Dr. Laura Brown: Feminist Therapy For All

[Music] Thank you for listening to Therapy for Guys. My name is Kike Atri and I'm a licensed professional counselor in Katie, Texas. In this podcast, I want to explore the issues that men stay silent about. Our struggles with anxiety and depression. Our relationship issues. Obstacles that we face with a diagnosis like ADHD or autism or OCD. In our big existential crises, those related to spirituality and religion. To larger cultural realities and to the question of the meaning of life. If you enjoy this podcast and you would like to learn more about me, I would encourage you to check out my website. You can find it at kikeatri.com. That's q-u-i-q-u-e-a-u-t-r-e-y.com. I would love to hear from you. I would love to connect. And as always, remember, continue the conversation. [Music] [Music] [Music] In this episode, I speak with Dr. Laura Brown. Dr. Brown is a clinical and forensic psychologist in independent practice in Seattle, Washington. A speaker and author on feminist therapy theory and practice. She offers workshops and trainings to professionals and the public on such topics as trauma treatment, cultural competence, psychological assessment and ethics. In this wonderful episode, we discuss her Jewish social justice tradition, decolonial, liberatory, intersectional feminist therapy, both the theory and the practice side. Her relationship to IKIDO and how that connects to her therapy. She helps us understand toxic masculinity and how feminism can benefit men. And so much more. This was one of my favorite conversations. As I say in the podcast, I felt like I was sitting at the feet of a true master. This is someone who's been in psychotherapeutic work for well over 60 years. It's incredible. She knows so much and she has a way of connecting with people that's inspiring. Guys, we need to rethink feminism. Feminism is not a dirty concept. It's not something that we need to be afraid of. It's not going to emasculate us. As she points out in the podcast, feminism is not anti-man. It's anti-patriarchy. It's anti the ideology that results in toxic masculinity. Why would we want to be a truncated version of ourselves? We need to open up to all of our emotions and understand the ways that the larger system has disempowered us. I really hope that you're inspired by this conversation. My hope and prayer is that you connect with a friend, go out to eat, go grab a beer, and talk about some of these difficult topics. Explore how feminism could help you and shape you and even transform you. As always, guys, remember, continue the conversation. [Music] [Music] So, Dr. Laura Brown, thank you so much for being a part of my podcast. Therapy for Guys. I'm very excited about this conversation tonight. Well, I'm pleased to be here. So, why don't we get started? What's on your mind? Well, so what I like to start with is by asking the guests to just maybe briefly introduce themselves a little bit of background and then sort of what they're up to in terms of their scholarship or their clinical practice and then maybe we can launch into a conversation after that point. Wow, that's a long, long answer. So, I was a therapist until December of 2018, working primarily with survivors of complex childhood trauma. I continue to do forensic work in the area of bad things happening to people and I do consultation which looks like supervision and I'm writing, working on some new books and being able to teach in the era of COVID via Zoom, just finished recording a series in China. I'm getting ready to do some workshops in Canada and another series in China. So, I'm doing what I've been doing in my career which is kind of spreading the word about doing decolonial, liberatory, intersectional feminist therapy which I've been involved with since before I started graduate school back in 1973. Oh, I love it. And in a moment, I really want to kind of dig deep into what that means and what it looks like in practice. But one of the places I wanted to start was just in doing more research on you and learning more about your work and the trajectory of your career. In several places I saw that sort of the Jewish social justice tradition was maybe still is very important to you and I was hoping maybe you could speak to that and what ways has that tradition sort of shaped you? That is the core of who I am. So in Judaism we have 613 commandments. But two of them are particularly important and one of them is Setic Tildolf which is Prasujustus and the other one is Tikun Olam which is the healing of the world. And if you look at there's a lot of stuff in the Hebrew Bible which I know in the original and Thai taught Hebrew school for years I speak the language pretty well. There's a lot of stuff that stories about people doing things to each other. There's some beautiful poetry, there's some interesting philosophy but there's also a lot of rules about how to treat people in compassionate and just ways. And it comes out as don't put a stumbling block before the person who can't see. Be kind to the stranger which really is how we speak of the immigrant because you are strangers in the land of Egypt. Don't withhold wages from the worker. Pay them what you agreed to pay them. That is in Torah. So I was raised on that stuff. I was raised with the notion that as a Jew I can do a lot of things that probably violate some of the 613 because in Judaism there's a lot of wiggle room but that the issues about justice and just treatment of other human beings and creating a just world remain core and central. And so that got me started into social justice movements when I was still a teen and I haven't been doing that for about 60 years of that now. That's amazing. Wow. And I've talked to some Jewish scholars who have talked about even the concept of righteousness isn't about, you know, individual morality and kind of a purity thing, but it's about right relationship. And I didn't know if that would resonate with you. Yeah, because purity is, it's a whole different category of stuff in Jewish thought. It's not about setting yourself above people. It's about how do you take other people into account? How do you think about your effect? I'm not sure. You know, we're coming up on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. And the hymns we chant in which we basically confess our wrongdoings are all chanted in the first person plural. No one says, I did this, but I didn't, but I didn't do this thing. It's like, we all did these things. Oh, I love that. And we are all accountable. And the other part of the Yom Kippur service that I really love is there is a line that says for wrongdoings between humans and the divine, the day of Atonement and atones, it repairs. But if you have a rupture with another human, you have to go repair that