:43):
Wow. And so that was your first experience with psychology or the field as a child in a family?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (09:51):
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I couldn't help but feel that it could be so much more-- psychology could do so much more. It could kind of support my parents' hopes for other possibilities that didn't have to be so constrained. It could help address pain and really form better stories. And I guess in that way I was kind of a critical liberation psychologist or interested in it long before I even knew what that meant.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (10:20):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking yeah, also postmodern narrative, like really kind of adding all these aspects together and really kind of coming to that at a young age. That's great.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (10:31):
Yeah. It was sort of contending with, you know, what, what are these hauntings? What, what do they mean for us? And sort of a disenchantment with a kind of narrative that didn't, that we didn't seem to fit in. But I also think it doesn't do justice to humanity more broadly. That it's not just something that some people are in the margins of, even though that's true that some people are marginalized by this and other people from different social positions might see themselves as reflected in psychology stories. It still doesn't do a service to make anyone singular or static when we're really multifaceted conflicted of two minds about things and sort of changing in our context and environment and operating within not just sort of relationships and social systems and to ourselves and our experiences, but where in a society with stories and ideologies and we're operating within that too. And I think psychology can often miss that. And liberation psychology is kind of about recontextualizing both the field and our understanding of our experiences in it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:47):
Yes. And actually, can you for our listeners and, and for me in your, your own words, like how do you define liberation psychology, or how do you describe what liberation psychology is?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (12:01):
It might help to maybe get at both the critical and liberation parts, which I sort of pieced together and speak a bit about what I see critical liberation psychology to be. I guess what I'm sort of pointing toward is how I felt psychology faltered because its methods and practices were built off of these invisible assumptions about people. Like I was saying, that people are static or they're predictable or determined. Say by their genes or childhood or even a traumatic event. And that we humans are sort of described as a singular thing, maybe by diagnosis or something that seems to define us. And to be clear, I'm not saying that all of psychology believes this, and I've actually taken refuge in a lot of theories within and outside of the field, such as psychoanalytic or family systems. You know, relational modes of practice, feminist, multicultural, humanistic, existential psychology, because I think that all of them, in my view, offer some framework of the person as more dynamic and multifaceted.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (13:12):
But the reason I end up defining myself as a critical liberation psychologist is because critical psychology, I see it as including the vast strands of psychology that have critiqued the field's relationship to power. So it takes a closer look at a couple of things. What power does psychology exercise critical psychology highlights that the field ultimately defines what it means to be human, right? And it sort of arbitrates the range of what's considered normal or healthy behavior. And I think critical psychology also looks at the politics operating in the field or how psychology operates within this broader context. It's not just defining these things in a vacuum. So when it constructs the idea of what's normal or what's a good or a healthy person in terms of behaviors or modes of functioning, it tends to describe people in ways that support or uphold or maintain or contest sociopolitical structures.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (14:19):
So what is the productive, you know, what is productivity in the broader context of capitalism or sexuality in moral or religious norms? And often there's been a generalizability problem in psychology where a lot of developmental psychology was grounded in western educated, industrialized rich or democratic samples. Usually college undergraduate students who are participating in research studies, psychology, research studies that are then generalized as this is what it means to be a person globally across time and space and all context. And in that way, I see critical psychology as bringing together these strands of decolonial feminist post-structural and liberation sort of critiques. Im thinking of Sunil Bhatia, the psychologist who wrote decolonizing psychology book and who described it sort of as psychology speaks for us without us, for a lot of people who are marginalized in the global south, or who become marginalized by this really constrained way of understanding ultimately psychology, subject matter, which is the person or the human experience gets really narrowed.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (15:38):
Sure. Yeah. And as you were saying too, kind of the influence of politics and culture. I had actually a, a great teacher for the history of psychotherapy, and he was a Marxist and talked about how the kind of psychology that was going on in Germany and, you know, earliest 19th century, you know, was very different from a lot of the behavioral stuff that was happening in the United States, which was influenced by people were funding the institutions that were, you know, helping to get the workers to be able to work more efficiently on understanding more kind of behavioral interventions for the industrial revolution. And just those kind of aspects of how the financial system, the power system, and the different cultures and the influences influence the, the research, the thinking about psychotherapy, the approaches and, and so on.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (16:29):
That's great, because my impression too is often that we don't get that learning or education in psychology even about how to kind of place experiences into context. Or at least it doesn't feel, you know, I get a few emails probably a month at this point from prospective students seeking out graduate programs that might offer a kind of psychology that recontextualizes human experience instead of taking it outside of it. And understanding it from outside of that. So it's nice to hear of an experience where you'd get exposed to that way of learning or thinking about the person.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (16:09):
Definitely. Yeah. San Francisco Bay area is definitely, got that, got that aspect integrated with the cultural competence, which is really great, and I feel very fortunate to have that in my graduate program. So the, so there's the critical liberation psychotherapy that's taking a critical look at power and the context and all these influences on these diagnosis or these approaches or so on. And you were saying that then you're also taking another aspect and kind of bringing those together?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (17:42):
Yeah, I can, I suppose it makes sense then to speak a little bit more on how I see the liberation piece as building off of that, though it's also one of the strands that engages in the kind of critique of power. I guess it makes sense also to say that critical psychology when it engages this critique isn't saying that we shouldn't have values. It's more so...or that it's inherently wrong for psychology to operate in tandem with social systems. Right? It's really saying that that's inevitable, that you can't be value neutral. So if we're inevitably going to build theories around assumptions of what it means to be a healthy person or to live in a healthy kind of society. Let's honestly identify what those values are, let's name and analyze those systems that we're inevitably operating within. So in seeing critical psychology as this kind of truth telling.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (18:39):
It's a way to engage not only in ideological critique, but also in developing practical action and intentionality toward what's called a liberatory praxis. So a cycle of reflecting and theorizing, and then engaging in practical action so that psychology can be reimagined as a tool for liberation-- not one of normalization or alienation. And what you were describing too about the historical education and Marxist education, you got, it makes me think about the institutional psychotherapy movement, the Frankfurt school, Erich Fromm, and others. And this word alienation sort of reverberates across them. Franz Fanon talked about it as the kind of estrangement one experiences when they are understanding themselves through the colonizers culture. And the gaze of authority that leads to psychic splits or symptoms. And of course, Karl Marx talks about the separation we have from the means of production as alienation, or how we can't connect our self experience to the economic systems and practices that define our day-to-day lives. Yeah. And then of course, there's Freud who talks about estrangement and the ways social authority, you know, civilization and its norms become internalized. As a kind of super ego and then psychic conflict. So yeah. Interesting. Digressing, maybe.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:16):
No, no, it's great. So yeah, so the liberation aspect is the being able to kind of step back from and look at and reflect on the context in which the person is experiencing. And also the, I also did narrative training for a while. They talked about oppressive dominant narratives and really kind of looking at those effects on the particular person, the client, and helping them also seeing those depressive--those oppressive dominant narratives and kind of looking at how do you work, how do you live within them? 'cause I think like you're saying, you're also living within this context, but it sounds like the alternative is just going with the assumption that these things are normal, going with the values of the colonizer or of the dominant perspectives or so on, which might be marginalizing others. So rather than just taking that as truth and assumption and going with it, actually stepping back and looking at it and looking at its effects, you know, I think-- I don't know a lot about feminist psychotherapy, but I think that was a really big piece around kind of looking at the way that the, the context is affecting and rather than just taking all these assumptions, actually becoming aware and recognizing these pieces that are also at play.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (21:35):
Absolutely. And I think that's, you know, the founder of liberation psychology, Ignacio Martín-Baró that's sort of what he critiqued about the objectivist or positivist lens of psychology, is that it makes all these truth claims not just about how to be a healthy person or narratives about personhood or what may be called subjectivity. But about what are veritable ways of knowing and studying and understanding experiences and reality and society. So it doesn't just marginalize people. It marginalizes methods and theories and practices that we can use collectively to make sense of ourselves that may also broaden the range of what's possible for subjectivity and how we can be in society or collectively.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (22:28):
Yeah. Can you almost like give me an example of like a compare contrast of how one might work with a client or how this might look in, in psychotherapy to kind of get a sense of the, like a concrete kind of how this looks in the work?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (22:44):
