Many of us struggle with adult friendships and relationships where we feel depleted when our needs are not met,

grieving when our friendships aren't balanced,

when the energy out isn't being reciprocated.

🌐 True needs challenge the status quo: of assigned conditional rules and requirements for so called “love and care”

Sometimes “love and care” may be disguised as a series of conditions. We may have been taught to meet other's needs first before we get to pursue what we want. Over time, the more we perceive the needs of others, the more we struggle with people pleasing behaviours. Needs will be perceived as a zone for emotional burnout, and uber confusing. ‘Needs’ from conditions are not rooted from a place of love, respect, solidarity and reciprocity.
 

🌀 People pleasing is giving "I don’t know how to meet my needs”

People pleasing tends to lead us to become disingenuous with ourselves and with others around us. It takes us away from the present moment by predicting what others’ needs are before we know what ours are.

🍄 Needs contain multitudes. They come from a radical, unfixed and abstract space. 
 

We have the right to feel, to transform, to express a range of self to meet mutual understanding of these needs.

🪴 Our needs are true expressions of our identity.

I notice my body slowly ease up whenever I nurture and actively find ways to meet my own needs.

🤚🏼 Refusal for ‘uncomfortable performances’

I hope you will practice taking a few moments every time you are about to reply to a friend to figure out what your needs are with this friendship!

Is it love, appreciation, respect, autonomy, nurturance community, intimacy, safety, security, commitment, consistency, mutual understanding, connection…?

💗 We need culture and companionship that truly loves us.

Just as much we train to predict, foresee, and have gotten really good reading into what other's needs are…

⏰ When you find out what your needs are, what are the things you will have room for?

By working on bracketing out assumptions and decentering how you will be perceived, you get to make space for authenticity, rooted in humanizing responses towards yourself and can then be reflected back to your relationships.

🌳 Needs are not individualized and all needs are equally important! 
 

Our needs are not in the shape of a triangle/hierarchy.

Did you know Maslow, the person who ‘coined’ the hierarchy of needs took Blackfoot first nation’s knowledge and teachings when he spent 6 weeks there in 1938, and shaped human needs to reflect that of white supremacist culture (into a triangle) where needs are individualized.
 

🧭 If we haven’t even began to decolonize our human needs, no wonder it would be difficult to understand and ‘actualize’ what our needs are! 

It makes sense why so many of us are looking desperately for spaces where we feel a sense of community and belonging. And we end up blaming ourselves and the city for being the problem. We haven’t found ways to take care of each other to reach reciprocity yet.

🪨 Staying in care of our needs fuels our demands of a better world. And helps us reclaim the rest/ease our bodies need to thrive in.

There is no need to rush or get to perfection. Unlearning needs is going to be a lifelong process. There will always be time, to reimagine the relationship with needs to reach self-actualization (in my own words, to understand oneself).

🛟 This practice is expansive and life-saving ♡ 

So please keep coming back to your human needs!

CW: This next bit is about AI. Please take care of yourself. You don't have to read this. Your wellbeing is much more important than this stuff anyways.

 

 

Is it just me or have institutions been changing their sense of speed to match that of what a machine-learning AI would be? 

The world around us have been fear mongering and warning us that "AI isn’t the future, it’s the present."

 

And as AI becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, it has influenced our expectations and standards for ourselves and how productive we need to be. 

 

Do those ‘not enough’ intrusive thoughts show up for you?

It's definitely been biting me this entire year and I'm so sick of it.

Collectively, it's being felt and it's a lot on our nervous systems, on our communities, and on the way we operate in our daily routines.

It's like adjusting to a pandemic with permanence, coming in fast at us.

This reminds me of the same intense charge race and yt supremacy has on us, and all the other -isms have on the oppressed. 

When it comes to this charge, we tend to override and not look at the impulse, or flight responses our body has tempered for us.

Our bodies KNOW what this is. 

As a therapist, my role is to support and protect our nervous systems (think of it as leaning into our experiential wisdom and presence as we move through the world). And embracing our humanity.

We need to listen to the artists and humans when working with AI. We need to center in our humanity and protect our communities. 

We need to remember what is indispensable about you.

That is what will save us.

If you are in need of a few moments, please stay here and tune into your body. Your breath. The speed of you reading and taking this in. Slow down. Literally go take a break if you feel compelled to.

Play around with your tone of voice as you repeat these words with every inhale. If you're more of a visual person, try imagining an image of each of these mantras… here it goes…
 

I am not a machine. 
PAUSE.

My humanity is vital for life on Earth.

PAUSE.

I am not replaceable. 

PAUSE.

I am indispensable. 

PAUSE.

I am enough just as I am.

PAUSE.

I have ancestral wisdom.

