Gabes Torres: Re-rooting therapy and re-membering community (ep383)
“One of the introductions to Counseling Psychology teaches the Freudian concept of neutrality—when the patient’s social identity, when politics leave the door and you start treatment. But if we leave out identity, if we leave out the very sources as to why my client is sick in the first place, then I don’t see why this is not a cycle.”
In this episode, we welcome Gabes Torres, a therapist, organizer, and artist who was born and raised in the Philippines. Her work focuses on imperialism and its vast impact our collective mental health. She has an MA in Theology & Culture, and Counseling Psychology; both graduate degrees were accomplished in Seattle, the city where she organized with abolitionist and anti-imperialist groups at a local, grassroots level. In her clinical practice, Gabes works primarily with women, femmes, and/or trans patients of the global majority, and she is a mentor to therapists, organizers, artists, and culture workers around the world.
Some of the topics we explore include the lasting impacts of intergenerational trauma, the troubles of over-pathologizing and arbitrary pathologizing, dreams of a world where therapy is no longer needed, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Rowan Rain
Episode-inspired artwork by Fernanda Peralta
Episode references:
Writing by Gabes Torres, including various offerings
Gabes Torres on Instagram
“The Politics of Rage”, “How to Process Our Collective Grief”, “How to Decolonize Mental Health Treatment for BIPOC”, articles by Gabes Torres
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a book by Ocean Vuong
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Gabes Torres: One of the things that came up for me, and still does, is just the troubling ways that higher education severs individuals from context.
Growing up in a collectivist culture, it's not if, but how, I see things and people connect to their context, and that includes their political and systemic backgrounds.
For instance, I don't know if folks are familiar with attachment theory, but attachment theory is basically a theory that analyzes the connection between infant or child, and their caregiver, and how that connection or lack of connection affects the infant or child's psychobiological development and their later relationships.
So if the infant and caregiver had what's called an attuned connection, like there's enough closeness and also enough distance, like the caregiver is not smothering the infant, it's likely that the infant is going to grow up to be a securely attached adult. But if the caregiver was absent, it's likely that the infant is going to have a preoccupied attachment, meaning when it comes to their later relationships as an adult, they get a little bit more anxious about abandonment; whenever their partners are seemingly emotionally unavailable, they freak out a little bit and try as much as they can to retain the relationship, even though the relationship is pretty stable.
So that's a kind of oversimplistic way of describing attachment theory, [which has] a lot more attachment styles. But when I studied that, I notice that there's a little bit more of the diagnosing or the analyzing of the problem, than [there] is looking into solutions. And perhaps that's more specific to my education background. [Also it] was that [attachment theory] didn't apply to me as much, knowing that I had more than one caregiver. The way that it was taught was that there's only two, and usually it's a hetero couple, that raises the child. And my questions were, well, what if I was raised by many? And what if my concerns around relationship have more to do with a wider set of relationships than just romantic or dating or marital partnerships?
Because that's also what it looked like it concerned. [It looked like] attachment theory impacted only more intimate or traditionally romantic, monogamous relationships. And perhaps to add to that too, with regard to attachment theory, I was so mindful during that time, especially, of the increased reports around about family separation, like what does the infant/child relationship with their caregiver look like, in the context of family separation, in the context of anti-immigrant policy, that the child was separated from their family, was separated from their parent, not because it's the parent's choice, but because of the state, that it's because of this abrupt and atrocious separation where ICE invades their home?
What does that look like? What does a child's nervous system and neural activity look like in light of that? So I was bringing those questions of like, how do we politicize, how do we collectivize these approaches? And I think that ever since, especially the pandemic, there's been an increase of conversation [around how we] decolonize or radicalize psychotherapy. And [there's] a ways to go, knowing that therapists and therapeutic treatment is still within the context of an industry. And as long as any work is in the industry, it's always tied to capitalism. It's always tied to some degree of exploitation.