Yeah. That maybe it makes sense for me to describe a bit about critical liberation psychotherapy, or at least what I'm calling as a model of critical liberation psychotherapy and how it kind of takes this critical liberation theory and tries to consider what would it mean if psychotherapy is not just an institution that risks enforcing a status quo, or primarily working to adjust individuals to an unjust social situation, or even worse scapegoating them, right? So this model of critical liberation psychotherapy or CLP. Was an attempt to create a framework for how psychotherapy can resist that practice of simply adjusting individuals. And I've been really asking, it comes out of this question how and whether psychotherapy can be for liberation, can it support liberation? And I was also trying to get around some of these overly simplistic ideas of diversity, or how the multicultural movement got co-opted into misguided ideas that bucket people into identity politics categories.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (24:01):
And it keeps everything still A-contextual and in the individual, and then it just becomes about everyone having access to the same psychotherapy as usual. The same version of psychotherapy that's aimed at maybe symptom-reduction that's stripped from its social context and hyper-focused on finding pathology or problems and locating them in the patient and in a boundaried way, taking it out of the story as I was saying before. So CLP is not new per se, but it is a guiding framework that I've tried to ground in all of that critical liberation theory. And the way I see it is that all practitioners can use this model to examine existing practices within their theoretical orientation or alternatives that have been marginalized, recenter them, and honestly ask what are their risks? How can these practices be used to address alienation and actually foster liberation?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (25:03):
So that gets us to, you know, then how do we understand how something like psychotherapy could be about social liberation? How is the social connected to therapy? How could changing an individual experience or subjectivity support social movements. It all gets sort of tangled there. So I find myself thinking about this a lot, but there are different ways of understanding liberation and feminism and humanistic existential thought, but I see it as referring to, you know, liberation as referring to how do we broaden our range for possible ways of being in the world. For participating in society, for reclaiming repressed aspects of our experience. How do we bridge that individual pain or experience to collective circumstances. And emancipation as opening up more sustainable ways of relating to self, others and to our environment as all of those things are connected. So I can get to your question a bit by saying that psychotherapy first practice in this way requires a kind of reconfiguring how formulation and conceptualization occur.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (26:30):
Often I hear this narrative of when is this just what the person, you know, the patient is going through, and when is it something that's cultural as if there's sort of a distinction or a line that you can draw between the two? Yes. And the first step here is recognizing that the social or the cultural, it is already present. And psychotherapy is already ideological. That's what critical theory helps us to do is, is see how it's there. And I'm inspired again by the Frankfurt School and Lin Layton social psychoanalysis, and also decolonial liberation psychologists like Danielle Gaztambide, Lillian Comas-Diaz. So when I say the social is acting upon and just acted out in the patient's life Yes. And the therapeutic encounter, I'm also suggesting that it doesn't, it's not, you know, multicultural therapy when it's being spoken about necessarily in discourse or when it's broached, though It could be, but it already is present. In the person's lived experience, in the relationship encounter as it is unfolding in the discourses that are drawn upon intentionally or unintentionally, and in the goals of, of therapy itself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:49):
It's not like it's there or not there. It's always there.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (27:54):
Yeah. And, and maybe there are maybe I can get to an example of that, but, but yes, basically in, in someone's hopes for themselves or their innermost wishes or desires or fears or their, you know, formative relationships, you might say their sense of epistemic trust. How do I know that I can trust my assessment of what's going on? Or where have I inherited these feelings or self experiences or self concepts come back to relationships and all the social that is transmitted through them you know, what kind of person and change they wanna see through therapy can often involve kind of tinkering with subjectivity. That makes sense. Only when you look at the broader picture of why would someone want to be more productive? Why would someone want to avoid their sadness? Why would someone be caught in sort of a self-defeating pattern of sabotaging relationships? That those all get to processes that are inevitably involved in social context.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:02):
Sure.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (29:05):
Yeah. I can name maybe a few of the guideposts and critical liberation psychotherapy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:13):
Well, I'm wondering about like, what is, how does it look different than maybe other psychotherapies when you're in the room with your client? What is happening or what's are there any illustrations that might help about like what, what's being done differently in the room in the session? Say somebody's coming in saying, I've got, I think I have depression. How, how, from a critical liberation approach, what are you doing similar or differently to, to other psychotherapy approaches?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (29:49):
I think primarily one thing about how I'm understanding critical liberation psychotherapy or any kind of liberatory psychotherapy are a couple of maybe disclaimers. First is it's not the case that I think liberation psychotherapy implies that liberation primarily happens in an individual therapy context. It is more so how can therapy as an already existing institution that is primarily a relationship. Not just to another person, but to an institution. How can that support liberatory outcomes? So that being said, I am sure that there are moments in many therapies that have already happened and are happening that have been liberatory for people. Just as relationships are sort of the foundation of social movements, different ways of relating and what I think. So it's not as though critical liberation psychotherapy is entirely its own different thing from therapies that already exist. In fact, it's really about channeling what may already be effective tools for harnessing liberation across existing theories within the field and marginalized by the field or existing practices.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (31:17):
So in a way, ultimately critical liberation psychotherapy creates a novel experience. Where another way of being and relating can be actualized in the clinical encounter. In a way that sort of disrupts the logic of the status quo, but it allows someone to not just theorize or imagine what they could do, but they live a different way of being or relating to another person, in this case the therapist or an institution. And it kind of unlocks different possibilities. And in order to do that, the process of psychotherapy itself has to resist the kind of objectification that can come out of positivist or objective paradigms. So by seeing the person in their experiences and context, they're not, you know, objectified as Fauquet would describe it by say just a diagnostic label, but they're multifaceted. They are of two or more minds about something.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (32:29):
But there's also this idea that I'm trying to bring forward that psychotherapy itself gets objectified within this system. That it is a relational vehicle that drives, you know, we see that research all the time. It's the relationship that drives outcomes. But so often we talk about psychotherapy as it could be, you know, a step-by-step manual for treatment for treating a problem. And that interventions are either one thing and they're either good or bad, like silence is one kind of thing and you should do more of it or less of it, or you shouldn't do self disclosures or interpretations can be an abuse of power. Right. That we're defining them in one way. Rather than something that occurs specific to the situation in the moment to the person and within, again, the context of the actual psychotherapy encounter. Sure. So one way is kind of reclaiming a sort of critical discernment and usage of these, you know, what you might call micro interventions or even just broader interventions that any of them could be used to word liberatory aims if they are facilitating other ways of relating-- to self experiences, to others, to ecology that aren't repressive or subjugating so that they open up what liberation psychology terms a kind of accompaniment a kind of an accompaniment with each other, accampamento. That you are fellow travelers which also kind of deviates from the idea of any kind of expertise or psychotherapy as a process where an expert provides a prescription that acts upon a disorder entity. Right. It just is different from that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:27):
So it's kind of more of like a mindset of the therapist and particularly not having rigidity about no self-disclosure, yes, self-disclosure, but more attuning to the current situation with the client and, and really seeing what is, is gonna be helpful in that circumstance. And then at the same time, the client is maybe having a different experience of the therapist and maybe they even expected from psychology or therapy or, or so on. That again, kind of creates a scenario where there's kind of not necessarily questioning the assumptions, but having a different experience, which then kind of expands one's perspective or consciousness.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (35:13):
It, it does make me think about critical consciousness as being one of the guideposts of critical liberation psychotherapy, but also a key part of Paulo Freire's idea of conscientization liberation psychology and liberatory pedagogy of a way, a kind of novel experience that also facilitates a person not just experiencing themselves differently, but understanding the interconnectedness of self to others and to more mutual ways of relating to others. So that my, you know, there's that indigenous victim that if you've come here to help me, then you're wasting your time. But if you've come here because you realize that your liberation is bound in mine, then let us help each other that it is kind of subverting the power dynamic in a way. Sure. Or at least making it more fluid. Having fluid expertise there and opening up a kind of critical consciousness where someone recognized the way, the ways that they're suffering their dreams, their pain is bound up in others and has implications for sort of mutual accountability, not just to how they see their symptoms.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (36:36):
