Episode 134: Redefining Trauma Work Through Collective Healing [featuring Marjorie Jean]

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Transcript

PATRICK CASALE: Hey, everyone. You are listening to another episode of the All Things Private Practice podcast. I'm your host, Patrick Casale. I'm joined today by Marjorie Jean. Jean, I want to just get that right, LCSW in DC right now but splits time between DC and Haiti.

We are going to talk about her concept of esteem, some of her work with intergenerational, and trauma, and just culture, in general. And we tried to record, I think about a year ago, maybe.

MARJORIE JEAN: A year ago,

PATRICK CASALE: A year in Haiti.

MARJORIE JEAN: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

PATRICK CASALE: And it did not work out. So, I'm glad to see you here today. And I'm really happy to have you on.

MARJORIE JEAN: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for rescheduling.

PATRICK CASALE: Life happens, internet happens, you know, in this new world of like everything being virtual. So, totally understand.

You know, like when things don't go well, and people cancel or things don't go as planned, you're kind of like relieved in an energy sense too, of like, "Okay, well I get to like breathe for 30 minutes before I do the next thing." So…

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah.

PATRICK CASALE: So, you are an author, you're a speaker, you're a coach, and consultant, you're a therapist, practice owner, all the things. And you have a lot of cool stuff going on. And I would love to hear a little bit about your story because I think it's a unique one. And I love following your social media, and what you do, and put out into the world. And how you help the therapist community at large. So, yeah, please share whatever you'd like.

MARJORIE JEAN: Thank you so much, again, for having me. It's always pausing. And also, it feels good to, kind of, hear how people see you. Because on social media, you're just telling a story that is relevant to you in the moment or sometimes always relevant, but you don't know how people receive it. So, whenever I hear that feedback, it's always pausing, but also like, "Oh my God, I'm so grateful that this is how you see it because that's how I see it too."

A little bit about me, I'll go back a little. I migrated from Haiti many years ago or two decades ago, moved to the DC metropolitan area. And then just about a little over three years ago decided to move back to Haiti.

I am Haitian, I am a mother, I am a therapist, I'm all the things that you just listed. And more than anything, I am committed to doing work in the realm of trauma, specifically, intergenerational trauma, developmental trauma, attachment trauma, self-esteem, and cultural esteem, which I call also collective esteem. And all of these, for everyone, but also, centering the experiences of BIPOC, particularly, black people.

And I have been doing this work for a while. I have transitioned from different, I would say, systems. I've worked in the hospital system, I've worked in clinics, I've worked in the school, private practice, you name it.

And for me, I've really find the sweet spot, which is where I am now, both still seeing my therapy clients, but also helping small organizations to be more trauma-informed, not in a performative way, but in a real impactful way.

And so part of the reason for wanting to go to Haiti, I wanted to work with organizations to help them to start to think about what trauma even is and how their spaces can be more trauma-informed and more trauma-inclusive. And also providing therapy in a way that felt relational, not therapeutic, but like daily life, how that looks like for my people or the people that I serve. I just wanted to kind of make the shift.

And that's kind of what I've been doing for the past few years now, just been very intentional about how I show up. I'm a storyteller, so my therapy looks that way also. It doesn't always feel like therapy from what my clients tell me. It really just feels like a conversation, but they're doing deep psychic work.

PATRICK CASALE: I love all of that. And I think you made so many good points, especially, interweaving your own culture into the therapy room because we so often get it wrong where it's like, this is how therapy is supposed to be performed, right? And that I think is problematic when we look at it from a cultural lens.

And then, ultimately, like you said, just trying to help organizations become trauma-informed and not the trauma-informed of, like, I hate the word trauma-informed sometimes in a therapeutic space because I'm like, we should all be "trauma-informed" if you're a licensed mental health professional.

But what you are touching on is this collective trauma, this intergenerational trauma, and ways to actually show up. And like you said, without it being performative. So, I think that's a big takeaway.

I think we've seen a lot of practices start to use language that's more affirmative in the last couple of years. We always want to know like, does it go beyond the language? Is there actually action happening to back up the words on the website? So, I really love that you said that.

And I'm really fascinated by, like, you going back to Haiti to work in the communities, to bring this mentality of community support, everyone kind of helping each other out, really ensuring that they have each other's backs because Haiti has been through some devastation. And you know, we see it on the news, but a lot of us will never experience that. And I think it's really a powerful message that you really brought back to your country. How was that received, by the way?

MARJORIE JEAN: It was… I want to be intentional because language is important, so I don't want to use language that… but it was difficult. Difficult on both end because I was coming into a space… Well, I am from Haiti. I also had been living in the US for many years. So, I was American in a lot of ways. And I embrace that. I embrace my Americanness.

