Decolonization with Sacred Stories: Narrative, Postcolonial, Existential Traditions
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
— Audre Lorde
“Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meaning in personal time and space. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection.”
— R.D. Laing
Narrative Therapy and Sacred Storytelling for Intersectional identities
Narrative therapy is a respectful therapeutic approach that centers your lived experiences, identities, values, and stories.
I synthesize Narrative therapy with culturally affirming, social justice, & decolonizing scholarships and expressive arts practices.
I utilize sacred cultural storytelling to support BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA, & Immigrant folks in giving voice to (or writing, or singing) narratives and stories of cultural & ancestral resilience, dignity, joy, worth, respect, laughter, solidarity, struggle, & empowerment.
Humans are storytelling creatures. We all have stories of who we are and where we come from. Stories synthesize multiple experiences into a single meaningful gestalt, and can help us feel more whole and connected to something greater than ourselves.
Decolonizing Storytelling
Storytelling is indigenous to many cultures. But most stories of Black, Indigenous, POC, & Immigrant folks are told by people in positions of power operating from a colonialist white supremacist paradigm, and thus implicitly the stories of black and brown folks become infiltrated by negative messages about who we are.
Many folks come to therapy with internalized colonialist stories of who they are, and thus feel bad for not measuring up the standards of success of the dominant culture, while becoming increasingly disconnected from their own ancestral stories of cultural worth, respect, healing, & wisdom. I offer therapy to support you in reclaiming the story of yourself, in asserting your dignity, your right to exist and be seen and heard, in the reclamation, rediscovery, reinterpretation, and retelling of your stories.
In Narrative therapy we say “the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem”. To put it another way, I am here to support you on your journey, not to fix you, because you were never a problem that needed to be fixed to begin with. The story that we are broken and need to be fixed is a story that harms many. It is a story that oppressive systems instill in people facing oppression and a story that we can tell of ourselves, our families, our culture, race, identities, communities, and ancestors. It is a story Narrative approaches explicitly aim to help you dismantle.
We experience the problems of our life through our own human subjectivity, through the politics and perspectives of our lived-experience, and these politics can convince us to identify with our problems.
But YOU are not the problem. You are not broken. You are not defective. The problem is the problem. In this case, the problem is also that we are human beings in a broken, defective, oppressive, dehumanized, unjust social world.
The social world, with it’s structures and norms that justify and rationalize systemic oppression and gaslight the oppressed, can convince us falsely that it is us and our peoples, past and present, that are broken, that it is we that are the problem.
Stories of black and brown immigrants as barbarians, dangerous criminals, and alien hordes invading the white spaces of the united states are everywhere.
So what can we do? Therapy can be a space where you reconnect with, reshape, reform, and speak your story within our own cultural frame of reference, in ways that honor you and your ancestors. Sacred Storytelling is the art of embodying and telling these stories.
To put it another way, the way we experience our problem is part of the greater gestalt of the story we tell ourselves (and are told by others) about who we are. All knowledge that is historical, cultural, personal, or relational is inherently interpretive, a story from a perspective.
The stories we think, write, and tell of who we are, personally and ancestrally, consolidate the disparate strands of our lived experience into a meaningful whole. Ultimately, the story of who we are determines what we see and what we do not see.
Cultural Stories of Resilience, Dignity, Recovery
Human life is full of narratives and stories of who we are personally and collectively.
Some stories give us personal, racial, cultural, ancestral dignity, subjectivity, value, and worth. Other stories rob us of our worth and dignity.
Some stories, often formed young, and from places of deep wounding by trauma, adversity, or social injustice, are rigid, unable to shift, locked in a limited perspective that is unable to take in new information. These stories are often taken for granted, assumed to be so self-evidently true that we are not aware they are stories.
In therapy we work to create new stories. Stories of who we are that are more alive, flexible, dynamic, creative, adaptable. Stories that can allow us to view ourselves and any issue we are struggling with from multiple perspectives.
By telling the stories of those who came before, we can reclaim and situate our present into our cultural, racial, ancestral, and intergenerational lineage that helps us reconnect with dignity, respect, solidarity, and pride. The story of you becomes a chapter in the story of your peoples struggle. Transgenerational and communal stories of BIPOC and Immigrant resiliency, struggle, self-determination, visibility, worth can reconnect us to lived-experience of cultural respect, dignity, continuity, and worth. Stories connect the present with the past, and draws the present towards the future.
Our personal and collective stories of our communities and ancestral lineages, become the backdrop out of which we project into the future. Being human means reaching towards a future. Our dreams, goals, yearnings, visions call us to manifest our potential, to become more fully who we are through actualizing our possibilities.
By telling your story, you bring your past into your present and your present into your future.
By calling forth the stories to come, you fight, struggle, inch towards the dreams you envision, encircling the stories of the past and present with the dreams and stories of the future.
Whose stories need we tell so that we can reconnect with representations of our cultural worth? Who do we need to speak into existence that their names shall not erase for history? Which stories can help us connect with our power, connect with our rebellious insistence on small acts of daily cultural, racial, social dignity, visibility.