rupture in order for the rupture to be healed. So you can't just say, oops, God, sorry, you have to go and do the rupture repair. And so this is the time of year when a lot of Jews will go around saying to people, if I did something that ruptured our relationship, let me know so I can do what I can to repair it. And you'll notice that in, like Jewish people, we know we'll say, if I offended you in any way in the last year, we're coming up on the 10 days, what's called the Yameem Naraim, the 10 days of Abitim Rosh Hashanah, our new year, and Yom Kippur the day of Atonement. It's like, that's sort of your last chance to get that into your work. And so when it says, said it to your dove, pursue righteousness, it's pursue justice. And it's not even pursue its run hard after justice. And where you see people getting in trouble, you know, if you read the stories of the hypothetical kings, and I think a lot of it is made up stuff. If you read the story of how they got in trouble, they got in trouble because they stopped being decent. You know, King David gets in trouble because he sends a man off to get killed at war so he can have his wife. Right. And he suffers for it ever after. And so I think that that message that being respectful and decent and pursuing justice is so very central to everything I haven't learned about how to be in the world. And so when I encountered the social justice parts of psychology, it's like, oh yeah, this is where I belong. Wow. This is who I'm there. This is what I'm here to do. And how can I keep deepening that, which is what I'm about? Oh, that's great. So one thing you said, I think in one of the podcasts that I listened to was that it, you know, something also connected to your Jewish roots was being an iconoclast. And I was curious what you meant by that. Oh, okay. So I grew up in a family where this family model was don't be a sheep and follow the flock. Oh, I like that. And there's really great things about that in that it makes you iconoclastic and it makes you question everything. And certainly Jewish education is the teaching of critical thinking. We really are asked to question everything. But my family took it up several matches and like don't go along with stuff just because everyone else is going along with it, which is which when you're in middle school sucks. Right. Yes. I work with a lot of middle schoolers. So yeah. Yeah. But as a psychologist, it has given me a freeing foundation to look at the canon of our field and say, excuse me, this is rife with sexism and misogyny and racism and white supremacy in homophobia. And we could do something about that. Let's do something about that. Yes. I always say that the iconoclast calls bullshit on stuff. Precisely. And in my case says, and then what are we going to do to clean it up and change it because it's not enough to just say, oh, the emperor has no clothes. Okay. It's essential to say. And so what are we going to do? How are we going to take responsibility because there is no such thing as a bystander as the student movement said in the 1960s, you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem. And if you're standing by, you're part of the problem. And so being part of the solution to the problems, not just in our field, but in the world is what my colleagues and I have been up to for a very long time. Wow. Okay. I'm hoping we can get into that. So I remember in grad school reading your book and learning about you and other sort of feminist therapists. In my own work, I've emphasized relational cultural theory, which maybe we can talk a little bit about. And I work primarily with men. So I feel like I'm familiar with sort of doing male therapy, but with sort of a feminist perspective in a lot of ways. But I was hoping that you could just give us like an elevator pitch on what you mean by feminist therapy. And maybe we can kind of break that down a little bit. Well, as we as we just say, I'm one foot standing on one foot, the essence of it. So intersectional liberatory decolonial feminist therapy is a therapy that centers gender and power in its analysis of how it is the people become disempowered and distressed. It looks at systemic and structural forms of oppression, starting with patriarchy from which flow, misogyny and toxic masculinity. Yeah. And from which also flow, other forms of structural oppression, such as white supremacy, heterosexism and homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism and so on. So for feminist therapists, the sort of the the big overarching structural form of oppression is patriarchy. And the distress of the people feel is evidence of how they're trying to cope with that and how it's affected them. So how they're trying not to know that it's affecting them, how they're trying not to know how unsafe they are in the world, how they're trying to express the experience of being wounded by it. And so we don't look at people's distress as a symptom. We don't look at their problematic behaviors as a symptom. Instead we say, okay, what's the distress telling us about this person's circumstances? What are these problematic behaviors telling us about something this person doesn't know how to solve because misogyny, toxic masculinity, patriarchy, white supremacy have given them self-destructive tools and answers. Wow. And you find that a lot of the work you've done and that you continue to do has to do with like psycho education helping these individuals understand. Well, somewhere down the line, yes. Okay. But when someone comes into your office and distress, you don't give people a lecture about blood flow before you put on the bandage. Right. And so what I do is I do feminist therapy with people. And I ask the question, how is this a problem? When someone thinks it's a problem or I say, what is this problem? Are you trying to solve with this that is creating more problems for you? So I see. And I look at the issues of power and powerlessness and work to create a collaborative relationship with people from the start that says, I know a lot about the conditions under which change can occur. And you know everything about you even though it's been hidden from you, even though you have been misled, even though you have perhaps been lied to about who you are and what your capacities are. So let's get together and figure this out. Somewhere along the line, and in my consent form, it says, you know, what I do is feminist therapy. Sure. And every person born male who's walked into my office has read that and says, what does this have to do with me? I said, you know, what it has to do with you is that this is about the ways in which you've been taught to be a man that have harmed you. And I said, you stick around for a little bit, see what you think. If it turns out that it's not a good