Full transcript:

Emily Race: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Founding Mothers Podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. 

Today we are speaking with Dr. Jennifer Mullan. Affectionately nicknamed "The Rage Doctor" by peers and clients, Dr. Jennifer Mullan is trained as a clinical psychologist and is a published author.

Dr. Mullan seeks to unpack the oppressive legacy of modern mental health practices and reconnect practitioners and clients to the roots of our wounding and healing within a sociopolitical lens, most particularly for Queer Indigenous Black Brown People of Color (QIBPOC). 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: So how do we provide more free conscious access that isn't going to place little Brown and Black kids in prison [00:01:00] industrial systems, meaning, giving them these diagnoses and a conduct disorder. Okay? Then eventually you're gonna have antisocial disorder. Then eventually you're gonna be this, and this, and this, like it keeps the school to prison pipeline. 

Emily Race: Dr. Mullan believes it's essential for mental health professionals to question the relatability of the mental health industrial complex, ultimately to reassess their education and whom they are serving.

Dr. Mullan earned a Doctorate of Psychology (Psy.D) in Clinical Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies; a Master’s degree (M.A.) in Counseling & Community Agencies from New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology & Elementary Education from New Jersey City University.

She currently serves communities as an Ancestral wound worker, Consultant for schools and behavioral and mental health organizations, and as the CEO and founder of Decolonizing Therapy, LLC. 

Welcome Dr. Mullan. Thank you so much for being with us today. I'm really, really excited to dive into a [00:02:00] lot of different aspects of Decolonizing Therapy and the work you do and your vision for the world. Thank you for being here. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Thank you for having me, Emily. I'm so grateful and excited to get going. 

Emily Race: Cool, cool. I'd love to typically start with a little bit of who you are in this moment. I know that's a big question, but who are you today?

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: I love that question. I'm a little bit of an astrology geek, but it's not my forte, I just wanna say that, it's not what I do, but I'm into this Scorpio season, I really thrive in the fall, especially living on the east coast. I really thrive when it feels like the collective is looking at the shadow or is being forced to look at the shadows. I'm hearing of these eclipses and dark moons and for whatever reason it just makes me giddy and childlike. 

All day I've been doing a lot of self-care, and so today I have been a spiritualist. I was able to do a journey, some meditation. I fed myself, "running" the business through the phone, but trying to stay away from it.

And today I am a lover of all things that are dying and that need to die and that need to go and that need space while releasing and dying, 'cause as we know, there's a lot of grief in that. 

Emily Race: Yeah, for sure. Ooh, I'm excited to see how that comes to life in this podcast today.

'Cause right, 'cause this conversation is going to be a lot about imagining new worlds, but we can't really talk about that without also talking about what has to die in order for new things to be born. So we'll take that theme and run with it. 

Why don't we start to talk about, through the lens of Decolonizing Therapy, what does the "work" that you do look like in the world? 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: I feel like my answers are consistently switching because the work shifts. Sometimes I think we're the vagus nerve of mental health. Sometimes I think it's spinal cord, other days I'm like, oh no, where the container. That which is Decolonizing Therapy keeps going through deaths and rebirths too, right? 

Very quickly, very, very quickly. but at its core, I would say we call it DT for short. DT is a movement and it is a loving and yet firm request for practitioners, but it started as therapists, as that's how I was trained, but asking practitioners to take a look at how colonization or experiences of historical and ancestral traumas have or may have and continue to impact not only an individual and their family and their descendants, but also how it impacts, impairs, affects, collective, larger global society.

What happens when we continue to work through a frame — a very well-intentioned one, I wanna hope, a well-intentioned mental health frame — yet I lovingly say, as someone who is practicing for 20 something years, that felt jaded, it felt unfair, it was oppressive, particularly for people that have been historically excluded or racialized bodies. But I think for all peoples, it has been dehumanizing, and just not quite enough. Incomplete.

Allow me to also caveat, I'm not trying to stroke anyone's ego or anything, but therapy can be and is important. But I do think that there is a certain point in which many, many individuals want, desire, need, and request more.

Often that "more" is dependent on where their process has already been with said therapists, oftentimes "more" starts to push up against their own family traumas. And I frequently talk about some of the work that DT is and what it does is like this trauma hamburger that a lot of us are living with. People have heard me say this, and I really do need to beg someone to draw this in some cute way. Yeah. But it's like the middle, the patty, the turkey burger, the sweet potato burger, is what's happening in this world currently and what people's [00:06:00] energies, minds, body spirits are pushing up against and what they're dealing with and processing.

At the bottom, is people's personal familial trauma or things they went through throughout their own life that could have been traumatic, could have been jarring, dissociating, disconnecting. 

 The top being the ancestral piece. What have been some of the experiences that our ancestors have undergone or created, or I wanna say "permissed", I don't even know if that's a word, but allowed, or were a part of, or pulled back from, or watched happened. Could think of probably hundreds of scenarios in which current day traumas, situations, stressors, are being activated because of these two buns, right. It's squishing it together and it's currently activating more, and at the same time it informs who we are and what we do. 

I think that DT, I provide some level of reeducation, some level of [00:07:00] space holding, but I'm very clear that the container can only hold as much as people are willing to put in. 

