EP 2.1: Balancing Goals and Healing in Therapy: Navigating the Tension with Silvana Espinoza Lau

Apr 5, 2023

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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.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

The complex set of factors that impact how therapists approach goal-setting before a client even gets in the room, from education to pressure from insurance companies
Why we need to acknowledge the biases and agendas we bring to our practice, and the wider context of cultural agendas that impact our clients
Why measured progress is not the same as real healing, especially within oppressive systems
How to lean into curiosity and connection when working with clients with differing identities