Decolonizing Therapy with Founder and Movement Leader
DR. JENNIFER MULLAN
Danielle Bezalel:
Hello, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, how are you today?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I am doing wonderful. Hello, hello, Danielle. Thank you for having me.
Danielle Bezalel:
It is my honor. I have been following you from afar for quite a long time and I'm a very, very big fan of your work. So I'm honored and privileged to be able to have a conversation with you today on Sex Ed with DB. So thanks again for being here.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Thank you.
Danielle Bezalel:
Of course, yeah. I'd love for you to share a little bit of yourself. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us about your work and the many, many talents that you have.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
You're really kind, many many talents. My name, I'm Dr. Jennifer Mullen, y'all. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you community, the sex ed community for welcoming me on in. My pronouns are she, her and hers. I was born and raised on the East Coast in the tri-state area of the New York, New Jersey area of Lena Lenape land. I currently reside in New Jersey. I am also very bi-costal. My doctoral program was in the Bay Area of California. I am a proud New York, New Jerseyite. Some people say they
Danielle Bezalel:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
hear it in my accent and other people are like, no, we don't hear it. Depends on where you're from.
Danielle Bezalel:
Yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
What I can tell you about me is, let me see. I am a daughter and a cat mom. sister and a teacher and a healer and a partner and I am a lover of all things ocean and stars and nature under the night sky. I am a lover of like deep conversation. Yeah. I'm a lover of deep conversations of anything that involves a sense of depth and intimacy and vulnerability. What else can I tell you? I also have a deep connection to my deep inner rage child and my rage ancestral inheritance and along with that rage comes a great deal of compassion. vulnerability with myself and with others. I love holding space, you know, when it feels equitable and boundary filled and I have capacity for it. So a bit about decolonizing therapy. I was lovingly forced into Instagram. Let me just say that.
Danielle Bezalel:
Lovingly forced. Okay, set in the scene.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Right, so I long time ago was doing a lot of work with People's Institute of Survival and beyond and so this is their word, voluntold. So I was voluntold by my students. So I facilitated a peer education group for about 13, 14 years and that peer education group also saved my life back in my early 20s in college. And years later, I came back from California and I was offered this temporary position at the counseling center at a university. All of this to say, it became one of the greatest loves of my life and periods of my life, being able to facilitate among other things at the university, this magnificent peer education group, which was a mix of activism, psychodrama, somatic work, interactive presentation and programming around sex, drugs, relationships for college students, as well as these beautiful retreats I would do two times a year with our students that were deep, deep, deep. And so we did rage retreats, we did family generational trauma retreats, you know, they're meditating on the beach, screaming, crying, vomiting, you know.
Danielle Bezalel:
Every orifice, something's happening.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
yep. Yeah, I think that decolonizing therapy came out of my very holistic interactive work with those students and with other individuals who had very full lives despite trauma, despite the historical trauma that they went through, despite the intergenerational trauma that they received without consent, right? Despite living or growing up at or below poverty level or in the inner city. living with multiple intersecting identities, I noticed that my students and myself managed to find joy and repair within ourselves, as well as moments of tenderness and the beginnings of healthy relationships together. Because I think relationship, right, can be with friends, loved ones, colleagues, right?
Danielle Bezalel:
Yes.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Relationship is so massive with Earth, with trees. So decolonizing therapy is about, I think, lovingly as possible, but earnestly and honestly looking at what I believe is our original attachment wound, which
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
is the colonial attachment wound, right? Where, how, why were we ripped away from our customs, our lands, many of us, all of us, right? What happens when and if we're allowed? to be replaced on those lands or allowed lands. What is our relationship with the land that we're currently on? And it's a loving request and demand for the mental health field systems, you know, institutions and structures and all of that, as well as those of us in individual or group practice or working in universities. It's a loving demand to Create A, more equitable practices, more holistic practices that involves the other, right? Not just completely shutting away our humanity. Many practitioners are very, I believe, like our sensitivity and our ways of knowing and our other ways of knowing, with a capital K other ways of knowing, has been sort of euthanized, right? And sort of. We've been told to be as apolitical, as neutral to as many things as possible,
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
to sort of be this blank slate walking into the room or holding space. And I think about my most loving therapists, helpers, healers, spaceholders, there was nothing neutral about them.