There are times I'm like, wait, I'm kind of bringing the same energy, I'm rested. Why is this not working? Why are people not? And I'm like, oh wait, okay. Yeah. I'm being asked to drop in to all this harm and shame and stuff. 

Emily Race: Yeah.

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: And there hasn't been some individual stuff worked out. Or people are really not ready. They're just expecting me to come in and, here we go. Let me lay it all out and you're just gonna jump in and wanna do this. And so I'm learning. I think we all are. 

That there is no one quick fix. The other thing that DT does is provide workshops. We're not diversity equity education work. There's a place and a time for it.

I was very much involved in it for a really long time, and probably what helped organize me and politicize me a little bit was doing a lot of anti-racism work. And I think it was crucial to my identity.

Figuring out, okay, why am I feeling like this? Why am I angry? Why am I da da da da da da.[00:08:00] 

I've also been writing the last two years. The decolonizing therapy book will be out in 2023. We're still waiting on a release date. 

Emily Race: I can't wait for that.

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Yeah. Yeah. That's part of what we do. Oh, the other piece is, I hold space and I talk about really big emotions, like rage. Which myself and mentors have called "sacred rage", as well as grief and different forms of disenfranchised grief or unaddressed grief. That's both global, collective and individual. 

Emily Race: Mm. Oh my god. I feel that here, I'm pointing to my chest for those who cannot see. I wanna actually underline what I'm hearing from you is in this DT work, in the decolonization work, it's a pretty big task I know for my own experience through decolonizing frameworks and looking at it in my own life, it is not a "one and done" thing, like you said. 

Acknowledging what the road looks like ahead. I am curious what has been the road to get here? If you had to summarize briefly how you even got to this place of having this very firm request that [00:09:00] therapy shifts. How did you get to that place? 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: I almost died physically, emotionally, spiritually, literally. I always unconsciously was drawn to the most intense levels of practicums, internships, work, and so my doctoral program I was working with adult sexual offenders that had high rates of recidivism and were seen as pretty violent.

And I was in these groups, predominantly the only one woman-identified, everyone else male-identified, and often toyed with like a cat and a mouse. I was often placed in very intense situations, and I thought, "This is what I gotta do. This is what I have to deal with, I gotta sit with it."

But when these realizations melted and people became people, and you start seeing that there are some threads and themes and commonalities of neglect and abuse and manipulation, like mind manipulation, that's this thread in certain populations, especially people that harm other people, It's [00:10:00] usually about power and control more than it is about the physicality. Although the physicality has an impact on the victims and the survivors. But there was this realization that it's not just about childhood. 

And then I started working with children and youth that were in partial care hospitalization that had deep, deep, deep, deep, deep traumas that I don't even want to ever repeat, and same thing. We'd get to a certain point, then they weren't listening. We'd take away their snacks or not give them lunch 'cause they didn't make their points. And I remember telling a supervisor, "This is violent. Aren't we recreating what's happening at home? Aren't we recreating the very things we're trying to save them from?"

And then we're calling Child Protective Services, or Division of Youth and Family Services depending on where you live, on these parents and all these families because the child haven't had enough to eat. But did we find out why? What else can we offer?

And they would say " That's not our realm. We'll let the social workers handle that." And then I would talk to the social worker and the social workers like, "listen, they've dealt with [00:11:00] da, da da da. They have gotten all that they could receive. There's something". So there was always another block towards allowing access to someone or a family. There's always a block to humanizing.  And I felt that poor people frequently received the crap services. The therapist that would leave moment after moment. They were always receiving the shit end of the stick, to be real. 

That put me in others in hyper savior mode, unconsciously. 

It placed me working on units and in places where I was dealing with harm all the time. Never exploring the impact it had on me. Never in a program where we like, “How are you really doing? Here's how you cope with this. Here's how you energetically, if you're super sensitive and highly sensitive, this is how you protect yourself from this level of onslaught of trauma and attack.” 

Worked at a university was doing literally 5, 6, 7 jobs in one. Co-created and facilitated an LGBTQIA support group 'cause there [00:12:00] was none on campus. That filled up so fast. Doing grants, running a peer education group. And that really became the impetuous for what I see now as Decolonizing Therapy where I was doing psychodrama. 

These were individuals that had maybe some, never been to the ocean. Some had never been to places to eat outside of, no shade, but TGIFridays and buffets and here we are trying to give different experiences. We're going to Broadway shows, we're trying to get money for things. We're doing meditation on the beach, doing rage retreats, doing family ancestral trauma retreats where I'm printing pictures of their caregivers and 

Emily Race: Wow.

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Give them mirrors and people are vomiting and it's so contained, so careful.

Emily Race: Right. Of course. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: So supported. I don't mean to just rush over it like that, but the realization was with the right container, with the right love and nurturance, we can all evolve, heal, love ourselves more, be in better relationships, do work that is in alignment with our higher self, even if that doesn't mean going to get a master's, a doctorate, whatever, dot, dot, dot, [00:13:00] dot. Even if it means being a full-time artist. 

And it was really my students at the end of a retreat, we always have meals together, 'cause that's something that not all of us had growing up. 