fit for you, you'd be glad to refer. But that's what I think it has to do. And you know, you look at the work of people like Matt Engler Carlson or Ron Levant who do feminist therapy focusing on the experience of people born male and looking at the effects of toxic masculinity. You know, Ron came up with the constructive normative male Alex Obamia. And these are feminist therapists who are men who are looking at the conditions and experiences of people raised in the toxic stew of toxic masculinity that is part of patriarchy. Yeah. So how would you, let's say there is a male in your office and they're wondering wondering about the whole feminist thing, and they've heard toxic masculinity is harmful to women and to trans people, but they haven't thought about how it's harmful to themselves. How would you begin to help them understand that? - Well, I would ask them questions. First of all, I wouldn't say toxic masculinity to them. - Sure. - Unless there's somebody who comes in saying, I wanna deal with that, which is rare. What I would say is, so if you're wondering how this feminist therapy thing has to do with you, the question I would ask you is, what lessons were you taught about what you had to do to be a man that are part of the pain that you're bringing here today? Well, that opens up a lot of discussions. - Yes, it does. - Do you recall any conversations throughout your years that were really interesting around that question? - Well, what in particular, and this was very early in my career, and this man, he was an upper middle class, white man, highly educated, referred to me by a mutual acquaintance. And at some point after it was clear that we were gonna work together, I said, so I'm really curious of all the therapists in Seattle, why me? And he said, because if you can be comfortable and content and okay in the world, as this lesbian in this world that doesn't like lesbians, we're talking in the early 1980s. - Got you. - Then maybe I could figure out why I am so uncomfortable in my own skin and have been forever, 'cause I don't feel like I'm being a man the right way. And so maybe you can help me with this. - Wow, that's powerful. - And I said, I said, you know, I am so honored that you're willing to take the risk with me. And let's start at the very beginning. How is it that you don't feel like you fit? And we went from there. - Got you. Yeah, I know I really liked that. You know, one of the things that that kind of leads me to want to ask you is, how would you and kind of feminist therapy in the strand that you work in, think about power and working with a client around issues of power? - So first of all, feminist therapy really doesn't define power in the way that it's typically defined in terms of power over people or control of other people and resources. - Okay. - There's really four dimensions of power. And I think you encountered this in my writing. - Yes. - And then, I think that, you know, that's the kind of power that you're going to have to do. - And then, you know, I think that's the kind of power that you're going to have to do. - And then, you know, then dissociating from particular emotional experiences. And there we get to normative male Alexa Thomia, which is incredibly disempowering. 'Cause if the only emotion you're allowed to know about is anger, then you are so disempowered. - Absolutely. - It was said. - It's like, you have a toolbox that is empty, except for the hammer. - Mm. - And, you know, so my spouse is a journeyman carpenter and she's got an amazing set of tools, like hundreds and hundreds of tools that are specialty tools for lots of different things. - Sure. - Well, that's what we need emotionally. We need all of those specialty tools. And sometimes, the hammer is what we need, if there's an ale and sometimes, it's something that it's a dremel tool. You have something that, you know, and you can do like fine carving with. So, we have inter psychic power. Our relationship to ourselves, our ability to sue ourselves, to ground ourselves, to be fully present with ourselves, with all of our emotions. Then there's interpersonal power, which is being able to be effective and relational to repair a rupture, to accept repairs of rupture, to be attuned to other people, to be able to have boundaries that are not thick walls to be able to respect the boundaries of others, to solve problems in ways that don't do harm to others. - Yes. - And then there's what I think of as spiritual existential power, which is having a meeting-making system that is yours that wasn't the one that was, you know, force-fed you. - You're right. - But that is yours that works for you, that gives you a sense of connection to your value and to making the world a better place. And people are disempowered on all of those variables, to one degree or another. And trauma is disempowering, oppression is disempowering. And so people come in and they say I'm depressed. And what I learned to ask really early on is, so what does your depression do for you? Because depression is a form of power of the enslaved. If you're depressed and you can't do what you're supposed to do, you can't be faulted for it because you're depressed. - Right. - Well, the power of the enslaved, the just not being able to do something, the question is, so is it there another way for you to have power and choice? Because if this feels like the only choice you have, you're suffering a lot for this one. - Yeah, no, that's really good. - Yeah. - Now, you know, I've heard you talk about, and this I guess would be related to the interpersonal power dynamic, just energetic attunement in therapy. - Yeah. - And I just, I love that because I think that's such an important part of how I think about my own work. And so I was hoping you could just riff on that, what you mean by energetic attunement with people, with clients that you work with. - So I didn't know that not everybody picks up on people's energy. And I think that I learned to do that in a family with a very depressed father and a probably autistic father, where picking up on energy was a necessary survival strategy because if I could feel the energy of the house when I came in, I could protect myself, I could take care of myself. And if I missed where the energy was, that things would happen. Well, it turns out that that's very useful for being a therapist. And so I noticed what's happening energetically. I kind of sort of feel what's happening. I feel in my body, what is my body feeling about what's happening with this person's energy? I get, this is gonna sound bizarre, but I have an internal jukebox. - I like it. - My unconscious speaks to me through words in music. I used to be a singer and it comes from diagonally to the right. And so I'll pick up energy because I get a song that comes at me