Like let's say someone is understanding their symptoms the same way that this paradigm tends to understand nature. Right. That it's a natural kind of thing. And the way we tend to relate to the environment and to natural kinds of things is to try to have power over it, to control it and to feel sort of like it can be, you know, measured and commodified and even exploited that there's a risk that psychotherapy more broadly. The general critique of it is that we do that almost with symptoms. We make suffering something that's measurable. A natural kind of thing that we need to have control over and power over. And there's a suppressive logic to that. And there's this idea that once we measure them, the aim is to reduce them rather than exploring their meaning, either existentially or in relation to say a demand that you were referring to earlier or say, working just toward productivity. Maybe there's an element of so-called symptoms being a manifestation of someone's resisting that ideology. That it actually is not healthy for the person, but really about helping to maintain an economic market which aren't always mutually compatible outcomes.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:59):
Sure, sure. You know, back to kind of like a illustration of either, you know, something you've done with a client in session or like an example of something you might do with a client in session. Is there anything that you can kind of share? Like, like with the, like with this client I was doing X, Y, or Z, we were talking about the like that. Would you be able to give any example?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (38:22):
Yeah. I think your point about how the therapist in CLP would want to be thinking about and listening in this contextualized sort of critical consciousness way to try to identify first what these patterns are. In the person, and then thinking, how would the psychotherapy encounter, or the ways I'm relating to and with this person subvert that pattern or open up another possibility that seems to involve more sustainable or mutual ways of relating to each other, right. That isn't sort of exerting that authority. So I'm thinking about a time when I was on call. And I was speaking to someone who was not my patient in this system, but who was actively suicidal. And they were a trans person in their early twenties, and they'd called the center maybe several times when they had wanted to die. They had this intent, but you could say an indirect kind of plan to find and consume poisonous mushrooms that they had researched. And I couldn't see them in this interaction as they were on call. But they'd changed their name that was assigned to them at birth to "NPC". Which is a gaming acronym that stands for non-player character. So it's that term for an irrelevant person in the story centered around a protagonist. So there's sort of a plot device who isn't afforded their own will or even just a kind of depth of personhood.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (40:03):
And I considered this as part of a pattern of self-abnegation in their life, of a kind of hermeneutical injustice, not having frameworks or language in psychology or otherwise that makes someone experience legible or meaningful as a full kind of person in their own world. And a kind of relational probably and institutional rejection, certainly it felt on the edge of what our training around suicidality, which largely tends to be around assessment and prevention, but not really working with someone in, in that pain. Yeah. And so it was just an interesting marker of how they'd chosen this name that ultimately rendered them sort of illegible as a person.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:56):
Yeah. Irrelevant or like, yeah. Really. Yeah.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (41:00):
Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:01):
Anonymous, or like almost meaningless.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (41:05):
Right. And, and, and at the same time sort of, you know, the, a duality of that calling in and making their experience known. To me. And so I'm listening to them trying to make it legible. So the way I'm now using micro interventions, you know, reflections restatements or a kind of phenomenological exploration, I'm trying to articulate their experiences as they're telling them to me as they're meaning them. Sure. Only as I could understand it back to them so that at least it starts to become legible between us, which might seem like the sensible, clear thing to do, but it's surprising how often in those moments, especially if something like suicidality is, is triggered. There's this what they call in motivational interviewing the writing reflex, like if you are an authority, and psychology, of course, confers with its credentials and licensing and whatnot, a kind of authority to kind of get in and interrupt what's happening.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (42:13):
And prevent, so you're not doing maybe a lot of exploration of lived experience typically in a moment like this because you're diving into an assessment and documentation and maybe a fear response triggered by liability concerns. So it felt all the more important to be openly checking and revising my understanding. Using empathic inferences, clarifying reflections. Immediacy, self disclosures, you know, maybe not about the content of me, but about experiencing them and meta communications about, you know, wow, I'm so, I'm so struck by the meaning of NPC, this name you've chosen to not matter as a person, but then I'm almost seeing you as reclaiming it in a way I hadn't thought of. So even my usage of their chosen name-- sort of trying to turn its meaning on its head and communicating I am learning and being influenced by you. So who is a protagonist here? And you know, using this language of almost being gamified, I mean, of course that implies so much about systems that they live within. And to highlight how our whole relationship, you know, the therapy encounter was existing in the constraints of what this system and psychotherapy could do for them. So it felt important not to mystify power or the reality of how therapy was bounded or what informed consent could mean and what it really might mean in this institution in this moment where I'm practicing.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (43:58):
So I can say in this example, a couple of things that feel key about CLP. Is that critical consciousness is not really something you can prescribe.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (44:09):
Because if you were to do that, if you're trying to say, here's how you're being oppressed, here's how being transgender has led you to feel alienated in x, y, z way, that is not a process that subverts the idea of, as a psychologist, I'm the authority and I'm telling you what you need to do. It recreates it just with different language. So, you know, I'm not the expert of your experience, but I can use my tools and training and my power in therapy to mutually explore your experience, and I can use my authority of my experience relating to you to genuinely participate in this exploration together and to be faithful and to represent my own experience of you knowing the power that I have, not disavowing that or pretending like that can be fully flattened.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:58):
Yeah. Yeah. And so it sounds like rather than maybe taking that knowledge that you have and kind of directing it towards a client as like a psychoeducation or, or something to that, like something that they're lacking and that you are giving, instead, you are using that knowledge which is influencing your reflection or your reactions to what you're hearing and then using self-disclosure to, to share that. And so it's, it's kind of present, but it's not necessarily in a top-down way. It's more in kind of a relationship kind of seeing way.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (45:40):
A relationship-- what was the last part you said? Like
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:42):
Seeing like you're seeing the client, them, like seeing them and kind of bringing that in with your and empathic conjectures of, of the, the knowledge that you have.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (45:54):
I think so. And, and I think you probably hear as you're saying that, that there are probably so many theoretical orientations in schools of thought and psychology that are relational and that are aiming to have that, but something happens when they get maybe confined within particular systems you know, managed care systems and session limits and insurance structures where diagnosis is required. That I think actually makes this harder to do in the moment than you might, you know-- I'm sure you know this too--then seems it should be more accessible For psychotherapy encounters to use these tools in this way. But I think a lot gets in the way of that systemically.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:46:43):
Sure. Definitely. Yeah, and I like how you're using the concept of the writing reflex because yeah. And motivational interviewing, that idea that the person's like trying to get the person on the right path, which is what their assumption is of what the right path is or what is supposed to be done or so on, rather than staying with the client's experience and really trying to understand and see them...which then oftentimes helps us move together. I think about it as like the big head nod when the client feels like, yes, you're really, you're seeing me, you're getting this, and then we can kind of move in a direction. But I think that it sounds like-- and I always, you know, in multicultural work or cultural competency, you know, there's, I think you were alluding to earlier that sometimes it, it goes in this direction of like, this is what this type of group has as their experience or so on and almost kind of stereotypical, which some, some of that is helpful and understanding, but the biggest piece is also I think the therapists reflecting on their own power, their own privilege.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:50):
Their own assumptions that they're bringing in. It sounds like you're saying that, you know, maybe rather than just jumping in with the assessment or decreasing the liability or so on, like kind of being able to stay with your own experience of some of those impulses or, you know, kind of assumptions while also staying with the client and not necessarily just kind of going with those, you know, kind of impulses or assumptions and is that kind of---?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (48:21):
Yeah, and I think, and adding to that, you are being reflexive about self and the encounter with the patient and this other person, and you are accompanying them in this kind of mutual exploration of lived experience with the kind of trust that in getting closer to that other possibilities that have may, that maybe have been repressed can be reclaimed. And there is a reflexivity that I'm arguing for about the field of psychology itself as very operant in the room in the relationship, that there are certain assumptions that come with that, like the hyper individualist assumption, which can conceal the nature of this relationship. But I, I do take from a sort of relational psychoanalytic and, you know, notion of intersubjectivity that it's also about more than my situatedness and subjectivity or yours or the, or the patients, that there is a third thing that is being created there that can trouble and work with more dynamic understandings of, you know, what Jessica Benjamin calls doer or done to dynamics.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (49:38):
But that third thing I see, and the relationship itself as being more than just relational, that in every relationship exists, these social dimensions of ideology, of discourse. What is a mutual relationship? How does that look when there's a built-in power imbalance? What does it mean when it comes to self-expression or authenticity? And so I guess I can think about an brief example for this too. I've been thinking a lot more about tyranny and fascism these days. And tyranny, you could say as a social system or ideology, it relies upon a kind of subjectivity, a kind of person and way of being that is obedient. Maybe shame is a prominent experience and a kind of self surveillance. So experiences or emotions tend to be avoided or disavowed even repressed or split. So there might be resentment there about that self surveillance, but nevertheless, there is kind of a you know, self abnigation that's happening there.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:45):