Even if they hated it initially, they usually got down with it after a while. We would always have a lunch and/ or a breakfast or dinner question.

And sometimes that would take two, three hours, depends how deep it got. Sometimes it was light, like "what Marvel character are you most identifying with today and why?" Sometimes it was deep. One day they all lovingly called me in, my college students, my peer educators, and they were like, "it's time for you to be out in the world and it's time for this work to be in the world."

And one of my peer educators placed me on Instagram and I was like, what?

So that's a bit of how this work came about. And I was burned out for six months plus, had to take off of work, get doctor's notes and sleep all day and still wake up super exhausted, couldn't think, foggy brain, emotional, affecting all my relationships around me. My job consumed me,[00:14:00] it never felt like enough. And then the realization through organizing, through learning from other people's students, activist groups, through my own spiritual work, through shamanism, through African spirituality, through Buddhism, through going back to some of my roots and understanding my indigenous ancestries, African ones and Irish ones, and dot, dot, dot.

Really starting to see, wait, I'm finding more relief, and so are the people that I'm serving when it's in the alignment. When we are most connected to the schedules, the energies, the weather, the foods and the healing practices of our ancestry and our original people. 

Emily Race: Mm. Wow. Thank you to these students, your community that you were supporting so much and then they turned the mirror around a bit on you. I'm so grateful because for those who don't know, you have a Instagram following that's quite large at this point. Aside from the number game, it's more about the influence that you can have on shifting the narrative around what [00:15:00] therapy and wellness and support can be.

If I'm hearing you correctly, are you basically saying that in therapy and like the traditional models, which I'm assuming have deep ties in white supremacy and colonization, things like that, there has not been historically space to look at ancestral trauma and ancestral lineage?

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: That's a great question and thank you for honing in on that. I love that question. Traditionally, no. In my master's program, at a pretty well known East coast massive institution, nope. 

Emily Race: Wow. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Nothing came up. I was in a Counseling and Community Agency's Master, so you would think, right? No, as well as in my doctoral program and clinical psychology in an extremely Buddhist, Buddhist appropriated, program. We were talking about the transpersonal. And I think that that's what I was craving and I didn't know it.

I was like, no, there's something here. 'Cause this is my process and I'm wondering if they're gonna show us this. We talked about birth trauma and there were some classes where there was Buddhism and psychotherapy and there were some classes [00:16:00] where, I got a professor that brought up ayahuasca for one class.

And then when I asked about the indigenous people, it was literally awkward radio silence. It was just a question. And I always got in trouble for questions. I'm just curious. I just need to know. But he's such a kind man and he just looked at me like was trying to set him up somewhere and I'm like, I'm really not. I just really wanna know because this is around where some of my people are from, and I didn't say all that, but he's like, oh, it's coming up. And it was like one slide with a little baby bit about the tribe, but not much about it's original uses and who was allowed to use it and why, and what were the after effects.

You see what I'm saying here? 

Emily Race: Totally. Yeah. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: So there was some sprinkles in my very non-traditional doctoral program, but we were in couples counseling classes, we were like, "why are we not talking about queer families? Why are we not talking about blended families?" 

Why are we not talking about polyamorous relationships or co-parenting? We weren't learning any of that and it was really in my own inquiries, through my [00:17:00] own work and poking some professors that I sort of pseudo trusted. My dissertation chair, Dr. Tanya Wilkinson, who is amazing, an amazing artist and an amazing human and writer, gave me "Native American Postcolonial Psychology" by Eduardo and Bonnie Duran.

They were native identified, indigenous identified and talking about the soul wound. And I started crying. I just opened it up and I saw the term "soul wound" and addiction and cycles. And I started crying 'cause I'm like, this, wait, this is what I'm talking, I think I even said something like "soul or spirit wounding".

And she was like, “It's on my bookshelf. To be honest, I've never read it, she was honest, you know, like "I skimmed it". 

And then Dr. Joy DeGruy, years later came out with post-traumatic slave syndrome. Got emotional then. Was honored, able, to take a small one day workshop course with Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, who's Lakota identified, and she broke down unresolved grief and disenfranchised grief in a people and native people, and talking about also the [00:18:00] soul wound and historical trauma. Crying. 

So you see the point here, why this is such an important question because the questions we receive when we're bringing this ancestral, naturally holistic work, whether we're bringing in reiki and the people that are allowed and do reiki, or accupressure, acupuncture, whether we're doing tea ceremony, whatever the person may need, and the person in alignment culturally that is able to do it.

It's always like, “Well, where is the evidence? What peer review journals says this is okay?” And it's like, “Well, how can we have evidence and peer reviewed journals left and right when it's not always allowed? “

Not talked about. Poo-pooed by professors when we're asking to do this for our thesis. I think now it's becoming bigger and I'm seeing the social work school saying, "Nope, this doesn't work. This is carceral." 

I think I just followed "abolitionist social workers" or something like that. Students with their professors really finding other ways instead of sending people to hospitals, which could be deeply [00:19:00] traumatic for many of us, especially poor people. When you don't have high end private hospitals and wards and suites. 