and I'll say, I just thought of curiosity. I'm wondering if maybe something that this could be going on. And eventually people I work with long enough said the jukebox, I'm like, yeah, the jukebox. So I also am now a second degree black belt in the Marshall Art of Peace, IKIDO, where we work with energy and where we can move people through the world and touch them energetically and resolve conflict when somebody moves towards you in a way that could do you harm, that you could make sure that no one has harmed them to them by weaving the energy around them, feeling the energy in them, doing something that's both connective and create safety. - Oh, I love that. - And for me, when I discovered IKIDO when I was 50, I'd read about it and it made a lot of sense to me, and I started studying it at 50. I was like, okay, as a therapist, this is a really valuable thing to have because it sort of takes my capacity to sense energy up many, many notches. But a lot of it is, what is it like to be in the room of someone, what does it feel like? When someone walks in and I feel agitated, when someone walks in and I feel just wave of sadness wafting across the room for me. And I haven't been a therapist for almost four years, but I still do forensic evaluations. - Okay, I wondered about that. - In cases that involve trauma. - Okay. - And so people will be sitting across the screen for me in terrible distress and I can feel it. And they may be doing their best not to express it. And I'll say it seems as if there's some kind of feeling coming through the screen to me. Am I making that up? And they'll be like, no, I think, can you tell me the name of the feeling? So I think being attuned to what it feels like to be in the present. of another person and the hard part for me is being out in the world. Okay. And because I can't shut this off entirely almost ever. Sure. Unless I've got a book in front of me. Okay. And books have been the, how to shut off the energy of the world coming out of this energy my whole life. But I will be in a group of people and pick up that somebody is in distress somewhere. And sometimes I will respond to it. And sometimes I won't. Because sometimes I have enough resources to respond and sometimes I don't. But I've been in situations where I will feel the distress coming at me. So and then I was helped along in my skills at this by my late therapy dog who hasn't been with us for nearly 14 years. I'm sorry to hear that. I was hoping you would talk about him. Because Schmullik was a master at reading the changes and how people smelled and how they were breathing because he was a staff at your bull terrier. Terriers are extremely predatory dogs. They're among the most predatory of the dog breeds. Terriers and docksons. And because they're predatory they really smell and sense very subtle changes. Well, you take a dog who from the age of eight weeks sat in the therapy office and his predatory instincts get turned into what looks like extreme attunement to human beings. And so he would his behavior was suddenly change. And I would realize he was picking up on something I hadn't noticed yet. And he taught me how to notice things. Micro expressions, micro changes that I didn't know to see or to notice. And sometimes people would get really annoyed with him. It's like, "Schmullik, stop telling Laura what I'm doing." I'm sorry, but he's incapable of not telling us. It would be very interesting. I work with some people who have dissociative ego states. And sometimes the switching would be very, very subtle. And his behavior would change radically. And I would say, "Okay, is there someone else up front?" And that one would get like, "Schmullik, you gave me away." So he really added to that. But I think that you don't need to have a therapy dog to do this. Okay. Although I can tell you that many of the people I trained have therapy dogs as a result of watching Schmullik at work. Oh, I bet it. But noticing what does it feel like to be in the room with someone? What are they carrying in the room and being open to that as really important information? And to say, "I feel something powerful and heavy. Can you tell me what you would call that?" So I don't name the feeling for someone. Okay. Because that's me imposing my language on it. Sure. But instead, I'm budding the person to know that I'm resonating with them. And sometimes the person will say, "I don't want to talk about it." Right. And I'll be like, "Okay, let's just agree that we've agreed not to talk about the whatever it is and that we both acknowledge that it's here. Tell me what you do want to talk about." There was a guy I worked with for quite a long time. He was a survivor of horrific sexual assault by priests. Oh, man. And most of the time what he wanted to talk about was our local sports teams. Okay. And he would come in and he would start on that and I would say, "Okay, can we just stop from moment in a degree that we're going to agree that we are talking about the Mariners? Because there's something going on with you that you're not ready to talk about yet." But I'm not going to pretend that there isn't something that you're not ready to talk about yet. I'm just going to agree that you get to decide what we're talking about. And he would be like, "Oh, yeah, Doc." And because he could trust me not to push him, he was able to eventually come in and say, "Okay, I think I've been avoiding talking about." And it turned out that there was a thing that nobody knew about that was enormous and even more of a sense of shame for him than the rapes by the priests. And that took a lot of years of, "Okay, how about the Mariners?" Right. And eventually I said, "Could we at least talk about the Seahawks because I watched them?" But it's that kind of thing that's being willing to, instead of saying to people, "You're being avoidant, you're being defensive to say this person doesn't feel safe enough yet." So respect that and do the process of becoming safe enough by respecting them. But also be their therapist and say, "We're agreeing that we're not talking about the thing that whatever it is we're not talking about. We're agreeing not to talk about it until you are ready to talk about it." I like that. Could you say more about what it looks like for a feminist therapist to cultivate that therapeutic alliance? Are there other things? I've read that you've talked about the importance of rupture and repair, what about therapists disclosure, those kinds of things. What does all that look like? Well, it doesn't look like one size fits all. Amen to that. Because there isn't. What there is is asking someone sometimes, "Would it be helpful for you to hear about something in my life?" And sometimes what I do is I make up a strong person and say, "You know, can I tell you about