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
There was nothing neutral about, not that they were sitting there like, this is what I believe and this
Danielle Bezalel:
Sure.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
is what I need you to do. No. I mean, there was tenderness, there was vulnerability, but these systems instructors currently have been making people feel for many, many years, like we're problematic, like we're the reason why we have depression, anxiety, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my work in this world is to say, hey, no, you're probably really great. And your nervous system, your body, mind and spirit is responding to really violent, unhealthy environmental systems around us. So your body and your mind are doing exactly what they should be doing, which is like fucking, oh, can I curse? Which is the last thing I'll say, which is to fucking protect us deeply. And so I want to remind people that we are as well as possible and that we can get back to that innate wellness that we've known and that our cultures and our ancestors have known for eons. And we deserve to ask these mental health and every other kind of field you could think of for better ways because it is incomplete as it stands.
Danielle Bezalel:
no, no, no, no, the intro question. First of all, I have a lot to respond to, I have to tell you that we have a lot of similarities from your beginning intro. It's very rare for some reason, for guests to share like, really like pieces of them rather than just kind of start off with their, their job kind of title. And I need to tell you, I'm a Long Island gal. So I'm from New York. I live in Oakland, I'm a Bay Area girl as well. So I really relate to this bi-coastal thing. Ocean lover, like listen, I love the beach. Every time I go into the ocean, I'm like, water is healing. Like this is amazing. Like I just really relate to that. And I just love talking about the ocean with whoever wants to talk to me about it. So anytime you let me know. and you mentioned that you really love like intimate deep conversation. I am exactly like that as well. So I just loved hearing all that because I feel like we would be pals and would be great friends. So I just wanna throw that out there for a second. We have a lot in common there. And I really, really appreciate everything you said. And I feel like that was such a full and rich intro because this isn't just like a... question answer kind of episode, right? There are a lot of things that we need to kind of unpack here and go through. And for folks who are listening who haven't necessarily heard of this aspect of your work or this concept of decolonizing therapy, they might have some questions and need to break it down bit by bit, right? So I think before we even get into that, I want to know a little bit more about how you specifically came to this work and maybe what has been like surprising to you along the way. And like, I wanna hear a little bit more, you mentioned it briefly, but of you in therapy as a patient, like how did that experience kind of mold and shape you into doing the work that you're doing today?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I love these questions and I'm gonna look at the clock so that I don't go on because again with deep and intimate questions when I when I receive these types of questions I get really excited and um yeah so I just wanted to say that
Danielle Bezalel:
Totally.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
so okay and by the way side note um when I was in my doctoral program I lived in San Francisco the Excelsior district and then I kind of couldn't afford that now mind you this is back and like oh I'm gonna date myself here This is like maybe 2005, 2006, right? And I moved to Oakland Lake Merritt on
Danielle Bezalel:
Yes!
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Lennox Avenue, or Lennox Street, right across from Children's Fairyland. So
Danielle Bezalel:
Amazing.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
now that very apartment is probably triple what I was paying,
Danielle Bezalel:
yeah, that's a whole other thing.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
but I got to enjoy it. Okay.
Danielle Bezalel:
Amazing, yes, I love the lake.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I love the lake. So yes, okay. Well, first of all, I started, I don't even know where to start. There's so much. So. Let me say that back in 2000, perfect setup, back in 2004, 2005, I left my master's program. I finished. I went to NYU Steinhardt School of Ed and my major was counseling and community agencies. And I thought I was just going to work in a hospital setting. I was still very much what I lovingly call like a rigid, psychoanalytic, competitive, ego-minded New Yorker.
Danielle Bezalel:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Bless them, love them. But... no
Danielle Bezalel:
I relate.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
shade, but, and I had a teacher years later, my spiritual mama, Bola, shout out to her in the Bay area, was like, Jen, people go to New York to do, I'm trying to do her voice if you can't tell, people go to New York to do, people come to California to be, and I was like, oh, because that was my experience. I came into my classes at CIIS, transpersonal psychology, first day of class, and I'm like, raising my hand, I'm all intense, and I'm ready to do this work. And I'm great at trauma work, and I just finished working at UMDNJ Hospital Trauma Unit. I felt like I was gonna be the next expert in trauma and be like a dean of a university.