And so every day I'm amazed that it's starting or it has been starting maybe for the last year or so, but definitely in early, mid -2000s when I was doing my work and dissertation, I was even told by very well-intentioned, I believe, I'm gonna try to be positive, a professor that was doing work globally, "politics and psychology don't mix, Jennifer. So you just gotta stop." And I walked away, my stomach hurt, and then I found other people that were like, "yeah, you're onto something." And I had a lot of white professors say, "there's certain things I can't touch, I try but in good ethical conscience when I go there, I feel the person clam up or I feel they look at me like, "oh yeah, yeah, yeah", but they're sort of letting me off the hook 'cause I didn't understand something."

Or they would say to me, "cultural competence is not enough. We gotta go deeper. Maybe you could help our field do that." 

It was just sort of like, [00:20:00] "yeah, we need this." "go, go" and " cultural competence" and "diversity" was sort of it.

Now, in these days, it's becoming an understanding that, wait, maybe people of racialized bodies are not the minority. We're really the global majority here. Maybe this has all been a form of fucking gaslighting,

Maybe it's not imposter syndrome because it's really our spidey senses and our fight or flight and our intuition and our internal, "wait, am I being discriminated against?" barometer, because we live it, that's like, “wait, no, this table wasn't made for me to sit at.” Is that imposter syndrome or is it, "I feel like I have to work triple hard, to be seen, to say the right things, to articulate, to use the right language, because they're gonna come for me anyway.

Or they're not gonna hire me anyway, or they're gonna try to refute all my ideas anyway. I can't tell you how many people that I work with, have worked with, hold space [00:21:00] for, that I'm friends with, that we all have this deep, a lot of us do, but this sense of "what I'm talking about must not make sense, okay, so my ancestors speak to me, but wouldn't that just be considered unwell and having auditory or verbal hallucinations, and so that's part of what we're trying to remove in Decolonizing Therapy, is that those diagnoses are not always accurate. They can be super harmful. Right? 

And how is it that whole groups of people are getting diagnoses, like whole groups of people that have survived certain wars, famines, forest migration, this is like real time. 

I was listening to a podcast of this clinic in San Jose. I don't wanna say Cambodian, I'm not sure, they were refugees. But they had just seen all this war in trauma and literally this small clinic, the director realized that the majority of these refugees, we're talking 90%, were being diagnosed, whoa, I'm getting chills, with schizophrenia.

Emily Race: Oh, shit. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Like, it's, it's glaring. It's glaring. 

Emily Race: Ugh. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: [00:22:00] Right. It's glaring. I'm getting chills because this has happened historically. So when I talk about a therapist or psychologist, psychiatrist, social workers, being part of the systemic problem, it isn't like, "oh, you're a bad therapist and you're a bad therapist".

It's "how have we been trained? How have we been socially conditioned? How has ethics told us this is what you do, this is how you do it, this is how you diagnose them". 

Emily Race: Right. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: But is it really taking into account the historical trauma of colonization, of forced migration, of neglect, of war, of genocide. Is it taking into account for white- bodied people, what their ancestors have done or not done, how it might be impacting them? Their wellbeing, personality, shame how that comes up. I just keep getting goosebumps because it's not out there enough. 

Emily Race: Not only is it not out there enough, this isn't something that only lives in the past. It is still very much alive in the present and so to have a framework, tool, space held, capacity, for all of that. It feels to me like [00:23:00] the missing piece that I've actually been searching for of like, how do we move forward? How do we almost complete the cycles of what have been harmful so that we can move forward?

But you can't do that without also holding that space to heal. You can't just bypass it, right? So, crucial work. And I'm curious actually, if we can skip ahead to what your vision would be for the world, what is your vision? 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Also, great question and thank you for it. My vision for the world is that at present time, the people that can, first, we're all in different places and spaces, right? So to expect this work in decolonizing therapy to be in alignment with someone perhaps, hypothetically speaking, that might be a bit younger or in their teenage years or coming into young adulthood, they're just being exposed to therapy, some of it will be helpful, but really they may need some really strong, maybe slightly more traditional, yet culturally competent, techniques. Grounding, how to look at one's self's thoughts, how to [00:24:00] regulate, how to look at their nervous systems. Even kids can be taught "what's fight, flight, freeze".

I was doing it in a classroom with second graders, we were teaching them things and we had colors, and these kids knew so much more about their bodies than I did. 

So I'm answering part of the question right there and saying, I don't wanna also forget those that are not having this academic brain, 'cause I have to call myself out sometimes. Sometimes I'm like, "you are using really big fucking words, Jen. Can everyone digest this?" And that's part of how academia trained me. Hence I call myself out and so does my community all the time. Right? I just wanna say that.

But I don't think we should forget the kids and the parents that are working two jobs and taking care of an elder at home and are dealing with disability. 

That first line should be what do people that are at and below poverty level, that don't have enough support, how can we start to continue to increase mutual aid? How do we take care of each other? How do we formulate better communities in communities that have purposely been torn apart, like many inner cities, right? Or reservations or so on and so forth. 

How do we provide more free conscious access that isn't going to place little brown and black kids in prison industrial systems? 

