Choosing a guide isn’t easy
You don’t know this new person or what it will be like to talk to them. When so much of our suffering is socially determined, it can be hard to trust someone who was educated and trained by this same society to hold our story with honor and respect. For this reason, and because my therapeutic approach places a strong emphasis on identifying and living by our values, I would like you to know what my values are as an antiracist therapist, so you can know what drives me. Hopefully this will help you decide whether we would be a good fit.
1. Love/agape
We are Love, the universe is love, God is Love. We are here to Love each other. We have been conditioned by our collective trauma to distrust the existence of Love. The solution to this is Compassion (recognizing the existence of suffering and desiring to alleviate it) and Service (taking action to alleviate suffering).
2. Humor
When one’s faith in Love is strong enough, the discomfort of suffering can be made lighter through Humor. A joke is like a higher power whose mysterious ways somehow make our suffering more bearable. It depends on our willingness to surrender to what we can’t control, which takes Humility. Humor is evidence of our divine Creativity.
3. Justice
Cornel West says that Justice is what Love looks like in public. The existence of Love does not prevent the existence of suffering, and some forms of suffering are the result of injustice. Injustice is when one person fails to take Responsibility for their life and instead exerts their will over another. Justice can only be served if one is faithful to Truth.
4. Healing
Life moves towards wholeness when it has what it needs. Unhealed trauma reacts to life, spreading more suffering around. If we have faith in Love, and wish to lead lives of Service, Truth, and Justice, we must devote ourselves to our individual and collective Healing and Growth.
5. Spirituality
We are all connected to something bigger than ourselves. We are all here for a purpose. In order to find it, we must evolve from a mindset that says that life is happening TO us, through a mindset that says that life is happening FOR us, and to a mindset that says that WE are happening for LIFE. The life of the planet and everything on it. We are here to Serve and Celebrate life.
6. Responsibility
We each have a body, mind, and spirit. We each have the planet and all of its gifts. We each are the beneficiaries of countless privileges that we did not earn. Some of those privileges are determined by a society built on generations of unhealed trauma. Each of us has a role in Healing ourselves and the world. This starts by looking inward every time we have the urge to point an accusatory finger outward. Social forces have great momentum, and it will take great Discipline to harness the power of our Responsibility.
7. Community
Though we may feel alone, we are not. We each have gifts to give, and we each have wounds that can be healed by others’ gifts. We must learn to Trust again, and to build networks of Interdependence.