Yeah.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (50:46):
And I think about how fascism and its inner machinations, like concentration camps and mid 20th century Europe, really depended upon obedient civil servants professionals who failed to uphold the ethics of do no harm, because harm became normalized by kind of tyranny or people in business who sought out to profit off of cheap labor and labor practices that were exploitative of people and natural resources. So if critical liberation psychotherapy or any kind of psychotherapy, it doesn't have to be called that to be liberatory, but if it can open up more equitable or sustainable ways of being with one's self experiences relating than a patient or a person is less amenable to a kind of tyrannical or fascistic subjectivity, that the, you know, the therapy relationship is being reconfigured as a mutual exploration into lived experience, not silencing of it, but understanding the current situation with critical consciousness, reclaiming repressed possibilities. And if it can reorient around mutual accountability and relationships, then tyranny is resisted. Yeah. So therapy can open up these questions like, to whom and what are you connected? What does your pain and anxiety mean for your being and collective wellbeing.. How is your suffering connected to others? The architecture that formed you and what is possible for us now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:10):
Mm-Hmm. That's great. Well, it sounds wonderful that you're, you're doing this work and it sounds like the-- and you're doing some research around this? Or is this theoretical writing research articles?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (52:24):
Yeah. Some theoretical research articles. We've got a call for a special issue out in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology on Liberatory Praxis now. So we're working through kind of compiling and editing that special issue, and I co-run a research lab with David Goodman and Mookie Manalili here at Boston College and the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, which is just an awesome group of students and early career folks and transdisciplinary areas who are all coming together to kind of reimagine what psychology can look like if it supports liberation or a fuller picture, what it means to be human.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:05):
Wonderful.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (53:05):
I'm lucky to be able to do that work with them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:07):
Yeah. Sounds great. And is there any books that you would recommend or anything you know, folks can look up the research any additional resources that you would suggest for folks that are interested in learning more about liberation psychology or even, I don't know if there's trainings or even group discussion, because I imagine that that there's a process of liberation that the therapists also need to go through to be able to extend that into the work with their clients.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (53:40):
Yeah, certainly there's a body of literature on critical consciousness more broadly, but it can trace back to sort of the historical roots in Paolo Freire's and Ignacio Martin-Baró's work. So those are sort of the, the seminal texts in the area, but since it's been a burgeoning area of study and that's both really exciting and contains risks that, like other terms in the field, we've seen it kind of get diluted and. Maybe misappropriated and it loses its meaning because it is about social change ultimately. So there are people who I think rightly are very skeptical that just be an increase in liberation psychology research would mean that there's more Conscientiousization around this. But Danielle Gaztambide, writes about decolonizing psychoanalytic technique. Lillian Comas-Diaz ber has a co-edited book on liberation psychology more recently. So there are certainly a couple of newer texts that I think get to this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (54:44):
Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today, and I really appreciate it. It sounds like you're doing amazing work and and needed work especially as we're, you know in general, but as we're like you're talking tyranny in the times that we're, we're living in right now. Kind of being able to bring in that consciousness that that liberation piece as we're dealing with what we're dealing with and particularly the ways that this things are, are being affected with people of different experiences that are being even more marginalized or alienated within the current system that we're, we're dealing with. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, take care.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (55:27):
Thank you. It was a real pleasure.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:29):
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Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances 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. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally focused couples therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma;
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:26):
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Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:19):
Today I’ll be speaking with Dr. Zenobia Morrill, who is a critical-liberation psychologist and psychology professor at William James College. She received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Boston and completed her pre- and post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine and at Yale Health, Mental Health & Counseling, respectively. Inspired by her personal and professional experiences with the mental health system, Zenobia emphasizes the power in psychological frameworks as the stories we use to understand ourselves, and the risks presented when these frameworks cannot capture the complex existential, sociocultural, familial, physiological, and tacit dimensions of humanity. Her work centers on the belief that psychological healing must account for these broader meaning systems and political structures that shape individual experience. Her research and clinical interests include psychotherapy process, global mental health, qualitative methodology, theory and philosophy, and critical and liberation psychologies. A recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, Dr. Morrill’s work and Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy model have been recognized and presented internationally.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:31):
Let’s listen to the interview
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:33):
Hi, welcome.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (03:35):
Hi. Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:37):
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. So I have learned a little bit about the work that you're doing and the involvement with liberation Psychotherapy from a colleague that is on a board of mine of the Association of Family Therapist, Northern California that was you know, talking about this approach and maybe we're gonna reach out to have somebody speak on it. And I got really interested and, and read a little bit about some of the work you're doing and, and wanted to learn more about, about the work and the approach. But first, I always like to start off and find out from folks, you know how'd you get doing what you're doing? What's kind of the evolution of your thinking? How did you get to this work?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (04:17):
Sure. Well, well, first thank you for this question. I think it invites a kind of storytelling and honestly I'd say that's what drew me into psychology, where stories. I grew up in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC and I remember thinking to myself when I was in high school that the one thing I could really see myself never growing tired of is working with people and-- with their stories. And I've learned that people can always surprise you that there's something humbling about realizing you never get to the point where you've just heard it all. So I didn't ever really want clean answers because that didn't feel, I guess, honest, and I didn't really believe my curiosity would ever be fully gratified, and that was compelling to me. I think I just wanted, and, you know, think teenager existential angst and all, I think I just wanted to have the courage to face up to the idea that we humans are existing without really knowing why or what for.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (05:23):
And I was recognizing that there was no real consensus or clear verdict that we can collectively agree upon anyways about what we are to do with our lives. And so what a dilemma--right? And I was feeling that I didn't want a career where I avoided this elephant in the room, so to speak. And what did seem very real is that we have each other. We aren't alone in figuring this out. We can share our stories and we can form them and be formed by them. So I sought out to be a psychotherapist because I imagined it was about accompanying someone and confronting these existential truths and in their journey and sort of figuring out together how to be. And so today it's sort of evolved where psychotherapy feels like my wheelhouse. I'm an early career psychologist. I teach clinical theory and practice courses in the doctoral program at William James College.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (06:23):
I researched psychotherapy process and I practice psychotherapy all here in the greater Boston area. But yeah, my story with psychology, it's kind of been one of heartbreak, and this is, I think, relevant to liberation psychology, which I'm sure we'll speak more about, but it makes me think about testimonium or the way storytelling in liberation. Psychology is both a method and a moral act, and it links the individual to the social. So it bridges what seems like isolated pain to its historical relational contexts. And my first exposure to psychology was because my family was in a lot of pain, and sure, this meant that I had my first experience in therapy as a patient, but I also experienced the institution of psychotherapy and psychology-- its theories, its frameworks, its methods and practices. So I saw sort of firsthand how the diagnose-problem treat-with-prescribed-solution.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (07:33):
Approach that tends to be so dominant in the field totally missed the mark. It actually took all of the ways that our pain in my family, how it was connected to each other, and how we were taking place in a broader story of my mother's immigration from Pakistan, my dad's departure from the world he knew having grown up in a conservative cattle ranch in the western US, and the ways that the two of them sort of came together to try to form some new better possibility for their lives. So they had us, but I think they found that the constraints of their lives, the social part that bridges their individual pain, what they'd tried to sort of run away from haunted them. And when psychology took all of that suffering out of context, and not only missed the truth of their experience, but it sort of did violence to their stories, to our, our situation. Yeah. rather than helping us address kind of those complicated realities of pain and what's at the root of it, and ideally even open up new possibilities for, I guess being in the world, it sort of stultified them. It reduced the problem to maybe superficial biogenetic or behavioral abnormalities at the root..