Meaning, giving them these diagnoses and a conduct disorder, then eventually you're gonna have antisocial disorder, then eventually you're gonna be this, it keeps school to prison pipeline.

I believe that front and center that community, which I grew up in, very much needs to be involved in what change looks like. There needs to be free access to therapy, including family therapy in every single school system, not just private schools. Because every single counselor and guidance counselor or school psychologist that I have talked to and/ or helps train, says "I administer tests. I deal with occasional crises." "If a student or a teacher has passed away, I might run a group." 

" There is no real [00:26:00] long-term support and there's no time for that. I'm not allotted time for that." Or there's one therapist, or two, for a school of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids. How do we shift that, or what kind of models do we need to start shifting where maybe educators are also better equipped and are learning how to hold this. And maybe there's already a social worker, a counselor, guidance counselor in every classroom. 

And I know, money, access, funding, right?

Emily Race: Right. But it's a shifting in priorities. Right. So what I'm hearing is, yeah, we have a different infrastructure, one that is centered in care.

You're using the example of therapy, but I'm actually curious to dive into this vision deeper. What would that type of therapy look like in this vision? 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Yeah. I wouldn't call it therapy at all. 

Emily Race: Okay, great. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: And I don't think it needs to be therapy. And again, this is my ideal world and where sometimes I'm like, we're getting there, we're getting there, and then we're not, where people are learning more about what feelings [00:27:00] are and that feelings like rage and grief are not necessarily bad or destructive. When we pay attention to them along the way. When we give them spaces before they need space or they take space. That's usually what I tell kids all the time and they get, it like that. We're the ones that don't get it. We don't talk. 

Emily Race: Right, right, right. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: A) is reeducation of what emotions are. ‘Cause I don't think people know the differences between feelings and emotion. I don't think people know the difference between bad emotion, good emotion. There aren't. 

B) there has to be reconnection, a re-rooting, a regrounding to everyone's own process with their own ancestries. Whatever that looks like to a person, including people that have been foster care systems, never met their family systems, have been adopted. There's lots of different creative ways I'm hearing that we can begin to understand, what's a little bit of my people's lineages, histories?

Where'd they come from? What did they do? What was that land like? What were [00:28:00] their daily practices? Did they go walk this many miles to get water? Did they tend to chickens in the morning? Did they do yoga? What did my people do? 

Because with that knowledge, it isn't just intellectual. It is vastly embodied and visceral. Every time I learn something else about my peoples, and they're across the world, every time I learn something, I would get emotional. I would go through a purging period. I would start thinking about, what does this mean for me and where I live or what I do or how I engage with people?

Of course, I love circular inquiry. The Kuna Indians, which is part of where my people are from, the women-identified people were the ones that lead things. They take care of the money, they take care of the structures. They go to work. It's not called two or twin spirit, but there are individuals that identify as both genders and they're sort of like the social workers, supporters, elders, shamans of the tribe and of the community.

Learning these things helped me to understand so much that I [00:29:00] couldn't verbalize. That no kind of procedure could get me to. 

And so I want that for everybody.  That experience that we can't put our fingers on and quantify.  It's our divine birthright.

The other piece of DT is collective work. That might need to look different in different places or spaces. So for the students at the university, peer education worked, 'cause it didn't help having somebody that is in a position of power to just give answers.

It helped to be able to witness other people that have been doing the work a year before you, looks like you, engages like you, talks like you, in some sense, maybe have some of the same trauma histories as you. And they're controlling their anger, they're taking a deep breath, they're raising their hand 'cause they can't hear someone across the room in group, which is not something they would've ever done. All these growth wins. 

I think there needs to be more spaces for containered group even with people we don't like or don't identify with. My students learn so much, they'd be like, "Jen, Jen, I'm [00:30:00] not feeling so and so da da da da." "Ok, have you sat with it? Have you sat with, what about them reminds you of yourself?"

"I knew you were gonna say that shit." I knew you were gonna say. That doesn't mean you have to love them, that doesn't mean, but can we respect each other? Is there something that they bring that you need to learn about yourself? If they're being harmful, that's a different story and then we protect the sanctity of the group.

But if it's just, "I don't like how they talk. They're not like us", that doesn't jive. I think that we learn a sense of tolerance, learn a sense of where diversity in the right ways and places can be a strength. Not in this Pollyanna whitewash," diversity is a strength", but more in a multi-generational, multicultural way of learning about each other.

Another piece of DT is really to continue to work with trying to stay away from sending anybody that is dealing with mental health illnesses, disease, not being well to hospitals or calling cops. That's part of the abolition piece, where we're deeply trying to dismantle and undo, along with other groups that are much more informed. We're just supporting that process and learning from that process and giving to that process, to make sure that we're not continuing to send people to a hospital. 

Sometimes it's ideal and it's what's needed so someone doesn't harm themselves or others, but other times there haven't been plans made prior with their support so that there could be places and spaces where individuals are like," okay, we're gonna call you" or " just in case crew". I used to do this with students all the time. "Who are your people? Can we invite them into a session? Can we talk about if you have another episode like this again next year, what that could look like, where you need to stay, what that looks like? How can we all together contract for your safety? How can we make sure that you don't do A, B, C, and D again? Because if this hospital was so traumatic for you, you're still paying off the bills, you're paying off the ambulance bills, you're in deep debt because of that, help me to do this while you're not in that place."