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I had all these very rigid no shade deans or anyone else, but I had all these very like... I was perfectly trained and prompted to be... a Western psychotherapist, psychologist, clinical psychologist. And what I mean by that is like follow the rules, A in this lane,
Danielle Bezalel:
Get your hours, right? Like.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
get your hours, right? I did APA internships, I did all of that. I had the most intense internships from the level of violence I would not even want to impart in anyone by saying it and repeating them. I worked with adult sex offenders, I worked with children sex offenders, I worked in prison systems. I worked with children under the age of eight. literally passing on and dying, having stage four cancer at Oakland Children's Hospital. When I tell you that I placed myself, and I say this purposely, in every single possible position I could think, because there was some part of me that felt that I had to do that, that I almost needed to place myself in the most intense internships. even if it was like ripping me up inside or affecting my sleep or affecting my mental health or my relationships, dot, dot, dot. I also worked at UCSF AIDS health project as an intern doing neural psych assessments with individuals living with HIV AIDS and how it was affecting their frontal lobe. So that's a little bit about some of the work I did. Um, and so trauma was like my middle and last name, you know, and anyone that was going to be around me in some way, shape or form. had to be willing, consciously or not, to participate in a world that kind of grew very dark.
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
You know, because my life was very heavy in that way. And I grew heavy and no one was talking to me about having emotional boundaries, energetic boundaries, about how I was absorbing things. Nobody was talking about, hey, are you letting this go? Are you transmuting this? Like, what are you doing with all this trauma that you're hearing? Or how does that impact you in your body? None of my programs. ever addressed the emotional ramifications of being a psychotherapist or clinician or however you want to call it. And so I ended up coming back to the East Coast for my APA internship. I worked on a residential unit with male identified individuals that had committed sex offenses that were adolescents. this is fucking hard.
Danielle Bezalel:
Yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Where this is like, I thought
Danielle Bezalel:
The hardest, potentially,
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
this is hard.
Danielle Bezalel:
right?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yes, yes. And, you know, it was started to really unpack and really see how my own childhood trauma and history of abuse, whether remembered or not completely remembered, parts of it or not, was starting to deeply impact the work I was choosing and that this in turn, I was having flashbacks and memories of things. How do I say this? This goes into me being a therapist,
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
right? And I'm sorry, being a patient in therapy
Danielle Bezalel:
Right, right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
or a client in therapy. I remember my therapist at the time who was with me for 10 plus years with me when I got married, when I got divorced, like, you know, or saying to me, are these your own memories? Right? And I remember looking at her and I was like, oh, doctor, are you allowed to ask me that? Like, we had that kind of relationship. Like, ooh, like she was a highly spiritual being. I was a highly spiritual being. And she said, all of this is welcome here. And I'm like, yeah. And I started crying immediately. And then I told her about this little female spirit that was torturing me when I was a kid outside my window. And I was like, are you gonna hospitalize me? And I see people's auras and. Da da da da da, and I have to bring in large quantities of light because this is my role in the world, and this is what I was told at two years old when I cracked myself in my head, and they said, we're not gonna let you die right now, you're coming back, and I went into this whole thing with her sobbing.
Danielle Bezalel:
Wow.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Not only does she go over time, gasp, because therapy, where am I? Sorry, I have a big laugh. In the therapy world, it's like. You have poor boundaries, you went over time, you know? I used to get in trouble for that shit. Right, right, and thank you and that's it. She went over time and she never did. And she took a deep breath and she got closer. It was appropriate, loving. I had been working with her for like two years or a year and a half. We had a relationship and she said, imagine me reaching out and putting my hand on yours. I'm like, you can, it's fine. It's like, I tell you everything in my life but we're not allowed to just even like,
Danielle Bezalel:
Touch right,
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
love it, like respectfully, we eventually did. But, you know, and she's just like, you are not crazy. And I know that word has so many connotations and I don't mean to repeat it in that way, but she said, you are not crazy. And oh my gosh, I was on my knees on the floor sobbing. Right?
Danielle Bezalel:
Wow.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
And so she and I continue to do great work together. We had boundaries and I respected her life and I didn't know a great deal about her life. And she allowed me to learn about energetic boundaries. She, we were able to talk about meridians and chakras and energetic bodies because it was already something I was seeing and experiencing. If she didn't know she was connecting me with other people, you know, she would connect me with people. Jennifer, I was in this meditation and this name came to me. I don't know if this means anything to you. That is what I needed.