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (08:58):
It wasn't taking into account the context and the various, you know, kind of systemic aspects both in the family as well as culturally and historically.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (09:11):
Yeah, I would say so. And I think by locating a problem, kind of one static or singular problem in a person, which diagnosis or other sort of categories tend to do in western psychology, I guess mainstream global psychology even it sort of forecloses on a more complicated picture as well as other possible options for how we could be or relate or understand ourselves.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:43):
Wow. And so that was your first experience with psychology or the field as a child in a family?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (09:51):
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I couldn't help but feel that it could be so much more-- psychology could do so much more. It could kind of support my parents' hopes for other possibilities that didn't have to be so constrained. It could help address pain and really form better stories. And I guess in that way I was kind of a critical liberation psychologist or interested in it long before I even knew what that meant.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (10:20):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking yeah, also postmodern narrative, like really kind of adding all these aspects together and really kind of coming to that at a young age. That's great.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (10:31):
Yeah. It was sort of contending with, you know, what, what are these hauntings? What, what do they mean for us? And sort of a disenchantment with a kind of narrative that didn't, that we didn't seem to fit in. But I also think it doesn't do justice to humanity more broadly. That it's not just something that some people are in the margins of, even though that's true that some people are marginalized by this and other people from different social positions might see themselves as reflected in psychology stories. It still doesn't do a service to make anyone singular or static when we're really multifaceted conflicted of two minds about things and sort of changing in our context and environment and operating within not just sort of relationships and social systems and to ourselves and our experiences, but where in a society with stories and ideologies and we're operating within that too. And I think psychology can often miss that. And liberation psychology is kind of about recontextualizing both the field and our understanding of our experiences in it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:47):
Yes. And actually, can you for our listeners and, and for me in your, your own words, like how do you define liberation psychology, or how do you describe what liberation psychology is?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (12:01):
It might help to maybe get at both the critical and liberation parts, which I sort of pieced together and speak a bit about what I see critical liberation psychology to be. I guess what I'm sort of pointing toward is how I felt psychology faltered because its methods and practices were built off of these invisible assumptions about people. Like I was saying, that people are static or they're predictable or determined. Say by their genes or childhood or even a traumatic event. And that we humans are sort of described as a singular thing, maybe by diagnosis or something that seems to define us. And to be clear, I'm not saying that all of psychology believes this, and I've actually taken refuge in a lot of theories within and outside of the field, such as psychoanalytic or family systems. You know, relational modes of practice, feminist, multicultural, humanistic, existential psychology, because I think that all of them, in my view, offer some framework of the person as more dynamic and multifaceted.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (13:12):
But the reason I end up defining myself as a critical liberation psychologist is because critical psychology, I see it as including the vast strands of psychology that have critiqued the field's relationship to power. So it takes a closer look at a couple of things. What power does psychology exercise critical psychology highlights that the field ultimately defines what it means to be human, right? And it sort of arbitrates the range of what's considered normal or healthy behavior. And I think critical psychology also looks at the politics operating in the field or how psychology operates within this broader context. It's not just defining these things in a vacuum. So when it constructs the idea of what's normal or what's a good or a healthy person in terms of behaviors or modes of functioning, it tends to describe people in ways that support or uphold or maintain or contest sociopolitical structures.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (14:19):
So what is the productive, you know, what is productivity in the broader context of capitalism or sexuality in moral or religious norms? And often there's been a generalizability problem in psychology where a lot of developmental psychology was grounded in western educated, industrialized rich or democratic samples. Usually college undergraduate students who are participating in research studies, psychology, research studies that are then generalized as this is what it means to be a person globally across time and space and all context. And in that way, I see critical psychology as bringing together these strands of decolonial feminist post-structural and liberation sort of critiques. Im thinking of Sunil Bhatia, the psychologist who wrote decolonizing psychology book and who described it sort of as psychology speaks for us without us, for a lot of people who are marginalized in the global south, or who become marginalized by this really constrained way of understanding ultimately psychology, subject matter, which is the person or the human experience gets really narrowed.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (15:38):
Sure. Yeah. And as you were saying too, kind of the influence of politics and culture. I had actually a, a great teacher for the history of psychotherapy, and he was a Marxist and talked about how the kind of psychology that was going on in Germany and, you know, earliest 19th century, you know, was very different from a lot of the behavioral stuff that was happening in the United States, which was influenced by people were funding the institutions that were, you know, helping to get the workers to be able to work more efficiently on understanding more kind of behavioral interventions for the industrial revolution. And just those kind of aspects of how the financial system, the power system, and the different cultures and the influences influence the, the research, the thinking about psychotherapy, the approaches and, and so on.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (16:29):
That's great, because my impression too is often that we don't get that learning or education in psychology even about how to kind of place experiences into context. Or at least it doesn't feel, you know, I get a few emails probably a month at this point from prospective students seeking out graduate programs that might offer a kind of psychology that recontextualizes human experience instead of taking it outside of it. And understanding it from outside of that. So it's nice to hear of an experience where you'd get exposed to that way of learning or thinking about the person.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (16:09):
Definitely. Yeah. San Francisco Bay area is definitely, got that, got that aspect integrated with the cultural competence, which is really great, and I feel very fortunate to have that in my graduate program. So the, so there's the critical liberation psychotherapy that's taking a critical look at power and the context and all these influences on these diagnosis or these approaches or so on. And you were saying that then you're also taking another aspect and kind of bringing those together?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (17:42):
Yeah, I can, I suppose it makes sense then to speak a little bit more on how I see the liberation piece as building off of that, though it's also one of the strands that engages in the kind of critique of power. I guess it makes sense also to say that critical psychology when it engages this critique isn't saying that we shouldn't have values. It's more so...or that it's inherently wrong for psychology to operate in tandem with social systems. Right? It's really saying that that's inevitable, that you can't be value neutral. So if we're inevitably going to build theories around assumptions of what it means to be a healthy person or to live in a healthy kind of society. Let's honestly identify what those values are, let's name and analyze those systems that we're inevitably operating within. So in seeing critical psychology as this kind of truth telling.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (18:39):
It's a way to engage not only in ideological critique, but also in developing practical action and intentionality toward what's called a liberatory praxis. So a cycle of reflecting and theorizing, and then engaging in practical action so that psychology can be reimagined as a tool for liberation-- not one of normalization or alienation. And what you were describing too about the historical education and Marxist education, you got, it makes me think about the institutional psychotherapy movement, the Frankfurt school, Erich Fromm, and others. And this word alienation sort of reverberates across them. Franz Fanon talked about it as the kind of estrangement one experiences when they are understanding themselves through the colonizers culture. And the gaze of authority that leads to psychic splits or symptoms. And of course, Karl Marx talks about the separation we have from the means of production as alienation, or how we can't connect our self experience to the economic systems and practices that define our day-to-day lives. Yeah. And then of course, there's Freud who talks about estrangement and the ways social authority, you know, civilization and its norms become internalized. As a kind of super ego and then psychic conflict. So yeah. Interesting. Digressing, maybe.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:16):