I know in the so-called United States, there's been a therapist shortage. A lot of my therapist friends have been in a way like participating in an exodus from the field, because of burnout, because they're underpaid, and because they don't see a lot of hope in finding sustainable care within the mental health industry. And, everybody has a different story. But I also think that there can be glimpses of hope that can radiate from the community, maybe not so much the industry, but from the community itself. I know for myself personally, I grew from my community of fellow therapists. But yeah, there are a lot more questions. I think there are more questions even more so now than ever.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. These are really critical questions to consider, and it seems like there are certain norms or what's viewed as the norms, that a lot of these theories have been born out of, that have been propped up as the ways to understand mental health or mental health conditions. As a recurring theme on the show as well, we really recognize that context is always really key.
There's also the concern of over-pathologizing, which disproportionately affects communities of color and people of the global majority and those struggling with poverty, and in some cases, there's also even been made-up pathologies named to keep people in line with the social order desired by those experting their power. I would appreciate if you could elaborate on how certain illnesses have historically been socially constructed against certain expectations or standards for particular groups of people, so that what might otherwise be considered reasonable and understandable reactions to the societal forces people face, end up labeled and treated as problematic and a sickness to get rid of? What are some examples of overpathologizing or arbitrarily pathologizing that have stood out to you most?
Gabes Torres: We can date it as early as the mid-1800s, where a psychiatrist named Samuel Cartwright invented or made up this disease, this pathology, called drapetomania. And this was a mental disorder that "caused" enslaved Africans to run away from slaveholders. This was written in clinical texts. It's kind of like our version of psychology textbooks and the DSM. Atrocious as it may sound, grotesque as it might sound, it was kind of like that. It was normal during that time to have those approaches.
It just shows how historically the world of mental health and psychology has perceived, in different scales and it's changed over time, how resistance to oppression or resistance to bondage, is a disease. The way that that's seen today comes up in different ways. I've always thought that Black and Indigenous folks are the most impacted in this. [But I'll speak from personal experience:] I think of the times when I was looking for therapy, and how there was this pressure to be well, in order to keep functioning, in order to keep going back to school, keep going back to work. And maybe I didn't have the tools and resources and language at the time, but that's what felt like was therapy.
[Therapy] didn't want to engage for more than just being a tool of the system. It didn't ask about my sense of aliveness, like where my desires were. It only wanted me to be well enough so that I can go back to work and school.
I think that's one personal example of how that might look like. Its only function in my life is to see how I was functional and how I was usable by the system. The other examples that I can think about is the normalized structures and cultures of policing within the mental health industry and also in psychology education, where I was often really harshly criticized for a lot of ways in which I challenged or criticized the theory itself, as if there is a standard of what it means to be a "healthy" human.
It seemed like their standard for a healthy human was to be white and cis and abled and thin and living in a or raising a nuclear family. And the ways that I challenged that was risky, in a way that my grade was at stake. And the grading system in any form of education is also a form of policing that we don't talk about enough. There's a lot in the education system that has to be addressed. [But] back to the policing in the mental health industry, we can see the ways in which especially disabled and trans folks and Black, Indigenous and people of color, are overpathologized and in that, have suffered through different kinds of forced treatments and different ways of being overpathologized when really the roots of their depression and anxiety have so much to do with the system.
And especially if the therapist is a white, cis and hetero person, they have a different reality. And what ends up happening is it's set up for the potential to be gaslit. Patients who [have] oppressed identities are likely to be gaslit because of that power dynamic, because the therapist does not understand their reality. And one important thing that I would emphasize is just the normalization of disposability culture in that industry, where just because the patient is not showing traits or behaviors or characteristics, or even like physical characteristics, of what it means to be a healthy person, there's an impulse, a systemic and collective impulse to dispose of this person. That is dehumanizing. And that always angers me, knowing that the mental health industry is where vulnerable people who want to heal, to get better—[so] there's like an element of helplessness.
Kamea Chayne: There definitely seems to be a cultural and systemic gaslighting going on. Even just this idea that the dominant extractivist culture sees fatigue and unproductivity as a problem. What if there weren't value judgments on fatigue and bodily calls to rest, but they were able to be seen as just that—like we have calls to work, and also calls to rest so that our other bodily functions and senses can work and be productive in their own ways?
