In the final episode of my last season, Therapists As Makers of Culture, I asked you to think about what kind of professional culture you want to leave behind for the next generation of therapists and clients. 

We have an opportunity, with a little luck and intention and skill, to change something important about the structures of how things have been. We have an opportunity to lay the foundations for a different, hopefully better, culture of therapy that we’d like to leave behind for whoever comes next.

I want to make a professional culture where we challenge ourselves and each other to stretch our capacities to hold complexity.

In this conversation with Silvana Espinoza Lau, we’re discussing some of those complexities.

We’re talking about how we determine and assess where we’re actually trying to go with clients when we embark on the journey of therapy with them, the importance of paying attention to all of the different and sometimes competing agendas that inform a client’s stated goals, and how we can use connection and curiosity as our guideposts.

Silvana Espinoza Lau (she/her/ella), is a healer and settler in unceded Kalapuya land of the Champinefu band. She holds several privileged and marginalized identities that inform the way she supports people. Experiencing an oppressive system, that at times told her she did not belong, has given her enough empathy to support people who have felt othered, unseen, underserved, and underrepresented.

She loves to support individuals who feel as the representatives of their culture, or who feel in between cultures. She especially likes to support BIPoC, a population that has been largely underserved and asked to adjust to Western norms.

Even though she believes in anti-oppression, decolonization, and liberation, her hope is to move towards dismantling and recreating therapy as centering the people who have been forced to exist at the margins due to our current oppressive systems.