Qualifications

A note about my qualifications: I am very aware that the majority of my teachers have been white. I am aware that many of them have not acknowledged or named the lineages their knowledge stems from. Instead, they continue the practice of extraction and benefiting from Indigenous Peoples. I have done my best to disrupt the classrooms that I learn in and wish to name the roots of some of the practices here:

Internal Family Systems is often credited as being developed by Dick Schwartz. Many of the practices in IFS are based on shamanism and the healing steps were created by Michi Rose to bring the spiritual back into psychotherapy.

Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy is often credited as being developed by Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer but elements of psychotherapeutic practices can be found in many ethnogenic or shamanic rituals. It is important to name María Sabina Magdalena García, a Mazatec sabia (wise woman), who granted R. Gordon Wasson access to the healing ritual known as the velada which included the use of psilocybin. As a result of R. Gordon Wasson, María Sabina and her whole town, went on to experience extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization by the Western World.

Group Therapy is often taught as being developed by Joseph H. Pratt, Trigant Burrow and Paul Schilder however, group therapy is rooted in the tradition of talking circles that Indigenous Peoples in North America use and have used for millennia.

Lastly, I am ashamed, but not surprised that all of my post-graduate educational institutions have failed to call for an end to multiple genocides (Congo, Burma, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Palestine & Syria). I am in the process of divesting from these institutions and working towards engaging with teachers who practice from an anti-oppressive, decolonized perspective.