somebody who's had an experience like yours?" Yeah. So it's a non-self-disclosure, self-disclosure. Sometimes people will ask me questions and I'll say, "You know, that is behind my privacy boundary. It's perfectly reasonable for you to want to know about that." But that's not something that I share with people outside of very close intimate circle of folks. And then I'll say, "And because you've been violated so much, this may feel to you like a rejection. Because you don't know that it's okay to have a privacy boundary." And I have one person who went into impatience because she was suicidal over something like that, probably a dozen times. In the first couple of years, we worked together. So it's about being reliable and trustworthy and doing what I say I'm going to do. It's stupid stuff like starting with sessions on time and ending them on time. No, that's not stupid. That's important. And when people say, "Well, why won't you run over?" I say, "Because we have an agreement." Yes. And if I don't keep that agreement with you, then I break it with the next person and the next on the next. And I don't want to break the agreement with you. And so what I'm doing, the reason why 15 minutes before the end of the session, I say, we've got 15 minutes. Let's make sure you're ready to go out the door. It's not because I'm watching the clock, it's because we have an agreement. This is part of the boundary that keeps us safe. You can rely on me that always start on time. This is why somebody wrote a fake, really negative, yelp review about me once I know it was. Oh, no. And what they said is she left me waiting for 45 minutes past the start of the session. And what I thought is, well, we all know that this is fake because if there's one thing you know about Laura Brown, she always starts on time. Starts on time, she ends on time. Or if I have time, and I will say, okay, I've got a half an hour before my next meeting, let's agree to go over 15 minutes. But we always buy agreement. Okay. Never by accident. So part of modeling being empowered is that we ask for what we want. We make agreements, we keep agreements. And when somebody says, this isn't working for me instead of saying, well, this is the way this is supposed to go. Right. To say, all right, if this isn't working for you, then it's not going to work for me. So let's figure out what isn't working. And let's find something that will work for both of us. I like it. How do you explore, you know, when clients get angry or when they are angry, but they don't want to express it? Well, first of all, when clients get angry, I'm thrilled. And usually the first time someone gets angry, it's like, yeah, you've got to be like, I'm out of my mind. You know, you know, therapists are crazy, but the fact that you can get angry with me means that you have come to believe that I'm safe enough, that you know, I won't punish you. I won't retaliate against you. I won't tell you you're a bad person. I won't treat this as not okay. I mean, we have one basic rule, which is the therapy office is a safe space, which means you cannot do physical harm to me or anything except the -- clean xbox. Okay. If you need to be destructive to something, tear up every clean xbox and the room and then together we will put it in the recycle bin. Okay. Because clean x has no inherent value. But no threats of violence, no doing violence to yourself, to me, to the stuff in the room, except the clean xboxes. Sure. But anger isn't violence. Yelling at me and saying, "Ah, you know, I'm not going to yell too loud so I don't blow out your listener's ear drive." And when somebody isn't ready to express their anger at me, what I will often say is I'm picking up on something and I don't know what it is. And it'll be like, "I don't want to talk about it." It's like, "Okay, but you know when you're ready." The other interesting thing is, so I've learned that I have, when I'm really concentrating and listening hard, my face looks angry to people. Got you. And I learned this early because people would say, "Why are you angry at me?" You look angry. It's like, "I'm not angry. I'm listening really hard." So I learned to say to people, "I have been taught by many folks sitting in the chair you're sitting in, but when I'm listening really intently and concentrating, that sometimes that looks like I'm angry. I promise you, if I'm angry at you, you won't have to figure it out. I will tell you." Got you. And so if you're not sure, check it out. But this is my very serious expression, paying a lot of attention face. And my angry face is, "Wow, I really do not like what you just said." And I would like to find out what's going on there. I will use my words. And what I'll say is, look, you grew up in a situation where people gaslit you, they lied to you, they said, "I'm not angry." I got a fair amount of that. Let's laugh. I said, "I will not gas like you. I will not lie to you. In here, this is the one place in the world, except when I'm sitting in front of a jury having raised my hand and sworn to tell the truth. This healing space is the one place in the world where I absolutely am committed to telling the truth. Even when it makes me feel crappy." Okay, so this, thank you. That was beautiful. This next question, it does apply, or I'm wondering about how it applies to therapy, but maybe even outside the therapy office, even venturing into things like spirituality or your rootedness in the Jewish tradition. How do you think about things like ambiguity and uncertainty? Well, those are really the core of what we do. Okay. One of my very best professors on the first day of the therapy methods class said, "A good therapist has a high tolerance for ambiguity." I couldn't agree more. And when I went on, and this has been inherent of lesson memory, who was a Jesuit priest before, he became a psychologist. Oh, wow. And what I said to my students is, we don't just tolerate ambiguity. We embrace it. We love it. And then we learn that it really sucks. So I've been living for the last four years with stage 3V, metastatic melanoma. Oh, wow. So I am living in uncertainty and ambiguity. I'm having the embodied experience of a rare form of this disease that doesn't respond to the standard treatments that a year ago my team thought I would probably be dead by now. And then they decided to try something that was kind of outside the box. And yay, here I am. So if we want certainty, go into some other field. Yeah. You know, don't become a therapist because we don't even know how people will be when they walk in the door the next time. You know, we see people one or two hours a week and that leaves another 100 and said 67 other 66 hours about which we know nothing. Very true. And so being on the one hand, having a general sense of what's the road this