However, I went into Haiti with a mentality of wanting to be a fixer. When you go into spaces wanting to be a fixer in some way you diminish or you overlook the people in their capacity for helping themselves.

What did help me challenge that is as a brain spotting therapist, as somebody who is a somatic therapist, I'm always focused on the client being the expert. And so even though I went in with that default mentality of being a fixer, I immediately had to shift into, "Wait a minute, these people, my people are the experts of their own lives." They are, ultimately, the experts of their own trauma and their own trauma recovery.

And so there was this conflict in the process, so I had to get over that. So, for me, it wasn't even the people, it was my posture that needed changing.

So, the first part of the trip, I really was just focusing on changing my posture. So, once I got over that, once I got over the need to kind of want to fix, I then adjusted to, "Let me get your perception of what you think is going on. Let me look at all the cultural systemic things going on that may be impacting the way that you see the problem and the way that you understand the problem." And then we get to the problem because there was all these external barriers that were in between us that needed to be addressed. There were all these projections that were in between us. I was projecting, people of my community were also projecting. I had to navigate through all of that be.

And I also see that as part of the work too, before I could actually do the individual work. So, it was challenging, to answer your question, for all those reasons I just stated.

PATRICK CASALE: That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like there was a lot of deep introspection when you got down there to really challenge some of those narratives from coming back from the states and then being trained in becoming a therapist.

How was that received once you worked through some of that stuff? When you worked through some of those projections? Did you notice a big shift?

MARJORIE JEAN: I noticed a big shift, primarily, first in me because what I thought was the problem wasn't the problem, yeah. So, that was for me [INDISCERNIBLE 00:09:55] groundbreaking in some way because what I had seen as the problem wasn't the problem. So, I went from, I want to work with people individually to no I wanted the community healing circles because-

PATRICK CASALE: I love that.

MARJORIE JEAN: …I wanted to tap into the conversation that the community was having. So, let me get in circles with people in the community and have conversations in that way. And have these conversations be healing, offer healing insights on both ends. They were offering me insights and I was offering insight, utilizing my training background and what I knew of the culture.

So, the impact happened when I moved from doing individual thinking about the work being individual to, oh no, for this to be impactful in our community, we do best in community. Let's focus this, let's make this community work versus individualized, like single-person one-on-one therapy. That would not be effective in that space, in that moment.

PATRICK CASALE: So, that to me sounds so intentional. And that sounds like the definition of trauma-informed care when you are really taking a step back, taking your own biases out of the equation, your own projections, and getting a good understanding of what the community needs as a whole, and how can you best support them.

And I had someone on here a couple months ago talking about, you know, the mental health industrial complex about how one-on-one therapy is not really that useful in a lot of spaces and how can community healing is so much more important.

And I believe that wholeheartedly because 50-minute increments of our time, sure, useful, absolutely. But also a very privileged place to say like, I can afford to show up and spend 50 minutes of time talking about me. I think that community healing is so important and it's so overlooked, especially, here in the States.

Like, I think if we were to introduce that concept, I imagine you'd get met with like, "Well, that's not evidence-based." Or, "That doesn't work here." Or, "How would you charge for that?" And I'm really interested in this because to me, what you just described is really what people need.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah.

PATRICK CASALE: And I think that we feel so disconnected from each other so often and we don't have a good sense of community. I'm using generalizing language, I don't want to be black and white about that. But I do think that in this country, especially, we often feel really disconnected from the communities that we live in and participate in.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you 100%. While I was still in Haiti doing this work, I was also still seeing my US clients virtually. And I can tell you the way that I practice, even though those sessions were one-on-one, we very much invited the other people in their lives in the therapy session.

So, if this person was dysregulated, their nervous system was all over the place, activated because of a relationship with their partner, an issue with their partner, with their sister, with their brother, or their mother, we would have a conversation about the family dynamic. I would be open to say, how do you feel about inviting them into your session so we can get the root cause because I do intergenerational work. So, I don't just focus on my client. I understand around my client a lot of people, and they impact the way my client receive therapy, the way they respond to therapy, and their ability to show up or not show up.

So, for me to just look at just Patrick would be such a disservice to the work. So, even when doing individualized work, I, in my intake session make it very clear that it's individual therapy, but you are coming in with a lot of people and we acknowledge these people whether or not they're present or absent.