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I didn't need somebody to start putting up all of these boundaries and rules. and not allow me to be close enough in a way that respected her as well because that was just re-traumatizing me. Right? We don't do that here. We don't do that. I was a highly sensitive child. Highly sensitive. Quick story. I'm going to explain. I don't remember this. I was told by multiple family members that I got sent to the principal's office in kindergarten. He, he, he, he. I was a little trouble maker from the start. The teacher that I loved a lot and loved me and loved my mom and loved my mom's cupcakes, I just wanna say, got really pissed when I guess she was having a bad day and she started speaking pretty intensely to some of my classmates. I can take the abuse, that seems to be the theme in my life.
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I don't like when people that are not realizing they're being abused are being abused, gas lit, exploited, I don't do well, hence decolonizing therapy, right? Because it's like, wait a minute, all these people I'm serving don't realize they're being gas lit. Right? So she's yelling at everybody. And I was like, Miss So-and-so, please stop it. You're just mad because your husband's cheating on you. And he was. Come to find out.
Danielle Bezalel:
Oh my God, how did you find that out?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Exactly, and mind you, I was born in 78, so there's no cell phone, there's no, I knew. Like that happened, this is from a very young age with a capital K, I just knew things.
Danielle Bezalel:
Wow.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I just knew. And I'm like, it's not our fault, you can't treat us like that just because you're sad and upset. And you know, I'm like, you need to go talk to your mom the way I talk to my mom. You know, and
Danielle Bezalel:
Wow.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
like that was me at a very, very young age and I got sent to the principal's office because you can't talk to your teacher like that, air quotes, right? And principals like, Jen, you know, you can't draw on the bathroom wall. I'm like, but it's happy faces. They're like, you can't talk to invisible people in class. you can't say things about your teacher that are true. Like, she can't yell at us. Like, you know, so they would laugh at me and at the same time be like exasperated and like, you're fucking driving us nuts.
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
And can you come get your daughter? And I would get punished because my parents didn't, even though my mom experienced it, she didn't want me to be that kid and have that kind of trouble in my life. You know, so I hope I'm answering your questions. I know that was really long.
Danielle Bezalel:
I mean, I think I think it's an important response because there's this idea of your intuition and spirituality, having impacted you from a very young age and you kind of craving to be in tune with that in a way that was healing to yourself and potentially other people. So that's what I gather from that.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I love that, I love that, thank you. Thanks for putting it together like that for me.
Danielle Bezalel:
So moving on a little bit, kind of the same topic, but I wanna talk more about decolonizing therapy because you gave us this really beautiful introduction and I wanna be really clear about what exactly you do there and hear a little bit more about the organization and what it looks like, right? So this is an organization that's dedicated to providing training and workshops for therapists, nonprofits and professional associations. And I'm wondering like, What have you learned as being the founder of this amazing organization and international movement? And what is this organization do in these trainings and workshops? And what are some of the ways that folks are learning and unlearning things in them?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yeah, great questions. Decolonizing therapy is very much about helping people to unlearn and relearn our natural, I believe, state. I believe that decolonizing therapy is shadow work on a collective level. And what I mean by that very clearly is that we're picking up as what is happening internationally and globally related to mental health themes. how spirituality is often co-opted
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
from various people, places and spaces and has been for very many years. And even how the mental health systems punish, kind of like we were just talking about, punish whether or not that is there in people and places and spaces that are in opposition. or trying to push up against whatever the norm is. So for example, when we look at diagnosis and we look at children, we see a lot of diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, intermittent explosive disorder. And if you look at those statistics, mostly it is young black children, particularly male identified children that are given those. diagnoses most often. Really, a, this disorder, all of these disorders are behavioral. None of them really speak to the root cause or the issue. And even if you look at, this is my opinion, even if you look at anxiety, right, those are a set of symptoms, right, that is not a person. in my humble opinion, and that does not describe a person. We can say a person is anxious, a person is feeling anxious, and I know it's a whole reframe, but all of this is a form, it could be a form of dangerous mind control. And as we see, we do have generations of people identifying, feeling as though they are this. Even though they know they're not, there's an aspect of, well, I'm just a really anxious person. Well, I'm just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, so part of what I believe decolonizing therapy, we have been trying to do is educate on a how historical and intergenerational trauma is one of our soul wounds, right? Roberto Duran, who is the writer of Native American post-colonial psychology. Um, It has written about and talked about the soul wound for many, many years. And we have many indigenous elders. And when I say indigenous, global indigenous elders across the globe that have been talking about this out of body spirit experience that happens when a people, a culture experiences an attempted genocide, a war, a sense of intense violence based on who they are. And so the thing is, if we are continued to be hunted, harmed, and hurt, based off of simply who we are and how we walk in the world, and then we're given a diagnosis to say, Hey, you're anxious, you're depressed, you're, and again, not that these things don't exist. I'm not saying it doesn't exist or that there's no such thing as a biological component to them. But our environment does impact our biologies.