PAUSE.

I am part of creation itself.

PAUSE. And exhale……… 

How is your body doing? 

Can you orient to something supportive around you? 

Let's go with that…

“Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art; the art of words…the name of our beautiful reward is not profit, it is freedom.”

— Ursula Le Guin 

“This is not how a human face looks” “The proportion is not right”

At first, resistance towards making art sounds like the inner critic.

That “my drawing is not up to par so I am not an artist”. 

 

I’ve been noticing that these critiques are ideas that originated from colonialism of what art is and isn’t.

Colonization of art has changed the way we see art culturally, politically and socially. 

Under censorship and control (aka. capitalism), our creative practices has become commodified - where art should be made for profit and for some form of gain.

Art is an act of resistance

How can we start to make art for ourselves as resistance from colonialism and for joy?

How can we connect with our images and art making that isn’t based from a lens towards the fine arts?

…working with art and images as a means to resist socio-political oppression.

Anti-oppressive art therapists are working to reclaim our creative practice and decolonize art making with art therapy and contesting to structural oppression from the psychotherapy field.

Shaun McNiff wrote in his book, Trust the Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go, that “art therapists are like refugees from the art world”. I’d like to think of us as rebels of the art world instead.

So how have you been rebelling in your creative practice?

“All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS. What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. 

I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it.”

―Toni Morrison

Some forms of art as resistance I have been working with are: 

• Making zines: a form of self-publishing art that came from feminist, activist movements popularized from the 80s. When I first started working as an art therapist, I created a workshop called, Zine Therapy (I was obsessed with making them). Zines are easy to distribute, low budget, and the content is filtered through the creator’s POV. My current faves are by Bianca ✨

• Cartoons and memes: sometimes opinionated, other times sensitive, maybe brightly coloured or humorous, through a critical lens through doodles/animations or storytelling with images … like my friend's work by John! ✨

• Clay/pottery: when I play with this earthy medium, themes around politics of the body and ‘smashing’ the patriarchy come up (💁‍♀️to get those air bubbles out). I love the meditative and trance-like feeling when I’m on the wheel… the way this medium holds memory and can be both delicate and forgiving—like healing with trauma.

If you wanted to share your thoughts, feel free to email me at linda@deciphercounselling.com.

Save this practice and come back to it for another day. If you know someone who may like this, share this blog post with them!

Thanks so much for being here :-)

I have been reflecting how from the outside…

social justice-work,

work by creatives or

those who want to make change in the world,

…have become romanticized.

It's the work that drives us to go around what's been already mapped out.

It can be deeply healing and rewarding, and can also be gritty, hard work.

So, what does social justice-oriented care look like? It means that we are committed to providing care that is anti-oppressive and rooted in social justice principles. This means that we work to identify and challenge systems of oppression. We aim to practice being in accountability and collective care with one another. We know that social change is a slow and difficult process, but we are committed to the long haul.

Here are some justice-oriented practices we, as a group therapy practice and as therapists, are committed in doing:

1. We are committed to the unlearning, decolonizing and working with values rooted in the principles of anti-oppression/anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, and HAES alongside you. We are also committed to examining our relationships to whiteness, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and cis-heteronormativity as we talk to folks who come across our practice.
   

2. We aim to organize and redistribute wealth as much as we can. We reflect and actively work through a scarcity and charity mindset to one that is in solidarity and in community. After all, this work is survival work.
   
   

3. We aim to uphold anti-carceral care towards nuanced experiences and mental health cases we work with. Aka fighting for a world free from policing. Consent is highly prioritized in our work with folks. We are continuously reflecting on what the therapy field does that may perpetuate harm and power dynamics in and out of the therapy room. 
   

4. The effort to flatten hierarchies in systems. We work from a horizontal decision making structure in our team where we have as many people and members make decisions as possible.
   

   
   Note: We get that many of the folks we work with are struggling with or don’t work in settings where they can advocate/speak up for their values, are acknowledged, and are feeling stuck. In therapy, we may be brainstorming ways to support you in these oppressive spaces and find ways to name out what is going on more clearly.
   

5. We aim to support people in most dire conditions and center in marginalized folks and voices that are most impacted first, always.
   

6. Generative conflict and communication. Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid discusses how conflict can be reworked into something positive and generative rather than something to be avoided and left to fester. This can look like clear decision making everyone is trained in.
   

7. We are committed in our own healing. Because some of us have been through similar stuff like the folks we work with and part of their journey speaks to parts of us from different points in our life that we are still working on. This is probably a big reason why we want to do this work alongside you.

We want to work together with you to end oppression in all of its forms. When we say "with you", we mean it. Everyone has a role to play in social justice, whether it is big or small. Because social justice in therapy can support folks to be heard and felt.