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Good Evening Everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here on your occasion of celebration, your Sash Bash. And thank you to Dr. Yokoyama for her generous introduction. In my humble opinion, JFK is blessed to have such a phenomenal woman amongst its faculty.
Intitally, when invited to speak, I thought, surely JFK could find someone more impressive!
But, as I mulled it over, I thought, ‘who better to speak to you about the path ahead, than a relatively new psychologist like me?” I have only renewed my license three times thus far. I work closely with graduate students almost every day. So I remember, and am constantly learning about the psychology trainee experience.
Which is a unique worldview.
I mean, really-
What kind of masochistic people willingly take on such an ordeal?
• A challenge that lasts for years and includes
• Spending a year in an ethnographic placement in the most unfamiliar community you can find?
• Donating thousands of practica and internship hours?
• Incurring enormous financial obligations?
• Incurring the ire of your neglected loved ones?
• Reading thousands of pages of journals and texts?
• Completing a dissertation or doctoral project?
• thousands of hours of introspection and self assessment, which, let’s all admit, when done correctly, can be uncomfortable-even painful.
• And all for no guarantees of any kind for fame and riches!
Let me say this: I KNOW what kind of people would do such a thing.
People with the soul and the mettle to be leaders.
JFK is a favorite institution for non-traditional students. The kind of students I feel a kindred experience with, many of whom may have been told such messages as I was told:
“It’s not realistic for you”
“Who do you think you are?”
“Why do you have to expect so much? Can’t you just be a team player?”
Or my favorite:
“You work in what kind of places? Huh, you don’t look that tough”
As Dr Yokoyama mentioned, I want people to know I was a non-traditional student. I was admitted to graduate school branded as probationary status-because I had worked to support myself while juggling a double major, and had the lack of sleep and erratic grades to prove it.
But I believed in what I was doing.
I felt a fire when advocating for misunderstood, stereotyped, and underserved communities that had never before manifested in my education. I want people to know I haven’t been a straight A student probably since 4th grade - because I want to completely shatter the myth that only a certain “elite” can ever dream of wearing that cap, gown, and hood. As a clinical supervisor, it is now my privilege to play a role in guiding the next generation of psychologist advocate-leaders. I see the strengths and bright ideas you all are fomenting, and it is inspiring! I also have to bear painful witness to the homophobia, sexism, racism, ageism, classism and disability biases which both clients and students must combat regularly.
It was in 2008 that one of my trainees was told during an internship interview “you know we don’t really have many clients of color and we have no gay clients. I don’t think you’d fit n here.” It is in 2009 that my students still are given poor evaluations for speaking up about social justice and cultural issues in class. (not at JFk!)
Most institutions in psychology do not practice a commitment to multicultural values and community service as JFK does. Our field currently remains permeated with a vstigial vocabulary that betrays privilege, hierarchy, and bias in its very definitions. Identified patients, dysfunctions, irrational, abnormal, hysterical, enmeshed, not “psychologically minded”…I feel these are false relics from a time of fear and stigma. When we were too afraid to admit that at times we or the ones we love are patients, clients, consumers too.
What better way to spend one’s career than to care for the humanity of others? In my experience, working as a psychologist has allowed me grow deeper, become more patient, appreciative, and mindful. Working for the health and well being of others has sustained my own development and allowed me a job that is full of meaning, purpose, and growth.
I want a similar satisfaction to be yours. Fine tune that inner compass.
You have been trained in clinical and ethical issues. You have demonstrated the heart of a healer. As you now move away from your classrooms, supervisors, and faculty, you must be a reliable and steady guide for yourself and your peers. I met a dear friend and colleague, Dr. Susan Ono, at Asian Community Mental Health Services. We assisted one another in navigating early career challenges, confronting old power structures, and studying together for Board licensure. Dr. Ono was the one who introduced me to Dr. Yokoyama, and in turn each of us have introduced the others to like minded thinkers and healers and perhaps most importantly- doers.
I learned far more at Asian Community Mental Health Services from my clients and colleagues than I ever did in my formal education. I had co workers, mere para-professionals which some doctoral students or licensed staff looked down upon as “not doing therapy”. Even though some of these para professionals, mental health specialists, were the living breathing embodiment of resiliency. To work shoulder to shoulder with those who emerged from catastrophic trauma, and rebuilt lives and families and now served the community-this was what I needed to learn.
