272: What Do We Mean by Therapy, and Culturally Responsive Care? with The Yellow Chair Collective

Raise your hand if you’ve been to therapy before.  My first time, if I’m remembering correctly, is a few months after my Dad died when I was in my mid-twenties, and my college roommate set me up with her aunt, who was a renowned psychoanalyst.  She also happened to be Asian. Now that it’s been decades and I’ve had so many more experiences with so many more therapists, all of whom have been white, I realize how rare and fortunate it was for me to have had that experience of a therapist who culturally understood me, which then played a formative role in my own understanding of my relationship with myself, my parents, self care and success and my place in the world. 

 

If you’ve never had the experience of having therapists who are the same race as you, you might really get this visceral sense of relief that we are talking about.  This unspoken understanding that can-not always, but often, exist in those spaces of similarity.  I think it’s played a huge part in the relationship we have had, as multi-ethnic daughters of one Japanese immigrant parent and one white American parent each - there were just some things we didn’t have to explain to each other.

 

Which is why when we learned about a whole mental health support system - one we’ve come to learn doesn’t have to just include therapists, but a whole system of community support - that is centered on Asian Americans, we wanted to seize the opportunity to talk about culturally responsive care, about what it means to work on ourselves to be better people, and more.

What to listen for:

• What it means to be a better person 

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