And to the question of health, lately, I've really been sitting with the question of what health even means. As you've shared: “It costs too much to stay alive and to not live in pain. We are struggling in a simulation that convinces us that to take good care of ourselves is a burden. This is one of the cruelest realities this classist and ableist system has normalized.”
To this point, especially in the last years I've engaged with more people who earn a living using physical labor whose daily work is extremely taxing on their bodies. And when they pull out a cigarette or a soft drink to help relieve their pains, exhaustion, and stress, which helps them to alleviate those symptoms and get through the day, I really have started to question whether the concept of what is considered healthy has been over-standardized and universalized.
Because in a sense, overworking could be understood as a symptom of an extractivist, classist, ableist and racialized culture and economy, and if we point to people doing whatever they need as immediate relief as their problem of ill-health, rather than another mode of symptom alleviation, just like the many other forms of medical drugs out there as well that also have side effects but are never labeled as unhealthy, then all of this type of framing just takes us further away from getting to the heart of the erosion of our collective and interdependent wellbeing.
I'd be curious how your views on what it means to be well or what individual actions are considered healthy or not, have evolved or shifted as you dive deeper into maintaining a collectivist and contextualized lens, looking at mental health.
Gabes Torres: Sometimes I don't use the word "health", because of how much the overstandardized versions of health have really overtaken the word. Whenever I think about or hear the word "health" or "healthy", it always goes back to those overstandardized impositions of what it means to be healthy. I use the terms like "regulated", or "coregulated" more, which means that my nervous system is attuned or feels safe with other nervous systems or other systems or other ecosystems, because that assumes more than just the human species—like a person can be in a place of homeostasis, even in the presence of non-human species, which the mental health industry doesn't talk about enough, like how it's like to have attachment figures or to coregulate with the natural world.
My approach to healing has more to do with how I'm connected to the rest of the members of the ecosystems and even beyond this plane.
If my client leads with it, we would talk about what it's like to connect with ancestors, what it's like to connect with what we call spiritual guides, or their own interpretations and associations with the spiritual realm because our spirituality is also a part of our wellbeing, and it's also one of the aspects of who we are that's colonized. So I feel like it's also necessary to find some healing in that part of our lives.
When it comes to, I think you mentioned short-term ways to ease ourselves, I'm all about self-soothing tools. I'm all about finding ways to address and attend to present pain. And what is so devastating about the system right now is that you really need a lot of money to be able to ease that pain. And I see that more, being here in the Global South, where not a lot of people have access to those ways of alleviating their pain due to mass poverty, etc. And so with my proximity to these contexts, I find it important to get to the bottom, to the root issue all the time, like, why do these experiences of disease happen in the first place? And this is when I get into organizing or try to incorporate organizing [into] my clinical work.
Organizing has that vision or has that focus to address and divest and dismantle the very sources of corruption that cause the unequal or inequitable distribution of resources, opportunity and rights. And the sources as to why our very rights are violated, why the planet is damaged and has to outlive a lot of the industrialization. So with that, I feel like this is when [I feel] my desire for therapists to become more aware of that importance, of connecting the systemic and collective reality with treatment. Like, one of the intro courses that we have is the Freudian concept of neutrality, [which is] when the patient's social identity, that's when politics leaves the door and then you start treatment. That's one of the concepts that I was pretty passionate about addressing during grad school.
If we leave out identity, if we leave out the very sources as to why my client is sick in the first place, then I don't see why this is not a cycle.
They go to work, they enter society, and all of my clients are Black, Indigenous and people of color, experience depression, and they go back and find help. They seek treatment, they find a therapist. And usually, more often than not, the reason why they go to therapy is because they want to be well enough so that they can go back to work. It doesn't feel like the root cause is addressed in that regard. That's what I feel like, in a lot of contexts of mental health, is missing. And I can understand why therapists would find it hard to address that, too, because it would mean that if we get to the root cause, they're out of work.
