Hi there! It’s been an exciting start to my grad school journey at CSU East Bay. I am trying to balance being radically present each day with staying organized enough to show up on time and complete all these assignments, and still take care of my body and spirit with exercise, food, sleep, and slivers of joy. It is a challenge! Respect to all of you that do this with your commutes etc. regularly. Life just doesn’t stop life-ing, but I think it is worth it to write these letters every so often to practice liberating myself from waiting for a more peaceful time to share.
A bit about the daily experience: the Tuesday commute to campus is about an hour, half of it in stop and go traffic, and I roll right into Child & Youth Psychotherapy, which is a full class of ~40 students that combines MFT with School Psych and School Counseling cohorts, with lots of stimulating art and group activities. The featured image for this post is some of my amazing artwork from that class. I am probably the oldest person in all these cohorts! Someone in the MFT cohort asked everyone at our lunch break for their birthdays, and when I shared mine she was like “oh you’re my mom’s age.” I was like “amazing, I love that 😂.” My ongoing joke is that I am 24 during the day, and back to being 42 at night where I crawl into bed and try to restore myself.
After the C&Y class I briskly commute back home for a Multicultural Counseling zoom class, which fortunately was switched to zoom after the first week being in-person where the option was presented. “Yes please!” to being able to snuggle with our dog, Estrella, during little zoom breaks. I like this class a lot, because it gets to the heart of how to practice cultural humility: a lifelong, self-reflective practice of examining one’s own biases and cultural identity to foster respect and trust in diverse interactions. We live in the bay area, and it is wise in general to not assume things about a person before hearing from them directly, even people who look and behave similarly to oneself.
However, this doesn’t mean we start from a blank slate, because one of the assumptions we can safely make is that everyone is impacted by systemic oppression, and the historical context of how each person from different and often intersecting groups is likely impacted is important to be aware of too. A tangential example of cultural humility from the Child & Youth class: we are working on a group project that focuses on immigrants and undocumented youth and how their mental and physical health is impacted by the threat of deportation (themselves and/or of their parents/guardians). I have to keep reminding myself that this doesn’t necessarily mean Latinx youth! There are immigrants from all over the world, many from primarily English-speaking countries even (11%), and research isn’t just focused on the U.S. either.
All of this sharing is a form of self-disclosure, which is me talking about my experiences that may or may not have some relevance to yours, and is useful for building rapport and trust, and showing that I am a real human with thoughts and feelings just like you, not some therapy robot. But since you didn’t ask for it, it is important that I limit it. It is important that I limit it even if you do ask for it. This is emphasized throughout the classes, especially the Microcounseling 4-week intensive class that just finished. Yay for having Saturdays back, but I will miss this class because it’s so practical. It’s all the little things good listeners do, just more intentionally.
One last thing I will share today that I would like to believe is helpful is about what therapy is. For many good reasons, psychotherapy carries stigma due to its troubled history, limited access, as well as cultural and individual values around self-sufficiency, and in what areas it is considered acceptable to give or receive help. So my question for you is: how often in your life does someone really listen to you? Like, they give you their undivided attention, they put away their phone, they don’t try to problem solve or make it about themselves within the first few minutes? Would you like that kind of experience?
Mauricio
P.S. I really appreciate questions and curiosities you may have that could inspire my writing, so if you have topics you’d like to hear more about, please reply or let me know at an upcoming session 🙏.