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Right? And so if you look at the theme, what we're asking people to do are look at all the ways, shapes and places in which our environment. in which our environment, particularly things like capitalism and colonization continue to impact our well-being, continues to stop us from having basic needs, clean running water, access to healthcare, kind of therapy that my child needs, even though let's just say I'm a working mom with a mother at home with Alzheimer's and I'm working three jobs and I'm just barely making ends meet because the living wage doesn't fit the minimum wage. Can I get this great kind of therapy for my child that's cutting edge? Oh, sure, for 500 an hour. That's violent to me, right? It's not only violent, but it colludes with things like capitalism, right? And so I laugh because to me, what we do in decolonizing our therapy is just simply reeducation to look, look, this is. This is how colonization has fucked with our mental health. This is how it was transmitted in all these ways, unconsciously and consciously. This is how it impacts us current day. And here's all the structural pieces, like racism, like sexism, like transphobia, ableism. But these are all the ways that it continues to impact us. And this is how they get to categorize us and pathologize us. And here is how we start to rehumanize. And here is how we start to see the humanity. So I would like to believe that what we do in these undoing workshops. I believe what we do in these undoing workshops, it take the past, invite people to take their innate wisdom, merge it with what is happening in the present and being honest about the kind of grief we're dealing with, the kind of collective soul exhaustion we're dealing with as a collective, and creating something badass that is less incomplete and less violent for the future.
Danielle Bezalel:
Yeah, wow. That I yeah, I really appreciate all of that and feel like I'm sure that therapists who are in these workshops and folks who really want to address these really, really big issues but are you know, doing so in their one on one or group therapy practices, it's kind of like a both end, right? It's like, how do we work within the current system, but shift the way in which we're we're dealing with that and slowly radicalize it, right? I mean, like how else is that? Is that how you would describe it?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yeah, I think that for now, the kind of therapies that we have now are probably, for some people, work, right? For some people that probably can pay a little bit more or that can pay out of pocket, probably many people can find what they need, but I do believe that eventually the whole paradigm will be shifted.
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
And I believe that... that is gonna continue to be a collective effort. So for now, I do believe that we need what we have. There's so much pain, there's so much grief, there's so much collective trauma, but I do believe it is incomplete and insufficient. And I do think that the more that people have what we see as marginalized identities, the more we feel the incompletenes.,
Danielle Bezalel:
Okay, so what I wanna shift to next, you briefly mentioned this, the idea of rage and grief, you know, the idea that... folks are doing rage workshops with you and they're crying and they're throwing up and they're you know, all of the all this, you know, like anger and pain like comes out, right and you kind of are self named the rage doctor and You talk about honoring rage and grief a lot and I'd love if you could talk about why in work like this We shouldn't shy away from things like rage and grief, but potentially center it in some experiences
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was after a rage retreat where my prior university students were like, we're calling you the rage doctor. And I was like, no, please don't, that sounds so dark. Yeah, and it spread on campus. And the people would be like, what's up rage doc? What's up rage doc? Oh, I have a session with you next week. I can't wait, rage doctor. And I'm just like. And so that's kind of how that popped off. I will say that I think that rage is often misunderstood. I believe, again, like many other emotions, it is often pathologized. I am not a proponent or I do not ask anyone to be violent towards anyone else. The purpose of rage work is to do the preliminary work. to befriend and start to love on your rage child, your rage adolescent, your rage adult self, or your rage ancestral inheritance. have the smallest ears ever which do not relate to my 5'10 body. and so, so I think that rage is often getting a bad rap the way that other mental health diagnoses or issues or expressions of pain often come about. And my work has always been a, to do the work around my own rage because I was holding a lot for my family without realizing it as a child and as a teen. And I think not being able to honor my spiritual ways of knowing created more trauma for me and more anger and resentment, right? Because I would get in trouble for being sensitive. I would get in trouble for crying about something. I would get in trouble for not wanting to fight someone. I would get in trouble for, you know, I live in a tough environment. And I think that my rage, there's disguises of rage. I should say that too. And many people's rage is a barometer.