No more theory.
Real, authentic practice. It would have been much more comfortable to stay in my lofty “I’m a trained license track therapist” office. But I know my clinical efficacy, to say the least of my humanity, increased by stretching my boundaries to encompass different ways of knowing and healing.
Who could imagine that I, an Asian American Californian, liberal tree hugging granola bibliophile would find herself deployed to police stations in post-Katrina New Orleans? What on earth was someone like me gonna do within a para-military organization in the South?!
Up in a FEMA helicopter, all us SAHMSA volunteers went silent with ache and dread at the destruction which went on literally as far as they eye could see. The few civilians remaining in town guarded their homes with shotguns at the ready.
I had certainly never been trained for this.
But I knew how to create collaborations. I knew how to sit with trauma and remind people of the humanity extreme conditions can strip. I had a bit of street credibility hailing from Oakland…most importantly, I knew how to sit down and start a conversation over a bowl of Corn Pops, Bread Pudding, or 9th ward gumbo.
I knew how to help facilitate a poetry slam, a Motown review night, and do outreach at all hours. The Katrina Assistance Project was an acid test so to speak, of the meshing of formal education, with life experience. It was an opportunity to lend a hand to a community healing itself, and we all grew from the lessons of co-creation.
There simply is no current body of empirically validated practices for some of our most underserved communities.
You shall be the ones who help create it.
There is no place in our current healthcare behemoth to reimburse and fund community based interventions because they do not conform to that outdated medical, in office, isolated, individual model.
Once you get out there, if you can not find a space for yourself with a traditional employer-think big. Maybe it’s time for you to create that space for yourself. Perhaps you should follow your visions into fruition.
In graduate school, there was an African American couple, my dear friends Alexis and Shawn, who began to draw up plans for their own agency upon realization that there simply was not established agency doing what they felt was important and of interest.
A few years later, they founded their own: Fruge Psychological Associates. FPA is one of the only for profit training sites, and the first minority founded and owned site to have won a major contract with Alameda county in decades. Our founders and supervisors are all people of color who have spent the majority of our careers with underserved populations. We primarily serve youth of color through private contracts. And we operate a clinical training program because we see the value of training psychologist who are immersed in the community, who can learn to utilize their creativity and humanity in ways that exceed traditional classroom training.
What sort of agency or educational facility might you bring to fruition? I am eager to hear of it.
Keep your visions long and wide ranging. When I talk about community, I mean community-from your city block all the way to the international community. I have presented at conferences in other countries about the kind of multi-culturally informed, innovative work that we all do here, and the excitement in the room has been palpable. We have so much to learn from one another, and your voice is long overdue in this global conversation.
I had never dreamed psychology would bring me to New Orleans, to juvenile hall, hospice, the heart of Richmond and Oakland, La Familia Consejera, Buenos Aires, Havana and this Fall, Wuhan, China. Simply by remaining open to possibility and alert for new opportunities- incredible experiences and horizons opened up for me.
As they shall for you. Get on the list servs, nominate yourselves or one another for committees and boards, publish your papers and books, present at conferences and symposiums-our field needs to hear what you have to say! If your friends are too modest to nominate themselves, YOU can nominate them.
I’d like to wrap with a note of wisdom from one the more influential white males in my personal development.
Am I talking about Freud? No.
Not Jung, nor Beck, not even Carl Rogers or Michael White…
I am referring to, Mr. Fred Rogers.
Let us think of those who have liked you, accepted you, “just the way you are”. Ironically, that kind of acceptance leads us all to exceed our limitations.
Being SEEN and being validated in the now, allows the future to expand.
Why don’t we take a moment now to meditate together upon all the people who have supported us, cheered us, tolerated and prodded us, and simply loved us into being- who have guided you- culminating into this night’s milestone achievement.
In our hearts, or with our voices, let us say, Thank You.
Esteemed graduates, you have toiled for many years to attain this remarkable educational achievement. You have collectively given thousands of hours of yourselves to healing others, and being a bridge and a guide who pays it forward. Please don’t forget to practice your self care as you go forward.
I trust your lives have been transformed through this process, and indeed, you shall make important changes to our world. As is the motto of JFK University.
I am so honored to share in this evening with you, and so pleased to stand here and say:
CONGRATULATIONS you have earned it!
And:
WELCOME. What a happy moment to meet new colleagues who are fightin’ the good fight!