PATRICK CASALE: I love that. That sounds like a very different mindset than what is "typical" in the therapeutic spaces. And I think that's so much more important, especially, when you're doing trauma work because you're right. I mean, if we're talking about intergenerational trauma, we're talking about decades and generations of trauma, collective trauma experiences that are passed down through genetics, and DNA, and our biology, and a lot of things that we're often even unaware of. And so often just having such a hard time to navigate that, make sense of that.

And if we're just doing traditional talk therapy where we don't often uncover the root of that causation or even really figure out ways to work through those experiences as well.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah, absolutely.

PATRICK CASALE: So, tell me about your project, your definition of esteem, how you kind of differentiate between what you said before we started recording of self-esteem and then community collective esteem.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah. I've been working on esteem for many years before I even knew I was working on esteem. I was working on my esteem. So, there were a lot of… I go back to stories that I've written, that I've written just for myself since I was 12 years old, navigating very intense trauma. And I was just like, "Oh my God, these are esteem-builder stories."

And for me, a huge part of my roadblock and building my esteem was the community that was involved in the development of my esteem could not be trusted. I could not trust them because they were responsible for my trauma. And so they played a role in that esteem. So, I had to be recover.

Few years ago, I started thinking about how… I would look at my clients who would be struggling with vacant self-esteem, ambivalent self-esteem. And I would just say, what is, I mean, these people have everything. They have the career, they have the title, they have the money. Like, on paper they have everything. So, where is the self-doubt coming from? Where is this people-pleasing coming from? Where is this perfectionism coming from?

Yes, some of it is a product of anxiety, but I also thought about, "Oh my God, there's a self-concept issue here, grievance here. There's an esteem grievance here, so let's look at that."

So, that's really when I started tapping into esteem and I'm thinking, "Wait, it would be harmful to say just this person is responsible for building their self-esteem." Because life changes all the time. Situations change all the time. And so your self-esteem is not this thing that is just, "Oh, I have reached it and that's it."

Anything could put you down, could pull you down. And so if you don't have a community around you to anchor you, the pulling you down could be, I mean, harsher than if you actually have social support, if you have people showing up for you.

So, I think it's very harmful to just say, "Oh no, so only you can work on your self-esteem." No part of your self-esteem at the root, at the foundation of that is the people around you. So, let's not just talk about self-esteem, which is why I just talk about esteem. Esteem and that it looks at the culture and it looks at you. Ultimately, you have to do the work.

And part of doing the work is finding community that is affirming. That is so important because you could have everything, but if the community is not affirming, it is not community, and therefore it throws darts at your self-esteem. So, the work needs to match the community.

And some people call it tribe, some people call it people I fellowship with. Whatever you call it, there needs to be an alignment because they are the one anchoring the work that you are doing.

Similar to a therapist, right? If you want to work through your negative or limiting self-talk, you want a therapist who can anchor that. You want a therapist whose modality is in alignment with that. You wouldn't want a therapist who does opposite work of the thing that you're trying to accomplish.

So, that for me is esteem. Esteem is not a thing that only you can work on, but it's the culture supports your esteem, the community supports your esteem. And when the community shifts, our esteem shifts.

PATRICK CASALE: It makes a lot of sense when you start looking at it through that lens of if you don't have that community anchoring you in, and it's not in alignment with who you are and your values, how dysregulated you can become regardless of your "mental fortitude, or success, or the work that you've done on yourself." If you don't have people in your corner to support you, to hold you accountable, to love you, to connect with you, that can feel like, kind of, like an iceberg type of situation where everything is just above the surface.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah. Because we all have a master narrative. Like, I call it like the repetitive thing that always comes up for us, right? It's a master narrative. We all have that, but it is reinforced by our community.

So, if this master narrative is rooted in trauma, right? If your community reinforces that, it is very unlikely that somehow if you obtain all the success you're going to shift. No, you're not. Nothing is going to shift within how you view the world. Those things that you possess, those things that you have, have nothing to do with your self-esteem. The master narrative does and the things that anchor your master narrative does. So, we want to, what is the master narrative, and who are the people in your life that support it?

So, I have one question or two questions that I often ask when I'm working on a manifesto with a client around esteem work is when you think about the scope of your life up to this point, what has the thing that has sustained your esteem? And it's often a question most people cannot answer in the first session? That sometimes a lot of time they answer after eight months. Sometimes I've had a client answer it after two years of work.

PATRICK CASALE: I'd be that client.

MARJORIE JEAN: Because they've never thought about. And what is your relationship to people and things when it comes to your esteem? So, those questions.

PATRICK CASALE: Those are the questions that if you asked me on the spot right now, I would sit here like with this blank stare, and I would just be like, "I don't know how to answer that on the spot."