No, no, it's great. So yeah, so the liberation aspect is the being able to kind of step back from and look at and reflect on the context in which the person is experiencing. And also the, I also did narrative training for a while. They talked about oppressive dominant narratives and really kind of looking at those effects on the particular person, the client, and helping them also seeing those depressive--those oppressive dominant narratives and kind of looking at how do you work, how do you live within them? 'cause I think like you're saying, you're also living within this context, but it sounds like the alternative is just going with the assumption that these things are normal, going with the values of the colonizer or of the dominant perspectives or so on, which might be marginalizing others. So rather than just taking that as truth and assumption and going with it, actually stepping back and looking at it and looking at its effects, you know, I think-- I don't know a lot about feminist psychotherapy, but I think that was a really big piece around kind of looking at the way that the, the context is affecting and rather than just taking all these assumptions, actually becoming aware and recognizing these pieces that are also at play.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (21:35):
Absolutely. And I think that's, you know, the founder of liberation psychology, Ignacio Martín-Baró that's sort of what he critiqued about the objectivist or positivist lens of psychology, is that it makes all these truth claims not just about how to be a healthy person or narratives about personhood or what may be called subjectivity. But about what are veritable ways of knowing and studying and understanding experiences and reality and society. So it doesn't just marginalize people. It marginalizes methods and theories and practices that we can use collectively to make sense of ourselves that may also broaden the range of what's possible for subjectivity and how we can be in society or collectively.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (22:28):
Yeah. Can you almost like give me an example of like a compare contrast of how one might work with a client or how this might look in, in psychotherapy to kind of get a sense of the, like a concrete kind of how this looks in the work?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (22:44):
Yeah. That maybe it makes sense for me to describe a bit about critical liberation psychotherapy, or at least what I'm calling as a model of critical liberation psychotherapy and how it kind of takes this critical liberation theory and tries to consider what would it mean if psychotherapy is not just an institution that risks enforcing a status quo, or primarily working to adjust individuals to an unjust social situation, or even worse scapegoating them, right? So this model of critical liberation psychotherapy or CLP. Was an attempt to create a framework for how psychotherapy can resist that practice of simply adjusting individuals. And I've been really asking, it comes out of this question how and whether psychotherapy can be for liberation, can it support liberation? And I was also trying to get around some of these overly simplistic ideas of diversity, or how the multicultural movement got co-opted into misguided ideas that bucket people into identity politics categories.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (24:01):
And it keeps everything still A-contextual and in the individual, and then it just becomes about everyone having access to the same psychotherapy as usual. The same version of psychotherapy that's aimed at maybe symptom-reduction that's stripped from its social context and hyper-focused on finding pathology or problems and locating them in the patient and in a boundaried way, taking it out of the story as I was saying before. So CLP is not new per se, but it is a guiding framework that I've tried to ground in all of that critical liberation theory. And the way I see it is that all practitioners can use this model to examine existing practices within their theoretical orientation or alternatives that have been marginalized, recenter them, and honestly ask what are their risks? How can these practices be used to address alienation and actually foster liberation?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (25:03):
So that gets us to, you know, then how do we understand how something like psychotherapy could be about social liberation? How is the social connected to therapy? How could changing an individual experience or subjectivity support social movements. It all gets sort of tangled there. So I find myself thinking about this a lot, but there are different ways of understanding liberation and feminism and humanistic existential thought, but I see it as referring to, you know, liberation as referring to how do we broaden our range for possible ways of being in the world. For participating in society, for reclaiming repressed aspects of our experience. How do we bridge that individual pain or experience to collective circumstances. And emancipation as opening up more sustainable ways of relating to self, others and to our environment as all of those things are connected. So I can get to your question a bit by saying that psychotherapy first practice in this way requires a kind of reconfiguring how formulation and conceptualization occur.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (26:30):
Often I hear this narrative of when is this just what the person, you know, the patient is going through, and when is it something that's cultural as if there's sort of a distinction or a line that you can draw between the two? Yes. And the first step here is recognizing that the social or the cultural, it is already present. And psychotherapy is already ideological. That's what critical theory helps us to do is, is see how it's there. And I'm inspired again by the Frankfurt School and Lin Layton social psychoanalysis, and also decolonial liberation psychologists like Danielle Gaztambide, Lillian Comas-Diaz. So when I say the social is acting upon and just acted out in the patient's life Yes. And the therapeutic encounter, I'm also suggesting that it doesn't, it's not, you know, multicultural therapy when it's being spoken about necessarily in discourse or when it's broached, though It could be, but it already is present. In the person's lived experience, in the relationship encounter as it is unfolding in the discourses that are drawn upon intentionally or unintentionally, and in the goals of, of therapy itself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:49):
It's not like it's there or not there. It's always there.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (27:54):
Yeah. And, and maybe there are maybe I can get to an example of that, but, but yes, basically in, in someone's hopes for themselves or their innermost wishes or desires or fears or their, you know, formative relationships, you might say their sense of epistemic trust. How do I know that I can trust my assessment of what's going on? Or where have I inherited these feelings or self experiences or self concepts come back to relationships and all the social that is transmitted through them you know, what kind of person and change they wanna see through therapy can often involve kind of tinkering with subjectivity. That makes sense. Only when you look at the broader picture of why would someone want to be more productive? Why would someone want to avoid their sadness? Why would someone be caught in sort of a self-defeating pattern of sabotaging relationships? That those all get to processes that are inevitably involved in social context.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:02):
Sure.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (29:05):
Yeah. I can name maybe a few of the guideposts and critical liberation psychotherapy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:13):
Well, I'm wondering about like, what is, how does it look different than maybe other psychotherapies when you're in the room with your client? What is happening or what's are there any illustrations that might help about like what, what's being done differently in the room in the session? Say somebody's coming in saying, I've got, I think I have depression. How, how, from a critical liberation approach, what are you doing similar or differently to, to other psychotherapy approaches?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (29:49):
I think primarily one thing about how I'm understanding critical liberation psychotherapy or any kind of liberatory psychotherapy are a couple of maybe disclaimers. First is it's not the case that I think liberation psychotherapy implies that liberation primarily happens in an individual therapy context. It is more so how can therapy as an already existing institution that is primarily a relationship. Not just to another person, but to an institution. How can that support liberatory outcomes? So that being said, I am sure that there are moments in many therapies that have already happened and are happening that have been liberatory for people. Just as relationships are sort of the foundation of social movements, different ways of relating and what I think. So it's not as though critical liberation psychotherapy is entirely its own different thing from therapies that already exist. In fact, it's really about channeling what may already be effective tools for harnessing liberation across existing theories within the field and marginalized by the field or existing practices.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (31:17):
So in a way, ultimately critical liberation psychotherapy creates a novel experience. Where another way of being and relating can be actualized in the clinical encounter. In a way that sort of disrupts the logic of the status quo, but it allows someone to not just theorize or imagine what they could do, but they live a different way of being or relating to another person, in this case the therapist or an institution. And it kind of unlocks different possibilities. And in order to do that, the process of psychotherapy itself has to resist the kind of objectification that can come out of positivist or objective paradigms. So by seeing the person in their experiences and context, they're not, you know, objectified as Fauquet would describe it by say just a diagnostic label, but they're multifaceted. They are of two or more minds about something.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (32:29):