That's one of the things that I had to face within myself, like Gabes, if you want to walk the talk, then that would mean that you won't have clients anymore... I try to like provide therapy in a way where the client is aware of these dynamics, within their own time and pace. And also, I want to do therapy in a way that would make therapy obsolete, and that my clients are able to cultivate the cultures and the relationships that would make it so that they don't need therapy anymore, because they're coregulated enough and enlivened enough with their relationships that they find their own self-soothing tools and find meaningful relationships to get by—and to not just get by in life, but to flourish in life.
I had to really confront myself and ask that question: Gabes, are you really willing to participate in that level of radicalization? And as a human being, I would waver. Like, that's scary to me. That's risky to me. But I have to be really honest about how I desire this for my clients, out of a love for them, out of a love for my own self, in wanting these flourishing relationships and this form of coregulation to be normalized, just for the sake of freedom, and just for the sake of our planet, and for the sake of our future, of our descendants, whether biological or non-biological.
I don't know if I drifted from your question, but that's what came out for me.
Kamea Chayne: And something you noted is that “There’s nothing post about postcolonialism”—because the legacy and impacts of historical happenings live on to shape the reality of today. And beyond the more material injustices and remnants from the past, I want to talk about intergenerational trauma, and how our bodies express or hold onto traumas experienced by our parents, grandparents, great grand parents, which you'd touched on in the introduction.
But what do we know about how historical traumas might still affect those with lineages tied to those past events? And what implications would this have on, for example, the mostly accepted idea of meritocracy, or people earning their status, power, wealth based on their individual abilities and merits, as a gold standard of fairness?
Gabes Torres: Thank you for addressing that. Whenever I'm in a room of Black, Indigenous and people of color, I always say that it might seem that the sciences have confirmed this reality that we've inherited trauma. And I feel like we've already sensed it for a while. We've known of this intuitively, even before the sciences confirmed this, that we have inherited a lot of the wounds and the hypervigilance of our ancestors, which is also overpathologized within the mental health industry and we also have to recognize that it is, in a way, our ancestors' gift of knowing what it's like to survive in a world that targets us in different scales.
One example that I can think of is my cousin. She has financial stability. And yet whenever she feels like she's running out of toilet paper, of rice, or any anything that she considers a basic need, even if it's not even close to running out, she needs to always supply it with more toilet paper, with more rice, with more food, etc. She's always asked like, why is it that I have this internal impulse to want to make sure that I'm not running out. And then we had that conversation where I was like, ate, I think it has to do with the fact that our ancestors or lola, or even lola's lola, our grandmother's grandmother, they know what it's like to run out of basic needs. And so their survival strategy, I feel like you've internalized.
That's kind of like a way of framing it that doesn't overpathologize the survival tactic or the internalized survival strategy. And what the sciences have recently confirmed is that the intergenerational transmission of trauma is not just in the behavioral level, like on a social level, but in a genetic level. The way that we've inherited trauma is in our very cells. And if folks want to delve in further around that, the field of study is called epigenetics. And one of the first studies of epigenetics is when neuroscientists had interviewed folks of Jewish descent. One of the things that really caught my attention was how folks of Jewish descent had nightmares that were similar to that of their ancestors' nightmares during the Holocaust. That was really so fascinating to me. And perhaps I was curious about it because maybe there's some resonance with that experience.
One of the things that's important, too, is, I don't want to focus that much on the trauma. It has to be focused on, [and we must validate] a lot of what we feel, a lot of what we experience—all that is true. All of that is yours and all of that is also passed on.
[But] we are more than our wounds. We have inherited more than just the trauma. We have also inherited the medicine. We've also inherited the joy. We've also inherited laughter.
I think about my great-grandfather, who is a musical composer, [which] I recently just found out about. He's a violinist. And I've been I've been doing music since I was barely conscious—I have been singing, I have been writing songs, since young. And it was just really neat to realize that I have this ancestor who I just recently found out about, that I [probably] inherited a lot of skills and ways of creative expression [from].