And believe it or not, that takes a lot of work and any . Therapist knows that, right? Sometimes there's a lot of resistance. "It's not gonna happen again, I promise. I'm not gonna go, I'm [00:32:00] not gonna stop this. I'm not gonna stop my meds. I'm not gonna stop doing this practice". But as we all know, stressors and trauma can throw us off our loop.

And then the other piece is the healing ancestral part. I do think mental health or really, I call it emotional health, is mandatory and primary, if someone is having what we call panic attacks every single day. They're not thinking about A, B, C, D, F, G. They're thinking about " how do I stop this? I can't function." 

My concern in this dismantling is forgetting the people that are in it every day. As unsexy as that sounds, having been on those front lines with these people, I know that they're the ones that are frequently forgotten when we're formulating new ways of doing things.

So that's why I'm saying first phase is definitely including those that frequently have very little access to the kind of support we wanna offer. The next pieces is really bringing in teachers and people and different forms of spirituality, [00:33:00] initiations, herbal remedies, medicine, dot, dot, dot, we could keep going. Movement practices that are truly generative and somatic and embodied in healing. Things that can help people. 

So I'll give you a really quick example. Many, many times it would be months, years before someone that I was working with shared in group and or in private one-on-one counseling that they identified as someone that practices voodoo or Santería or some sort of practice that the world generally demonizes. Usually African, Afro-Caribbean spiritualities are often seen as dark and black, when the reality is there's a darkness to all, that's part of shadow work, right? And I find that really harmful since that's part of many people's identities. 

It's just part like, "oh, I was just initiated when I was three." "I was initiated when I was 16. It saved my life. I was having mental health breaks all the time." "I [00:34:00] was in a therapeutic school. This religious spirituality getting initiated, it saved my life." I hear it all the time. "Oh yeah, my mother did Santo because, and she's in Santería because she had cancer. It saved her life. She's alive now 20 something." 

All the time. I hear it. Trying to separate a person from something that is so deeply rooted in their culture and in their identity and in their ancestry is harmful. I would sit sometimes in staff meetings with really great therapists and psychologists be like, " we don't do that." I would go through this whole, "I'm not saying we do that, or I'm not saying that I should take it upon myself to use my trainings and my path to do that with them. I'm saying what else is possible?"

Who do we need to invite in, with their permission? The person receiving the therapy has expertise. So how do we draw that expertise out and say, "Hey, how would you do this in your culture?" 

The reason I'm bringing this up is because, it's not just powerful, it's the root of what fucking healing is. We're not going back to the way it was thousands of years ago. [00:35:00] And we all have very different histories and peoples of healing. 

Asking an Irish person not to look at some of their history, not to look at which relatives, how they died coming across the sea due to the potato famine, their feelings related to colonization, that was already in there.

Even before we were talking about decolonizing therapy, I was sitting with people of Ireland that were very much well aware of how colonization impacted their family and how Christianity and Catholicism really harmed and stole the magic, other people's words, not mine, from their people. That their people had to hide their magic. 

When I think of colonization, and its impacts, it's there. This reremembering and this honoring of our cultural shadows and the construct and the beliefs and the physical aspects of colonization took from our people.

We're reclaiming it and we're trying to fit it into a way that feels natural and in a way that feels generative in present [00:36:00] day. Maybe we cannot all go back to what was nor do we maybe not want to, however, we are reremembering what did work. We are reremembering some of that wisdom, not just the trauma.

And that is part of that decolonizing therapy process, too. Divesting from a very white, cisgendered, heteronormative, male way of " Doing therapy" is the only way to help. No, that's how you treat, right? That's how you diagnose, that's how you tell somebody a diagnosis, which could be helpful.

Emily Race: Right. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: When I understood my ADHD symptoms, I was like, oh, okay. That was the first step. But then I later on understood, wait, I'm also super, super sensitive and intuitive. 

And there's my neuro divergence, mixing with creativity and mixing with ancestors communicating with me.

Emily Race: Yeah. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Yeah, it's gonna be hard to stay focused, when inside I'm receiving intuition, information, I'm assessing the environment, is it safe to be here? Why are they treating me this way? So there's all of this [00:37:00] going on. 

Of course ADHD is what fits for what I am experiencing, but, do I have it? 

Emily Race: Right. This is something that keeps me up at night sometimes is, within this therapy world, it seems like there are the world of diagnosing and it's a layered question around language that is used, that is harmful, and that we need to evolve from, what would you like to see in terms of language and labels and diagnoses and things like that. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: I identify them as expressions. I think that's a, a way to move it away from the medical model. 

Emily Race: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Thank goodness for modern medicine. We're not dying, hopefully, most of us, from abscesses in our mouths and foot fungus and the cold. I'm not trying to trash it all. I'm just saying that the medical model does that: diagnose, prescribe, pathologize so that we could treat. 

There is a place and a space for treatment, and if somebody wants that, that's fine. Where it can be super problematic is when we see the roots of the diagnostic statistical manual. Half the time we're looking at behaviors. We're looking at symptoms and we get that. But you're looking at symptoms, expressions, right? 