Danielle Bezalel:
Hmm
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
And it's also a boundary maker. It's a way of saying, hey, this has crossed my boundary. I don't like this, or this is unjust. This is not fair. And this is not on a heady intellectualized level. I need to stress this. And this is why I believe that it's easy to pathologize anger and rage, although those are two very separate emotions. because rage is actually super authentic. It's super honest. It's very, I know this is gonna sound so odd, but like pure.
Danielle Bezalel:
I completely agree.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
That's kind of it, right? Like, yeah, it's kind of like being in love. It's like, you know when you are
Danielle Bezalel:
Yes.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
and you can't fake it. Right? Like, it's okay to not be, but people could see it in you or like around you or you're there just like, oh. Why do you sound so happy? Right? And with rage, my experience is no matter how much we try to cover it up and mask it, and understandably masking it saves many lives, especially the darker you are, right? Or the bigger you are. Or if you're visibly disabled, we know that law enforcement will react to individuals that are having a psychiatric break with reality and may have bigger bodies, darker bodies, be disabled physically. and either hospitalize them faster or harm them or kill them or choke them or dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. So we understand that masking our rage is a lifesaver. It's a defense mechanism. It's a coping mechanism and it is a way to survive. It is an evolutionary process. However, feeling rage is in my opinion, extremely ancestral meaning but it's not just ours we're feeling. that it is also, again, this is where it goes into decolonizing therapy and the colonial wound. Sometimes I say, everything in me felt that. Every ancestor in me stood up and felt that. And that's when I feel that rage come in me. I don't act on it anymore the way that I used to when I was younger. I don't kick a chair. I kick a chair, or maybe I do when I'm driving in my head. You know? But generally, I know when it's time to cry in a pillow, when I'm really feeling grief. Generally I know, like for example, when I know with the murder of Trayvon Martin going way back to the beginning of some people's awakenings, you know, when it comes to racial identity and equity and what have you, this is, you know, understanding that black bodies were being killed faster and poor bodies were being killed faster with something that was very known and understood to me and my family personally. However, with the death and the murder of Trayvon Martin when George Zimmerman was found innocent, I remember sitting in my living room and without from one second to the next, bellowing and screaming at the top of my lungs. No! Like it was, it was like even thinking about it, it gives me goosebumps, right? Because it reminds me of my reaction. to watching the Twin Towers fall in front of me, like, you know, across the river, just like literally watching them fall, thinking, what is that? Is that debris? Are those people? What are those little things? Like, literally, it's that kind of feeling where everything in me just gets one massive goose bump. And I remember thinking this young man was, this was unnecessary, this was gunned down, and this was like a lynching, even though he was not choked out. This was an act of violence, and I remember this. even though I haven't seen this before in this body, why do I feel like I've been here before? And this isn't about just something I read. And so I think for many folks whose people have histories of violence, rage becomes this ancestral inheritance. And so my teacher, Ruth King, would say, rage is the love child of trauma and shame.
Danielle Bezalel:
Mm.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
And I think I would lovingly add that it is the love child of ancestral trauma, grief and shame. And I think that rage work will continue to be necessary as we move forward in this world.
Danielle Bezalel:
Yeah, I really relate to this as someone who feels my emotions very deeply and expresses them very deeply and that doesn't always go with how other people around you feel and receive emotions. And so, you know, I feel this idea very strongly of when I feel rage and I run really hot, I express it. And I think that it's interesting to think about how that goes or doesn't go with the people around you who you are in relationship with. And like, sometimes I wonder, depending, obviously, on what exactly it is, like, why don't you feel rage? Like, there is so much to be angry about and there are so many injustices in our communities, you know, nationally, globally. And I am... inspired by rage, I feel like it makes me feel like it's important and essential to the rest of my feelings and my identities. And so I really, really relate to what you just said.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
I love that, yeah. Yeah, I love what you said about like, why are you not feeling rage? Because when people say to me, and this might be some of the listeners out there, so let me just offer this reframe, because people will say, I don't like fuck with rage. Like, it's not a thing. I don't feel it, it's not in my life. And I say, okay, well, you know, take this self-assessment, you know, in Ruth King's book, Healing Rage, you know, and just see if that's true, because there's disguises of rage. And you know, and she goes into really beautifully how some of these disguises are raised keeping us alive, right, keeping us well, keeping us in our jobs, maybe keeping us not cussing out our family members. There is, and they relate to like fight, flight, freeze. Right, there's depression, not in a clinical sense, but in the energy sense of depression, devotion, dependence, distraction. dominance and defiance. Those are the six, um, disguise of the rage, according to Ruth King's work. And I find that when I was working with people, um, they would come into me and often say, you know, I'm just angry. It's just anger. And we would really differ between the experience of anger, which is also really healthy and the experience of rage, which often after experiencing or expressing it leaves a hangover feeling. I call it a rage hangover. I know for me it's a toxic tonic. of shame, of, oh, I could have said that differently, or did I ruin this relationship? I'm beating myself up. So sometimes my rage, and sometimes some people's rage is very justice-centered and eloquent, right? And sometimes our rage is messy. And I know many people, including myself, when they're truly in a rage, they can't stop it. And we're not talking about physically harming, but, you know, yelling or even though I can see myself, you're feeling it, I can say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, internally, like no, no, no, or step out of the room. It's coming anyway. And someone or many people need to receive it. You know, and what I can say about our rage, why I believe it's sacred, is that it demands a space to be heard, to be seen, and it also demands for us to fully witness and have witness. And that's why I think retreats and workshops are extremely powerful.