Stories are told not just personally, but also culturally, collectively, socially, and systemically. What are the politics of storytelling? Which ancestral and intergenerational stories are told in our society? Whose lives are remembered and whose forgotten? Which names do we speak? Which names do we leave out?
From whose perspective do we tell these stories.
The story of my origins as “middle-eastern”, a term from a european colonialist frame of reference, is a different perspective than a story of my origins as Iranian-America, or West Asian, terms that allow for perspectives other than that of european colonialism.
Too often the story of who we are is told from a colonial white supremacist narrative that reinforces a view of ourselves as passive victims, as oppressed peoples lacking any inherent subjectivity but only understood in relationship to the oppressors.
In therapy we can collaborate to retell and update your story, your ancestral story, your community story, the story of you and all your myriad parts, selves, longings, meanings, roles, and identities.
Existential Scholarship and the Art of Living
I have been strongly influenced by existential philosophy, cinema, psychology, literature, poetry and theology for over 22 years.
Existentialism thinkers challenge the underlying philosophical assumptions of dualism, scientific determinism, objectivism, rationalism, and consumerism that underly western civilization.
Existential scholarship instead situates human life in terms of direct, immediate, subjective, embodied lived-experience, lived-meaning, and lived-truth within institutional, cultural, historical, social, and systemic social norms, structures, values, and forms.
Existential scholarship attempts transcendence of the false dualisms (mind-body, self-other, self-world, freedom-determinism, nature-nurture) of western civilization.
Existential Scholarship is perspectival. Rather than construing the self as being an objective value-neutral subject “inside” you, existential scholarship situates being-human as fundamentally contextualized in systems with interpretative cultural schemas. Being human is a being-in-the-world, a social world, with others, embedded in systems. All attempts to articulate human experience, live in the world, envision, perceive, sense, relate, speak, or make sense of things is inherently only an interpretation from a personal and social perspective.
Thus, In terms of the politics of our lived-experience, there is no objective, neutral, value-less, perspective-less, unbiased, view from nowhere that can transcend all social and systemic situatedness. A perspective can illuminate, make visible, give voice to, heal, recover, reshape, reform, but any perspective reveals something only in relationship to what it hides or does not reveal. Some perspectives are helpful and others are harmful, some shed light and heal, some obfuscate, mystify, gaslight, and abuse, but they are all views from somewhere.
All this has enormous implications for therapy, and the politics of how we engage in our healing.
“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“Every persons foremost task is the actualization of their unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities”
— Martin Buber
Existential Therapies
Existential scholarship informs Existential therapies
Existential therapies center your lived-experiences, values, possibilities, social contexts, challenges, and opportunities to manifest your potential.
Existential therapies are interactive, serious, playful, and relational, a dialogue of perspectives out of which something new can emerge for you that is greater than the sum of both of us. As your therapist I offer an active, engaged style that supports you in exploring your life history and path, envisioning new possibilities for living a meaningful life, and taking action to manifest your potential and to more fully embody your vision of you.
Existential therapies are present moment focused. Wherever you are, there we may begin. In sitting with your present, we unfold past, present, and future.
Existential therapies emphasizes situated freedom and situated choice. Rather than describing human life as purely a passive consequence of causal processes or the result of completely free internal choices, existential therapy situates human life as a freedom to choose that is embedded in and constrained contextualized structures, power dynamics, norms, and values of our social contexts.
As your therapist I support you in look at opportunities for choice within your social-historical context, while recognizing the limitations inherent in being situated in social contexts, especially if we also face oppression in those contexts.
Existential therapies emphasizes lived-meaning. Rather than searching for meaning, as if meaning were something you can “find”, existential therapies view meaning as being created through the ways in which you take up the meaningful opportunities and challenges life presents you within your social-historical context.
As your therapist I invite you to explore your ancestral story, your social context, your dreams, vision, and callings for the future, with the aim of creatively envisioning possibilities for what social opportunities may be afforded you that you can take up towards the project of creating and constructing your life.
Finally, Existential therapies hold anxiety, suffering, hardship, challenges, and opportunities as inherent in life. Our mortality and finitude define every moment of our existence, and gives shape to our central task of fulfilling our potentials. Loved ones could be hurt, social oppression exists, environmental injustice ravages our planet, moral and philosophical certainty is elusive, and much is beyond our control. There is much pressure in our society to be compulsively happy, or at least to pretend to others that we are. But life is challenging. This is the nature of life.
Even in our toughest moments however our most fundamental human freedom remains, our ability to give meaning to our suffering by responding to it in ways that are aligned with our values. Anxiety, fear, suffering, loss, these are all inherent parts of the journey, and they are vitally important in that they call us to ourselves, call us to give meaning to our lives through our actions, attitudes, values, and choices. But there are no guarantees. The best we can do is to do the best we genuinely can, from where we actually are, in light of the challenges we face and the opportunities available to us.
How Do I Start Therapy?
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“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly”
— Victor Frankle
“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a persons life. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience”
— Martin Buber