So I find it important to emphasize that we have received not just wounding, but also joy and also a sense of being that is collective, that trusts the ecosystem, that has a particular interpretation of what it means to be free, of what it means to live. That's [so] vital for me to talk about—that whenever we talk about the transmission of trauma, that [we also talk about how] we've also inherited medicine.
Kamea Chayne: A lot of people have skewed perspectives of those with mental health conditions, primarily that those that do are more dangerous, crazy, unpredictable, and more likely to commit acts of violence. And, I think much of this comes from movies, stories, and mainstream media having disproportionately portrayed mental health in particular ways.
In reality, as I've learned, people with mental health illnesses at large are no more likely than the 'average' population to enact violence or commit crime based on how the state defines crime. And in fact, as a call for more compassion rather than fear or judgment, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be the victims of crime and violence than to be the perpetrators.
How do you think the media has contributed to the public's skewed perception and understanding of mental health, and what do you see as the power of storytelling to seed more rooted and life-enhancing imaginations and help to co-create a more caring world—as you say, with more fierce kindness?
Gabes Torres: Life-enhancing imaginations. I love that. Thank you, Kamea.
So historically, the entertainment industry has always portrayed mental illness as you said, [as] dangerous and even hopeless. Dangerous to such a superlative degree. It just stuns me how normalized that is. That then creates a stigma that fears mental illness. I think about how movies portray schizophrenia and depression, etc., when, as you said, these cases of severe mental illness causing crime or dangerous acts [are] very, very few. And of course, the industry would want to create spectacles that would lead them to earn money.
I think that having that conversation is so important, and I also recognize how the evolution of storytelling is going about right now. I think about the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. I think it's the best movie of the year, so far. The way that it portrayed depression was so kind, honestly. It was so kind and creative, and even not so scary. It was accessible and in a way, it was resonant for those who have depression, and perhaps more specifically to those who have Asian ancestry or who are of Asian descent in the United States. I think one of the powerful parts of the film was how after certain folks who are of Asian descent watched it with their parents, there was an act of forgiveness that took place, because the parents understood their child's experience a little bit more.
I remember when the movie was out, the majority of my clients who are of Asian descent started talking about it that week, and wanted to process it with me and wanted to use some of the elements of it to make sense of who they are, in a way that, again, was not scary, in a way that did not stigmatize mental illness. So I feel like there are parts of mainstream storytelling that is is starting to destigmatize mental illness in a way that is kind, is creative, is empowering, that doesn't stereotype or overgeneralize the experience, but as a conversation starter.
I feel like that's what storytelling does for us. It invites more storytelling. If not for that story, we would not be able to see our story, in a way.
I feel like whenever I tell a story, whenever I welcome my specificity, the particularities of who I am, there's something about that that invites another person, that encourages another person to look into themselves, to see the parts that resonate, to see the parts that perhaps don't. And then it kind of compels the other to explore themselves, with a bit of courage and risk, and to also share. And I feel like, in a way, that's the point of it.
The life-enhancing imaginations, and the many different ways in which creativity can flourish within the context of a multiplicity of stories, a multiplicity of poetry's and of just anthologies in general, and the many different mediums that can go about.
I think about also violence, that film, or mainstream media shows, which I think has to be handled with some degree of care. Not to the point of making it a spectacle, not to the point of making it trauma porn. But I feel like there is some degree of not sanitizing the grotesqueness of a situation that has to be portrayed as well. It's not just the medicine from the film, but somehow, we have to also display or communicate the grotesqueness of what had happened, the atrocity that has happened, has been happening, inside a lot of these conversations, this discourse of what it means to be a human, in this world and during this time.
Kamea Chayne: I love the idea of storytelling that invites more storytelling and openness and curiosity, rather than leads to hard conclusions or judgments.