But those are the deep meaningful questions that are really important when we're thinking about our sense of self, and our connectedness to the world, and the people around it. And I think those are really important questions that existentially, I don't know if I have the immediate response to, but they're really depth-based too.

And when you are starting to, like, do these trainings with other organizations or clinicians, and they start to grasp this concept of esteem, and they start to implement it, what types of changes do they typically see in personal or professional lives?

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah, the changes are incremental. And so one thing I always suggest, invite people to do is to take note, whether it's if you're journal person, great, you can journal. I have actually an esteem workbook that people can use for that. If you are a person, voices help you, you do that. I am that person where I will record. In the middle of walking somewhere, I will just pull up my memo voice thing on the iPhone, I will record the thing that comes up for me, the thing that I just noticed.

So, it's always important to track. So, tracking is a huge way of seeing it because in the moment, you may not, but once you track it and you go back, you're able to say, "Oh my God, look at this."

So, I have a client of mine who walked away from a major opportunity that she thought was an opportunity, but something that opportunity in the past served her well. But now that she was working on her esteem and trying not to attach her self-worth with her market worth, she was willing to turn away from an opportunity that she thought was not an opportunity because of where she was in her esteem work.

Because that is another question. When working in this field, oftentimes, we have these opportunities we don't want to miss out on because, hey, we are entrepreneurs, we want to put ourselves out there, but sometimes the esteem can suffer. We might take things that do not serve us simply because it puts us somewhere on social media. So, being in a position to say no to what would feel like opportunity to other people was a huge thing for some… or is a huge thing for some of my clients.

So, being able to just be okay with self pacing, I'm not going to grab every opportunity, I'm going to say no to certain things, and saying no to certain things means that I'm saying yes to other parts. And the yes could be, "Oh, I'm saying yes to being more authentic. I'm saying yes to just resting. I'm saying yes to having time and not having to do anything with time." Because sometimes we think having more time means we have to utilize it. No, we do not. Having more time could just be to be in time.

So, these are some of the things that I see with my clients, and with that nervous system is more regulated, anxiety is more manageable.

The other thing is for clients that I have who struggle with anxiety is maybe the anxiety will be in your life. Let's not try to beat anxiety out of your life, but let's use it to be the stool that helps you to stay on alert when it's needed.

And so now anxiety is not the prominent thing in my life, but it's present. And I'm not trying to erase it. I'm not trying to make it leave. So, I think the internal narrative shifts, the posture then follows, and then they see the result in their relationships with self and their relationship with the community. But it's not always easy, right? It's difficult work and sometimes it's painful to be in those spaces before it actually smooth itself out.

PATRICK CASALE: It's really well said. I love that framework and that concept, you know, because you're right. I think circling back to what you said about being entrepreneurs, and we want to say yes to all the opportunities, we don't want to miss out on opportunities. A lot of the times we're saying yes because it's either like, this is what I think I'm supposed to do. I am very much in that hustle culture, like grind culture, onto the next thing. Can't even sit with my accomplishments or what I've created. I have to constantly be moving. Or I'm saying yes because I'm people-pleasing. Like, there are so many reasons behind that, but essentially, when you're addressing it from that lens, it feels much more manageable. But you're right, it does get uncomfortable first.

And I was laughing when you were talking because the time thing, that's the thing that I still struggle with and I've done a lot of work around that of like, okay, I'm intentionally creating free time in my schedule because I need it. My body is telling me I need it. My nervous system's telling me I need it. I'm feeling burnt out. And then I look at my calendar and I'm like, "Okay, so what can I put in Tuesday and Wednesday because I have all of this free time?"

And then having to circle back and be like, "This is what you need." Like, how do we sit with that discomfort of just being like, it's sometimes anxiety provoking to have this free time in your schedule, and that's okay because the alternative is like filling it, depleting yourself, reducing your executive functioning, getting irritated, getting frustrated, getting burnt out. So, sitting with those two simultaneously and just allowing for that to be the process. But that's a work in progress too.

MARJORIE JEAN: It is.

PATRICK CASALE: Maybe lifelong. But like you said, the anxiety can exist. It doesn't have to go away. You can just acknowledge it. You can even thank it for being there and it doesn't have to be debilitating. And I think that's a big shift.

But I really love that perspective and I love what you're talking about in terms of getting community involved, lots of really cool concepts, and lots of different unique approaches to not only therapy, but just life experience.

And I really appreciate hearing these things because we want to push the kind of therapeutic norm in this country. I think we want to really change and shift the narrative and perspective in the way that it's practiced, because, you know, I think that community-based care is significantly more helpful. So, I really appreciate what you're doing in both countries.