Emily Race: Expressions. Yeah. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: It's not the root. So if you're a symptom person, great. I'm not. And I don't think a lot of people these days are feeling that so much. We're sort of like, what's the root of this shit. 

What I frequently will remind people is that the root is not something that modern medicine can always put their finger on. And that doesn't get paid by insurance if you live in the States.

Emily Race: Right. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: If you feel me. 

Emily Race: Totally. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: So diagnosis is meant to work in line with managed care, another system, which is why we call it a mental health industrial complex, or medical industrial complex. Because it feeds a whole other system that doesn't usually benefit poor people, people of 

color.Diagnosis also increasingly follows children throughout their lives. Depends on what state you're in. We call 'em IEPs. Their reports, the [00:39:00] individual educational plan. 

But really it's reports that follow kids along the way, especially in certain areas, there is a pipeline, or a friend of mine calls it a nexus, where it's school to prison. Particularly for black children. Again, diagnosis may not seem as harmful for someone who is affluent. Not always, I still think it is. But really, really life-changingly horrible. 

For those that are not understanding what this label may mean.Some labels engender more compassion, we would hope, like a PTSD diagnosis. When I worked on a partial care unit, I would say 90% of the adolescents and children were Black, Caribbean, Latino, and almost all of them had diagnosis that were behavioral. 

Emily Race: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Oppositional Defiant, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Conduct Disorder. You get where I'm going with this. It's increasingly behavioral. And what that continues to do then is put labels. So teachers get [00:40:00] the kids. Universities see the kid and they're like, "Oh, okay. This person's a problem. "We then, then our personal bias. 

Emily Race: Totally. Yeah. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Right.

Emily Race: Self-fulfilling. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: "Oh he's Oppositional Defiant". "Oh, ODD." "Oh, Sharon. You have an IED." Right? All the time. We said it, we did it. I was part of it. When I didn't know enough, you thought, what you did on the unit. " You have so and so. ODD." right? And then we're right away placing it on them. Without getting curious, why is the kid acting out? Why is he shredding up your papers every time he walks into your class? He doesn't do that in four other classrooms. I'm not saying it's your fault. But what's happening in here? Or how's he feeling in here? Who do you remind him of? What's going on that he doesn't take a piss in the corner of anyone else's classroom, but yours. 

Emily Race: Right. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: True story. So yeah, that's one part of it. And then the other piece of it is that there are also roots of racism, of ableism, of eugenics, really embedded in diagnosis. There's a whole [00:41:00] chapter dedicated to this in the book about Samuel Cartwright. I don't like to give Cartwright a lot of energy and I don't even wanna call him a doctor, because I feel like doctors should help and heal and make people better. But essentially he did all these horrible experiments on enslaved Africans and did all these things, it's just, don't even wanna talk about it and think about it right now and all these things to tear families up, rather than looking at why enslaved Africans trigger warning, might be eating dirt because of nutritional deficiencies. He's saying, "oh, look, they're not human. They are animal, they are this", and this is in books. This is then supported. Diagnoses are created. 

I can go on for hours and bore everybody. Literally some of these diagnostic categories and some of the ways that enslaved Africans were treated, and why then some people that have come to be known as white, and speaking of the colonies, went on to treat enslaved Africans in certain ways, were based off of some facts and findings of doctors like Samuel Cartwright that did some very heinous [00:42:00] experiments that were extremely racist, and sexist. They were just not human. And so the roots of diagnoses themselves are quite harmful and painful for many peoples. And that's just one example of one culture and one racial identity. 

Another piece is that race in itself, as we know, is a Specious classification. Right. But It's completely made up. Not that it doesn't have impact on individuals and how we walk in the world, and oftentimes people of color need to work through racial identity before they can shift and move into other things. I mean, it's kind of always there, even when you're like, I'm not thinking about it.

Yeah. But then someone may engage in certain ways or treat you certain ways or leave you out of things, harm you, we call that racial trauma or race-based traumatic stress. But even that, even those kind of diagnoses, I have feelings about them. Do we need to diagnose and say that this is an odd grouping of symptoms or are these really normal, understandable symptoms, expressions of [00:43:00] behavior based on how an individual is being treated or based on their history or their people's history. Does that make sense? 

Emily Race: It totally makes sense. And I know we're coming up on time, but I just wanna ask before we start to close out, is just on that rage piece, right? 'Cause this is triggering for me that you're called "the rage doctor" and you've been reclaiming what rage is and normalizing that. How would you define for folks who may be connecting with that experience, what is the importance of rage? In the vision of the world, how would we hold that? 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Rage is my favorite thing to talk about these days, because I think lots of people experience it and feel it and or push it away and dismiss it because it is such a shadowy energy and a shadowy emotion in our world.

When we think of rage, we often think of tantruming. People harming each other. Often, whether or not we wanna admit it, the image is of darker bodies rebelling and throwing things in streets and breaking things and burning things. And so that tells us information, too.

My work is in helping us to kill this belief that rage is something that we need to sweep under the rug, 'cause anything that we're sweeping under the rug, eventually will be seen.