person would like to go along? Where do they hope to be? And for me, knowing that each person who comes to me is this luminous human being. And I can see that even if they can't. Okay. But then how we get there and people say how long this is going to take and what I say is this is not bullshit. This takes as long as it takes. Thank you. And we can't speed it up because if we speed it up, we're going to do damage to you and I'm not willing to do damage to you. And the first thing we do is you figure out how to be empowered and how to assess when other people are behaving in ways that deserve the honor of your trust. I love that, Dr. Lour. Yeah. And so we we talk about how do you assess because people get gaslit and and their assessment capacities. And you know, human beings are born able to assess. We're born able to know when someone is safe enough or when someone is disconnected or when someone is unsafe. Would you say that's intuition? Not intuition. It's actually it's so evolutionary psychology as the few things right. Okay. One of them is we have something called cheater detectors. And this is because when we were 300,000 years ago, early homo sapiens and living in very small bands, we needed to know immediately who was trustworthy and who was not. We need to know if someone was betraying us or someone was safe for us because if we if someone was betraying us, we needed to cut them out of the band fast. Yeah, that makes sense. And so that's part of the neurobiology of attachments. Okay. Is the ability to know when someone is or is not safe. But that gets messed with by, you know, it's like Philip, Mark and his famous poem, they fuck you up your mom and dad, they may not need to, but if they do, they fill you with the faults they had and add some expert just for you. Right. And so life happens at masses with our ability to assess. And so teaching people how to assess and also saying there's no such thing as absolute safety, there's relative safety, there's safe fur, there's closer to safe, there's safe enough for a particular thing. What we have to do here is create safe enough for you to be in touch with the things that you protect yourself from the rest of the time. And you have to assess me. And therefore, I don't expect you to trust me. You have to assess me. So go for it. And I'm going to behave in the most trustworthy manner. I know how. I like it a lot. Can I ask another question about ambiguity and uncertainty? Of course. So whatever you'd like. And I don't want to create a caricature, but, you know, with many people that I work with, even my own kind of past, I think things like religion and spirituality sometimes get coded as things that lead to a lot of certainty and security. But I have not always found that to be the case. So when you think about your own sort of Jewish background, where there are places in your sacred text or practices where you learn to kind of sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. Well, of course, there's a book of ecclesiasties. Oh, one of my favorites. Which essentially says, you don't know what's going to happen. But so on Yom Kippur, actually, I'm both both of the high holy days, both on Oshushanah and Yom Kippur. There is a hymn called the Unitana Tokuf. And it was written by Rabbi who was being tortured to death for being a Jew during the era of the first crusades in Germany. And what it says is that Oshushanah, it is written in the book of life and on Yom Kippur. It is sealed for the next year. Who will live and who will die and then there's this whole long list of ways you can die. Okay. There's the end of that list of ways you can die. It says, but repair and righteousness and justice can change things. And you don't know if you've changed things. And by the end of Yom Kippur, it's there. And for the next year, you don't know how it's going to be. So be the most decent person you can because that might keep you alive for another year or not. And so this is the most solemn hymn in the High Holy Day service except for Colnidre, which is how we start the David Hohman. And for me as a kid growing up, it's a little scary at first. It's like, you know, who by sword. And you know, Leonard Cohen has a song based on this. It's who by fire and who by water. Well, that's the on time at Tokyo. Okay. Because now Leonard Cohen was raised practicing Jew. And what it that hymn taught me as I got older and could think about it in a more abstract way is that you don't know if you will live through the year. And you don't know if all of your efforts to be alive, which you know, in the 21st century, it's you are eating right and taking your medications. So in Jewish tradition, is are you being a decent human being? Are you repairing the ruptures you have created in the world? And maybe that will work and maybe that won't, won't, no. And so Judaism is not, if you behave well, you will go to your reward because we don't really have, there's a kind of a vague afterlife for some branches of extremely alter orthodox Judaism. But for most of us, the majority of Jews, it's like there isn't something next. There's, you know, maybe a re, if you believe in a divine being, which I don't, there's, you know, your soul reunites with the divine. Sure. But we don't have, there is no hell below us as John Lennon once famously said. Yeah. There really is above us only sky. That life is here on earth and also Jewish history teaches us that you don't know when the next bad thing is right around the corner. You know, there's the joke about what is Jewish holiday. They tried to kill us. They didn't succeed. Okay. Now let's see. Yeah. Because that is our history. Is that for basically since the year 586 before the common era, some empire, some empire or another that doesn't approve of who we are has been trying to kill us off. You know, the show at the Holocaust was the most recent large scale version of it. But right. You know, in the villages in which my grandparents grew up, there were murderous pogroms every Easter. Oh, man. And, you know, I heard stories about that from my grandparents and they hid in the basement and they moved to America. So when you grow up, it's hard of a culture where you can be fine one day of the next day, the crusaders come to town and decide that they are going to burn you all up the stake because you will not accept their version of God. You learn that. You can't predict what's going to happen next. So live as a decent human being now. We don't have a, if you do the right things and believe in something, you'll go to your reward. You'll not have that. Right. But it's just a good thing. And it's kind of like, it's a little bit like Buddhism. Sure. And then there's a lot of people who describe themselves as jubus. We are both Jewish and Buddhist because Buddhism