All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
Random thought three: In was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Thank you for your insights. This one hadn't fully clicked for me, but I had never felt fully comfortable with this model. I'm immediately suspicious of any model that presents a single "right" way and is predominantly focused on identifying the ways you can be "wrong" and correcting them. Which as you lay out perfectly here underlies and acts as a seed for supremacist frameworks. I absolutely believe that decolonizing the family/systems of kinship is among the most vital pathways to liberation. Kinship is the heart of collective power, the heart of indigenous + traditional land-based lifeways. And the homogenous white(ified) nuclear family is the core cell of empire.
Any model that begins with the premise of diagnosing 'wrongness' and universality tends to smuggle supremacist logic under the guise of care. Attachment Theory, like so many other psych frameworks, positions itself as neutral and liberatory while reinforcing a moralizing gaze, which is just a euphemism for legibility within artificial norms. Thank you for articulating your response so clearly.
Every Pluto transit leaves behind a world unrecognizable from the one before. The challenge isn’t just destruction—it’s making sure what comes next is worth it.
I’ve been out of touch with my Media and Cultural studies at uni for a couple of years now and your essay brought back all of my feelings I experienced when researching and learning about ideologies and certain lectures. Makes me really question, again, the meaning of my own work and how I can incorpoate these structures within it.
That’s great to hear. It’s always fascinating how certain ideas or frameworks stay dormant for a while and then resurface with new urgency. Ideology has a way of shaping us even when we think we’ve stepped away from it. If the essay sparked something, maybe it’s worth revisiting those structures—not just as theory, but as something to actively shape your own work. What are you thinking of incorporating?
Very good question. I have quite abstract thoughts, hard to express with words which is where I have my art to clarify that part for me. I guess, in my thinking… I want to steer clear from anything ideological, political, social, etc and just create but theres no way thats possible because we ourselves are shaped by all of those markers. I’ll have to think this one through.
That makes sense. Art can capture what words can’t, and that’s part of its power. But maybe the question isn’t whether you can steer clear of ideology, politics, or social forces, but how you navigate them without feeling constrained by them. If we’re shaped by these structures, then isn’t art also a way of reshaping them—whether we intend to or not?
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?
All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
Yes, it’s time we begin to name the elephant in the room
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
The power is removed once we start naming the constraints. It starts somewhere, somehow. Glad to be in conversation with you.
wowwwwww. this truly needs to be read worldwide!
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
you point out many interesting connections. thank you for writing in.
Random thought three: In was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
“[Our hearts] are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.” — thank you for your poignant reflection, mercury
Truly one of the best pieces I have read for a long time. Thank you for putting words to what many of us have been struggling with.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Thank you for your insights. This one hadn't fully clicked for me, but I had never felt fully comfortable with this model. I'm immediately suspicious of any model that presents a single "right" way and is predominantly focused on identifying the ways you can be "wrong" and correcting them. Which as you lay out perfectly here underlies and acts as a seed for supremacist frameworks. I absolutely believe that decolonizing the family/systems of kinship is among the most vital pathways to liberation. Kinship is the heart of collective power, the heart of indigenous + traditional land-based lifeways. And the homogenous white(ified) nuclear family is the core cell of empire.
Thank you for this work. It is deeply important.
Any model that begins with the premise of diagnosing 'wrongness' and universality tends to smuggle supremacist logic under the guise of care. Attachment Theory, like so many other psych frameworks, positions itself as neutral and liberatory while reinforcing a moralizing gaze, which is just a euphemism for legibility within artificial norms. Thank you for articulating your response so clearly.
Thank you for producing this. I have a lot of thinking to do. I absolutely loved the music at the end. Kindness is king!
I'm so happy you enjoyed it!
thank you <3
This is the perfect Pluto in Aquarius revolutionary type of text we need to see more of for the generation to come
Every Pluto transit leaves behind a world unrecognizable from the one before. The challenge isn’t just destruction—it’s making sure what comes next is worth it.
Great essay!
Thanks Alexandra!
I’ve been out of touch with my Media and Cultural studies at uni for a couple of years now and your essay brought back all of my feelings I experienced when researching and learning about ideologies and certain lectures. Makes me really question, again, the meaning of my own work and how I can incorpoate these structures within it.
That’s great to hear. It’s always fascinating how certain ideas or frameworks stay dormant for a while and then resurface with new urgency. Ideology has a way of shaping us even when we think we’ve stepped away from it. If the essay sparked something, maybe it’s worth revisiting those structures—not just as theory, but as something to actively shape your own work. What are you thinking of incorporating?
Very good question. I have quite abstract thoughts, hard to express with words which is where I have my art to clarify that part for me. I guess, in my thinking… I want to steer clear from anything ideological, political, social, etc and just create but theres no way thats possible because we ourselves are shaped by all of those markers. I’ll have to think this one through.
That makes sense. Art can capture what words can’t, and that’s part of its power. But maybe the question isn’t whether you can steer clear of ideology, politics, or social forces, but how you navigate them without feeling constrained by them. If we’re shaped by these structures, then isn’t art also a way of reshaping them—whether we intend to or not?
Thanks for the perspective :) and chat!
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?