I hate cleaning under my couch, but when I do, I'm sure I'm gonna find cat puke and like shit that I don't wanna look right. 

Emily Race: Right. It's there. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: I gotta clean eventually or the smell is gonna come out. Right. You get what I'm saying here, right? 

Yeah. 

All of this to say, my teacher, Ruth King, she wrote a book "Healing Rage". And I had the pleasure as a doctoral student to barely afford to take her retreat in the Berkeley Hills years ago, like two thousands when I was living in California doing my doctorate. I learned so much about how rage is visceral. How rage is, I think she calls it in her book, the Love Child of Shame and Trauma.

And I lovingly add on, I believe it is the love child of ancestral trauma. And shame and grief. I believe that grief and rage are two sides [00:45:00] of the same coin. I think that some of us, and this is based on all of my experiences, my work, readings, working with people, my own rage.

 I firmly, firmly believe that some of us are more inclined to be more agitated, irritated, angry, ragy. 

And some of us are more inclined to feel our deep feelings and feel depressed maybe, or feel like I can't move or have a flat affect, right? 

And then there's some people in the middle, but generally rage is often demonized. Pathologized. My offering to the world around rage, is that A), we need to have a relationship with it. Anything that scares us. Anything that's like, "oh, no, no, no. I don't really feel rage." When people say that I giggle.

Because part of what my teacher also talks about, her amazing book, "Healing Rage", is that there's rage disguises. And those disguises aren't, per se, bad. Rage is not to be eradicated. Rather, the disguises are there to keep us alive throughout our childhood and adolescence and our [00:46:00] life. There's rage disguises, like distraction. Dominance and defiance, which we often think of when we think of rage.

Devotion is a disguise of rage. Depression, not in the clinical sense, but as I said, like more in the emotional sense. There's six of them and I know I didn't name all six, but they're all start with Ds. She does a beautiful self-assessment, which allows us to look at lifelong patterns, and then we can look at, oh, distraction, devotion.

Mine were really high in distraction and in defiance, but for some years it was also devotion. I was devoted to my job, to my students. Sure. Everything but myself. Give, give, give, give. This martyr energy that I inherited. I think that rage work goes alongside parts and inner child work. It is shadow work. It is at its core, and it's inviting us to look at the parts of ourselves and our ancestries that we have disavowed, disowned, disassociated from, in order for us to feel more whole, and to be less reactive. Rage work isn't [00:47:00] necessarily about cussing everybody out because I feel like it, like no .Right. But some people may need to lovingly be told a better boundary. Rage work is about stepping into an innate higher self or power.

That is ours by divine right. In order to preserve our integrity and our authenticity. 

Emily Race: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I really feel that. Right. Reclaiming some power that has been suppressed or taken away in some ways. 

To close us out, what inquiry or invitation do you have for folks who have listened today to take away from this conversation?

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: The inquiry right now would be around the pieces that you may have disavowed, as I said, or dislodged or pieces of yourself that almost that are deceiving you into thinking that you can't be all of who you are.

Can you begin to find the pieces that are currently present in your life that you want to no longer carry with you? 

Can you identify these and can you form a new relationship to it for about a week or two. Are you willing [00:48:00] to have a relationship with something you say you wanna let go of or not be anymore? Or habit you wanna break? 

Instead of just saying, "Oh, I let this go. I wanna release that. I don't wanna be this anymore. I'm no longer this, I'm getting up early every morning." Can we befriend or try to have compassion for, at minimum, this part of us that we're so ready to be done with and disavow and can we befriend this for a week or two? Can we be with it and the uncomfort and then decide how we may wanna proceed? If that makes sense. 

Emily Race: It makes sense. 

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Okay. I wanna make sure it makes sense. But great. 

Emily Race: It makes sense, and good luck to everyone who takes that on, myself included. I love it. 

Lastly, how do we stay in support of you or in connection with you moving forward?

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Thank you. You can find me @DecolonizingTherapy on Instagram, on Twitter @drjennyjennm. We have a brand new upgraded website at www.decolonizingtherapy.com. We have a [00:49:00] rage webinar already on like a little mini course, but a bigger course is coming out soon. I'm working on it as we speak, for those that might wanna dig deeper into sacred rage, It's called Befriending Your Rage. Coming soon. Please sign up for our newsletter. We're always highlighting people that are doing new and different things, and we're always highlighting any courses or any kind of workshops or free education or anything like that.

Emily Race: Amazing. Oh, Oh, I'm looking forward to all that's to come, and thank you so much for bringing us back to these questions in this way of thinking about the roots, our roots, the root of our, our expressions, all of that. It's, I mean, it's such important work and I'm really grateful for everything that you're doing and who you're being.

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Thank you. Likewise, Emily. Thank you for inviting me on. Thank you for asking these really beautiful, poignant, very well listening questions. Um, and thank you for your podcast. Thank you, listeners. 

Emily Race: Yay. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mothers podcast. This podcast is [00:50:00] produced and hosted by me, Emily Re, and edited by Eric Weisberg.

If you wanna support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life. We'd also love to hear from you if you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the. You can email emily@founding-mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.