doesn't say, you know, if you chant on money, potenti, home enough times, you'll end up a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are on earth because even though they could ascend to something, they're here to do good and to create good. So there's, you know, I think that there's some versions of some faiths that have this good works equals reward. I mean, Calvinism, Calvinist Protestantism certainly preached that. And also, you know, preach that you knew that people were good because they were having successful lives here on earth. And therefore the poor must be sinners. And those were the people who came and invaded the area that's now Massachusetts and you have murdered the indigenous people of there. But John Calvin was very much, you know, if you're doing well in life, if you're well off, then God must like you. And you will go to your heavenly reward. You know, as we do say, "Gaegas and Deh, you should live and be well if you want to believe that if it works for you." Don't try to kill me off or kill off anybody else. Right. Because they don't share that perspective on how the world works or whether there's a divine or what the divine is. One of our great scholars, Moshe bin Maimum, Moses Maimonides, who was a physician in Egypt in the 12th century of the common era. Sure. When Jews were really flourishing in the Muslim world, wrote that it is heretical to assign any human characteristics, including gender, to a divine being. Yes. And so when I studied that, because I went to Hebrew school for a long, long time, I was like, "Oh, cool. We happen, Jewish prayers have addressed divine beings in the male voice because as in English, things defaulted to male for a really long time. And when I meditate, I address my sense of the divine in the Hebrew voice in female voice in Hebrew rather because that's how I experience that energy, not as a divine being out there, but as a female spiritual energy. And I know it's not a goddess up there. It's like that's how it feels right to talk with that. Sure. I was about to ask you that because I've had friends throughout the years that were Jewish, somewhere atheist, some maintained a monotheism, others, almost like a pantheism or some kind of notion of a divine energy that permeates all things. And I didn't know if you sort of thought through some of that stuff. The thing about being a Jew is that we are not based in faith. Okay. We are based in the Adeez and Human Being. I think we need more of that. Yeah. So you don't have to believe in gods. You can be an atheist Jew. You can be an agnostic Jew. You can have a Jew who like me has this vague sense of a loving, compassionate spiritual energy. Okay. That's kind of where I'm at, too. It's a little hard to be a Jew and think that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. We think he was a rabbi. There were a lot of rabbis that the Romans crucified during that period of time. He had a follower in Paul who promoted him and his teachings. And then the Emperor Constantine decided to take that on as the official religion of the Roman Empire and things went downhill for Jews after that. But we say if there are two Jews, there are three synagogues. Yours, mine and the one neither of us will go to. Yeah. Early Christianity was the third synagogue for a very long time because I mean all of the students of that rabbi were Jews. Right. And for the longest time, all of the students of that rabbi were Jews. And what Paul figured out is that if you required people to join this synagogue to become Jews, you were going to have a smaller number of people to get to join your synagogue. So he said, you don't have to get circumcised, which was easier on men joining. Sure. And you don't have to stop eating pork and shellfish. You don't have to keep the kosher laws. Okay. So fast forward, he looked a lot like what we call jokingly junitarians. Jews who don't keep the kosher laws and who may or may not circumcise their male children. Got you. Because they don't think that that's a good thing to do the little baby boys. But they still identify strongly as Jews. And it's just that in the year, you know, 40 of the common era, we weren't at that level of abstract thinking about it. Okay. Okay. And we also still had a Judaism that was centered around temple sacrifice. But after the year 70, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, we got, we developed the Judaism we have today, which is one more basic scholarship. Right. Right. Okay. Can I ask you maybe one last big question about feminism? All right. Okay. So, you know, this is therapy for guys. And you know, a lot of the listeners, many of my clients are men. And I think, wrongly, there's this stereotype that feminism is kind of a bad word or it's scary, you know, some guys feel emasculated when they hear that or, you know, they're not sure what to think. Why do you think that is? And how would you kind of address some of those concerns for guys that aren't sure about feminism? Well, let's start with, where does the myth come from? The feminism is anti-men and it comes from people who are powerful within the patriarchy, who would like to shut down the kinds of overthrow of patriarchy that says that all human beings are of equal value, treated according to our capacities, and that human beings should have bodily autonomy and that doing violence, sexual violence, physical violence is not acceptable. That's what feminism is about, really. So if you've got somebody who's got a big pulpit who would lose their power over people, if they accept the notion that human beings really are of equal value, it doesn't matter if you've born with a vulva or a penis or indeterminate genitals. because one out of every 2,000 humans is born with that third set of circumstances. It doesn't matter. What matters is, is this a good person? Do we raise them to be a good person to maximize their talents and capacities, to dress in ways that are comfortable for them? Not because this is people with penises should dress this way, and people with vulva should dress this way. I mean, the only real differences. So boys are born less neurologically developed than girls. They're about 18 months behind girls in neurological development on average. So they acquire language on average later, and they acquire the capacity to be to sit still on average later, which means we have an educational system that disadvantages people born with penises because all those things come along with it. Feminism says pay attention to that. Pay attention to that actual biological difference, because it's really the only one there is. And the other one is that people with uteruses can get pregnant, whether it's women, non-binary people with uteruses, or trans men who've kept their uteruses. And therefore, we