Just to further expand this conversation a little before we come to a wrap, I’ve been curious to look at the climate crisis as a relational crisis: as a reflection of the erosion of place-based relationships and rooted communities, including the human and more-than-human world. Because the more fragmented the relationships of all kinds are in a community, the more energy- and water- and labor-intensive it would be to upkeep all of the systems that we and our broader ecological bodies need in order to survive.
So I’ve wondered what thoughts or reframes it might invite if we were to apply the lens of therapy and context-aware therapy onto the Earth’s ailments; so not to reduce them into isolated parts and elements. What have you thought through on this front and what does this stir up in you at the moment?
Gabes Torres: I love how you frame it in a way that the climate crisis is a relational crisis. I feel that same way about postcolonialism being a relationship issue as well. I just feel like it's always going to come from relationship.
A lot of our issues, a lot of our crises, a lot of our struggles, are in the context of relationship. And it must also mean that our healing and our liberation is also in the context of relationships. That it is through relationships that we are liberated.
So I love that you started there.
In the context of therapy, I think that my response is going to be a little bit more specific or contextualized within being here in the Global South, where a lot of the outcomes from hyper-industrialization of fossil fuel industries [are felt]. We are the ones, in disproportionate degrees, experiencing, bearing the brunt of climate calamity. About two weeks ago, there was a super typhoon that hit the Philippines. We did not expect the extent of it. It caused at least 150 casualties and thousands of families displaced, again, from their homes. And this is in the context of just recovering from the previous typhoon.
[So] the question of how connected mental health is with climate, I feel a certain close proximity to it. It's not a question [of] if, but how? I mentor certain young organizers and activists here in the Philippines, and the majority of them are youth climate activists. And what's interesting is that these young folks are, while they're the most hopeful folks that I've worked with, also the most anxious. They're the most anxious because they work with farmers directly. They work with the poor directly. And I can only imagine just the vicarious trauma that they've internalized from being exposed to a lot of these stories, to a lot of these cases. And yet again, they're also the most hopeful, even in their extreme anxiety.
Whenever I ask them, what brings them hope? What keeps your hope strong? And what keeps your heart soft? It's because they're also in closer proximity to the farmers, as well the land. They are aware of the natural reciprocity among species. They know the processes of vegetation, of pollination, of how there are many ecosystems within one ecosystem. They know the Earth's capacity to heal herself and to also even while healing herself, sustaining us. So I feel like the reason for their hope is because they have an internalized understanding of how natural abundance is. And again, it just so happens that the state interferes and violates that abundance, capitalizes on that abundance, or capitalizes on our fear of scarcity in that regard.
In terms of broadening it, outside of my context, my encouragement to folks is to use the framework of it's not if, but how, we're connected to the earth. I would invite y'all to consider how consumption looks like in your life. What I would do personally is whenever I access healing or self-care resources, whether that may be candles or any kind of medicine, like tea or food, I would pay attention to where that product is coming from. And I know that that entails a lot of work, and research, to consider the companies from which it comes from, the shareholders of the company, are the shareholders major fossil fuel industries? Is the company a major fossil fuel industry? How much do they use plastic, etc.?
I think that we have to take seriously how we diminish our complicity, in participating in capitalism and polluting the earth, and really understanding how no amount of our own sacrifice and our own giving up on certain products that don't come from the ethical distribution of such products, [can even begin to] amount to what the Earth, what species beyond our own, have already given up, and [what has already] been taken away from them. [We have] to really fiercely understand that the ecosystem at large really impacts us. That would entail challenging our individualistic perceptions of healing, of "success", of what it means to flourish. I feel like that's a deep unlearning, that we have to do, as community members in the ecosystem.
We also have what it takes. It's framed all the time—understanding the level of interdependence that we have—always [as] a challenge. And to a degree it is, but I'd like to think that we have an innate understanding of our ecological relations, of our inherent capacity to give and to give up, to practice reciprocity with the rest of the Earth, and to get rid of the concept of rivalry between the natural world and the human species—which, again, the media projects all the time.
What if we access the inherent parts of us that knows abundance, that naturally practices mutual reciprocity?