MARJORIE JEAN: Thank you. I want to add something about the anxiety, just a bit of self-disclosure. Prior to this interview, I woke up this morning feeling so anxious, and then I had to take a moment and talk to my anxiety. And was just like, "Oh, you are really excited about this interview at 10:00. You really don't want to miss it. You want everything to work out."

So, this is your way of trying to get me ready, but I got it. I got it. "Internet is working. The kid is not going to go to school today because we don't want to miss this appointment. But he's fed, he's set up, you are set up, you have lighting, you have natural lighting coming in. We're good. You don't have to overwork for me. I got you, right?" I just accept that it's there. And so I embrace it and I talk to it.

PATRICK CASALE: I love that.

MARJORIE JEAN: It doesn't have to be this looming thing that controls my life, but it's present. I know it, and I'm not trying to make it go away.

PATRICK CASALE: We could have a whole conversation on that, but that is so often, I think, a default, like, mechanism for people is to feel like I have to make this feeling, this "negative" feeling or emotion go away, whether it's depression, anxiety, et cetera.

But anxiety can be a good emotion, too. It can actually be kind of saying to you, "I care about this thing. I want this to go a certain way." Like, there's good anxiety as well, and it's allowed to exist. So, I love that you just mentioned that.

So, you did mention before we started recording that you were really anxious. How are you feeling right now as we're getting ready to wrap up?

MARJORIE JEAN: I'm feeling so good because once I actually tap into this work it just… like once we start that's it, the anxiety's gone because now I'm just talking about what I do on a day-to-day and it feels so natural to me.

PATRICK CASALE: That is such a good point for everyone listening. So, what Marjorie just said and what I experience too, even when I do courses, when I do speaking engagements, and I know what I'm talking about, I have that, like, massive flood of anxiety beforehand, similar to what you're experiencing or were experiencing. Like, internet, lighting, what if they're doing construction outside of my…? All the things, you know, all the catastrophizing. Ultimately, followed by, like, racing heart rate, really tense, then I start talking and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Like I know what I'm doing. Like, it's normal."

And I want to highlight that for all of you listening, like it's totally, totally normal to feel anxious. It's also totally okay for it to just dissipate. And for it to kind of just fade away because you all know what you're doing.

And I think that if we reframe anxiety, and fearfulness, and some self-doubt as a positive in a lot of ways, as long as it's not paralyzing and debilitating then it's actually quite useful. And it's kind of an indication that you're on the right track.

MARJORIE JEAN: Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes we hold onto fear as like it's a badge of honor. Fear can just be the thing that, you know, walks around like a toddler. And you should let it, but you're doing something else. It's safe. And it has everything it need, but then you keep doing your thing. It's not going go away because life, it's life. It's [CROSSTALK 00:31:51]-

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah. You're not going to like outwork fear. You're not going to like outwork anxiety of the world of like just day-to-day. But it can also exist. I say the same thing about, like, impostor syndrome, self-doubt stuff. Like, it's never going to go away completely. But it also doesn't have to, like, steer the car while you drive it. It can sit in the backseat in a car seat and scream sometimes. Or like, you can put the music up and drown it out, or you can ignore it.

And like, I like that metaphor. I'm actually thinking about fear walking around now as a toddler and I'm watching my Shih Tzu walk around and he's staring at me, and I'm just waiting for him to like whine or bark. So, it's [INDISCERNIBLE 00:32:34]. He just got a haircut, so he looks nuts. Like, he looks like an old man.

Anyway, this was a really fun conversation and I'm glad we circled back to it. And I'm really, really happy that we made the time today.

MARJORIE JEAN: Same.

PATRICK CASALE: And just tell the audience where they you can find more of what you're offering, your workbook, any of the things that you have coming up.

MARJORIE JEAN: Sure. My website is just ramcircle.com. It's R-A-M circle, like the shape .com. On that website, you'll find my workbook Esteem. And this is also the place where if someone can request an appointment with me, individual therapy, I will say that starting at the top of the year I won't be taking any more therapy clients until the ones that I have rollout, if they do because some have told me they will never.

And then, also, on the website, organizations can schedule an appointment if they want mental health first aid training, trainings around esteem, cultural esteem. And if someone just want to connect with me, I'm on social media as well on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Marjorie Jean. So, yeah.

PATRICK CASALE: Thank you so much, Marjorie. And all of that information will be in the show notes and description. And links will be included so that you have easy access to all of her information.

Thanks for coming on and making the time today.

And to everyone listening to the All Things Private Practice podcast, new episodes are out every single Saturday on all major platforms and YouTube. Like, download, subscribe, and share Doubt yourself, do it anyway. And we'll see you next week.