Silvana Espinoza Lau is a licensed family and marriage therapist in Corvallis whose practice primarily focuses on supporting BIPOC folks and individuals of other historically marginalized identities throughout Oregon who have endured the ongoing impacts of racial trauma and other systems of oppression. By drawing from a practice known as liberation psychology and adopting a structural perspective, Lau seeks to examine how her clients’ interactions with broader social structures and power dynamics in their schools, cities, work environments, etc., affect their overall well-being.
The Affirmative Couch Magazine, which offers tools for understanding and practicing LGBTQ+-affirmative psychotherapy, defines liberation psychology as seeking “to understand the whole person within their sociopolitical, cultural, and historic context[s]” and to emphasize how contexts that are “oppressing, dehumanizing, and alienating” are at the root of psychological distress and maldevelopment.
“All the content, the context and the history are very important to the idea of trying to uncover all of these collective traumas, and more specifically, collective traumas from oppressed groups,” said Espinoza. “To me, that makes a lot of sense for therapy, and that is more or less the approach or the foundation that I use when helping my clients.”
It Began With Unlearning
To get to this point, Espinoza said it required a lot of unlearning on her part to shed the standard Western, Eurocentric construction and teachings of therapy, as well as its deeply colonial roots.
“I believe that therapy should not be an instrument for colonization and it should not be oppressive, but there are so many ways in which we can still colonize people, colonize bodies, and colonize minds,” she said. “We live in a society where there is a set of norms, but most of us deviate from those norms. If I am only seeing those norms, how could I help a client genuinely grow and heal if I am not seeing and affirming all of their parts — all of the underrepresented parts, all of the marginalized parts?”
One of the examples Espinoza shared of how therapy — and the broader field of mental health counseling — can perpetuate or remain complicity in oppressions is the apology that was put out by the American Psychological Association (APA) in late October of 2021. The apology was specifically directed to people of color in the U.S. for the APA’s longstanding role in promoting and entrenching systemic racism and white supremacy in its practices, and announced new resolutions for rectifying these historic traumas.
However, several BIPOC psychologists and scholars have pointed out that this was a far cry from sufficiently reckoning with the harm the APA has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on communities of color — both in the U.S. and around the world — and largely omits much of this still-unfolding history.
“We cannot expect the association to truly right its wrongs and end damaging practices in psychology when it leaves much of the ongoing harm unexamined and cherry-picks its way through history,” wrote members of The Association of Black Psychologists, the first and oldest independent ethnic psychological association in the U.S., in an NBC News op-ed. “…the APA’s inability to fully grapple with its history and how it continues, in its silence, to maintain racial inequity in access, misdiagnosis and maltreatment in mental health care is more than troubling.”
Vicarious Trauma and the Importance of Community
Another issue that Espinoza specializes in is vicarious trauma, a condition of being indirectly traumatized by exposure to stories or news of the suffering of another person or group of people.
“If nothing has happened to me personally, but if I see in the news or social media that so many individuals who look like me or who have some of my identities are being oppressed, are being threatened, are being killed, of course that’s going to affect me,” she said.
Examples in Corvallis include the incident of transphobic and transmysoginistic violence against Charlotte Osieczanek, who was assaulted and severely injured by three men during her graveyard shift at the 7-11 on Kings Blvd, and the more recent physical assault of an OSU student which may have been motivated by prejudice against the student’s sexual orientation.
The OSU Pride Center and SOL: LGBTQ+ Multicultural Support Network, in collaboration with Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), has hosted community care circles and queer self-defense seminars to offer support, provide space for, and center the voices and experiences of those in the queer community who are disproportionately vulnerable to violence, including queer and trans people of color (QTBIPOC) — and especially Black and Indigenous people.
“To our beautiful LGBTQIA2S+ community, especially our transgender and nonbinary members, we love you. You are beautiful and powerful. You are perfect just as you are, and you are enough,” read a Facebook post from the Pride Center. “We know this news will bring up many emotions for you. Grief, anger, and many other feelings are normal and relevant in these times, but you do not have to sit with this in isolation.”
“That’s the other side of this process; the work of the community mobilizing to do something about [issues that are harming and threatening people’s lives],” said Espinoza.
For Espinoza, one of her goals is for her clients to eventually outgrow therapy by helping them look for pathways to connect with people who can help them navigate the systems that favor some while disenfranchising others.
“As a therapist, what would be the point of working with someone dealing with all of their challenges from an anti-oppressive lens if the work is just with me?” she said. “I will be here if clients need me, but I want to help them work on their own agency and on finding a community that can help them and hold them as it can see them. I want them to know that they’re worth it to be with a group where they want to be that is really uplifting and nurturing them and helping them grow.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
The last couple of years have been marked by multiple and intersecting crises, which have further exposed the sinister reality that basic wellness and self-care are not only unattainable to many, but insufficient for contending with disastrous conditions.
“I don’t think the typical therapy answer is sufficient, and it’s certainly not accessible to everyone,” said Espinoza. “Things like, reach out to a friend, don’t forget to journal, take a bubble bath, read a book; not everyone has access or the time to do these things.”
Climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar describes the present moment as “the age of crisis conglomeration”, where “everywhere you look there’s some calamity wrapped in a tragedy inside an injustice — like nesting dolls.” She notes, however, that for those who have been systematically marginalized, seeing any crisis as a singular issue is a luxury — and an illusion — that could never be afforded.
“Black people, for example, have never been able to focus on one problem at a time, in our entire 400 years in this country,” writes Hagler. “The same is true for Indigenous people ever since white people brought themselves to this land. We’ve always had to live with compounding and competing crises — which means we might know a thing or two about how to deal with this moment.”
Espinoza agrees with this insight.
“Historically, BIPOC and other marginalized communities have not only been more impacted by these crises, but they have been experiencing these crises and challenges for way longer than people with other privileges,” she said. “We have so much to learn from the experiences of people who have been doing this for centuries, who have been finding support within their communities and have had to be resilient through so many losses.”
As for the question of how to remain resilient, Espinoza believes there is no single easy, fixed solution. But there are, she says, ancestral, decolonial traditions of collective care — which have survived being completely eroded and replaced by the individualistic structures of therapy we see today — that have been practiced for centuries by marginalized groups for continued growth, healing, as well as social transformation.
“I can talk about all the COVID workbooks, all the anxiety exercises, all the loss and bereavement exercises that you can practice, but I don’t think they would do any justice or could tackle all the complex challenges we’re going through,” she said. “I want to honor the idea of going back to reconnecting with my own ancestors to figure that out.”
To learn more about Silvana and the issues she focuses on in her work, visit her website. For mental health clinicians seeking to decolonize their practice and adopt a liberatory, anti-oppressive approach, Espinoza will be leading an 8-week training program beginning in late April that can be enrolled in here. To learn more about this program or receive other information on how therapy can be practiced in decolonial and liberatory ways, subscribe to her newsletter.
By Emilie Ratcliff
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