Next up, I fly to Austin Texas, on my own! My anxiety at leaving Lyndon and the children for three nights is greatly heightened by the fact my sister-in-law is worried that I might get shot in Texas….Apparently Texas is a hard-nosed State. Luckily, I dodge the bullets and arrive safely at the two-day long ‘Liberation-Based Healing Conference’ in tact.
This excursion on my trip embodies the beauty that is The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Award (www.wcmt.org.uk). I really have no idea if this conference will be relevant to my research but it intrigued me as I did my internet research back home and I couldn’t let it go. So I decided to throw it in as a wild card, seeing as the trip is funded not by myself but by the generous grant of WCMT. I just hope the gamble pays off.
The first night in the hotel room, I can’t sleep. This is the most frustrating aspect of motherhood – well, one of them – I spend months and months yearning for my own space and the chance to slumber in bed in the morning without being karate-chopped in the stomach by two children competing to get the first hug; then when I get it, I can’t sleep because I’m missing them! Needless to say, I am up well before breakfast is served as my body has long lost the memory of what it is to slumber and arrive at the conference – exhausted.
The first day of the conference is frustrating to me. It feels like the presenters are speaking another language. They’re not, but the combination of lack of sleep, bad acoustics and very dense subject matter makes me squint to understand until my eyes hurt. It’s made more frustrating because I just know that in amongst these words is something relevant and exciting.
I am invited out to dinner after the conference with the presenters and conference organisers. Even though it’s the last thing in the whole wide world I want to do, I agree as (if you can remember from the beginning of this stream of consciousness) I am trying out the ‘yes’ approach to life on this trip (out of character but thought I’d give it a go). Thinking a mojito would help the flow, I drink two in succession. The next few hours I spend in conversation but I have no idea what language anyone is talking – including myself…
The mojitos might not have given me any insight for the evening but they do help me to sleep and the second day of the conference offers hope of understanding…here is what I understand so far….
Liberation-based healing is an emerging and transformational philosophy and practice for bridging community activism and therapeutic practice with applications to family and community violence, trauma, mental health, immigration, health disparities, and child welfare services. This approach to healing builds on the idea that problems are only ever really solved in community.
This national conference seeks to bring together practitioners and therapists, community activists and organisers, educators and faith community leaders for dialogue and inquiry focused on a system of relational healing that embraces critical consciousness, empowerment, and accountability.
Rhea Almeida, the Director for the Institute for Family Services, originated The Cultural Context Model of therapeutic work and this underpins the Liberation-Based Healing Conference. As I understand it, the Cultural Context Model recognises that everyone has a position in society which can be mapped onto a matrix of power, privilege and oppression. It looks at the way colonialisation has marginalised many sectors of society and how this sense of powerlessness causes dis-ease. Instead of looking at the individual as the problem, this model calls for social justice as a way to heal.
So, in practical terms, if a family present with a problem to the Institute for Family Services, rather than have family/ couple therapy, they are invited into a cultural circle in which they start to learn the language of power, privilege and oppression. Within a community (ie. other people who have approached the Institute and have joined the group along with group facilitators) they use film narratives, music, literature and other media to look at the impact colonialisation and other forms of oppression have on their sense of powerlessness. It then supports them to bring issues to the group and the learning comes from the responses of the community and the accountability they feel to that community.
The whole of the conference is too theoretical for me to come away with any practical sense of the outcomes of the Cultural Context Model but I am still convinced there is something relevant and interesting in this model – so I shall just have to look into it more when I get home. And that reminds me, I am not here to look for answers…I leave the conference with a headful of half formed ideas, a padful of questions and a fistful of business cards.
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