Danielle Bezalel:
It’s making me emotional just to reframe it like that, because I really trust and believe that my rage is not necessarily other people's responsibility, but it does mean something for other people to acknowledge it and to understand it. I think that is extremely powerful for me personally as someone who really, really is a passionate person who lives in my emotions. I'm so like... like we said before, like we're very deep into conversation with people and that means something to us and like our souls and our hearts and the negative, you know, emotions, rage being a positive and a negative depending on how you're feeling it, depending on what that means to you are just as important, right? Like the hard emotions I'll say are just as important.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
They are just as important.
Danielle Bezalel:
Yeah, yeah. I love this conversation. I would love for folks to know that you have a book coming out and it is called Decolonizing Therapy. Decolonizing Therapy, Oppression, Historical Trauma and Politicizing Your Practice. And I would love for you to just tell me like what you hope folks are able to understand about their own practices and like, what, like how has your therapy practice changed or shifted since writing this book?
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for that. Yes, this book might as well be a baby. And I know people have mixed feelings about that, but I feel like this is my love letter to younger me. This is my love letter to therapists that know that there's more, know that there's another way and know that, and want to hear more about how the wounds of colonization, how being removed and Forcibly sometimes removed from our ways and our customs and our lands impact people more than we communicate This book is also for the everyday person although it is, you know a little bit heavy I take that back. It is heavier in some like jargon and you know I'm working on looking at the ways in which Higher ed has also conditioned me right and how I talk about colonization and reading all these things, but What I will say is that this book covers energetic boundaries. There's a whole chapter on the rage-grief access and how that shows up. There's a whole chapter on ancestral trauma and ancestral ways and how it's been co-opted by therapy. There's a whole chapter on diagnostic enslavement and the roots of psychology and the mental health complex and how things like revolution were then diagnosed. how when people spoke out that they were being harmed, it was then pathologized. And so I do think that there's a lot of history in this book, as well as exercises, affirmations, personal stories, quote unquote true, but case study stories, but not exchange names and change information from people I've worked with, as well as examples on how to work with individuals in a more... soul, somatic, sort
Danielle Bezalel:
Right.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
of spiritual sense, right? Honoring culture and identity. So yeah, I'm really proud of this. It's taken years. It's taken sometimes blood, sweat and tears, crying on my floor and other times writing beautifully and violently and I got this, I got this. I'm going to go ahead and close the video. say is that the book will be out in November. So that is the date. And yeah, I'm looking forward to also having a book club. Because I think that people will need to just like break it down bit by bit and really every chapter. It’s like 400 and something pages.
Danielle Bezalel:
I can’t wait read it. So I'm really, really glad that we're connected and that we had this really wonderful conversation. It was very meaningful to me. So again, thank you so much for being on. And I would love for you to just share where folks could find you and where they could get your work.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. You can find me at www.decolonizingtherapy.com or drJennifermullan.com, drJennifermullan.com. You can also find me on Instagram, at Decolonizing Therapy.
Danielle Bezalel:
Love it. Well, thank you again, Dr. Jennifer Mullan. You're amazing. Very inspiring. I can't wait to read your book. So thank you again.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan:
Thank you. Thank you, Danielle, and thank you to the community. I appreciate you all.