One timeless example is how we breathe out the carbon dioxide that our plants breathe in, and they breathe out the oxygen that we breathe in. Just by merely breathing, I am helping plants. I am helping many species just by simply existing. I feel like we've lost track of that inherent capacity, that natural capacity to practice reciprocity, in that way.
Kamea Chayne: A beautiful reminder.
And finally, I want to close off our main conversation by landing on your dream of a future where therapists are no longer needed. What do you mean when you say that we ought to decenter therapy as a source of care and not standardize it as the mode of healing? And at the same time, what would you recommend for people wanting to turn to therapy to help them better cope with their conditions of today while they work to strengthen their broader networks of relational interdependence and support?
Gabes Torres: Thank you for that question. I'm going to start with the second question. I think that as you look for clinical support, the question that is helpful in asking yourself is, what does health mean for you? What does wellbeing mean for you? And ask that question to your potential therapist or potential social worker—what does health and healing mean for you? And see if there's some resonance or alignment there. Because I can understand how hard it can be to find a socially aware, politically aware therapist, but I would also like to believe that they're out there.
And this is why I bring up the need to decentre therapy, because again, it's hard to access a therapist in general, hard to access a therapist who you can afford, hard to access someone who has some political alignment, spiritual alignment with you. It's also possible to find care from a multiplicity of places. I'm a huge fan of friendships, honestly. I'm at a point in my life where I feel like my [friends] are kind of like my lovers, my platonic lovers, my platonic soulmates. And being in this society, there's a hierarchical way of perceiving relationships. Marital or dating relationships are at the top, nuclear families at the top, and then friendships are at the bottom.
And yet we can experience intimacy in platonic spaces. So that's what I mean by decentering therapy. What is it like to find healing, or the feelings of being known, in places that have always been there, and yet were diminished in terms of value, that were put in the bottom of this so-called hierarchy of relationships? And this is very subjective. For me, at least, [as] we talked about storytelling earlier, if not for storytelling, if not for poetry, if not for movies, if not for what I call my literary companions, I don't think I would have gotten by the pandemic at all. So that's also another source of care that we could look into. What is it like to coregulate with art? What is it like to coregulate with the natural world, in a way that is not extractive? What is it like to coregulate or to find connection with things and with people and with sources that have little to nothing to do with the state?
That really is what I mean by collectivizing and deinstitutionalizing care.
What is it like to heal, that has little to nothing to do with the state?
What is it like to find medicine, as opposed to medication? It is important to find medication and I am a huge proponent of finding medication. And at the same time, I feel like the way to disrupt the cycles of abuse and trauma that the mental health industry participates in, is to have a fuller picture or imagination of what we already have. And I feel like we already have what we need. It just so happens that the state hinders us from seeing that or hinders us from accessing that. But I'd like for us to think that we already have what we need in order to heal.
Our bodies naturally self-heal. Whenever I have a bruise, it just heals itself. I feel like that is a reflection of how it might look like, [from] a more holistic point of view, including our mental health.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Gabes Torres: I really love On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, or anything Ocean Vuong related.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that helps you to stay grounded?
Gabes Torres: Basking in my ancestor altar, and just talking to them, and offering water and food and adoration, to my ancestor altar.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Gabes Torres: I think coming back to the motherland. It makes me emotional a little bit. I didn't expect that.
Coming back to the motherland has been one of my greatest sources of inspiration. And it has to do with the fact that even though a lot of my people are going through unimaginable scales of suffering, of poverty, of struggle, I see a lot of my people's hope, their willingness to still be hospitable, to still be loving, to still laugh. And I know that that has to be complexified as well, because we have to understand the notions of false positivity and some bypassing, but I feel like the ability to uphold joy in the midst of suffering, and strength in the midst of suffering, has been a big one for me, in inspiring me and motivating me in this life.
Kamea Chayne: Gabes, thank you so much for joining me here. I'm so grateful for your light and the gifts that you've offered us here. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Gabes Torres: You are worthy of the healing and the medicine that you are bound to receive.
