S2E5: Safety Is Not a Feeling: Power, Privilege, and Listening Deeply with Jay M. Seiff-Haron, Psy.

Episode 5 | Season 2

Safety Is Not a Feeling: Power, Privilege, and Listening Deeply

Guest: Jay Seiff-Haron, Psy.D

In this expansive and honest conversation, Alefyah sits down with therapist, trainer, and anti-oppression educator Jay Seiff-Haron to explore what happens when we let our clients challenge our worldview—especially around safety, power, and privilege. Jay reflects on growing up Jewish and queer, navigating whiteness and passing, and later becoming part of a Jewish–Muslim family, holding both marginalization and access within the same body.

Together, Alefyah and Jay examine how Western therapy—shaped by colonial and individualistic assumptions—often treats safety as an internal feeling rather than a reality shaped by power, history, and structural violence. They explore how therapists can unintentionally dismiss real danger by framing it as anxiety, distortion, or resistance, and why deep listening requires a willingness to be changed by what clients are telling us about the world they live in.

This episode is a call to complexity: resisting binaries of oppressed vs. privileged, refusing to rank suffering, and practicing a form of listening rooted in humility, justice, and shared humanity.

Highlights & Takeaways

• Safety is not always a feeling—it is often shaped by material reality and real threat

• Holding privilege and marginalization as parts, not opposites

• The danger of turning oppression into a competition

• Jewish identity, whiteness, and intergenerational survival strategies

• Passing, visibility, and choosing when to lead with different parts of self

• Neurodivergence and justice sensitivity as moral attunement

• How colonial psychology trains therapists to overlook suffering

• Why EFT already contains the tools for liberation—if we let context back in

• Letting clients reshape our understanding of the world through deep listening

Mentioned

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

Liberation-oriented and anti-oppression clinical practice

Neurodivergence and justice sensitivity

White Supremacy Culture (Tema Okun)

Decolonizing Western psychology

Cross-cultural and interfaith relationships

Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF)

Connect with Jay Seiff-Haron

Training & Consultation: eft-lifeline.com

Liberation-oriented EFT trainings, facilitated dialogue, and consultation for therapists and allied professionals.

✨ Connect with Deconstructing Therapy (Alefyah Taqui)
Therapy / Consultation • All Podcast Episodes
Instagram: @taquitherapy • @deconstructingtherapy
Facebook • TikTok • YouTube

Special Thanks: George Alvarez & Rayana Consulting

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - When Do You Listen to Your Clients?
• (00:00:37) - Deconstructing Therapy
• (00:01:48) - In the Elevator With a Jew
• (00:06:39) - "No Jew Is Ever Privileged or Discovered"
• (00:11:45) - How Having ADHD and Autism Has Helped Me Understand the World
• (00:14:32) - How EFT Changed My Therapy Work
• (00:20:48) - White Privileged Therapists on Compassion
• (00:27:36) - Privileged People on Decolonizing Their Identity
• (00:31:26) - Deconstructing Therapy: Palestinian Children's Relief