But there's also this idea that I'm trying to bring forward that psychotherapy itself gets objectified within this system. That it is a relational vehicle that drives, you know, we see that research all the time. It's the relationship that drives outcomes. But so often we talk about psychotherapy as it could be, you know, a step-by-step manual for treatment for treating a problem. And that interventions are either one thing and they're either good or bad, like silence is one kind of thing and you should do more of it or less of it, or you shouldn't do self disclosures or interpretations can be an abuse of power. Right. That we're defining them in one way. Rather than something that occurs specific to the situation in the moment to the person and within, again, the context of the actual psychotherapy encounter. Sure. So one way is kind of reclaiming a sort of critical discernment and usage of these, you know, what you might call micro interventions or even just broader interventions that any of them could be used to word liberatory aims if they are facilitating other ways of relating-- to self experiences, to others, to ecology that aren't repressive or subjugating so that they open up what liberation psychology terms a kind of accompaniment a kind of an accompaniment with each other, accampamento. That you are fellow travelers which also kind of deviates from the idea of any kind of expertise or psychotherapy as a process where an expert provides a prescription that acts upon a disorder entity. Right. It just is different from that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:27):
So it's kind of more of like a mindset of the therapist and particularly not having rigidity about no self-disclosure, yes, self-disclosure, but more attuning to the current situation with the client and, and really seeing what is, is gonna be helpful in that circumstance. And then at the same time, the client is maybe having a different experience of the therapist and maybe they even expected from psychology or therapy or, or so on. That again, kind of creates a scenario where there's kind of not necessarily questioning the assumptions, but having a different experience, which then kind of expands one's perspective or consciousness.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (35:13):
It, it does make me think about critical consciousness as being one of the guideposts of critical liberation psychotherapy, but also a key part of Paulo Freire's idea of conscientization liberation psychology and liberatory pedagogy of a way, a kind of novel experience that also facilitates a person not just experiencing themselves differently, but understanding the interconnectedness of self to others and to more mutual ways of relating to others. So that my, you know, there's that indigenous victim that if you've come here to help me, then you're wasting your time. But if you've come here because you realize that your liberation is bound in mine, then let us help each other that it is kind of subverting the power dynamic in a way. Sure. Or at least making it more fluid. Having fluid expertise there and opening up a kind of critical consciousness where someone recognized the way, the ways that they're suffering their dreams, their pain is bound up in others and has implications for sort of mutual accountability, not just to how they see their symptoms.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (36:36):
Like let's say someone is understanding their symptoms the same way that this paradigm tends to understand nature. Right. That it's a natural kind of thing. And the way we tend to relate to the environment and to natural kinds of things is to try to have power over it, to control it and to feel sort of like it can be, you know, measured and commodified and even exploited that there's a risk that psychotherapy more broadly. The general critique of it is that we do that almost with symptoms. We make suffering something that's measurable. A natural kind of thing that we need to have control over and power over. And there's a suppressive logic to that. And there's this idea that once we measure them, the aim is to reduce them rather than exploring their meaning, either existentially or in relation to say a demand that you were referring to earlier or say, working just toward productivity. Maybe there's an element of so-called symptoms being a manifestation of someone's resisting that ideology. That it actually is not healthy for the person, but really about helping to maintain an economic market which aren't always mutually compatible outcomes.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:59):
Sure, sure. You know, back to kind of like a illustration of either, you know, something you've done with a client in session or like an example of something you might do with a client in session. Is there anything that you can kind of share? Like, like with the, like with this client I was doing X, Y, or Z, we were talking about the like that. Would you be able to give any example?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (38:22):
Yeah. I think your point about how the therapist in CLP would want to be thinking about and listening in this contextualized sort of critical consciousness way to try to identify first what these patterns are. In the person, and then thinking, how would the psychotherapy encounter, or the ways I'm relating to and with this person subvert that pattern or open up another possibility that seems to involve more sustainable or mutual ways of relating to each other, right. That isn't sort of exerting that authority. So I'm thinking about a time when I was on call. And I was speaking to someone who was not my patient in this system, but who was actively suicidal. And they were a trans person in their early twenties, and they'd called the center maybe several times when they had wanted to die. They had this intent, but you could say an indirect kind of plan to find and consume poisonous mushrooms that they had researched. And I couldn't see them in this interaction as they were on call. But they'd changed their name that was assigned to them at birth to "NPC". Which is a gaming acronym that stands for non-player character. So it's that term for an irrelevant person in the story centered around a protagonist. So there's sort of a plot device who isn't afforded their own will or even just a kind of depth of personhood.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (40:03):
And I considered this as part of a pattern of self-abnegation in their life, of a kind of hermeneutical injustice, not having frameworks or language in psychology or otherwise that makes someone experience legible or meaningful as a full kind of person in their own world. And a kind of relational probably and institutional rejection, certainly it felt on the edge of what our training around suicidality, which largely tends to be around assessment and prevention, but not really working with someone in, in that pain. Yeah. And so it was just an interesting marker of how they'd chosen this name that ultimately rendered them sort of illegible as a person.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:56):
Yeah. Irrelevant or like, yeah. Really. Yeah.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (41:00):
Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:01):
Anonymous, or like almost meaningless.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (41:05):
Right. And, and, and at the same time sort of, you know, the, a duality of that calling in and making their experience known. To me. And so I'm listening to them trying to make it legible. So the way I'm now using micro interventions, you know, reflections restatements or a kind of phenomenological exploration, I'm trying to articulate their experiences as they're telling them to me as they're meaning them. Sure. Only as I could understand it back to them so that at least it starts to become legible between us, which might seem like the sensible, clear thing to do, but it's surprising how often in those moments, especially if something like suicidality is, is triggered. There's this what they call in motivational interviewing the writing reflex, like if you are an authority, and psychology, of course, confers with its credentials and licensing and whatnot, a kind of authority to kind of get in and interrupt what's happening.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (42:13):
And prevent, so you're not doing maybe a lot of exploration of lived experience typically in a moment like this because you're diving into an assessment and documentation and maybe a fear response triggered by liability concerns. So it felt all the more important to be openly checking and revising my understanding. Using empathic inferences, clarifying reflections. Immediacy, self disclosures, you know, maybe not about the content of me, but about experiencing them and meta communications about, you know, wow, I'm so, I'm so struck by the meaning of NPC, this name you've chosen to not matter as a person, but then I'm almost seeing you as reclaiming it in a way I hadn't thought of. So even my usage of their chosen name-- sort of trying to turn its meaning on its head and communicating I am learning and being influenced by you. So who is a protagonist here? And you know, using this language of almost being gamified, I mean, of course that implies so much about systems that they live within. And to highlight how our whole relationship, you know, the therapy encounter was existing in the constraints of what this system and psychotherapy could do for them. So it felt important not to mystify power or the reality of how therapy was bounded or what informed consent could mean and what it really might mean in this institution in this moment where I'm practicing.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (43:58):
So I can say in this example, a couple of things that feel key about CLP. Is that critical consciousness is not really something you can prescribe.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (44:09):
Because if you were to do that, if you're trying to say, here's how you're being oppressed, here's how being transgender has led you to feel alienated in x, y, z way, that is not a process that subverts the idea of, as a psychologist, I'm the authority and I'm telling you what you need to do. It recreates it just with different language. So, you know, I'm not the expert of your experience, but I can use my tools and training and my power in therapy to mutually explore your experience, and I can use my authority of my experience relating to you to genuinely participate in this exploration together and to be faithful and to represent my own experience of you knowing the power that I have, not disavowing that or pretending like that can be fully flattened.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:58):