have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to be able to decide what we do with our uteruses. Right. That's what feminism is about. And it's about freeing men from toxic masculinity from the thing that says boys don't cry. From the thing that says boys are supposed to solve problems with violence. From the thing that says boys are supposed to be the sole carriers of the burdens of supporting a family. And rather says, look, or that says boys, men shouldn't be able to be comfortable staying at home being the primary parent and homemaker. That that's not a lesser man, that's a man who has that skill set. I mean, my brother-- I've got two brothers who I adore, two younger brothers. And my middle brother was the only one of the three of us who really, really, really wanted kids. And there was a time in his life when he was the primary at-home parent. Yeah. Because he loves that. Sure. And he's good at it. And he could choose that. And there were times when my sister-in-law was the primary at-home parent. And there were times when they shared that equally, depending upon what was happening in their working lives. And no one ever said, oh, David, you're less of a man. But we also didn't say, oh, isn't it marvelous that you're being a primary stay at home here? And it's like, you always liked this. Yes. And yay, that you're in the time of the world when people can uphold you in this. And we think that you're a great dad. And hopefully sometimes, too, in a great grandpa when one of the children decides to give birth finally. My poor niece is there. Like, leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. But I think that that's what feminism is about. That's how men benefit from feminism. That's how humans of all genders benefit from feminism. Because what it says is how you are on the world is not about your genitalia. And realize the gender is socially constructed differently in different cultures. If you go to Southeast Asia, to Indonesia, men are wearing skirts. Right. They're called the wrongs, but men are wearing skirts. And they're holding hands. And that doesn't get them beaten up. So if there's a guy that's listening, and maybe they're curious about therapy or they're wondering whether they should try to enter that process, do you have any final words of encouragement? What you might encourage someone to think about as they start this journey? Well, what I would say is if you have a broken leg, you don't try to set it yourself, and you don't let it stay broken. Well said. If you have a broken heart, get help to heal your heart. Because if you leave it on healed, it will show up as all kinds of physical problems later in your life. Your body knows that your emotional heart is broken. Read a book-- there's a book called "In the Room with Men." OK. "It's an edited collection of stories by feminist therapists writing about working with men." Some of the therapists are men. Some of the therapists are women. I'm going to write that down. Matt Anglar Carlson, who is somebody I just have enormous respect for, is one of the leaders of the group of men who do feminist work with men. OK. I'm going to-- he's one of the editors of that volume. I may have to try to reach out to him. Yeah. And then I would read Andrew Solomon's book, "The Noonday Demon." OK. So Andrew Solomon, who's a psychologist, suffered with depression his whole life. And he writes about depression and about his own therapy experience. Oh, wow. OK. Now it healed him to where he's married to a marvelous man and they have kids. And he became a psychologist and he has a life. Oh, wow. Yes. And what I want to say to any man listening is do not let toxic masculinity imprison you and be a barrier to you healing your broken heart. Wow. Because you can be the man you want to be when your heart is healed. Your broken heart is an obstacle to being the decent, kind, loving, compassionate, strong, open-minded man that you want to be. So don't get in the way of being that man. Man, that is powerful. Yeah. Don't let the lives of patriarch. You get in the way of you being that man. Don't walk around on your broken leg for the rest of your life. Wow. So Dr. Brown, if anyone is interested in finding out more about your writings and what you're up to these days, is there a place where they can find you online? Yep. My website, drlorabround.com, drlorabround.com. OK. I'll include in the show notes. There are links to all my books. There are two books that I've written for the general public that are for people who grew up in really bad childhoods. One is about dealing with the aging and death of those really bad adults. The other one is about how to have healthy relationships as an adult when that wasn't ever modeled for you. Everything else I've written is-- it's kind of very dry, professional stuff. But there's links to some of the podcasts I've given talks on. And stuff about me. And if you're in heaven forbid, in a workplace discrimination lawsuit, you can send your lawyer to the website, because that's the thing I do. If you're a therapist who wants to do consultation, one time or on an ongoing basis, working with trauma, working with this intersectional decolonial feminist approach, that's the other thing I do. If you want to get me to give a talk, right now I'm only doing it electronically, because it's hard work for me to fly during the pandemic. After we're my N95 mass for eight hours. [LAUGHTER] But we're all hoping someday things will be safer. That we will have a new normal in which we are more compassionate. I'm loving to work one another. And in which the world is one in which we protect each other physically, emotionally, spiritually, in every possible way. Yeah, wow. Well, thank you so much. Again, I feel blessed and just uplifted to have spoken to you. I feel like I'm sitting at the feet of a master. So it's been a real pleasure. You are sitting with someone who brings thousands of lives and have channeled through me. And so we do honor to the people who gave me the privilege of sitting with them. That's what you have here. OK. If someone looks and sounds like a master, it's because we're channeling the people who gave us that privilege. Well said. Thank you again. You're welcome. Thanks for asking me. [MUSIC PLAYING] [Music] Thank you again for listening to this episode. I really hope that you enjoyed it. Just try to connect. Reach out to me. You can go to my website at quiquiutry.com or you can Google my name, Kike Otri on Google and there you'll find my Facebook and Instagram accounts. If you would like to schedule an appointment, you can go to my website or you can go to the website of the practice that I serve at Katie, Teen and Family Counseling.com. I can't wait to hear from you. Please share my content and remember, continue the conversation.