Yeah. Yeah. And so it sounds like rather than maybe taking that knowledge that you have and kind of directing it towards a client as like a psychoeducation or, or something to that, like something that they're lacking and that you are giving, instead, you are using that knowledge which is influencing your reflection or your reactions to what you're hearing and then using self-disclosure to, to share that. And so it's, it's kind of present, but it's not necessarily in a top-down way. It's more in kind of a relationship kind of seeing way.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (45:40):
A relationship-- what was the last part you said? Like
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:42):
Seeing like you're seeing the client, them, like seeing them and kind of bringing that in with your and empathic conjectures of, of the, the knowledge that you have.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (45:54):
I think so. And, and I think you probably hear as you're saying that, that there are probably so many theoretical orientations in schools of thought and psychology that are relational and that are aiming to have that, but something happens when they get maybe confined within particular systems you know, managed care systems and session limits and insurance structures where diagnosis is required. That I think actually makes this harder to do in the moment than you might, you know-- I'm sure you know this too--then seems it should be more accessible For psychotherapy encounters to use these tools in this way. But I think a lot gets in the way of that systemically.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:46:43):
Sure. Definitely. Yeah, and I like how you're using the concept of the writing reflex because yeah. And motivational interviewing, that idea that the person's like trying to get the person on the right path, which is what their assumption is of what the right path is or what is supposed to be done or so on, rather than staying with the client's experience and really trying to understand and see them...which then oftentimes helps us move together. I think about it as like the big head nod when the client feels like, yes, you're really, you're seeing me, you're getting this, and then we can kind of move in a direction. But I think that it sounds like-- and I always, you know, in multicultural work or cultural competency, you know, there's, I think you were alluding to earlier that sometimes it, it goes in this direction of like, this is what this type of group has as their experience or so on and almost kind of stereotypical, which some, some of that is helpful and understanding, but the biggest piece is also I think the therapists reflecting on their own power, their own privilege.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:50):
Their own assumptions that they're bringing in. It sounds like you're saying that, you know, maybe rather than just jumping in with the assessment or decreasing the liability or so on, like kind of being able to stay with your own experience of some of those impulses or, you know, kind of assumptions while also staying with the client and not necessarily just kind of going with those, you know, kind of impulses or assumptions and is that kind of---?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (48:21):
Yeah, and I think, and adding to that, you are being reflexive about self and the encounter with the patient and this other person, and you are accompanying them in this kind of mutual exploration of lived experience with the kind of trust that in getting closer to that other possibilities that have may, that maybe have been repressed can be reclaimed. And there is a reflexivity that I'm arguing for about the field of psychology itself as very operant in the room in the relationship, that there are certain assumptions that come with that, like the hyper individualist assumption, which can conceal the nature of this relationship. But I, I do take from a sort of relational psychoanalytic and, you know, notion of intersubjectivity that it's also about more than my situatedness and subjectivity or yours or the, or the patients, that there is a third thing that is being created there that can trouble and work with more dynamic understandings of, you know, what Jessica Benjamin calls doer or done to dynamics.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (49:38):
But that third thing I see, and the relationship itself as being more than just relational, that in every relationship exists, these social dimensions of ideology, of discourse. What is a mutual relationship? How does that look when there's a built-in power imbalance? What does it mean when it comes to self-expression or authenticity? And so I guess I can think about an brief example for this too. I've been thinking a lot more about tyranny and fascism these days. And tyranny, you could say as a social system or ideology, it relies upon a kind of subjectivity, a kind of person and way of being that is obedient. Maybe shame is a prominent experience and a kind of self surveillance. So experiences or emotions tend to be avoided or disavowed even repressed or split. So there might be resentment there about that self surveillance, but nevertheless, there is kind of a you know, self abnigation that's happening there.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:45):
Yeah.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (50:46):
And I think about how fascism and its inner machinations, like concentration camps and mid 20th century Europe, really depended upon obedient civil servants professionals who failed to uphold the ethics of do no harm, because harm became normalized by kind of tyranny or people in business who sought out to profit off of cheap labor and labor practices that were exploitative of people and natural resources. So if critical liberation psychotherapy or any kind of psychotherapy, it doesn't have to be called that to be liberatory, but if it can open up more equitable or sustainable ways of being with one's self experiences relating than a patient or a person is less amenable to a kind of tyrannical or fascistic subjectivity, that the, you know, the therapy relationship is being reconfigured as a mutual exploration into lived experience, not silencing of it, but understanding the current situation with critical consciousness, reclaiming repressed possibilities. And if it can reorient around mutual accountability and relationships, then tyranny is resisted. Yeah. So therapy can open up these questions like, to whom and what are you connected? What does your pain and anxiety mean for your being and collective wellbeing.. How is your suffering connected to others? The architecture that formed you and what is possible for us now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:10):
Mm-Hmm. That's great. Well, it sounds wonderful that you're, you're doing this work and it sounds like the-- and you're doing some research around this? Or is this theoretical writing research articles?
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (52:24):
Yeah. Some theoretical research articles. We've got a call for a special issue out in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology on Liberatory Praxis now. So we're working through kind of compiling and editing that special issue, and I co-run a research lab with David Goodman and Mookie Manalili here at Boston College and the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, which is just an awesome group of students and early career folks and transdisciplinary areas who are all coming together to kind of reimagine what psychology can look like if it supports liberation or a fuller picture, what it means to be human.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:05):
Wonderful.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (53:05):
I'm lucky to be able to do that work with them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:07):
Yeah. Sounds great. And is there any books that you would recommend or anything you know, folks can look up the research any additional resources that you would suggest for folks that are interested in learning more about liberation psychology or even, I don't know if there's trainings or even group discussion, because I imagine that that there's a process of liberation that the therapists also need to go through to be able to extend that into the work with their clients.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (53:40):
Yeah, certainly there's a body of literature on critical consciousness more broadly, but it can trace back to sort of the historical roots in Paolo Freire's and Ignacio Martin-Baró's work. So those are sort of the, the seminal texts in the area, but since it's been a burgeoning area of study and that's both really exciting and contains risks that, like other terms in the field, we've seen it kind of get diluted and. Maybe misappropriated and it loses its meaning because it is about social change ultimately. So there are people who I think rightly are very skeptical that just be an increase in liberation psychology research would mean that there's more Conscientiousization around this. But Danielle Gaztambide, writes about decolonizing psychoanalytic technique. Lillian Comas-Diaz ber has a co-edited book on liberation psychology more recently. So there are certainly a couple of newer texts that I think get to this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (54:44):
Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today, and I really appreciate it. It sounds like you're doing amazing work and and needed work especially as we're, you know in general, but as we're like you're talking tyranny in the times that we're, we're living in right now. Kind of being able to bring in that consciousness that that liberation piece as we're dealing with what we're dealing with and particularly the ways that this things are, are being affected with people of different experiences that are being even more marginalized or alienated within the current system that we're, we're dealing with. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, take care.
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D. (55:27):
Thank you. It was a real pleasure.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (55:29):
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